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RIP John Baldessari
A small collection of artworks by John Baldessari, an amazing artist who died yesterday. If you’re unfamiliar with his work, A Brief History of John Baldessari is worth watching too.
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Grid Corrections
Grid Corrections shows, as Curt Meine puts it, “places where theory and reality meet.” Geoff Manaugh, writing for Travel + Leisure:
De Ruijter soon learned that these kinks and deviations were more than local design quirks. They are grid corrections, as he refers to them in a new photographic project: places where North American roads deviate from their otherwise logical grid lines in order to account for the curvature of the Earth. You could drive out there your whole life, de Ruijter realized, and not realize that certain stop signs and intersections exist not because of eccentric real estate deals, but because they are mathematical devices used to help planners wrap a rectilinear planning scheme onto the surface of a spherical planet. In order to avoid large-scale distortion, the Jeffersonian grid—shorthand for the founding father’s 18th-century geometric vision of six-square-mile township parcels, intended to guarantee equal and democratic land-distribution nationwide—is occasionally forced to go askew.
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Bill McKibben in Mother Jones
From Are We Better Off: In Search of Common Ground by Bill McKibben:
But if the gross power of wealth is all we focus on, we may miss the chance for making real change. Because the greatest power of elites has been their ability to make us think like them. Our habits of mind imitate too many of theirs, and it hobbles us — how else to explain our willingness, in democracies, to let such bizarre inequality persist and grow? I mean, why did we let them cut taxes on the rich?
The answer, at least in part, is that we’ve abandoned a sense of common purpose for a pervasive hyperindividualism. Each of the crises listed above stems in some way from that willingness to think of our own particular interest as somehow divorced from that of everyone around us. At least since Reagan, we’ve come as a society to think of private as good and public as tawdry, and so it’s no surprise that we’re now outsourcing every government function short of pulling the trigger in battle, or that we watch with remarkable calm the steady erosion of our educational system.