Those were the days

Over on Public Address, Russell Brown has imagined what A.R.D. Fairburn would have been like as a blogger:

Fairburn is generally taught now as a poet, and he wrote quite a bit of that. But he wasn't the best of our poets, and, for me, it's his argument that's the key to him. His cranky, rambling 1944 essay, 'We New Zealanders', certainly has its flaws: most notably a section in which he hails the theories of Social Credit as the answer to New Zealand's economic problems. But it's also possessed of a raging, huge, unmissable voice.

... Fairburn had another key attribute of a good blogger: he didn't need much editing. "One of the remarkable things" about Fairburn's letters, declared James and Helen McNeish in their biography, Walking on My Feet, "is how meticulous Fairburn's English was even in his careless moments."

Suddenly I was cast into an alternate reality, where Peter Tomory, Hamish Keith, Gordon Brown, Wystan Curnow, Nelson Kenny and Imi Porsolt were running the 1960s EyeContact. And I thought: wow. That would be one hell of a read.

pshaw

After three presentations at the Venice Biennale (Peter Robinson + Jacqueline Fraser (2001), Michael Stevenson (2003), et al (2005) - CNZ, why did you not keep all the project sites live?) this year New Zealand is being represented by a small contingent of curators, artists, art dealers and a CNZ staffer, who are going to invade Venice surreptitiously and subversively with ... a book.

The 31-ish artists represented in the book (Ronnie Van Hout is a not-confirmed) were selected by a panel of eight curators and visual-arters. Over at Overthenet, you can speculate on which curator nominated which artist (apparently they all got one nomination the others couldn't veto) and then be astounded by the utterly ridiculous timeline that these artists have been given to prepare their artist pages - not to mention the finicky specs provided by the publication designer, Warren Olds.

I like artists. Some of my friends are artists. But if you give 31 artists 10 days to produce 6 pages of images, as 300dpi TIFF files, and think it will happen, either you're on something, or hurt yourself by holding your breath too long as a child.