"I have foresworn desire...I neither lick nor moan...I neither swallow..." Kim Addonizio's poem, "The End of It," is on Poetry Daily. Reminiscent of Yeats' line, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst/ Are full of passionate intensity" and Stephen Dunn's line, "Precision...is more radical than passion," it demonstrates the fecund nature of poetic iconoclasm. Or, if you prefer the more hackneyed characterization, the value of questioning everything. In the end, Addonizio may be sitting quietly, like Nanao Sakaki's "happy, lucky idiot." [NSF asexuals, hedonists, or the majority of non-eccentrics...but I doubt your boss at work will bat an eyelash at a poem--if so, sit quietly you happy, lucky...] [more inside]
posted by ottimo on Aug 9, 2011 - 41 comments

Art Crimes is a fascinating site about the history of vandalism in the fine arts, recently revived by a Frenchwoman who left a lipstick imprint on a 2 million dollar painting by Cy Twombly. Other examples include a British suffragist attacking a Velazquez with a knife, an installation vandalized by the Israeli ambassador to Sweden, two Chinese performance artists who urinated into Marcel Duchamp's Fountain, and a Canadian art student who vomited blue gelatin on a Mondrian. Oddly enough, the artwork that has weathered the most attacks is Rembrandt's The Night Watch, which has survived two knife attacks (one by an unemployed teacher with a butter knife) and an attack by a mental patient who had a compulsion to fling sulfuric acid at fine artworks. Other art vandalism methods, including glass cutters, hammers, scissors, guns, and ink, are discussed here.
posted by jonp72 on Jul 26, 2007 - 38 comments