The one good thing about space being the same as time is that if you travel to the outer reaches of the universe and the voyage takes three thousand earth years, your friends will be dead when you come back, but you will not need Botox.
Norman Mailers’s Limited Edition MoonFire
If I could ask Santa for one thing alone, it would be this book: Norman Mailer’s MoonFire. I caught wind of this from Katie while she was at Art Basel. Yes, it’s $1,500. But it’s worth it! Artnet tweeted about it too. Only 12 come with an actual moon rock (though I’m not sure how legal that is). However, prices vary depending on the size of the rock. Another selling point for buying the moon rock edition is that you get dinner with Buzz Aldrin! AND… the normal edition is limited to 1969. Nice touch, eh? Keep it in mind. Hint hint. Just saying.
An inside spread from the book. Image courtesy of Taschen.
A view of the book in its limited edition stand for the book and an actual rock up for sale with the edition. Image courtesy of Artnet’s twitter.
But outer Space,
At least this far,
For all the fuss
Of the populace
Stays more popular
Than populous.
At the same time, the very vastness of space acts as a strong discouragement; people complain that they cannot visualize the interstellar or intergalactic scale, and so refuse to investigate the matter further. This is as short-sighted as it is sad. In the first place there is no need to ‘visualize’ the universe in order to gain some idea of its workings—for no astronomer can really comprehend the enormity of his field of study. It is simply a matter of getting used to dealing with very large units of distance. On the Earth we might arbitrarily define 1 foot as a small distance, 1/1,000th of a millimetre as a very small distance. The astronomical equivalents of ‘very small’ and ‘small’ could be 1 mile and 1 light-year (5,880,000,000,000 miles). We can no more imagine 1/1,000th of a millimetre than a million miles—but no one is afraid of looking through a microscope! And at the same time there is no doubt which is the more impressive.
Art never responds to the wish to make it democratic; it is not for everybody; it is only for those who are willing to undergo the effort needed to understand it.
Current reading list:
Collecting Contemporary Art Flight of the Intruder And It Came to Pass—Not To Stay Seven Days in the Art World Let’s See Unsettling “Sensation” It’s ONLY Rocket Science: An Introduction in Plain English Spacesuits
I was sitting at Barnes & Noble yesterday reading Air and Space Magazine and saw that a book is being published in June about all of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo spacesuits at the Smithsonian. It is being put together by Amanda Young, the Smithsonian’s Museum Specialist of the spacesuit collection. The book, Spacesuits: Within the Collections of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, features an x-ray of Alan Shepard’s Apollo 14 suit used to determine how the materials break down over the years. There will be a book signing in July, which I hope to be in town for.
