Went to visit the Kröller Müller Museum deep inside the Dutch country side (if that exists) last Sunday. Apart form a walk in the rain through the splendid sculpture garden (an absolute must-visit) we had a short (too little time, must come back in the summer) walk through the permanent collection. One of the works that i really liked was this relief (or however you call this) by the russian avant-garde art group UNOVIS:

UNOVIS (1921) Suprematistisch reliëf

Apart from the beauty of the work as such i also find it quite intriguing that the design team at sony has apparently been inspired by this work when they came up with the symbols on the buttons of the playstation controllers.

Although i have a well documented faible for CFLs and i maintain a growing collection of CFL pictures in one of my flickr sets, all the photos i have taken so far originate from the middle east (the CFLs usually found in the west are pretty uninspiring). Fortunately a young entrepreneur (who is otherwise in the fairly stupid business of selling old style telephone handsets for mobile phones) has come to the rescue and created the PLUMEN, a low-energy light bulb prototype with a twist:

Some people find them unpleasant, but low-energy lightbulbs are a necessary innovation. Their presence in our lives explain the PLUMEN’s designers, “should be seen as an advantage to be celebrated by drawing, sculpturing, or scrawling in the air with light. The bulbs should not be viewed as an afterthought but instead as a centerpiece. then people might begin to buy these bulbs through genuine desire rather than mere moral obligation.”

Not sure if i buy this tear-jerk bullshit about genuine desire to buy a lightbulb, but at least this prototype has managed to get into the New York MOMA where the PLUMEN is currently on display at the ‘Design And The Elastic Mind‘ exhibition (extremely annoying flash site, that takes forever to load!).

Personally i think that cheap chinese flower shaped CFLs look much better…

The otherwise excellent MALBA (Museum of Latin American Art of Buenos Aires) is currently showing works of the Brazilian artist Hélio Oiticica in a solo exhibition. One of the elements present in all 5 works on display are photographic representations of cocaine (or to be precise lines of coke laid out on top of photographs of jimi hendrix, jesus, marilyn monroe and the like…).

However it seems like the curators of the show had the idea that they were sending out a bit of a mixed message here (or that there is a stupid law that does not allow minors to see works of art that depict drug use) and decided to put up a warning message at the entrance of that particular section of the museum:

[now i can’t translate this as i do not speak spanish but my understanding is that this means something like this: ‘Entrance prohibited for anyone under 18 years of age. This exhibition includes photographs depicting the use of drugs. The consumption of these drugs results in irreversible health damage. These works have been shown in various of the worlds most renowned museums in cities like New York, Barcelona, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro among others’]

I really like the part where they are hiding behind the fact that other museums have shown these works. Makes me somehow doubt that the MALBA will ever show a controversial exhibition for the first time (although Alan assures me that they have a really fine film screening programme & if anyone really wanted to stop people from taking cocaine in Argentina the should rather focus on the price (to low) and the quality (to good) of said agricultural produce).