his page collects news item commentary about drug issues; but not the "junkie winds up in prison" kind.  It's more about drug use in society, attitudes towards medication, and so on.  More serious than criminal, more wide-spread than individual.

More recent additions are added on top of the page.

July 30, 2003

Today, long-time site reader Snowy forwarded me this article from the Ananova news service, with the comment that it left him speechless.  I of course had to take a look, and while it didn't leave me speechless, it did crack me up.  The article concerns a town in Germany that's about to get a visit from Prince Charles, for some reason.  They just unveiled a new public statue there, basically the day before Charlie rolls into town, and it's um, a tad unusual.

Lovely, isn't it?

Called Arc de Triomphe, the statue by artists Ali Janka, Wolfgang Gantner, Tobias Urban and Florian Reither shows a naked man bending over backwards with his hands on the ground and a two-foot erection thrusting into the sky.

The statue was described as a tribute to Viagra and was unveiled in front of the Rupertinum Modern Art Gallery, one day before Charles was due to fly in for a visit to the Salzburg Festival.

Artist Ali Janka said: "We didn't do it to shock the prince and we hope he will get to see it. We think it's beautiful and has a distinctly royal theme about it, with the majestic arch of the man bending over.

"It was a double honour for us to know that Charles would be going past and would see all our hard work. "

Well, aside from being rather tasteless, it's just plain ugly.  Obviously art is very much in the eye of the beholder, but this looks really lowest-bidder in quality. The ragged, papier-mâché exterior gives it all the class of a bad Pride Parade float. And what's with the saggy old-style athletic socks, and wife-beater t-shirt?

There appears to be some sort of internal plumbing to it, what with the stream of water (?) squirting from the phallus and coming down where?  In his mouth to be re-circulated?  Over his head into some sort of fountain?

I actually don't think the design and model are all that awful.  I mean picture this in classical marble, minus the socks and wife-beater, and with anatomically-accurate curves and lines, rather than looking all emaciated and lumpy.  It would be rather cheeky, what with the fountaining cock, but it wouldn't look that out of place in an ancient plaza in Florence or Milan.

Not that I've ever been there.

May 20, 2002

While I prefer classical artwork, I'm not the type to bitch about all modern art and say it's disgusting or stupid, as politicians often do while trying to cut its funding (while spending 50,000x more on various pork plans for their biggest political donors).  But in this case, the art is clearly shit.  Literally.  Who the hell wants to look at bronze, "25 x scale" statues of piles of feces? And no, it's not actually crap, it's just a formless blob that looks exactly like it. That's irrelevant; even if it's not actually a sculpture of shit, it's not art; it's just a big bronze piece of crap that any asshole could produce.

March 21, 2002

Fake!, by Clifford Irving.

This is an interesting book on Elmyr de Hory, the greatest art forger of modern times.  As far as we know.  You can do a Google search on Elmyr and find plenty of articles and features about him.

A quote from this article, which is easier than me actually, you know, typing my own:

According to Fake!, the deliberately outrageous biography concocted together by Cliff and Elmyr, this man of variable names, wobbly gender and multiple styles had committed many more masterpieces than those for which he had gotten jailed. In fact, Fake! says Elmyr had painted over a thousand of the classics of modern art. Every time you walk through a museum and see a Picasso or a Matisse that you particularly like, you should stop and ask, "Now did Picasso or Matisse do that, or did Elmyr do it?'' Sort of changes your whole view of what critics call "the canon,'' doesn't it?

Another interesting page of forgery info can be seen here.  Especially interesting is the tidbit that various semi-famous artists have at times claimed that some of their authentic work, their less-great stuff, was fake.

This was notably the case with the Italian master Giorgio de Chirico who was charged in 1969 for having seized some of his sculptures as forgeries whereas he had signed a legal contract for their production. Another master, Maurice de Vlaminck refused to authenticate some of his own works simply because he did not like them anymore. He also was charged and received a fine for having rejected a painting which was in fact genuine.

Why?  So it would be discredited and perhaps even destroyed, and thus tighten the market for their other work, or future work.  Free publicity too.

I can't really recommend the book, Fake!.  I read it and tolerated it, but it sort of goes on and on with the same stuff.  Elmyr paints forgeries and passes them off to greedy clueless art dealers, Elmyr squanders his money, Elmyr says he'll stop and live off of his own work, etc.  Then he starts working these two nuts who are selling his fakes, making 10x what they share with him, traveling wildly around Europe and the US, etc.  It sounds better in theory than it is in actuality, since it just gets tedious.  The last 1/3 of the book is better, once it starts to unravel on them, and there is a bit more analysis and character description, rather than just events.

Get it from the library if you can find a copy.  Clifford Irving is the author.

All site content copyright "Flux" (Eric Bruce), 2002-2007.