Art Resources

Working in the Salt Mines: The Boss’s View

Author: MANOHLA DARGIS

In the world of celebrity do-goodism, Angelina Jolie is hot to trot the globe for the United Nations. George Clooney raises dollars and sense on behalf of Darfur. And Mike Judge? Well, the funnyman behind the cartoon yukfests “Beavis and Butt-Head” and “King of the Hill” and the very funny cult movie “Office Space” appears to have joined the ranks of celebrity do-gooders with his increasingly aggressive attempts to eradicate stupidity, one barbed, mean and sometimes hilarious joke at a time. With the barbarians clawing at the gate, somebody’s got to do it, right?

Mr. Judge’s most pointed attack on our perceived national calamity is his 2006 comedy, “Idiocracy,” about an average white guy who, after being put in a deep freeze, wakes up 500 years later to find that he’s the smartest person alive and that people are dumb as slugs, including the president, a “smackdown” champion (and an African-American). Mr. Judge’s most recent attack on the same subject is “Extract,” another big-screen comedy about an affable white guy, Joel (Jason Bateman, predictably pleasant), an Everyman and factory owner. (He makes flavorings.) His natural decency is under constant assault by a miscellany of indignities, including a wife, Suzie (Kristen Wiig), who won’t sleep with him; a droning neighbor who can’t shut up (David Koechner); and a factory populated by lazy, dense workers.

Fitfully funny with a low joke-to-minute ratio, “Extract” plays like two irreconcilable and unfinished sketches, neither particularly fertile comedic terrain. The first revolves around Joel’s beef that his wife has sexually closed for business by the time he comes home from work, a weak bit that Mr. Judge tries to exploit with repeated close-ups of Suzie cinching her sweat pants. At the urging of his friend Dean (Ben Affleck, delivering a real performance), Joel hires a part-time pool cleaner and full-time moron, Brad (Dustin Milligan), to service her. The second sketch involves the attempts of a vamping con artist, Cindy (Mila Kunis), to scam Joel by cozying up to a dim factory worker, Step (Clifton Collins Jr.), who’s suffered an-on-the-job injury.

What’s most striking about “Extract,” beyond the scarcity of jokes and absence of actual filmmaking, is its deep well of sourness, which at times borders on misanthropy. In his first live-action feature, “Office Space,” a comedy about the indignities of that modern hell we call a desk job, Mr. Judge took aim at the dehumanization of organizational life. In “Idiocracy” he expanded his sightlines to include corporations and consumer culture. The received wisdom remains that 20th Century Fox, which backed the movie, dumped “Idiocracy” into the marketplace because of its anti-corporatism: it mocks Fox News along with brand-name companies that run ads on media outlets belonging to Fox’s parent company, the News Corporation. What was often left unsaid amid the ruckus is that the movie conceives of its own audience as cultural dopes.

Charlton Hall presents Two Day Great Estates at Auction on Artfact Live!

Author: Doug Ellinger

Bid online exclusively through Artfact Live! on over 1000 lots of fine art and exceptional antiques in the Charlton Hall Great Estates Auction on September 12th and 13th.

(Boston MA) Artfact Live! is pleased to announce that the Charlton Hall sale Great Estates at Auction, on September 12th and 13th, 2009, is available for online bidding exclusively through Artfact Live! The two-day auction offers over 1,000 lots including: furniture, ceramics, fine art, silver, rugs, jewelry and more. If you can’t join the live auction action in West Columbia, South Carolina, visit Artfact.com, or its sister site in the UK, Invaluable.com, to login or register free to bid live online at this exceptional auction. If you’re not ready to bid, simply watch the activity live from the auction floor using the Artfact Live! console.

Highlights of the sale include:

DAY 1:
The top lot of day one is lot 199, a Louis XV style kingwood, satine and bronze-mounted bureau rognan attributed to Theodore Millet from the late 19th century. Millet’s firm, Maison Millet, operated in Paris from 1853 to 1902 and was well known for production of Louis XV and XVI style furniture. This piece is elaborately decorated and includes a built in clock and candleholders, bidding begins at $13,000.

Another notable piece in the Louis XV style is lot 247, a vernis Martin and gilt-bronze mounted scenic vitrine, by Louis Majorelle circa 1885. Louis Majorelle studied painting at the École des Beaux-Arts before taking over his father’s furniture business, the Maison Marjorelle, where he specialized in art nouveau pieces as well as more traditional styles. Bidding opens at $7,000.

