More miscellaneous details

Tag: art

  • Louise Bourgeois spider to return to Tate Modern for gallery’s 25th birthday – Museums Association

    The 10 metre-high stainless-steel spider that greeted the first visitors to London’s Tate Modern in 2000 will return to the Turbine Hall next year in honour of the gallery’s 25th anniversary. Louise Bourgeois’ Maman – which the late French-American artist described as an exploration of the “ambiguities of motherhood” – was initially commissioned for the gallery’s opening, and was exhibited both in the Turbine Hall and outside the museum before its permanent acquisition by Tate in 2008.

    , ,

  • ‘New Dawn’ and the Parliamentary Archives – Parliamentary Archives: Inside the Act Room

    ‘New Dawn’ is a major new permanent contemporary artwork by artist Mary Branson, celebrating the ‘Votes for Women’ movement in Parliament. It consists of 168 individually hand-blown glass ‘scrolls’, in the colours of the various women’s suffrage organisations, individually backlit to ebb and flow with the tidal Thames. And they were inspired by the Original Acts in the Victoria Tower.

    , , ,

  • Better images of AI

    Abstract, futuristic or science-fiction-inspired images of AI hinder the understanding of the technology’s already significant societal and environmental impacts. Images relating machine intelligence to human intelligence set unrealistic expectations and misstate the capabilities of AI. Images representing AI as sentient robots mask the accountability of the humans actually developing the technology, and can suggest the presence of robots where there are none. Such images potentially sow fear, and research shows they can be laden with historical assumptions about gender, ethnicity and religion. However, finding alternatives can be difficult! That’s why we, a non-profit collaboration, are researching, creating, curating and providing Better Images of AI.

    ,

  • The ugly objectification behind the world’s first robot artist – Frieze

    With an evangelical gleam in his eye, Meller claims Ai-Da is ‘a new voice’ in art, ‘probing our world from a non-human perspective’. (There are a number of other artists exploring art and A.I. right now, including James Bridle, Ian Cheng, Agnieszka Kurant and Trevor Paglen.) He is justifiably fascinated and worried by the ways in which technology is changing the conditions of life on this planet. Invoking Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, he hopes Ai-Da will provide a way for humans to grasp what machines will bring in the coming decade. But he is the wizard behind the curtain. Ai-Da has no learning capabilities, and in the absence of any affective programming, it’s hard to believe that Ai-Da has a ‘voice’ – whatever philosophers agree that to be. Perhaps there is a flesh-and-blood artist who could use it for productive ends, but at this stage, Ai-Da seems like a research experiment that’s been brought into the world too early, too primitive to tell us much. Despite Meller’s claims – and no matter how many times Ai-Da is referred to in the third person, as if to will it into life – it is not innately creative. It needs electricity. It needs to be switched on and set into ‘drawing mode’ by humans. Ai-Da can’t choose or refuse its subjects, it can’t switch up styles, backtrack, discard work it considers a failure, ascribe meaning to what it makes. Ai-Da is a tool, not an artist.

    Pygmalion’s shadow lurks around the edges of the project. Meller refers to the robot as ‘she’, as if it has independent thought, but acknowledges it’s also an ‘it’ with no autonomy. The humanoid form encourages audiences to engage with what it makes, he argues, and is gendered female so as to amplify the voices of women who have been ignored throughout art history. It’s an act of ugly objectification for a man to think he can solve that problem by making a mechanized woman. Ai-Da could have taken the shape of a Perspex box with a bionic claw poking out of the side, or had long rubber tentacles, or been coated in yellow fur and named Blinky. It did not need to look like a waxwork of a twenty-something woman.

    , ,

  • Traverse Hieronymus Bosch’s ‘The Garden of Earthly Delights’ with Smarthistory – Colossal

    Turning over the panels, as if opening the cover of a book, we enter an otherworldly realm where humans and beasts mingle with oversized animals, fruit, and surreal structures. On the left, Adam and Eve are introduced by a young God, before Eve was tempted to eat the forbidden fruit hanging in the Garden of Eden. In the center, dozens of nude figures frolic, eat, engage in sexual activities, forage, swim, and fly. On the right is hell. “One of the most compelling theories is that the central panel is an alternate story,” Zucker says. “What if the Temptation had not taken place? What if Adam and Eve had remained innocent and had populated the world? And so is it possible that what we’re seeing is that reality played out in Bosch’s imagination?”

