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"Tell the chef, the beer is on me."
— de.indymedia.org | Eiche in Lichtenhagen gefällt
"... Zu Eurem Glueck entspricht das nicht meiner Moeglichkeiten und auch nicht meinem Glauben von politischer Auseinandersetzung. "
ECCE HOMO - "C'est possible." L'équipe de restaurateurs professionnels qui analyse actuellement la peinture du Christ, massacrée par une octogénaire à Borja en Espagne, s'est dite confiante. Selon les experts dépêchés sur place, il est possible de redonner à cette peinture murale son aspect d'origine. Mais les fans et la ville seront-ils d'accord?
Depuis le 21 août dernier, les images de cette peinture du Christ datant du 19e siècle font le tour du monde. Une octogénaire a en effet voulu restaurer l'œuvre sans autorisation et anéanti le travail original de l'artiste. L'Ecce Homo d'Elias Garcia Martinez est désormais connu comme la pire restauration artistique de l'histoire.
Lire aussi:
» La pire restauration de l'histoire?
» L'artiste qui a massacré le Christ de Borja s'explique: "tout le monde me voyait"
» Le Christ de Borja massacré devient... objet de culte !
La restauration serait possible
Depuis la découverte de l'œuvre, deux spécialistes de l'entreprise de restauration Albarium évaluent les dommages. Après avoir enquêté auprès de l'octogénaire qui a retouché l'Ecce Homo pour savoir quels produits ont été utilisés, les restaurateurs ont expliqué être "confiants" et "contents". Selon eux, il serait possible de sauver la peinture d'origine.
Cette semaine, de nouvelles analyses seront faites et les restaurateurs rendront leur rapport.
Une pétition pour sauver la version de l'octogénaire
Mais les fans accepteront-ils de voir disparaître la pire restauration du monde? Depuis deux semaines, les images de l'Ecce Homo font le tour du monde et l'histoire de cette œuvre, inconnue jusqu'alors, a passionné les foules.
Les adorateurs de la toile se mobilisent d'ailleurs pour conserver la version ratée du tableau. Une pétition - recueillant désormais plus de 21.000 signataires - demande au maire de Borja de ne plus y toucher. Pour eux, il est important de conserver cette œuvre qui constitue "une critique subtile des théories créationnistes de l'Église et une interrogation sur l'émergence de nouvelles idoles".
Un filon touristique
Le maire pourrait lui aussi avoir intérêt à conserver l'œuvre telle qu'elle est aujourd'hui. En effet, la mairie de Borja a décidé de déposer la marque "Ecce Homo". Pourquoi? Officiellement, la mairie ne veut pas que le nom soit "mal" utilisé. Mais en déposant ce nom, la municipalité s'assure surtout des retombées économiques.
L'histoire de cette peinture aura fait découvrir cette commune de Saragosse dans le monde entier. Depuis les premiers articles sur le sujet, le 21 août dernier, la ville n'a jamais été aussi visitée. Des milliers de touristes se rendent dans l'église et font la queue pour être photographié à côté de ce nouvel objet de "culte".
Con el Ecce Homo twitter.com/Cabrejas1994/s…
— DavidCabrejas (@Cabrejas1994) Août 22, 2012
Ces curieux pourraient aussi être intéressés par des produits dérivés... D'ailleurs certains entrepreneurs ont devancé la commune: des tshirts existent déjà et une pâtisserie madrilène fait même des crêpes Ecce Homo...
Quel que soit le verdict des restaurateurs, la décision de conserver ou non la peinture reviendra à l'église de Borja.
Friedrich Hayek, Paul Ryan, Ayn Rand
A specter is haunting the Republican National Convention—the specter of ideology. The novelist Ayn Rand (1905–1982) and the economist Friedrich von Hayek (1899–1992) are the house deities of many American libertarians, much of the Tea Party, and Paul Ryan in particular. The two thinkers were quite different, subject to much misunderstanding, and, in Hayek’s case, more often cited than read. Yet, in popularized form, their arguments together provide the intellectual touchstone for Ryan and many others on the right wing of the Republican Party, people whose enthusiasm Mitt Romney needs.
