The art world told us that anything could be art, so long as an artist said it was. Almost anyone who goes through a gallery door is likely to have heard about Duchamp and his urinal. The art world is less good at explaining how certain people get to be artists and decide what art is for the rest of us. This process of selection might not make aesthetic or philosophical sense, but it works anyway. It’s about power: whoever holds it gets to officiate and decide. The “art world” is a way of conserving, controlling and assigning this precious resource.

{ Design Observer | Continue reading }

Tracey Emin’s Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 was a tent appliquéd with 102 names of the people she had slept with up to the time of its creation in 1995. The title is often misinterpreted, it is to be taken as a literal statement: “Some I’d had a shag with in bed or against a wall some I had just slept with, like my grandma.” The names include family, friends, drinking partners, lovers and even two numbered foetuses.

In 2004, the tent was destroyed in a fire at the East London Momart warehouse, along with two of Emin’s other works and some 100 more from Saatchi’s collection, including works by Damien Hirst, Jake and Dinos Chapman and Martin Maloney.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading }

Also known as “Papa Doc,” Francois Duvalier was President for Life of Haiti until 1971. Among other things, Papa Doc claimed to be the Voodoo spirit of death, Baron Samedi. This kind of hubris is exactly what you want in your elected officials.

After a heart attack plunged him into a nine-hour coma in 1959 that left him with massive brain damage, things kind of went downhill. He demanded that his temporary successor, Clement Barbot, be arrested, but when they couldn’t find Barbot, Papa Doc’s people told him that they believed he had transformed into a large black dog.

Understandably, Papa Doc ordered the deaths of all black dogs, because as we have mentioned, he was fucking insane. Eventually Barbot was caught and executed, and Papa Doc kept his head. You know, for Voodoo.

In 1961, he ordered new elections despite the fact that his “term” wasn’t up until 1963. The move completely baffled everybody until the results of the election, which saw Papa Doc win with 100 percent of the votes.

Papa Doc eventually died in 1971 of natural causes, but not before telling the world that he alone was responsible for John F. Kennedy’s assassination by way of a Voodoo curse. He even sent someone to Kennedy’s grave to collect the air around it so he could use it in a spell to control Kennedy’s soul. By all accounts, Voodoo is kind of awesome.

{ Cracked | Continue reading }

{ 1. Günter Fruhtrunk, 3 Grün, 1969 | 2. Gene Davis, Junkie’s Curtain, 1967 }

{ imp photographed by paul nett }

Life is not a long slow decline from sunlit uplands towards the valley of death. It is, rather, a U-bend.

When people start out on adult life, they are, on average, pretty cheerful. Things go downhill from youth to middle age until they reach a nadir commonly known as the mid-life crisis. So far, so familiar. The surprising part happens after that. Although as people move towards old age they lose things they treasure—vitality, mental sharpness and looks—they also gain what people spend their lives pursuing: happiness.

This curious finding has emerged from a new branch of economics that seeks a more satisfactory measure than money of human well-being. Conventional economics uses money as a proxy for utility—the dismal way in which the discipline talks about happiness. But some economists, unconvinced that there is a direct relationship between money and well-being, have decided to go to the nub of the matter and measure happiness itself.

{ The Economist | Continue reading }

photo { The Haven of Contentment }

When it comes to genes, evolutionary biologists have traditionally favored seniority. Genes thought to be most essential to life must be ancient and conserved, the assumption goes, handed down from species to species as the basic instructions of life. That sharing is evident in early developmental stages, which 19th-century biologist Ernst Haeckel observed to be very similar between different organisms in his famed recapitulation theory. The genes that drive those early stages of development are also shared by creatures as different as flies, mice, and humans, lending support to the idea that the most important genes for life go a long way back on the evolutionary tree.

By comparison, new genes haven’t gotten nearly as much credit. Arising more recently in evolution’s history, rookies that only count their age in tens of millions of years were thought to be less important - providing new functions and features that were nice, but not essential. If old genes were the bread and butter of life…

“Maybe the new genes serve a function like vinegar or soy sauce,” said Manyuan Long, professor of ecology & evolution at the University of Chicago. “They make your life better, change behavior, help a male find females more efficiently, but that’s all.”

But that ageist perspective is shaken in this week’s Science, courtesy of an exciting new study from Long’s laboratory. Using the fly species Drosophila melanogaster, Long, graduate student Sidi Chen, and postdoctoral researcher Yong Zhang tested whether silencing a new gene would be as fatal as silencing an old one. (…)

Another surprise implication of the data is the speed with which new genes can become an indispensable part of a species’ genome. When a new gene appears in a species due to evolution, one would not expect it to be immediately crucial - otherwise, how did the species survive before its arrival? But like a new employee in an office, a new gene can make itself essential by forming relationships with older, essential genes through what are called gene-gene interactions. Before long, the new gene has become a key part of the species’ survival…and there’s no turning back.

{ University of Chicago | Continue reading }

photo { Jeremy Liebman }

Cannibalism is part of the great cultural legacies of our species. In times past, for instance, we would eat our honoured dead to gain their wisdom.

In medieval times, it was believed that memories were stored in the cerebrospinal fluid. Sadly, it seems that memory cannot be transferred biochemically. (…)

In the Polynesian islands, human meat has always been known as “long pig,” because people taste like pork.