    , , , ,

  • OpenAI halts Studio Ghibli-style images trend, citing ‘important questions and concerns’ by the creative community – eWeek

    If you’ve been wondering why your social media feeds have been awash with Studio Ghibli-style images this week, OpenAI’s new image generator is the answer. On Tuesday, the company embedded the multimodal tool into GPT-4o, and users have been transforming their photos into vibrant, whimsical scenes reminiscent of the Japanese animation studio behind “Spirited Away” and “My Neighbor Totoro.” … However, the fun didn’t last long. The system card for GPT-4o’s native image generator now states that OpenAI “added a refusal which triggers when a user attempts to generate an image in the style of a living artist.” OpenAI acknowledged that the fact its tool can emulate named artists’ styles “has raised important questions and concerns within the creative community.”

    , , ,

  • No elephants: Breakthroughs in image generation – One Useful Thing

    Yet it is clear that what has happened to text will happen to images, and eventually video and 3D environments. These multimodal systems are reshaping the landscape of visual creation, offering powerful new capabilities while raising legitimate questions about creative ownership and authenticity. The line between human and AI creation will continue to blur, pushing us to reconsider what constitutes originality in a world where anyone can generate sophisticated visuals with a few prompts. Some creative professions will adapt; others may be unchanged, and still others may transform entirely. As with any significant technological shift, we’ll need well-considered frameworks to navigate the complex terrain ahead. The question isn’t whether these tools will change visual media, but whether we’ll be thoughtful enough to shape that change intentionally.

    , , , , ,

  • Chaos bewitched: Moby-Dick and AI – The Public Domain Review

    Each of these seemed to me “a boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly”. And indeed of any of them I might be tempted to cry out something along the lines of, “It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale!” or, “It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements!” Or perhaps even, “It’s a Hyperborean winter scene! It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time!” Further iteration was called for. The middle version possessed, to my eye, a dark central form of peculiarly leviathanic nebulosity. Onward!

    , , ,

  • Rembrandt to Picasso: Five ways to spot a fake masterpiece – BBC Culture

    In authenticating the painting in the Burlington Magazine, one expert insisted “in no other picture by the great Master of Delft do we find such sentiment, such a profound understanding of the Bible story – a sentiment so nobly human expressed through the medium of the highest art”. But it was all a lie. In a remarkable twist, Van Meegeren eventually chose to expose himself as a fraudster shortly after the end of World War Two, after being charged by Dutch authorities with the crime of selling a Vermeer – therefore a national treasure – to the Nazi official Hermann Göring. To prove his innocence, if innocence it might be called, and demonstrate that he had merely sold a worthless fake of his own forging, not a real Old Master, Van Meegeren performed the extraordinary feat of whisking up a fresh masterpiece from thin air before the experts’ astonished eyes. Voilà, Vermeer.

    , , , , ,

  • The inside story of Blenheim’s gold toilet heist – BBC News

    It was the night before, Blenheim chief executive Dominic Hare was at a glamorous exhibition launch party being held at the palace, hosted by Cattelan himself. It was America’s first time on display outside of New York and the artwork’s presence was creating a buzz. He remembers slipping away from the festivities, hoping for a turn on the fully usable toilet. But when confronted with a line, he told himself “that’s okay, there’s no point queuing. You can come back tomorrow and have a look”.

    But just a few hours later, his colleague Ms Paice was witnessing the final moments as the 98kg (216lbs) artwork was being heaved into a boot. She recalls a confusing and fast-moving scene: “It was just shadows and quick movement. I just saw them move towards the car, get in the car….and then the car just sped straight off.” From the burglars entering and exiting the courtyard, the audacious heist had taken just five minutes. Police arrived shortly after, and it was only when staff searched the palace they realised what had been stolen.

    “That was when… I felt my stomach drop,” Ms Paice says. “And I thought, this is big.” … The stolen gold has never been recovered.

    , , ,

  • Legendary photographer Martin Parr on the secret to a good picture – Esquire

    You’ve got to have a story. You’ve got to say something in photography. Unless you do that, it’s not going to work. So that’s the priority. What are you trying to say with your photographs? Stories are the backbone of good photography. You look at the world, it’s a funny old weird place. So inevitably, if I’m doing my interpretation of what’s out there, then humour will be part of it. Because the world makes me laugh, and cry at the same time. … When starting out, copy other people. Look at the history of photography. And when you’ve got the right subject matter, dive into that. Once you get engrossed in it, that’s when it’s likely that your own style will start to emerge. … I take a lot of shots, because to get that good one, you need to have some momentum behind you. You have to keep shooting. Wait for that perfect shot to emerge, or it may not emerge. You just don’t know until you start shooting it.

