Art Wortd Coop

Here is a guide for my pragmatic readers, courtesy of Donny Miller.
(I would never have dared to link to this if I hadn't originally found it at art.blogging.la.)
(Am I becoming cynical again?)

Our guest from the future will not avoid yet another interesting discovery. Those who go to visit the exhibition of avant-garde art, who buy an "incomprehensible" sculpture or participate in a happening, are dressed and groomed according to the established cannons of fashion, they wear jeans or brand clothes, they put on make-up according to the model of beauty promoted by the color magazines, the cinema, the TV, that is, the mass media. They take example from the ideals of beauty proposed by the world of the commercial consumption that the avant-garde art has fought against for over half a century. How are we to interpret this contradiction? Without trying to explain it, we can say it is typical of the 20th century.

- Umberto Eco, The History of Beauty (2004), here in my translation from Polish.
(You can read several interesting reviews of The History of Beauty at Amazon. As always, I only send you to the books I find genuinely brilliant. This a truly amazing piece of work, as usually in the case of Eco it combines profound insight with unparalleled sense of humour and sensibility)

I have started to introduce some changes to the New Art blog's appearance. As you can see, so far it's very small-scale (strategic ;)) : the page now has a favicon (tiny logo next to the address). The little image has to do both with contemporary art and with Portugal. The logo in the top right corner - the "network" - is also about to be replaced. I will be experimenting with some new images, and writing about the proposed changes. I would like to know your opinion!

The internet seems to be working particularly well for feminist art, or rather, for art centered on women. Here is another example: a simple "game" by Juliet Davis, called Pieces of Herself, where we compose a woman by exploring her surroundings and literally inputting the elements we choose on the anonymous figure. And they jump and dance and talk and ring, and all this inside of the woman we create. "You really should try and integrate all those roles into one", said one of the objects I selected.
Is this the specificity of a woman? Or is it just a person, and the gender/sex is irrelevant...?
Why is it a woman? What makes this experience unique for women?

(via Rhizome)