The Boys Consider Art Criticism and the South by Southwest Conference!

It's a lazy Spring Break and a slow local news week, readers, and the boys are still drunk! Nonetheless, let's take a quick look at some recent art criticism.

Most Americans are fairly successful in avoiding all things "artistic" but, even so, the now-legendary Obama "Hope" image created by street-artist Shepard Fairey (Chip: "What a great name for an artist!") introduced a little art into all our daily lives. But what's Fairey's other work like? The NY-Times provides an incisive look at his oeuvre, now on display in a retrospective in Boston (Richard: "I think this is the first time the LC has used the word 'oeuvre.' ").

"It is not too difficult to discern the shadows of an Oedipal drama swimming below the surface. Here is the baffling, autocratic father represented most powerfully by the image of Andre the Giant (whose positive counterpart is the Good Father Obama)."

Richard: "There's no joke here. That quote just makes me laugh for some reason."

Fairey has now moved on from helping electing a President to designing shopping bags for Saks Fifth Avenue.

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Although Austin's South by Southwest festival has grown too large (and thereby unhip) for most hipsters, it's still the place to be this week to catch up with 'important' hipster bands. The boys certainly wish they were there to catch the premiere of the Decemberists' new concept album Hazards of Love (which we plan to cover in-depth before it "drops" next Tuesday!). But the coverage of the festival suggests that the music portion of the festival may actually be less exciting than the "film and interactive" portion. Here's a description of a panel on new technologies from the NY-Times:

"On Monday Nick Douglas and Melissa Gira Grant, two veteran bloggers, hosted a session called the “Sex Lives of the Microfamous.” The two were involved once, and broke up on Tumblr, or so the story goes. But here in the offline world, they were back together and led a discussion with about 50 people that gradually revealed that everyone in the room was famous, at least to some other people in the room, and that coming to terms with living transparently was going to take some doing. One participant said he had some very firm boundaries. If a first date goes well, and he is interested in seeing the person again, he sets out the rules of engagement. “You can blog about me or you can date me, but you can’t do both,” he said to audible approval."

Richard: "I don't have any such rules myself. You can both date me and blog about my sexual prowess."