January 4, 2010
We’re one of the Best New Blogs of 2009: This year, one new site embodied the larger-than-it-seems Tumblr zeitgeist better than others: Mad Men Footnotes. TV recaps had become a moribund genre. Thousand-word recaps of things you already saw, recaps were the downtrodden hookers of internet discourse: felicitous with their views, but leaving behind the emptiness of sloppy seconds. Mad Men Footnotes flipped the genre around. It wasn’t about the telling you what you just watched — it was about exploring the entire universe that it created. Through short posts that allude to passing show references (Rothko, Ann-Marget, salted ice cream), the site made history feel like the present. Just as Mad Men uses the ’60s as a prism through which to understand contemporary advertising and desire, Mad Men Footnotes is shorthand for understanding blog culture. It is the quintessential use of the platform: a reblog of a reblog designed for reblogging. Well, we accept this recognition with quite dignity and grace a burst your chiseled cheeks grin. [image via AMC]

We’re one of the Best New Blogs of 2009:

This year, one new site embodied the larger-than-it-seems Tumblr zeitgeist better than others: Mad Men Footnotes.

TV recaps had become a moribund genre. Thousand-word recaps of things you already saw, recaps were the downtrodden hookers of internet discourse: felicitous with their views, but leaving behind the emptiness of sloppy seconds. Mad Men Footnotes flipped the genre around. It wasn’t about the telling you what you just watched — it was about exploring the entire universe that it created. Through short posts that allude to passing show references (Rothko, Ann-Marget, salted ice cream), the site made history feel like the present.

Just as Mad Men uses the ’60s as a prism through which to understand contemporary advertising and desire, Mad Men Footnotes is shorthand for understanding blog culture. It is the quintessential use of the platform: a reblog of a reblog designed for reblogging.

Well, we accept this recognition with quite dignity and grace a burst your chiseled cheeks grin.

[image via AMC]

12:05pm
(No. OF NOTES: 33)
  
November 9, 2009
When they showed the shot of a Farmer Whitman arguing with the farm co-operative it looked like it could transposed over the 1885 Potato Eaters painting by Van Gogh. It’s one of Van Gogh’s most famous early works.  His intention was to stay within the Dutch style of documenting peasent life. But instead of a rustic, idyllic scene of apple cheeked farm hands, Van Gogh depicted his toiling workers in an un-sentimentalized, dreary and ugly light (because, you know, most peasents’ lives are none too glamorous as evidenced by the jug swilling Whitmans). He wrote in a letter about the painting: I have tried to make it clear how those people, eating their potatoes under the lamplight, have dug the earth with those very hands they put in their dish, and so it speaks of manual labor, and how they have honestly earned their food. I have wanted to give the impression of quite a different way of living than that of us civilized people. Therefore I am not at all anxious for everyone to like it or to admire it at once. It’s real Salt of the Earth stuff. Oh, and make sure to wash your hands when handling the Rothko.

When they showed the shot of a Farmer Whitman arguing with the farm co-operative it looked like it could transposed over the 1885 Potato Eaters painting by Van Gogh.

It’s one of Van Gogh’s most famous early works.  His intention was to stay within the Dutch style of documenting peasent life. But instead of a rustic, idyllic scene of apple cheeked farm hands, Van Gogh depicted his toiling workers in an un-sentimentalized, dreary and ugly light (because, you know, most peasents’ lives are none too glamorous as evidenced by the jug swilling Whitmans).

He wrote in a letter about the painting:

I have tried to make it clear how those people, eating their potatoes under the lamplight, have dug the earth with those very hands they put in their dish, and so it speaks of manual labor, and how they have honestly earned their food. I have wanted to give the impression of quite a different way of living than that of us civilized people. Therefore I am not at all anxious for everyone to like it or to admire it at once.

It’s real Salt of the Earth stuff.

Oh, and make sure to wash your hands when handling the Rothko.

2:32am
(No. OF NOTES: 24)
  
August 7, 2009
It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way

Rothko meets Lo-fi. 

4:57pm
(No. OF NOTES: 2)
  
 “When you look at it, you feel something.” In the June 13, 1943 edition of the New York Times, Rothko, together with Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman, published the following brief manifesto: 1. To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks. 2. This world of imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense. 3. It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way. 4. We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth. 5. It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. [Rothko said “this is the essence of academicism”.] There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing. “We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.”

 “When you look at it, you feel something.”

In the June 13, 1943 edition of the New York Times, Rothko, together with Adolph Gottlieb and Barnett Newman, published the following brief manifesto:

1. To us art is an adventure into an unknown world, which can be explored only by those willing to take the risks.

2. This world of imagination is fancy-free and violently opposed to common sense.

3. It is our function as artists to make the spectator see the world our way not his way.

4. We favor the simple expression of the complex thought. We are for the large shape because it has the impact of the unequivocal. We wish to reassert the picture plane. We are for flat forms because they destroy illusion and reveal truth.

5. It is a widely accepted notion among painters that it does not matter what one paints as long as it is well painted. [Rothko said “this is the essence of academicism”.]

There is no such thing as a good painting about nothing.

“We assert that the subject is crucial and only that subject matter is valid which is tragic and timeless. That is why we profess spiritual kinship with primitive and archaic art.”

4:46pm
(No. OF NOTES: 19)