Creative Destruction

Saw this piece of art ("Pater Noster" by Sean Landers) at the Denver Art Museum a few weeks back (for more pictures of the painting, check out a photo album here). The basic premise is that the artist started writing brief "diary entries" in a way that formed a series of patterns on an immense piece of canvas. He started the work when he found out that his father had terminal cancer, and it ends shortly before his wife is to have their first child.

The result is a fairly stunning amalgamation of sardonic commentary ("I have to confess that I'm fucking great. Sorry if that rubbs [sic] the wrong way."), navel-gazing ("Tennis on Tuesday, the start of my new health routine."), and a heart-breaking kind of matter-of-factness ("I hung this canvas a year and a half ago. Since then, I got rich, my dad died, and Michelle is pregnant.").

I'm not sure why this particular artwork struck me as so fascinating. Much of what is written is the kind of banal reiteration of daily routine that is everywhere regurgitated at the end of the day. Then again, maybe it's the artist's lack of pretense that is so compelling, focusing as he does on the root - not the symptoms - of pain.

Another Fatal Conceit

Nice to see the world still has some sense...

I do find it interesting that the leader of an ideological movement that was founded on the theory that all of human history has been determined by material needs and conflicts (as opposed to a conflict of ideas or religions) is being undermined by a vast, poor populace that is waiting to grant Chavez sweeping socialist powers until he satisfies their, well, material needs.

Note to future socialist leaders: ensure that your populace has jobs before you try to swing it left. They'll tire of your ideology when they figure out they can't eat it. Ask Maslow.

The End of Embryonic Stem Cell Research?

From Time - apparently two separate research teams have managed to doctor adult cheek cells to simulate embryonic stem cells:

...scientists have surged ahead of ethicists and politicians in finding ever more clever ways to generate stem cells. But where other breakthroughs relied on using cells from living embryos — tiny bits of inchoate life, fraught with ethical issues — the work by Yamanaka and Thomson sidesteps that abyss by nursing adult cells into a state in which their cellular destiny is yet to be fulfilled. No embryos, no eggs, no hand-wringing over where the cells come from and whether it is ethical to make them in the first place.

The researchers admit that cheek cells are not yet able to provide the same benefits as embryonic stem cells, so the ethical and legislative debates may continue. At the very least, this seems to kill any hope the Left may have had (think California's Proposition 71 from a few years back) of acquiring public funds to continue human embryonic stem cell research...