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For Bookmark, ArtAsiaPacific invites an artist to spotlight some of their online sources of inspiration. This week we asked Jonathon Keats.
1. New Scientist
Often my art involves scientific research. I find newscientist.com superb for keeping track of the latest developments, and for maintaining (or feigning) scientific literacy. And to see how other artists are applying science in their work, an optimal source is New Scientist’s Culturelab blog.
3. We Make Money Not Art
If keeping up with the sciences isn’t challenging enough, keeping tabs on the arts is totally confounding. Maybe it’s cheating, but one of my strategies is to go meta, scanning headlines collected by well-curated arts news aggregators, such as ArtsJournal and Arts & Letters Daily. A more pleasurable approach is to follow a few especially astute bloggers, of which Régine Debatty at we-make-money-not-art.com is one of my favorites.
5. Critic-At-Large
Last month I began writing art criticism for the Forbes blog network. In recent posts, I’ve examined how Gustav Klimt avoided the perils of kitsch, argued that Banksy deserves a gold medal for his Olympic graffiti, and asked whether Damien Hirst might just be the world’s most misunderstood artist. I post once a week.
2. The Large Hadron Collider
In addition to reading about the sciences, I like to observe research in progress. CERN offers that opportunity to anyone with an internet connection, providing a live feed of proton collisions inside the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at atlas-live.cern.ch. Some of the exotic particles produced by those high-energy impacts haven’t been around since the Big Bang. Watching them, I realized that they’d make great pornography for God. (After all, if God created the universe, the Big Bang would be the moment of divine coitus.) So a couple years ago at a nonprofit art space in Brooklyn called Louis V. ESP, I built a votive altar with a live feed from the LHC. Here’s one media account of my porn theater for God.
4. Beyond the Beyond
For nearly a decade, the science fiction writer Bruce Sterling has produced the only blog I know of that truly defies classification. In the spirit of preserving what he has achieved, I will not attempt to classify it, let alone describe the eclectic content, but will merely recommend frequent visits.