    , ,

  • 1970s sci-fi book covers by fab1an – glif

    , , , , ,

  • Give it a Polish! Classic film posters with a twist – The Guardian

    This exhibition unveils how Polish artists interpreted US and UK films such as The Shining and Return of the Jedi while navigating the harsh realities of communist and post-Soviet Poland, at a time when censorship, propaganda and surveillance were omnipresent. … Blending raw intensity with haunting beauty, these posters reflect the psychological landscape of a society shaped by repression.

    , , , ,

  • I spent 24 hours watching The Clock – MoMA

    The meta-study “Severe Sleep Deprivation Causes Hallucinations and a Gradual Progression Toward Psychosis with Increasing Time Awake” (Frontiers of Psychiatry, 2018) found that subjects’ “perceptual distortions, anxiety, irritability, depersonalization, and temporal disorientation started within 24–48 h of sleep loss.” I can offer anecdotal confirmation. It is after 2:00 p.m. and I have been awake for 28 hours. I’m not hallucinating (yet) but I definitely hate everyone and, although I’m literally sitting in a clock, time is meaningless. One hour flies by and the next is like spending an afternoon at the DMV. Paul Hogan pretends to tell the time by looking at the sun (Crocodile Dundee, 1986) and I laugh for the first time in hours.

    , , , ,

  • ‘Photography is therapy for me’: Martin Parr on humour, holidaying and life behind the lens – The Guardian

    How would he define his style? “It’s the palette of bright colours, and getting in close to your subject matter. The colour helps to take it one step away from reality. I guess that’s a part of my, erm… ‘vision’ sounds a bit pretentious. And humour. Life is funny. I try to bring that into the images.” His pictures are balanced between documentary, satire and commentary, serious stuff disguised as entertainment, turning the familiar into something alien, making you look harder. … He resists defining his work but has said, “I create fiction out of reality.” What does that mean? “It’s the subjective nature of photography. The only thing that matters is your relationship to the subject. That’s what you’re in control of. It’s all true, but it’s my truth. My personal truth.”

    , , ,

  • The singular wit of one of the New Yorker’s first women cartoonists – Hyperallergic

    Born in San Francisco in 1899, Shermund moved to New York in 1924 to make her way as an artist. Her early cartoons centered on the character of the flapper — fashionably dressed, outspoken, and sexually liberated — whose comic interactions with other character types painted a picture of life in 1920s New York. Rendered in lines as crisp as the finest etching, and a sense of flapper style and posture drawn from life, Shermund’s young women gossiped in delis and on the subway; they smoked cigarettes and danced late into the night with married men; they woke up, horribly hungover. And while Shermund may have lampooned her flappers, her sharp social commentary took relationships between young women seriously, recognizing the true, even subversive solidarity between them. There’s a knowing wink under all that eyeshadow — each gossipy comment is a whispered secret.

    , , , , ,

  • The second wave of immersive institutions has arrived—how can traditional museums and galleries harness their power? – The Art Newspaper

    Museums and galleries have a fresh opportunity to work with a new type of digital art venue that is spreading around the world, with the power to tell interactive stories of cultural heritage to multiple users using free-roam VR headsets

    , , , , , ,

  • The horizon line – The Noah Kalina Newsletter

    Sometimes when I don’t know what to do, when everything around me seems overwhelming, when I feel like I have nothing important enough to say or like I have nothing interesting enough going on, I drive to the water and make a photograph of the water and the horizon and the sky.

    , ,

  • Appalled by X and Meta? Try these social media alternatives – Hyperallergic

    With less than half of a million active users at the moment, Pixelfed saw an unprecedented amount of new sign-ups in the week after Meta’s announcement of loosened content moderation policies. Initially reported by 404 Media, Meta users accused the social media giant of instantaneously deleting comments and posts including links to Pixelfed on its platforms as the decentralized platform gained traction. (Meta confirmed in an email to Hyperallergic that this was a mistake and most posts with Pixelfed links have been reinstated.) … The nostalgia for “Old Instagram,” the point in time when users were using the app for the fun of it by keeping friends and family updated through amateur photography prior to brand sponsorships and the over-saturation of influencers, can be channeled through Pixelfed.