{ Warren Ellis/Wired | Continue reading }

In a study published in May, Fisher and her colleagues asked 15 people who had recently been dumped but were still in love to consider two pictures—one of the former partner and one of a neutral acquaintance—while an MRI scanner measured their brain activity. When looking at their exes, the spurned lovers showed activity in parts of the brain’s reward system, just as happy lovers do. But the neural pathways associated with cravings and addictions were activated too, as was a brain region associated with the distress that accompanies physical pain.

Rejected lovers also showed increased neural response in regions involved in assessing behavior and controlling emotions. “These people were working on the problem, thinking, what did I do, what should I do next, what did I learn from this,” Fisher says. And the longer ago the breakup was, the weaker the activity in the attachment-linked region. In other words: Love hurts, but time heals.

{ Discover | Continue reading }

photo { Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster, From Here to Eternity, 1953 }

New research in Psychological Science found that the fear of being the target of malicious envy makes people act nicer to people they think might be jealous of them.

There are two types of envy says Niels van de Ven of Tilburg University and his coauthors: benign envy and malicious envy. People with benign envy are motivated to improve themselves, so they could be more like the person they envied. People with malicious envy want to bring the people above them down.

{ APS | Continue reading }

photo { David Stewart }

One in every 10,000 chickens is born gynandromorphic: half male and half female.

Developmental biologist Michael Clinton expected to find that the birds had abnormal cells. Instead he found healthy male and female cells. These cells keep their identity even when injected into an embryo of the opposite sex, indicating that their gender is innate.

The discovery that each cell in a chicken can be inherently male or female is a huge departure from biological dogma, which holds that hormones control sex characteristics in vertebrates. Gender-imprinted cells may exist in us, too. Male and female cells might respond slightly differently to hormonal signals, which may partially explain differences in male and female behavior and susceptibility to some diseases. 

{ Discover | Continue reading }

photo { Brandon Pavan }

Harder-to-read fonts boost student learning. Connor Diemand-Yauman and his colleagues think the effect occurs because fonts that are more awkward to read encourage deeper processing of the to-be-learned material.

{ BPS | Continue reading }

{ Atta Kim | Eight-hour photograph of the intersection of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street }

“Rocks or up?”

“Up, please.”

(…)

“In addition, most educated drinkers agree rye whiskey gives more complexity to the finished cocktail than bourbon. Since you’re obviously a little new to all this, let’s start you off with a Kentucky rye that’s been aged in Madeira cask and contains thirty percent corn…”

{ The Threepenny Review | Continue reading }

images { 1 | 2. Weegee }

The most famous Einstein pronouncement on God came in the form of a telegram, in which he was asked to answer the question in 50 words or less. He did it in 32: “I believe in Spinoza’s God, who reveals himself in the lawful harmony of all that exists, but not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.”

{ Big Question | Continue reading }

The leg-to-body ratio (LBR) is a morphological index that has been shown to influence a person’s attractiveness. In our research, 3,103 participants from 27 nations rated the physical attractiveness of seven male and seven female silhouettes varying in LBR. We found that male and female silhouettes with short and excessively long legs were perceived as less attractive across all nations. Hence, the LBR may significantly influence perceptions of physical attractiveness across nations.

{ JCC/SAGE | Continue reading }

{ James Joyce }

Although fiction treats themes of psychological importance, it has been excluded from psychology because it is seen as flawed empirical method. But fiction is not empirical truth. It is simulation that runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers. In any simulation coherence truths have priority over correspondences. Moreover, in the simulations of fiction, personal truths can be explored that allow readers to experience emotions — their own emotions — and understand aspects of them that are obscure, in relation to contexts in which the emotions arise.

{ Fiction as Cognitive and Emotional Simulation by Keith Oatley | Continue reading }

images { 1. Pinocchio | 2. Maurizio Cattelan, Daddy Daddy, 2008 | 3 }

The slasher horror film has been the subject of frequent criticism based on the assumption that female characters in these films are more likely to be the victims of serious, graphic violence that is juxtaposed with explicit sexual imagery. The purpose of this study was to address limitations inherent in previous analyses of slasher films and examine whether gender differences exist in the nature of violent presentations. A content analysis of several indicators of violent and sexual content was conducted using a random sample of 50 slasher films that were released in North America between 1960 and 2007. Findings suggested that there are several significant gender differences in the nature of violent presentations found in slasher films. In general, female characters were more likely to be victims of less serious and graphic forms of violence, but were also significantly more likely to be victimized in scenes involving a concomitant presentation of sex and violence.

{ Sex and Violence in the Slasher Horror Film: A Content Analysis of Gender Differences in the Depiction of Violence by Andrew Welsh, Ph.D., Department of Criminology and Contemporary Studies | PDF }

Is the desire to know other people’s secrets a natural instinct – or a vulgar vice?

The need to maintain a barrier against the outside world may be one of our most basic human urges; but another is the lust to know the unknown, to observe and indulge in the privacy of others. In his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life the sociologist Erving Goffman demonstrates how we all perform in various guises and to different groups of people, as if we were on stage. We preserve our “backstage” selves as an essential part of our identity – and it is this protected part of our personality that we attempt to mask, while harbouring a strong desire to penetrate those of others.

{ New Humanist | Continue reading }

photo { Man Ray }