The irony of today is that these two thinkers, in their struggle against the Marxist left of the mid-twentieth century, relied on some of the same underlying assumptions as Marxism itself: that politics is a matter of one simple truth, that the state will eventually cease to matter, and that a vanguard of intellectuals is needed to bring about a utopia that can be known in advance. The paradoxical result is a Republican Party ticket that embraces outdated ideology, taking some of the worst from the twentieth century and presenting it as a plan for the twenty-first.
Romney’s choice of an ideologist as his running mate made a kind of sense. Romney the financier made hundreds of millions of dollars in an apparent single-minded pursuit of returns on investment; but as a politician he has been less noted for deep principles then for expediently changing his positions. Romney’s biography was in need of a plot and his worldview was in need of a moral. Insofar as he is a man of principle, the principle seems to be is that rich people should not pay taxes. His fidelity to this principle is beyond reproach, which raises certain moral questions. Paying taxes, after all, is one of our very few civic obligations. By refusing to release his tax returns, Romney is likely trying to keep embarrassing tax dodges out of public view; he is certainly communicating to like-minded wealthy people that he shares their commitment to doing nothing that could possibly help the United States government. The rationale that Ryan’s ideology provides for this unpatriotic behavior is that taxing rich people hinders the market. Rather than engaging in activist politics, such as bailing out General Motors or public schools, our primary responsibility as American citizens is to give way to the magic of the marketplace, and applaud any associated injustices as necessary and therefore good.
This is where Ryan comes in. Romney provides the practice, Ryan the theory. Romney has lots of money, but has never managed to present the storyline of his career as a moral triumph. Ryan, with his credibility as an ideas politician, seems to solve that problem. In the right-wing anarchism that arises from the marriage of Rand and Hayek, Romney’s wealth is proof that all is well for the rest of us, since the laws of economics are such that the unhindered capitalism represented by chop-shops such as Bain must in the end be good for everyone.
The problem with this sort of economic determinism is that it is Marxism in reverse, with the problems of the original kind. Planning by finance capitalists replaces planning by the party elite. Marx’s old dream, the “withering away” of the state, is the centerpiece of the Ryan budget: cut taxes on the rich, claim that cutting government functions and the closing of unspecified loopholes will balance budgets, and thereby make the state shrink. Just like the Marxists of another era, the Republican ticket substitutes mythical thinking about the economy for loyalty to the nation.
The attempt to add intellectual ballast to Romney’s career pulls the ticket downward into the slog of twentieth-century ideology. Hayek’s Road to Serfdom, which in its better passages is a paean to modesty in economics, is read by leading Republicans as the formula that intervention in the free market must lead to totalitarianism. This is a nice confident story, with a more than superficial resemblance to the nice confident Marxist story that a free market without intervention would bring revolution. Like Marxism, the Hayekian ideology is a theory of everything, which has an answer for everything. Like Marxism, it allows politicians who accept the theory to predict the future, using their purported total knowledge to create and to justify suffering among those who do not hold power. Ayn Rand is appealing in a more private way because she celebrates unbridled anarchic capitalism: it magnifies inequality and brings pleasure to the wealthy, who deserve it for being so wonderful, and pain to the masses, who deserve it for being so stupid. Hayek thought that we should hesitate to intervene in the market because certainty about economic matters was impossible; Rand thought that the law of the jungle was itself a rather good (and sexy) thing.
Though he now prefers discussing Hayek, Ryan seems to have been more deeply affected by Rand, whom he credits for inspiring his political career. It is likely the combination of the two—the theory of everything and the glorification of inequality—that gives him his cheery, and eerie, confidence. Hayek and Rand are comfortable intellectual company not because they explain reality, but because, like all effective ideologists, they remove the need for any actual contact with it. They were reacting to real historical experience, Hayek with National Socialism and Rand with Soviet communism. But precisely because they were reacting, they flew to extreme interpretations. Just as untethered capitalism did not bring proletarian utopia, as the Marxists thought, intervention and redistribution did not bring totalitarianism, as anti-Marxists such as Hayek claimed.
Hayek’s native Austria was vulnerable to radicalism from the right in the 1930s precisely because it followed the very policies that he recommended. It was one of the least interventionist states in Europe, which left its population hugely vulnerable to the Great Depression—and to Hitler. Austria became a prosperous democracy after World War II because its governments ignored Hayek’s advice and created a welfare state. As Americans at the time understood, making provisions for citizens in need was an effective way to defend democracy from the extreme right and left.