    , , , , , , ,

  • ‘Mass theft’: Thousands of artists call for AI art auction to be cancelled – The Guardian

    A letter calling for the auction to be scrapped has received 3,000 signatures, including from Karla Ortiz and Kelly McKernan, who are suing AI companies over claims that the firms’ image generation tools have used their work without permission. The letter says: “Many of the artworks you plan to auction were created using AI models that are known to be trained on copyrighted work without a licence. These models, and the companies behind them, exploit human artists, using their work without permission or payment to build commercial AI products that compete with them.” […]

    A British artist whose work features in the auction, Mat Dryhurst, said he cared about the issue of art and AI “deeply” and rejected the criticisms in the letter. … Dryhurst told the Guardian that the piece of art being auctioned was part of an exploration of how the “concept” of his wife appeared in publicly available AI models. “This is of interest to us and we have made a lot of art exploring and attempting to intervene in this process as is well within our rights.” He added: “It is not illegal to use any model to create artwork. I resent that an important debate that should be focused on companies and state policy is being focused on artists grappling with the technology of our time.”

    , ,

  • What is AI art? – Christie’s

    With the announcement of a groundbreaking auction dedicated to AI art, we trace the history, technological advancements, key artists from the established to the new guard, and Christie’s role in shaping the landscape of computational creativity.

    , ,

  • Augmented Intelligence – Christie’s

    Augmented Intelligence is a groundbreaking auction highlighting the breadth and quality of AI Art. … The auction redefines the evolution of art and technology, exploring human agency in the age of AI within fine art. From robotics to GANs to interactive experiences, artists incorporate and collaborate with artificial intelligence in a variety of mediums including paintings, sculptures, prints, digital art and more.

    , ,

  • An exhibition of non-existent books – Hyperallergic

    Created by a team of artists, printers, bookbinders, and calligraphers, these books don’t belong to the real world, at least not in the traditional sense. They can be “lost” or “unfinished,” both of which apply to Sylvia Plath’s Double Exposure (1964/2024?), a semi-autobiographical novel about a wife with an awful husband, the manuscript of which was possibly destroyed by her awful real-life husband, Ted Hughes. The existence of this book here, with its cover of a doubled Plath beneath a serifed title and published by the actual Heinemann company, suggests an alternate and more kind reality in which Plath did not die by suicide, and her manuscript had not vanished. Or they are books that never existed at all, except in the worlds conjured in other works of fiction, such as “The Garden of Forking Paths,” mentioned in a Jorge Luis Borges collection fittingly entitled Fictions (1944).

    , , , , , ,

  • Radical doodles – how ‘exquisite corpse’ games embodied the Surrealist movement – Aeon Videos

    Commemorating [André Breton’s Surrealist] manifesto’s centennial, this short documentary from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City (MoMA) explores the surrealist exercise known as ‘exquisite corpse’, in which each participant creates one portion of a body, unaware of how the other participants’ contributions will look. Taking viewers through a history of the exquisite corpse up to today, the piece explores how these projects embody the surrealist emphasis on freedom, community and radical creativity.

    , , , ,

  • Even though it’s breaking: On barbarism and barbers; The Great Dictator (1940) – Bright Wall/Dark Room

    This is a still from Charles Chaplin’s 1940 film, The Great Dictator. It occurs at approximately the 1:59:32 mark. If our home releases and prints are different, the most important context for this essay is that we discuss the split second before Charles Chaplin speaks the film’s final speech. […]

    To be bold, to dare to be stupid: this single frame in The Great Dictator is the most essential frame occurring in Charles Chaplin’s filmography. It is the most elegant and achy navigation out of comedy, straight through tragedy, and into something like the human struggle ever captured by camera. It is something like the writing of resolution.

    , , ,

  • $50 Van Gogh? Experts say no, offering alternative attribution in dramatic art dispute – Artnet News

    The claim that New York-based LMI Group had discovered a long lost portrait by Van Gogh made a huge splash when it was announced last week. The company said the attribution was made by a team of experts according to a multi-pronged “data-based” approach costing over $30,000. Some commentators pored over the company’s 456-page report while others felt confident making their judgement from just a cursory glance at the composition. […]

    “I thought it was odd that a claimed title was in the area where usually the signature sits,” said Dr. Martin Pracher, who offers appraisal and authentication services in Würzburg, Germany. After conducting some research, he found other paintings signed “Elimar” by a little known Danish artist Henning Elimar, who was born in Aarhus in 1928 and died in 1989. In one case, a painting attributed to an “unknown artist” that sold for €25 ($25) at Auktionshaus Dannenberg in Germany in September 2024 also bore the signature “Elimar” written in black bold caps, just like the text on Elimar (1889). […]

    Edward Rosser, an art collector who was among those taken aback by LMI’s claim, said he was able to connect the painting to Henning Elimar thanks to “a simple Google search with the words ‘painting’ and ‘Elimar.’” This artist’s works, he found, bore signatures “as close as one could wish to the inscription on the yard sale ‘van Gogh,’” he said. “Much of what we respond to in Van Gogh’s art is the rhythm and proportion of his brushstrokes,” he continued. “They somehow, magically, create paintings that are ‘alive’; they even seem to vibrate.” Could the author of Elimar (1889)’s efforts ever compare? “I think it is a dreadful painting, and is about as far from a true Van Gogh as a painting could possibly be.”

