Nostra culpa

by Rainey Knudson August 20, 2007

OK, we teased Houston's CTRL Gallery a few posts ago for not having their lights working at their grand opening earlier this summer. But we stopped by this weekend to catch the current show before it closes, and it was well worth the trip. Though there was a room devoted to this horrible brainless trend of bad painting (in this case, by Yui Kugimiya), there were wonderful little pieces by Barbara Takenaga and Chie Fueki, and a terrific keyboard installation by Jean Shin (who did the pill canister sculpture now on view at the MFAH's Red Hot show). Looks like CTRL is the real deal — and you can see the show, To the Left, until September 1.

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so what March 20, 2007 - 12:34

Like it or not, our entire city and its cultural institutions are built off of natural resources money. In a city with more experts on the subject of the energy business than virtually any other place in the world, it is amazing that someone could create something this uninformed.

As for as the poorly constructed and misleading chart, it shows the profits of U.S. oil companies (which would also include heating oil, refining, chemical and natural gas sales) and not reflect the revenue of foreign national oil entities like Aramco, Petrobas or Pemex. The taxes paid are specifically on U.S. gasoline sales which would include taxes paid on sales from all of these entities. The two items are only loosely and abstractly correlated. It’s a stupid graph that only asks the question so what?

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Bobwhite March 20, 2007 - 15:16

I find it slightly ironic that Mr. Davenport would use the word “smug” in this observation. He must be looking into that chrome. I don’t think Shumate is asking anything of us, letting us off the hook, let alone giving us the feeling to do “something about it”.

Finally, with a little research one could find out that Shumate’s book is inspired from a well known series of children’s books titled JACK AND JILL that taught generations of kids how to read. The only “goose” here is Mr. Davenport.

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b.s. March 21, 2007 - 12:53

Shumate seems to have stolen his format for “an observation” (an irritating misnomer) from theyrule.net, and while he does use slightly different chairs for each CEO, the lack of declaration may have led many people to believe that 1. he did some research other than googleing, and 2. that he did anything different from his job as an advertising designer.

Knowing how to use illustrator does not make you a good artist.

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