Rich Republicans such as Romney are of course a small minority of the party. Not much of the Republican electorate has any economic interest in voting for a ticket whose platform is to show that government does not work. As Ryan understands, they must be instructed that their troubles are not simply a pointless contrast to the gilded pleasures of the man at the top of the Republican ticket, but rather part of the same story, a historical drama in which good will triumph and evil will be vanquished. Hayek provides the rules of the game: anything the government does to interfere in the economy will just make matters worse; therefore the market, left to its own devices, must give us the best of all possible worlds. Rand supplies the discrete but titillating elitism: this distribution of pleasure and pain is good in and of itself, because (and this will not be said aloud) people like Romney are bright and people who will vote for him are not. Rand understood that her ideology can only work as sadomasochism. In her novels, the suffering of ordinary Americans (“parasites,” as they are called in Atlas Shrugged) provides the counterpoint to the extraordinary pleasures of the heroic captains of industry (which she describes in weird sexual terms). A bridge between the pain of the people and the pleasure of the elite which mollifies the former and empowers the latter is the achievement of an effective ideology.
In the Romney/Ryan presidential campaign, Americans who are vulnerable and isolated are told that they are independent and strong, so that they will vote for policies that will leave them more vulnerable and more isolated. Ryan is a good enough communicator and a smart enough man to make reverse Marxism work as a stump speech or a television interview. But as national policy it would be self-destructive tragedy. The self-destructive part is that no nation can long survive that places stories about historical necessity above the palpable needs of its citizens. The tragic part is that the argument against ideology has already been won. The defenses of freedom against Marxism, above all the defense of the individual against those who claim to enact the future, also apply to the reverse Marxism of the Republican ticket.
The great political thinkers of the twentieth century have discredited ideological systems that claim perfect knowledge of what is to come and present politicians as scientists of the future (remember, Ryan’s budget plan tells us what will happen in 2083). The way to national prosperity in the twenty-first century is surely to think non-ideologically, to recognize that politics is a choice among constraints and goods rather than a story about a single good that would triumph if only evil people would allow it to function without constraints. The market works very well for some things, the government is desperately needed for others, and stories that dismiss either one are nothing more than ideology.
20/8/2012 –26/8/2012
Eigth Edition
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oAnth - also available on soup.io
Cecilia Giménez, 81, reportedly ill after media frenzy and talk of legal action over her well-intentioned restoration disaster of the Ecce Homo fresco
An 81-year-old who garnered worldwide media attention after she tried – and spectacularly failed – to restore a painting in her local church may face legal charges.
Cecilia Giménez, the well-intentioned amateur restorer from the Spanish city of Borja, is reportedly in bed after an anxiety attack, with neighbours and relatives suggesting she feels overwhelmed because of the media frenzy over the unintentional damage she caused to the mural.
The damage to the painting in the church of la Misericordia de Borja is reportedly being investigated by experts, with the artist's descendants apparently unhappy that an individual decided to take the restoration job into her own hands. They fear her handiwork may be irreversible.
Giménez told Spanish television that the priest knew about her attempts at restoration to the Ecce Homo painting by Elías García Martínez and that she had done nothing in secret. "The priest knew it and everyone who came into the church could see I was painting," she said.
Although no one seems sure when she embarked on the restoration project, news of the incident first appeared on the blog of the Centre for Borja Studies a fortnight ago.
The centre posted some before-and-after pictures, along with a plaintive message confirming that someone had recently been up to no good with a brush.
"As incredible as it may seem, this is all that remains of the work of an artist whose descendants still live in our city," it said. "We do not know whether this unspeakable deed can de remedied, but there can be no doubt whatsoever that someone should take the necessary action to ensure that such behaviour is not repeated. Whatever the motives were, it must be roundly condemned."
Professional restorers plan to examine the painting to gauge whether restoration is possible.
According to the local paper El Heraldo de Aragón, the city council is reportedly considering legal action against Giménez. Her actions meant the 19th-century painting, which was already in a poor condition, had been "completely destroyed", one councillor, Juan María de Ojeda, said.
Ojeda nonetheless criticised media attention as "disproportionate".
Giménez's efforts have been variously been dubbed "the worst restoration in history", "a botched job", and "a crayon sketch of a very hairy monkey in an ill-fitting tunic".
