gruenfeld

Hey there, just hawking still another project. Is there a severe lack of dating advice from polyamorous queers in your life? Check out my new blog, DATE (www.markthedate.blogspot.com), a no nonsense guide to everything you need to know about dating.

DATE is an Ann-Arbor-based queer-inclusive dating humor and advice blog. Send your dating questions to erikdsteel@gmail.com. Selected letters will be published anonymously.

Art or porn? I hate this question with a cliched amount of passion, but this morning, I literally had the question shoved in my face.

I subscribe to feeds for several art blogs, and this morning, while going about my "Google Reading," I saw a story about Bill Henson, an artist whose recent Australian exhibit had been raided by police for the showing a photograph of a naked 13-year-old girl in a coquettish pose.

Having a terrible internet connection made the story more dramatic for me. I'm reading, reading, reading, and then suddenly the text shifts to the right and there's the fucking picture.

I dry-heaved. I thought I was going to lose it, and by it I mean my dinner. I have absolutely no idea what kiddy porn tends to look like, although, if porn is, as another cliche goes, "known when seen," this was it. I could not believe the blog would republish this photo, which had apparently already made its way onto the internet, including onto child porn websites.

I felt violated. This image is illegal to look at, and this blog made me look at it. I understand covering issues in the art world - that's why the fuck I subscribed to the blog. But reporting the story in this case most assuredly does not fucking require reprinting Exhibit A. I hate to make snap judgments, but there was nothing at all right about this, and I for one, don't think this is an artist's rights or free speech issue in any way. Taking sexualized images of children is wrong, and so is making totally unsuspecting readers look at them.

Ugh.

I'm so excited about one particular deviant's gallery that I just had to give her a shoutout in my journal.

Last semester, I studied, among other things, the Czech avant-garde, starting with a movement known as Poetism. Wonderful artists like Karel Teige worked in a medium they called picture poems, and jillallyn's gallery reminds me delightfully of them, with her ongoing project using international envelopes to create some of the best collages I've ever seen, and trust me, I've seen a lot.

So, check her out @ jillallyn.deviantart.com/

Writin' a movie. Yep. Obviously you'll never see it here, but I'll link you up when it's done.

Also working on a large 3D collage.

And as always taking shitty photos. w00t

Check out my new photoblog Passeism @
passeism.blogspot.com