The Savitsky Museum

I've got a thing for Russian art. I am not going to pretend for a minute that I know much about it, or art in general. However, something about Russian art makes me weak in the knees. It is possible that my Ukranian great-grandmother's genetic influence is responsible, given my brother shares my obsession as well. The Hermitage would our mecca, however I just read about this:

"The Savitsky Art Museum, Nukus, is the ridiculous to the Taj Mahal’s sublime. If you get to Nukus in the semi-autonomous republic of Karakalpakstan in Uzbekistan, you will almost certainly be the only person you know who has. It is the most depressing and ugly place in the world; a rotting Stalinist excrescence built in the uncared-for nether-regions of the old Soviet Empire. It's a place that even in the old USSR was a forgettable, unimportant backwater, and it was precisely because no-one came here or cared about Nukus that one of the great art collections was built here by a remarkable archaeologist, who quietly saved the work of underground and officially degenerate artists. From the 1930s to the 1970s, he bought and was given artists’ entire portfolios. It is a remarkable and humbling collection, thousands upon thousands of paintings, drawings and sculptures produced in the face of great danger. The most moving examples come from the Gulag. Together this crammed and desperately under-funded gallery is a memorial to the power of culture, a candle of artistic resistance. The quality of the work varies hugely, from the great to the chronically derivative, but that’s not the point. Altogether they have a unique power."

-AA Gill

Know Your Asshole Footprint

I just came across this social-service feature in October's issue of Vanity Fair:

Regrettable, some American are simply not aware of how large an asshole footprint they leave on the planet. Here, Vanity Fair offers a questionnaire that will help such individuals determine the size and breadth of their footprint. If you answer "yes" to four or more of the questions for your age group, it is incumbent upon you to take urgent measures to reduce your asshole footprint.

1. Do you leave vitriolic comments in the "Comments" sections of blogs and web sites, even if you're commenting on something innocuous, such as an old Linkin Park video?

2. Are you convinced that it's only a matter of time before the world recognizes you as the next Andy Sambery?

3. Is your name Skylar, Taylor, Cat, Bryce, Morgan, Brandon, Braden, Hayden, Jaden or Brianna?

4. Do you work in an office with a Foosball or Ping-Pong table?

5. Do you run a T-shirt company that specializes in flimsy apparel that runs small and whose designs are essentially appropriations of old advertising and TV logos from the 1960 and 70s?

6. Before you go out bicycling, do you first change into a skintight spandex shirt with a gaudy pattern recalling a 1990s screen saver?

7. Do you refer to having young children as "doing the parent thing."

8. If you do indeed have young children, have you launched a blog, or, worse, a video blog, about raising them?

9. When you are being photgraphed, do you flash gang signs?

10. Have you or anyone in your close circle of friends written a roman a' clef about being a rich soicalite, working in publishing, working in film bonking the help, or any combination of the aforementioned circumstances?