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// oAnth
cf. WP (EN) - The Human Use of Human Beings is a book by Norbert Wiener. It was first published in 1950 and revised in 1954.
Wiener was the founding thinker of cybernetics theory and an influential advocate of automation. Human Use argues for the benefits of automation to society. It analyzes the meaning of productive communication and discusses ways for humans and machines to cooperate, with the potential to amplify human power and release people from the repetitive drudgery of manual labor, in favor of more creative pursuits in knowledge work and the arts. He explores how such changes might harm society through dehumanization or subordination of our species, and offers suggestions on how to avoid such risks.
[...]
Thanks to an inadvertent iconoclast, a second-rate fresco is now a 'masterpiece'. Turn her loose on artists that deserve attention
It's all over the internet, it's trending, tweeting, the funniest art joke of all time. You must know it by now. "Masterpiece of Jesus is destroyed after old lady's attempt to restore damage is a less-than-divine intervention", Worst painting restoration work in history", "Elderly woman destroys 19th century fresco with DIY restoration".
A woman said to be in her 80s in Borjanos in Spain took it upon herself to "restore" a fresco in the Sanctuary of Mercy church there. The original painting is an Ecce Homo by Elias Garcia Martinez and dates from the 19th century. But this triptych of photographs shows how totally it has been ruined. It's hilarious to see how the would-be restorer's efforts resulted in a complete reinvention of the painting as a crude image with a face like a neanderthal man's self-portrait. Oh dear. This pious art lover could have a career in slapstick if she wants, for her comic destruction of a work of art bears comparison with Rowan Atkinson giving Whistler's Mother a badly drawn cartoon face in the film Bean.
How did it happen? What was the well-meaning vandal thinking? Reports differ on the meaning of the middle picture in the before-and-after triptych: was this the result of water damage or the self-appointed artist's early effort to prepare the picture for restoration? Picturing how it happened is even funnier than seeing the contrasting versions themselves. Did she, like the Marx Brothers trimming a moustache in Monkey Business, try to fix one bit and then had to do another bit and then another until the whole thing was gone? Was it like Father Ted in the episode of the much-loved clerical comedy where he attempts to mend a car's bodywork with a hammer?
There is only one problem with this story. It doesn't really matter. Martinez is not a great artist and his painting Ecce Homo is not a "masterpiece". It is a minor painting in the dregs of an academic tradition. When it was painted, a boy called Pablo in another Spanish town was learning to paint in this same exhausted 19th-century style. Soon he would shake off the influence of his father the provincial artist Don Jose Ruiz y Picasso and start to reinvent art.
Google Martinez and you will find many, many references that have appeared in the last 24 hours to the botched restoration – and not much else. A previously obscure artist has become famous overnight because of the amateur restorer's exploit. A forgotten painting is now known around the world as a "masterpiece", because it was wrecked.
Perhaps this offers a new strategy for those who seek to popularise the Old Masters. What if even older, but far greater, paintings were to get the Mr Bean treatment?
After Rowan Atkinson gave a show-stopping Mr Bean performance as a keyboard player upstaging a Simon Rattle-conducted performance of Chariots of Fire in the Olympic opening ceremony, the composer Michael Nyman took exception to orchestral music being mocked in this way. Where did his sense of humour go? Surely he can see that classical music should use this strategy to popularise itself. We need Mr Bean disrupting performances of Monteverdi and Mahler. That will get the kids into the concert halls.
Similarly, the well-meaning restorer of this obscure Spanish painting should be turned loose on a couple of works that actually matter. Many true masterpieces are starved of the global attention this second-rate Ecce Homo has now got. She could be sent to Italy to see what she can do with the frescoes in the Palazzo Schifanoia in Ferrara. Revered by art historians, these paintings of the months of the year have never quite made it into popular culture. There are 12 paintings, one for every month, so one could be sacrificed for the good of the whole. A hideously repainted face on one of the lesser months might make their creator the 15th-century genius Francesco del Cossa as famous as the 19th century mediocrity Elias Garcia Martinez has now become.
