Van Eyck, Chandeliers, Perspective and Art History

Did early Renaissance painters use optical tricks to paint with perfect perspective?

See this August 26, 2004 article by Sarah Boxer in the New York Times entitled Computer People Reopen Art History Dispute

Visual Art Taking Over?

Visual Art Taking Over?

The Weekend edition of the Financial Times, May 29/May 30 2004 - which I was given gratis today at the Frankfurt Airport, thank you! - has an article entitled "Visual art on the rise" in its FT Arts and Weekend section.

The article concludes that the British art audience "has changed forever" in recent eras and that the visual arts are supplanting literature and music because they "seem best equipped to take the pulse of contemporary life, to describe the now".

Where does this put blogs? Should we be adding more pictures?

World's Greatest Sidewalk Art Painter

World's Greatest Sidewalk Art Painter

Go to this link to see some pictures by what we dub the World's Greatest Sidewalk Art Painter bouncechrissy: ***Pictures are back up!***.

The pictures as so 3-D it is hard to believe they are two-dimensional paintings on a sidewalk. This is "modern art" at its best. This guy should be famous - maybe he will be. Nobody seems to know his name- he's an Englishman.

Speech pauses like you know and uh more frequent among humanities professors

The following article of January 3, 2004 by Michael Erard in the New York Times refers to various studies about speech disfluencies such as "uh" or "um".

Interesting is one study showing that speech pauses such as "you know" and "uh" are more frequent among humanities professors and social scientists. As Erard writes:

But it may be Nicholas Christenfeld, a psychologist at the University of California, San Diego, and other researchers who have come up with the most appealing findings. He counted uhs among professors giving lectures and found that the humanities professors say you know and uh 4.85 times per minute, social scientists 3.84 and natural science professors 1.39 times, which, he said, suggests that humanists have more expressive options from which to choose.

We suspect, however, that it means that the natural science professors are lecturing about more certain factual materials, whereas the social scientists and humanities professors need these verbal pauses to "construct" their statements about things which - in the last analysis - are relatively more uncertain.

Mandarin Design Daily:The MEG Blog

Via Mandarin Design Daily:The MEG Blog and Whiskey River (which is a blog with many fabulous quotations) we are led to this quotation, to which we ascribe and have, most of our life:

"Don't ask yourself what the world needs;
ask yourself what makes you come alive.
And then go and do that.
Because what the world needs
is people who have come alive."

- Harold Whitman

Pink Floyd - Still the Best?

Is Pink Floyd still the best?

Now led by one of the world's best guitarists, David Gilmour, Pink Floyd seems invincibly perched at the top of the rock heap - at least, that is my impression, as I watch - here in Germany - the ARTE TV Pink Floyd show on December 30, 2003. Great music, especially when you consider Gilmour was born in 1946 - hey, that's my birth year too. Amazing.

But wait a minute, the video is from 1987. Still, great stuff. Will have to get that video.

ArtsJournal: Blog Central

Arts Journal : Blog Central

ArtsJournal: Blog Central has initiated several exceptional blogs on the arts.

These are:

Culture
About Last Night - Terry Teachout, Arts in New York City
Artful Manager - Andrew Taylor, The Business of Arts & Culture
blog riley - Rock Culture
Straight Up | - Jan Herman, Arts, Media & Culture News

Dance
Seeing Things - Tobi Tobias, Dance

Media
In Media Res - Bob Goldfarb, Media

Music
Adaptistration - Drew McManus, Orchestra Management
Sandow - Greg Sandow, Classical Music
PostClassic - Kyle Gann, Music

What movie Do you Belong in?

Here is the result of my movie quiz - really, I hardly ever go to the movies.


Moulin Rouge!

What movie Do you Belong in?(many different outcomes!)
brought to you by Quizilla

Most Wanted Works of Art

"The Most Wanted Works of Art", an article by Kelly Devine Thomas at Art News Online, comes via Tyler Cowen and the Marginal Revolution blog.

