This article from the NY Times is about PowerPoint and the art of criminally boring presentations, found here.

I have always despised PowerPoint presentations, and I thought I was alone. But this author sums up in one sentence exactly why I find it so detestabe

But the relentless and, some critics would say, lazy use of the program as a replacement for real discourse — as with the NASA case — continues to inspire attacks.

That's it! A lazy replacement for real discourse. (Let that ring in your ears for a few minutes).

If you read Kris' page, you may remember that he had to give a presentation in his Contemporary Art class at the end of last quarter. The major project for the class was a 15 page research paper on any topic of interest to the student, and the paper had to be presented to the class. The presentation requirements were that it be less than 20 minutes long and include some sort of visual component.

Kris spent a long time trying to decide what to use as his visual component. His topic was video vs. film (more detail than that I cannot elaborate on, I never read the paper) and he decided to show clips from several DVDs out of our collection.

Almost everyone else in the class gave a PowerPoint presentation.

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You should also visit illegal-art.org.

The laws governing "intellectual property" have grown so expansive in recent years that artists need legal experts to sort them all out. Borrowing from another artwork--as jazz musicians did in the 1930s and Looney Tunes illustrators did in 1940s--will now land you in court. If the current copyright laws had been in effect back in the day, whole genres such as collage, hiphop, and Pop Art might have never have existed.

The irony here couldn't be more stark. Rooted in the U.S. Constitution, copyright was originally intended to facilitate the exchange of ideas but is now being used to stifle it.

I love social commentary. Be sure to look at the visual section, and if you missed reading the web end-users license agreement that pops up when you first go to the site, you might want to go again. So. Funny.