Readers may recall previous posts on Jeff Han’s impressive multi-touch interfaces. Today Microsoft unveils a new toy.

More at Popular Mechanics and ZDNet. Art world please take note.

Ferrofluid, that is. Here’s Sachiko Kodama & Yasushi Miyajima having fun with helical iron shapes, an electromagnet and a pool of ferrofluid. 

More here. And some military applications.

Readers with a profound sense of kitsch and an eye for underfoot furnishing should pay a visit to David G Schwartz’s Gallery of Casino Carpets. Nine photographic galleries record the flair, ingenuity and staggeringly bad taste to be found at one’s feet in casinos from Vegas to the riverboats of St Louis.

It seems to me that Indian casinos have some of the most eye-catching floor coverings. But while they’re certainly worth stopping to admire, they’re perhaps a little too… high gear for the floors at Thompson Towers.

David G Schwartz is the author of Roll the Bones, the History of Gambling. (H/T, Coudal Partners.)

I see there’s been an impressive swelling of traffic to this site during the last few days. I’d like to think this sudden interest was a result of posts on PC bigotry or unhinged postmodern scholarship, or our high-minded discussion of the arts. I notice, however, that quite a few people are finding themselves here after Googling the word “blowjob.” (The phrase “Superhero Pornface” is also being Googled with surprising frequency.) Well, however you got here, welcome aboard.

With the artistic feats of Mr Delvoye and Ms Hines still fresh in our minds, I thought I’d share an extract from an essay by Stephen Hicks, titled Why Art Became Ugly. The essay is an examination of postmodern art, its origins, and its aesthetic and ideological shortcomings. In the following extract, Hicks notes the anhedonic tendency of many artists and their professed aversion to capitalism and any successful products of it. The relevance to recent posts is, I think, fairly obvious:

“There is the long-standing rule in modern art that one should never say anything kind about capitalism… German artist Hans Haacke’s Freedom is Now Simply Going to be Sponsored – Out of Petty Cash (1991) is [a] monumental example. While the rest of the world was celebrating the end of brutality behind the Iron Curtain, Haacke erected a huge Mercedes-Benz logo atop a former East German guard tower. Men with guns previously occupied that tower – but Haacke suggests that all we are doing is replacing the rule of the Soviets with the equally heartless rule of the corporations…

We would not know from the world of modern art that average life expectancy has doubled since Edvard Munch screamed. We would not know that diseases that routinely killed hundreds of thousands of newborns each year have been eliminated. Nor would we know anything about the rising standards of living, the spread of democratic liberalism, and emerging markets. We are brutally aware of the horrible disasters of National Socialism and international Communism, and art has a role in keeping us aware of them. But we would never know from the world of art the equally important fact that those battles were won and brutality was defeated.

And entering even more exotic territory, if we knew only the contemporary art world we would never get a glimmer of the excitement in evolutionary psychology, Big Bang cosmology, genetic engineering, the beauty of fractal mathematics – and the awesome fact that humans are the kind of being that can do all those exciting things.” 

If the subject is of interest, I’d recommend making time to read the whole thing. Hicks’ book, Explaining Postmodernism, is also recommended. Feel free to rummage through the archive and browse the Greatest Hits. If you like what you find, approval can be expressed with the button below.

Further to the recent post on the conceptual artist Wim Delvoye and his x-rayed blowjobs and tattooed pigs, a reader has noted the artist’s pretentious yet depressive and nihilistic tone. Delvoye has often couched his output in terms of “the folly of human achievement” and, like many of his peers, has spent a great deal of time either manufacturing excrement or presenting human ambition as “ridiculous.” A stance which raises the question of whether Delvoye regards his own work – devoted as it is to revealing the emptiness of human endeavour – as worth pursuing, or paying for. 

In matters excremental, Delvoye’s efforts are rivalled, perhaps even surpassed, by fellow artist Michelle Hines, whose 1995 work Peristaltic Action involved Ms Hines apparently producing a single, continuous turd measuring some 26 feet in length. This prodigious feat required, we’re told, a high-fibre diet, a butt plug and a suitable venue – the Cranbrook-Kingswood High School bowling alley in Michigan – which, according to Hines, “offered a length of floor suitable for measuring the results.” Readers with a sturdy constitution can click here to see Ms Hines in action, as it were.

There is, however, some doubt as to the veracity of Hines’, er, output, and the artist has subsequently claimed that her work is in fact a “parody” that explores the “absurd lengths people will go to be remembered.” Another Hines triumph, Number of Days Without Sleep, purported to show the artist depriving herself of sleep for 528 hours in December 1994 – which, of course, she didn’t. Unlike Mr Delvoye, and with suitable postmodern irony, Ms Hines seems to believe that ersatz pretension and vacuity is much more worthwhile than the real thing.