DAY2:
The top lot of day two, lot 762, is a George Inness painting entitled The End of an Autumn Day. It depicts a fall landscape painted circa 1894. Bidding for this lot opens at $40,000.

Also of interest is lot 755, a Rembrandt Peale painting of Niagra Falls circa 1830. Entitled Niagra Falls Seen from the American Side, it portrays a dark storm cloud approaching the falls. Bidding begins at $20,000.

When the Fur Flies

Author: Peter McKay

Creators Syndicate – The other week, our neighbors went away for a week and needed someone to watch Milo.

Milo is one of those small, longhaired dogs that you usually see sticking out of heiress' purses. They're tiny, yippy and frenetic. Real dogs actually wince when they see these little fur balls; they're embarrassed to be associated with them. Technically, they might not even really be dogs, as they seem to be composed of least 50 percent dryer lint.

When our neighbors left, however, they offered to pay our 13-year-old twin daughters to watch Milo. That meant going over to the neighbor's house four times a day, letting Milo out to go to the bathroom and feeding him. They'd have to stop by at 7 a.m., noon, 6 p.m. and then again at 11 p.m.

At first, I was a little skeptical, given that we have a dog of our own, a scruffy, old, smelly and stone-deaf West Highland Terrier named Harry. In the past five years, I have never seen the girls let Harry out, let him in or even feed him. Every once in a while, they squeal and ask why Harry has to chew himself like that in front of the family, but for all intents and purposes, he is invisible to them.

To be fair, Harry isn't much fun. He's doesn't play games, fetch or even move if it isn't absolutely necessary. He's now so old that every morning when I come down to the kitchen, I stand over his body — all splayed out in his dog bed — to see whether his chest is actually moving before I go get the paper. When he walks, he shuffles like a tiny, tired canine zombie. The children often complain that a live dog would be much more fun than a dead one.

With this job, though, our girls had their work cut out for them. Like so many purse dogs, Milo has an annoying tendency to pee all over the floor whenever he gets excited, which is just about every time someone comes in the door. So, our neighbors put up baby gates before they left, believing they could confine Milo to the kitchen where he could do less damage.

Milo may not be a guard dog, or even a real dog, but he turned out to be a genius at jumping over gates. Hours after the neighbors left, the girls found Milo standing in the front hall, out of the gate. Peeing.

They fed him, walked him and then put him back inside the kitchen. Then they stepped outside, ran to the windows and watched as this tiny hairball vaulted over the gate, landed in the living room and, just to add a little variety to his act, pooped. At this rate, the neighbors would come back from vacation and have to recarpet the entire house.

B.C. government restores arts funding after public outcry

Author: Ward Perrin

Groups will now get more gambling cash than previously expected

VICTORIA — The B.C. government, facing furious public reaction, restored cuts in gambling-revenue grants made in the provincial budget and went one step further Wednesday.

The total amount of grants now allocated to community and arts groups is about $12 million more than what was announced in February, Housing and Social Development Minister Rich Coleman said Wednesday.

Coleman acknowledged that groups that had been promised three-year funding in writing and then were told their grants were cancelled had cause for complaint.

Coleman indicated about $20 million in grants — $10 million this year, $10 million next year — would be restored to these groups. He said that an additional $30 million has also been approved to be handed out in grants during the current year, adding his ministry has seen an uptick in applications.

However, Coleman said the government will end the practice of committing to grants for three-year periods, and will return to a year-by-year approach. The three-year funding window had allowed arts groups to do longer-term planning.

“The lesson we’ve learned is we probably can’t go to three-year commitments if we don’t know what the fiscal future is going to look like,” he said.

“There will be no more three-year commitment letters.”

Amir Ali Alibhai, executive director of the Alliance for Arts and Culture, said he was “pleased that the government had the capacity to change its mind” about the restored grants.

But Alibhai said the way the government handled the grants decision was “cruel” and “disrespectful.”

Others also remained angry.

“People have been confused and seemingly deliberately led astray and misinformed about how gaming revenues are being distributed this year and in coming years,” said Jenn Farrell, who attended a meeting of Metro Vancouver arts groups Wednesday on behalf of a magazine called subTerrain.