    , ,

  • Strange, surreal and sexy: 31 images that changed the way we see our bodies – The Guardian

    These photographs show us our bodies as we have never seen them before. Edward Weston’s captures a transcendental elegance in his lover Charis, as she dips her face from view like a resting swan tucking its head beneath a wing. The late Ren Hang, whose nude portraits of queer Chinese youth challenged government censors, lines up a mountain range of undulating bottoms. Arno Rafael Minkkinen’s self-portrait, pale limbs sandwiched between those of a silver birch, has a mischievous otherworldliness. It is as if you could step inside the frame, and into a magical world. There is nothing like an image of a body to expand your mind.

    ,

  • AI art with human “expressive elements” can be copyrighted – Hyperallergic

    The report, which details the findings of an inquiry involving 10,000 comments from the public and input from experts and stakeholders, concludes that AI-assisted works for which a human can “determine the expressive elements” can be fully or partially copyrightable. Among the contributors to the inquiry were the Authors Guild, Adobe, the Association of Medical Illustrators, and Professional Photographers of America. […]

    According to the agency, “expressive elements” can be demonstrated when a human modifies AI output, or when “human-authored work is perceptible in an AI output.” However, the report stipulates that simply inputting prompts to generate AI output is insufficient, adding that whether or not human contributions are considered to meet the criteria for authorship should be determined on a case-by-case basis.

    , ,

  • In London, an enormous exhibition of 500+ works roots out the creative seeds of flowers – Colossal

    In nature, flowers serve as an essential component of the reproduction process. But for humans, scented blooms are ripe with myriad meanings and symbolism that transcend their biological functions. … A massive exhibition opening next month at Saatchi Gallery cultivates a vast repertoire of works that explores how blooms have become an omnipresent entity in human life and creativity. Flowers: Flora in Contemporary Art and Culture brings together more than 500 photographs, installations, sculptures, archival pieces, and other objects to create a rich landscape spanning millennia.

    , , ,

  • The winners of Rest of World’s photography contest – Rest of World

    Sandra Singh; Italy. A group of refugees is photographed a few minutes after landing on the Italian island of Lampedusa, the closest part of the European Union that can be reached via a perilous boat journey from Libya or Tunisia. The Mediterranean Sea is the deadliest migration route for those fleeing persecution and poverty in their home countries. Upon their arrival, these refugees borrowed a smartphone from a bystander and started a video call to let their relatives know they survived the journey. Their own phones had either been soaked during their crossing or had run out of battery during the long days spent on the sea.

    , ,

  • “Relaxations for the Impotent”: Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare and the contradictions of American smut – Public Domain Review

    Perhaps one of the reasons Fantazius Mallare failed was that it did not seem to deliver on its transgressive mission. Among the few who agreed to review the book was D. H. Lawrence, himself no stranger to courting controversy and running afoul of censorship laws. But Lawrence found the novel to be utterly lacking. “I’m sorry”, he wrote, “it didn’t thrill me a bit, neither the pictures nor the text. It all seems to me so would-be. . . . And really, Fantasius, with his head full of copulation and committing mental fornication and sodomy every minute, is just as much a bore as any other tedious modern individual with a dominant idea.” Dismissive of the whole enterprise, Lawrence offered an improved subtitle for the book: “Relaxations for the Impotent”.

    , , , ,

  • How to Work Better: Making a mural on Houston Street – Guggenheim

    As the critic John Kelsey notes in the Guggenheim retrospective’s catalogue, “Taken from a factory in Thailand and displayed in a supremely wealthy nation with one of the strictest immigration policies in Europe, the text becomes an ironic reflection on the way things go for commuter drones within a productively mobilized post-society, some of whom happen to be artists and curators: ‘SMILE.’” The mural’s audience in New York 25 years later is, if anything, even more subject to the piece’s ironies.