Cecilia Gimenez, an amateur art restorer, damaged a 19th-century painting belonging to a Spanish church, during her attempts to fix it
“ "Permanenter ästhetischer Umsturz: das ist die Aufgabe der Kunst" - Herbert Marcuse ”— Spanische Pensionistin übermalt Jesus-Fresko - Bildende Kunst - derStandard.at › Kultur
An elderly Italian woman appears to have destroyed a valuable artwork after she took it upon herself to ‘restore’ the crumbling painting.
The image, painted by 19th-century artist Elías García Martínez, had reportedly been deteriorating for some time.
The woman in her 80s, a neighbour of the church in which the fresco is located, attempted to restore the painting ‘without permission but with good intentions’.
But a donation from the artist’s granddaughter was about to fix that when the neighbour got in first to have a crack at fixing it up.
The results were not quite as she expected, however.
Once the budding artist realised she was in over her head, she confessed to local authorities.
A professional restorer is reportedly now set to assess the damage and see if the fresco can be saved.
via Elderly woman ruins valuable artwork – Yahoo!7 News.
// Sigalon: I can’t decide which one I like better…
Published on 22 Aug 2012 by CompactTV
Am 16. August 2012 war der Mitgründer der "Bewegung 2. Juni" Bommi Baumann zu Gast bei Compact live in Berlin und berichtete zu seinen Beziehungen zu Verena Vecker Becker und der RAF."Tell the chef, the beer is on me."
"Basically the price of a night on the town!"
"I'd love to help kickstart continued development! And 0 EUR/month really does make fiscal sense too... maybe I'll even get a shirt?" (there will be limited edition shirts for two and other goodies for each supporter as soon as we sold the 200)
Kommentar zu: "Diaspora hat seine Ziele nicht erreicht"
Macher der Facebook-Alternative ziehen sich zurück
http://www.tagesschau.de/ausland/diaspora100.html
mit Fiete Stegers, Fachredakteur des NDR für NetzthemenInterview
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// oAnth:
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Mit der skeptischen Ausrichtung des Berichtes, D* sei +/- gescheitert, aus der Fachredaktion für Netzfragen in der ARD bin ich so nicht ganz einverstanden; der Referent hält sich zwar argumentative Hintertüren offen, hält aber keinerlei Hinweise dahingehend für angebracht, dass Nischenanwendungen - als eine solche möchte ich nach wie vor D* einordnen - zumindest auf dem Gebiet der sozialen Netzwerke anderen Gesetztgemäßigkeiten unterliegen, als man dies beim Online-Mainstream und dessen Hauptvertreter Fb zu unterstellen geneigt ist.
Das zeigt sich m.E. auch sehr schön im Prozess, den die dezentral operierende Plattform ~F (Friendica) augenblicklich durchläuft, bei der just der Chefprogrammierer bereits vor 2 Monaten, die Hauptverantwortlichkeit für die Code-Entwicklung aus der Hand gegeben hat, ungeachtet dessen sich aber zunehmend mehr Interessenten mit und ohne eigenständige Serverinstallationen der Plattform zuwenden.
Dass D* ursprünglich mit dem Ziel antrat, Fb Paroli zu bieten, dient vordergründig als Hauptargumentation, welcher der Artikel folgt, aber dieses Ziel hatte sich ohnehin bereits spätestens Mitte 2011, wesentlich mitbedingt durch die Einführung von G+, als nicht haltbar erwiesen.
So blieb eine in ihren Erwartungen enttäuschte und missgelaunte Nutzergemeinschaft zurück, die sich bzgl. ihrer Konzepte eines dezentralen Netzwerkes mit föderativer Auslegung ernüchtert und ihr gedachtes Online-Refugium mehr denn je bedroht sah; der jetzige Schritt der D*-Entwickler kommt daher für den D*-spezifischen Nutzerkreis gerade noch zum richtigen Zeitpunkt und wirkt auf die vorwiegend IT-geschulte Online-Gemeinschaft meiner Einschätzung nach animierend - er wird, dessen bin ich mir gewiss, neue Initiativschübe für D* unter den Anwendern mit sich bringen.
Ungeachtet dessen erachte ich es längerfristig als erörternswürdig, dass sich mittlerweile 3 dezentrale soziale Netzwerke (die den Namen wirklich verdienen) D*, ~F und Libertree, zunehmend Konkurrenz machen, was unter den in diesem Anwenderbereich zu erwartenden Nutzerzahlen zu denken geben sollte.
Muc, 2012-08-29