Breast Augmentation Anyone?

I just stumbled upon the work of Philip Toledano who is a remarkably inventive

photographer who makes you look at the world in whole new ways. As he suggests through these images, "Hope and Fear is the External Manifestation of the External Desires and Paranoia that are Adrift in America."

Extinctions, Global Warming, are "part of the natural course of things" not something WE do!

Tim Johnston, International Herald Tribune

SYDNEY: Scientists in Australia say they have found a trove of prehistoric animal bones — including those of a large marsupial lion — that provides strong evidence that it was human beings and not climate change that killed 90 percent of the continent's largest animals about 45,000 years ago.

Professor Richard Roberts, a geochemist at the University of Wollongong who dated the bones, said that by comparing the dates of the remains with evidence of rainfall at the time, the scientists established that different species had managed to survive relatively major changes in the climate.

They argue that if the Nullarbor animals were well adapted to dry conditions for at least 400,000 years before they disappeared, then it is unlikely they succumbed to Ice Age aridity.
Their conclusions deal a blow to the longstanding argument that the extinction of Australia's giant native fauna, the so-called megafauna, was caused by natural changes in the environment and not humans. "I think we can forget about that as an explanation, because they had already survived the worst that nature could throw at them," Roberts said. "But what they hadn't counted on is the arrival of a completely new species that would eat them."
He added, "The only new element was us: man."

The major extinction of Australia's megafauna between 40,000 and 50,000 years ago also coincided with the arrival of humans.

Roberts dismissed the argument that the relatively small number of people, armed with only the most basic of weapons, could not have inflicted so much damage to so many species. He said low-level hunting of animals with slow reproductive cycles, combined with the widespread use of fire to clear ground and drive animals into traps, would have been sufficient to push animal populations below a number needed to keep species viable.

Among the casualties of the megafauna were 3-meter, or 10-foot, kangaroos, Thylacoleo carnifex, or marsupial lions, the Dromornis stirtoni, the largest bird ever known — it weighed half a ton — and the rhino- sized herbivore Diprotodon optatum.

Anxiety of Influence

It's not yet out on stands, but Harper's Magazine has two very interesting articles this month (Feb) on the appropriation of art by other artists who then use it to create something new. One is called "On the Rights of Molotov Man" based on an symposium at the New York Institute for the Humanities entitled "Comedies of Fair U$e." The article is an excerpt from a dialogue between the painter Joy Garnett, whose series on Riots featured a man throwing a Molotov cocktail, and the photographer Susan Meiselas, who took the original photograph of a Nicaraguan Sandinista. Joy Garnett had not asked for Susan Meiselas' permission before appropriating her work from the internet and using it as the basis for transforming it into the centerpiece painting of her series. The two argue over whether art's purpose is to decontextual or contextualize, the role of technology in helping to further decontextualization, and who owns the rights to subject material. The article immediately following is Jonathan Letham's "The Ecstasy of Influence: A plagiarism." Letham argues that source plagiarism is the essence of the artistic endeavor and that the arts do not operate according to the same principles of commodity exchange that other goods do. Art and culture, he argues, are a public commons and should not be restricted (especially by big corporations like the Disney Co. who have themselves liberally lifted from previous culture). Both articles, in light of the issues raised very recently over the plagiarism of historians, memoirists, and novelists, are pertinent and enlightening.

[image: Rene Magritte's, La reproduction interdite (Copying Prohibited), 1937 - Rotterdam Museum]