Evocatively

Like everyone else who woke up and checked their Twitter feeds this morning, we were amused and somewhat surprised to discover that our TweetDeck was chock-full of nothing but Courtney Love. As longtime fans of the eccentric Stevie Nicks disciple, we had been anxious to see how she would tailor her patented long-form stream-of-consciousness rants that she used to post on her MySpace page to fit Twitter's strict 140-character limit. Well, as it turns out, she hasn't. And because Twitter reads in reverse-chronological order, dissecting Courtney's latest missives is even more difficult than translating ancient Sumerian scripts. Fortunately for you, the active Courtney connoisseur, we took a few minutes out of our busy mornings to reorder her 95 hilarious musings on everything from Jimmy Fallon ("shout out to Fallon GOODNIGHT NANCY put a marie antionette wig on and watch Spice World") to Paul Rudd ("im havingwierder flashbacks of how Paul Rudd is secretly themost hugely sweet boy who ever did collect every Radiohead bootlegever") to the ghost Twittering phenomenon into a (semi-) digestible format. You're welcome!

If you've not checked out new york based, www.ArtCycle.com, you should.

It's a new curated website (aka.. a contemporary art pawn/consignement shop), and like Artnet.com it also is helping give the much needed liquidity and transparency to the contemporary art market.

They only started up in November 2008, and they actually have an impressive list of Contemporary Art inventory already.  They already have works by some impressive artists : Araki, Eggleston, Oliver Boberg, Hirst,Candida Hofer, William Kentridge, Opie, Anselm Reyle, Lisa Ruyter, Andrees Serrano, and Kehinde Wiley just to name a few.

The 1559 first edition of Praetorius’s history of the Roman Emperors was published in Latin without illustrations. For the first German edition, Praetorius added over one hundred woodcut portraits of the emperors described, taken from imperial coins and later commemorative medals.

The final portrait is that of Ferdinand I of Prague, who Praetorius met while on a diplomatic mission for the Archbishop of Magdeburg. This may have been a last minute substitute since the earlier text indicates the final portrait is to be Emperor Charles V.

Note the words in the woodcuts are printed white on a black background. It was easier to use a thin knife to cut out the letters than to cut around them. The large areas left in relief, printing black, make for a stronger block that would last through a large printing run. In fact, these same blocks were also used in Georgius Sabinus’ Catalogues Romanorum et Germanicorum Imperatorum in 1561.

We had hopes for In the Motherhood, the mom-driven sitcom that premiered last night on ABC. Not high ones or anything, but certainly hopes. Though its original inspiration — a series of seven-minute webisodes starring Leah Remeni and Jenny Garth McCarthy and based on real-life family horror stories submitted by actual moms — is only semi-funny, for the TV version, ABC upped the budget and recast Cheryl Hines and Megan Mullally, two of television's funniest actresses, as the leads. So why, then, was it so painfully bad? We didn’t laugh once during the 21-minute episode, not even when someone fell off the roof — and we always laugh when people fall off roofs!

In the transition from the web, the show lost a key element when real-mother-generated stories became off-limits (see here). The situations in last night's episode — a child tells his class that Santa Claus is a lie, one mom pretends to be pregnant for the attention, a single mom haplessly dates her colleague — felt too neat and, well, sitcom-y, to have come from the real world, and therefore weren't as amusing. The gloss of network TV makes the show seem recycled in a "haven't I seen this dumb show before?" kind of way, and the laugh track kills any desire you might have to actually chuckle. It's a shame that the talents of Hines and Mullally were so wasted.

Something new from Apture - along with videos, images, microblogs, music and files slideshows can now be embedded and linked using their layer. Here is an example, partly chosen because biological subjects seem to lend themselves to slideshow type presentations.

A company called Slideshare are the partners for this particular part of the Apture World Domination

Los Angeles based August Bradley belongs to our favorite new breed of fashion photographer. In fact we hesitate to box this style in being called “photography” although it most certainly qualifies as such.
As digital tools have evolved over the last decade we’ve seen a few artists here and there that blur the line between photography and photorealistic illustration, and few do it as well as this. As shown in the video, Bradley makes reference to classical European portraiture styles (think Baroque era paintings of aristocracy) and mashes them together with contemporary fashion. The result is something a little too perfect in some areas to be a painting, but with sketchy details that make brush strokes so pleasing.

Guest of Cindy Sherman, which opens today, chronicles the ill-fated relationship between famous photographer Sherman and Paul H-O (short for Hasegawa-Overacker), a former cable-access star. Sherman would rather you not see the film; after screenings last year, she issued a statement expressing regret that she’d cooperated with the filmmakers, documentarian Tom Donahue and H-O, who met and fell in love with Sherman when he was still doing his goofy art-world party-crashing show, “Gallery Beat” (which ran from 1993 to 2000). Vulture spoke to H-O about his relationship with Sherman, the art world’s wimpiness, and Julian Schnabel’s temper.

When’s was the last time you and Cindy talked?
Two-and-a-half years ago. After I moved out [of Sherman’s Soho loft], there was a certain point when she wrote me an e-mail and it said she didn't feel like she needed to talk to me anymore.

But she cooperated with the film while you and Tom were making it.
Oh yeah, yes, very much so. I mean, we did it legally — we got life rights and rights to images.

The New York art world, as seen in all the archival footage you and Tom worked into the film, seems very likable during the “Gallery Beat” era. With, of course, the exception of Julian Schnabel, who basically hates on you.
He looks a lot worse in other footage we didn’t use. Oh my God.

He rambled on further about how awful you are?
Oh, there was quite a back-and-forth going on there. I got some good punches in.

We were hoping it would come to fisticuffs.
That's the funny thing about the art world.

Everybody's a wimp?
Yeah. I mean, if you push somebody, they might start crying, you know.

Parts of the film are almost like a requiem for a time before big money ruined the art world. You seem hurt not only by what happened to your relationship, but also sad about what's become of the art world.
I am not hurt by what happened to the art world.

Annoyed?
I became alienated from what it became. In a lot of ways, I'm very detached from the elements in the film that might seem like they're, you know, deep emotional moments.

The title of the film comes from a night when you arrive at a formal dinner party with Cindy to discover that not only are you not seated at your famous girlfriend’s table, but you’re treated like a nobody.
I really did feel support of the artist, of her accomplishment. It's like, "Okay, you're the admiral — I can accept that." I just like to be the captain of my own boat. I need to have my own boat.

We'll admit it, we have zero insight into why YouTube user elbarto643 decided to mash together footage from Muppet Babies with dialogue from Lost. But bonus points for turning Kermit into Jack and Animal into Sawyer.

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