@ajxcam

Art / Urbanism / Medicine / Rants.

[@ajxcam @ajxcam]

I think turning this into a media story misses the forest for the trees. The problem here wasn't a press conference delay. The problem was that an entirely avoidable mass shooting occurred because SPD has absolutely no accountability, no coordination, no proactive policing, and no ability to catch anybody even when there's an extreme and immediate danger to the public. This isn't a press office problem, it's an SPD problem--and letting SPD leadership point fingers away from themselves doesn't serve the public interest. There were literally normal civilians on film before the shooting criticizing the obvious lack of security, and several others commented that the SPD officers that were there were clustered together talking instead of actually patrolling. I see this same pattern day in and day out in Seattle: manifestly unsafe situations (street takeovers, out of control night clubs) where something bad is obviously going to pop off, and instead of doing anything to prevent violence or maintain order, SPD does nothing until shots are fired and then they show up en masse to do paperwork, stare at police tape, and chitchat with each other while ignoring a host of other urgent calls. It's more important to name the specific SPD individuals responsible for the grave security failures that enabled the mass shooting than it is to find out who delayed a press conference.

[@ajxcam @ajxcam]

There’s probably a sloppy admin issue here too, but the experience they just had suggests that £60 actually isn’t a high enough price to prevent overcrowding, and that demand still greatly exceeds capacity even at the £60 price level. The alternatives to raising the price even more would have to be something like restricting foreign tourists or imposing a time limit on visitors (policies which would also deeply frustrate other visitor types). Ideally, they need to find some clever subconscious way to pull people through the house quickly in a way that feels fulfilling, but discourages visitors from staying inside too long. You frame it as being robbed of heritage, but I also bet some of the tourism bottlenecks exist specifically because the legacy family still uses the home and views the “true heritage” of the building as their private country house. It could be argued that it’s all the tourism-related activities that are the deviations from the actual intent and heritage of the property. There are probably Disney-like ways to really juice tourist throughput, but those would also ruin the authenticity people think they want at historic properties.

[@ajxcam @ajxcam]

I've reflected on this before too. Trawling auction catalogues isn't necessarily the best use of time, but it teaches you so much about schools, followers, copyists, and the diffusion of iconography and motifs. And, most importantly (imo), it helps you really recognize and appreciate those hard-to-articulate qualities that made a master a master--especially when you see how 100 different copyists and followers tried but could never quite replicate the same magic as the original master's technique. For art appreciation (or at least artist appreciation), scrolling through mounds of lot listings teaches you a lot of nuances that you'll never get in a formal art history education.

[@ajxcam @ajxcam]

@corruptNovelist @rorysutherland 😁

[@ajxcam @ajxcam]

@stephen_e_meyer @ErikBootsma I think your photo actually makes it look better than it does in person. Penn's architecture building isn't even interesting-ugly. It's just ugly-ugly in the blandest, boringest, crappiest way possible.

[@ajxcam @ajxcam]

@intermezzo_arts I think it's the finest example of all the variants, although it could use a bit of cleaning/conservation. Even the dog in the lower corner is such a charming detail, even though it's a bit squeezed in.

[@ajxcam @ajxcam]

Carlo Corsato proposes this reconstruction of the altar beneath which Titian originally intended to be buried. But, I'll be honest that this doesn't seem especially elegant either. Perhaps there would have been a background design which would have unified the cross and Titian's Pieta?
https://t.co/rs1kxnryY8

[@ajxcam @ajxcam]

@isl1965 Unfortunately, I think the entire church has lost its grace and cohesion as a result of clashing monument styles and scales. Everything seems quite inharmonious. I don't even think the Titian tomb is necessarily the worst offender there.

[@ajxcam @ajxcam]

Because it's a shallow and naive attempt by a tourist trying to undercut the people highlighting real and grave policy failures in Seattle.

Citizen: 10 people were stabbed in Chinatown across multiple different days by a violent criminal with 9 prior felony convictions, enabled by outrageous failures of police, prosecutors, judges, and policymakers.

@JackChambersGB : Well actually, I popped into Chinatown for a few hours, had tasty dumplings, and I wasn't stabbed... so I think things are actually great in Seattle. I'm not sure what the people are fussing about.

[@ajxcam @ajxcam]

Annnnd you’re full circle. “Well, yeah, everyone knows there’s rampant city wide violence that affects elderly women, 2 year olds, and school students, but so what loser? Pike Place looks nice in a tourist postcard photo and that’s what really matters.” You only care about your filtered Instagram narrative, and not about the reality of how many people are victimized by such smug complacency. You *should* be angry about a 2 year old getting shot in your city. The fact that you’re not is the issue.