This article gives a bird's eye view of some trends in art tastes and art desires. Interesting to read for example are the artists that Gates has collected and which oil paintings by private owners are simply "not for sale".

Please Touch the Art

Via the Explorator of Dave Meadows at Yahoo Groups we are directed to an article of November 2, 2003 by Carol Kino at the New York Times entitled Please Touch the Art

As Kino relates, a new method of "virtual" visits of museums can be seen at the Art Institute of Chicago in an exhibition entitled "Dreaming in Pictures : The Photography of Lewis Carroll", a virtual method first organized by Douglas R. Nickel for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

This method can be called a "virtual book", probably first developed at the British Library in 1998 as a temporary display called "Turning the Pages". That this method is state of the art might even be inferred from David Small's use of small interactive displays for the recent opening in Manhattan, New York City Museum of Sex.

Similar "virtual books" have been used at the Detroit Institute of the Arts by Matt Sikora and then at the Philadelphia Museum of Art for the exhibition "Degas and the Dance".

William Noel at The Walters Art Museum in Baltimore also uses a virtual book to display nine rare books.

The Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (I link here to the School since the museum website is not accessible as of this writing) in its coming Exhibition "Gauguin Tahiti" will also include digital kiosks.

The Museum of Modern Art, New York City, has used virtual-book kiosks.

Look also at the Russian Avant-Garde Book 1910-1934 online.

2blowhards.com and lousy Ivy educations

Oh dear, this blog is so good that I am really a bit unhappy to have found it - the time, the time, it will take to read this marvelous stuff.

The two blowhards, Michael and Friedrich, who describe themselves as a "media flunky and arts buff" and an "entrepeneur and arts buff" have a blog called, you might have imagined it from the beginning, 2blowhards.com, which they describe as follows:

"In which two graying eternal amateurs discuss their passions, interests and obsessions, among them: movies, art, politics, evolutionary biology, taxes, writing, computers, these kids these days, and lousy Ivy educations."

To which - I must exclaim - that when the grass is always greener, they could have gone to Nebraska instead. And then they would have noticed they mispelled Freidrich in their template.

Their most recent posting - as of this date of course - is that "We Need a Sociobiological Economics", Friedrich writing to Michael, in a superb discussion - and beyond - of a book by Robert Axelrod, “The Evolution of Cooperation.”

Although they do not say it, it all has something to do with John von Neumann, the greatest mathematician of the 20th century, father of the internal programming of computers and of game theory, a theory which you can reduce to the basic principle that "if all other things are equal, the winner of the game is determined by the rules".

So, do the 2 Blowhards discuss "the rules"? Take a look at their blog.

Out of Lascaux

The culture blog Out of Lascaux not only has some wonderful postings on its own but also has a nice side-bar of links to "Culture Blogs" and we will be examining some of these blogs in the future.

We definitely agree with her statements about "Class Distinctions" as posted by Alexandra on October 27, 2003.
Crass is not class.

It is also good to see links to the real official sites (and not the imitators) for
Lascaux
and
Chauvet

These are among the most stunning sites about ancient humanity on the web.

ArtsPundit

ArtsPundit is an art weblog, also known as a blog, which covers all fields of the fine arts such as painting, sculpture, architecture, poetry, music, and dance. Additionally, we also cover the decorative arts, which include "arts and crafts" such as wall painting, pottery, weaving, metalworking and furniture making. These definitions of fine art and decorative art are taken from the 15th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

We will post links to interesting "art" websites and comment on these, starting with the following link to Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log

Alan Boyle: Cosmic Log (Quantum fluctuations in space, science and exporation):

and Boyle's article there entitled

"When did language and art emerge among early humans?", which was posted on October 9, 2003. (See also the archives of the Cosmic Log at here).

Boyle links to The Leakey Foundation
to an MSNBC article on Human Origins
to Talk.Origins, which explores the creation/evolution/intelligent design controversy from the standpoint of mainstream science
and
to Becoming Human

all of which are related to the development of human art and consciousness.