[@ajxcam @ajxcam]

“If you’re not on board with innocent elderly women having their eyes stabbed out while walking down the street in Downtown Seattle, then why don’t you just leave?” ← This is the problem. You don’t give a damn about the actual victims, you only care about when people refuse to accept this as OK. It’s not OK.

[@ajxcam @ajxcam]

There was a mass shooting literally days ago at an iconic tourist center where a 2 year old was shot and two innocent people were murdered. And the murderer is still on the loose. This is exactly the grotesque complacency I was criticizing. “Sure a 2 year old baby was shot, but ya know, we have a good trend. Maybe next year it will be a 4 year old, then a 9 year old, then a teenager and we can stop caring about it! Sure, two Seattle high school students were murdered at a bus stop outside their school just a few months ago, but ya know, maybe next year that won’t happen again!” I’ve never lived in a city with this level of amoral complacency. Even in more dangerous cities with worse stats on paper, when a child was shot, the entire city was furious and disgusted. Here, people like you want to silence people calling attention to the problems, pat yourselves on the back, and post pictures of your deck views.

[@ajxcam @ajxcam]

🤦‍♂️The grotesque complacency of this. Do you think your nice view somehow cancels out the thousand overdose deaths each year, and the thousand shootings, and the several thousand break-ins? Do you seriously think that when people criticize Seattle they're saying that the Puget Sound or Lake Washington or the Olympic Mountains aren't attractive? Is that what you actually think people have an issue with in Seattle? And not, ya know, the cases of an elderly woman walking down the street having her eye stabbed out by a repeat offender that cops and judges knew was violent? Or how 3rd Ave is an open-air drug den? Or how nobody ever seems to get caught and held accountable for shootings, robberies, and a host of other serious crimes? What a staggering tone-deafness and lack of ethics to think that your pretty view negates the thousands of your fellow citizens who are homeless, drug-addicted, or the frequent victims of crime.

[@ajxcam @ajxcam]

@JackChambersGB Why are you gaslighting? When people criticize Seattle and San Francisco, it's not because the architecture and nature isn't beautiful; it's because bad policies and bad governance have ruined many parts of America's nicest cities.

[@ajxcam @ajxcam]

@JackChambersGB I think you deliberately left out the surrounding area.

[@ajxcam @ajxcam]

After someone smashed 20 car windshields on my block and a rando tried to kick in my door at 3:00am, I complained about police not doing enough about the crime in my neighborhood. My neighbor in the same building where this home invader tried to kick down doors literally argued verbatim "but the crime was here first." To her, violent criminals were part of the neighborhood character, and me not wanting to get murdered in the middle of the night in a home invasion by a random stranger was me being unreasonable. She literally got upset by me saying this, and stormed off. I've never met such a high concentration of people with such callous indifference toward the safety of their neighbors outside of Seattle. As long as the victim is someone else--not only do they not care about people getting shot, stabbed, robbed, or having their property destroyed--they will actively try to stop anyone from doing something basic to improve public safety.

[@ajxcam @ajxcam]

Yes, but there’s a major conflict of interest when the government intends to acquire the piece itself. The State gets to destroy the market value of the piece before the auction by declaring an export ban in advance, and then the State can swoop in itself to acquire the piece at an artificially manipulated low price. If they wanted to be most fair to the owner, the State should bid secretly during the auction to win the piece normally—or they would not announce the export ban in advance, let the auction happen normally to discover the market price without their participation, and then could step in to buy the piece at its un-manipulated market value. My understanding is that the UK version is closer to the second version: let the auction happen normally, then the UK government can either match the fair market value, or must let the piece be exported.

[@ajxcam @ajxcam]

This explains why the State announced the export ban before the auction then. By announcing the export ban beforehand, they dramatically lowered the demand and price for the busts, and then could swoop in afterwards to take them at a bargain price. However, doing it this way presumably annoys a lot of Spaniards: the owner loses money, the auction house loses money, and the domestic bidder can’t have the piece he thought he won.

[@ajxcam @ajxcam]

@vtramerced I don't see personally see Caravaggio, but it's an extraordinary portrait.

[@ajxcam @ajxcam]

Fascinating, although I feel like this part "Using a high-tech digital 3D modeling process, a point-by-point reproduction of the original plaster was created" could be a contentious art seminar debate. Even with malleable definitions of authenticity, casting from a printed out model of a digital scan seems like it's going past the breaking point. Even a cast from a cast from a cast has a physical chain back to something the artist physically touched or shaped. Having a digital scan intermediary completely divorces the end product from anything physically touched by Bartholdi. Even for already somewhat dubious posthumous casting rules, that seems like a bridge too far.