    , , ,

  • The Great Wave: why has this become the defining image of our era? – The Guardian

    Okuda thinks that the image shows “the grand scale of nature v humans”. It certainly speaks to the climate crisis, and to migration. Japan was following the sakoku isolationist policy when Hokusai designed his print. Trade was restricted. Foreign nationals couldn’t enter Japan. Overseas travel was forbidden. In this context, the new and exotic Prussian blue pigment – likely imported from Europe via China – would have been startling to Hokusai’s first buyers. Maybe that is another reason why this image feels hopeful. He put the world beyond the wave on paper.
    art hokusai painting printing

    , , ,

  • João Loureiro serves grayscale gelato at Tadao Ando’s MPavilion 10 – designboom

    On-site, customers can ask Piccolina about the flavors of the grayscale gelato, which range from light grey to almost black. João Loureiro tells designboom in an email that the flavors change every time the work is shown. ‘It depends on local flavors and the ice cream production system,’ he shares with us. Users across social platforms still try to guess the flavors, including black sesame, but only when they visit the stall at MPavilion 10 can they confirm their hunches. In a way, revealing the flavors online defeats the purpose of keeping the grayscale gelato a mystery.

    , , ,

  • My machine and me – Los Angeles Review of Books

    Mark Fisher described his millennial students as “a generation born into that ahistorical, anti-mnemonic blip culture—a generation, that is to say, for whom time has always come ready-cut into digital micro-slices.” For the next generation, the concept of time is segmented into even shorter media blocks. When is there the opportunity to feel sentimental? Should I feel sentimental about screen time? It is odd to be grateful to the laptop you paid $2,499 for, in 12 monthly installments, for reminding you of your physicality. I doubt Fisher would approve. The laptop gives the illusion of control over work-time when in fact it facilitates the erosion of a distinction between work and life. Still, I will take the help applying pressure to the hemorrhage. I want to be startled out of the trance, to pull my shoulders back and heave myself from bed. I want to remember that I am a body.

    , , , ,

  • Find awe and inspiration in thousands of public domain artworks – Hyperallergic

    “Around this time last year I had the idea to gather all the images in the Public Domain Review into a separate archive, in a way freeing these images from their textual homes and placing them front and center for easier discovery, comparison, and appreciation,” Adam Green, PDR’s editor-in-chief, told Hyperallergic.

    , , , ,

  • January 1, 2025 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1929 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1924 – Duke University School of Law

    On January 1, 2025, thousands of copyrighted works from 1929 will enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1924. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon.[2] 2025 marks a milestone: all of the books, films, songs, and art published in the 1920s will now be public domain. The literary highlights from 1929 include The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. In film, Mickey Mouse speaks his first words, the Marx Brothers star in their first feature film, and legendary directors from Alfred Hitchcock to John Ford made their first sound films. From comic strips, the original Popeye and Tintin characters will enter the public domain. Among the newly public domain compositions are Gershwin’s An American in Paris, Ravel’s Bolero, Fats Waller’s Ain’t Misbehavin’, and the musical number Singin’ in the Rain.

    , , , , ,

  • DOOM: The Gallery Experience – Newgrounds

    DOOM: The Gallery Experience was created as an art piece designed to parody the wonderfully pretentious world of gallery openings. In this experience, you will be able to walk around and appreciate some fine art while sipping some wine and enjoying the complimentary hors d’oeuvres in the beautifully renovated and re-imagined E1M1 of id Software’s DOOM (1993).

    , , , ,

  • Egon Schiele’s landscapes tell a winter’s tale – Hyperallergic

    An eternal fall permeates most of the artist’s landscapes, in which gloomy and Gothic towns are shot through with a sense of impending doom.

    , ,

  • Download 200+ free modern art books from the Guggenheim Museum – Open Culture

    Among the more than 200 Guggenheim art books available on the Internet Archive, you’ll find one on a 1977 retrospective of Color Field painter Kenneth Noland, one on the ever-vivid icon-making pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, and one on the existential slogans — “MONEY CREATES TASTE,” “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT,” “LACK OF CHARISMA CAN BE FATAL” — slyly, digitally inserted into the lives of thousands by Jenny Holzer. Other titles, like Expressionism, a German Intuition 1905–1920, From van Gogh to Picasso, from Kandinsky to Pollock, and painter Wassily Kandinsky’s own Point and Line to Plane, go deeper into art history.

    , , ,

  • The search for van Gogh’s lost masterpiece – The New York Times

    Art sleuths over the years have confirmed this much: that the Japanese buyer from 1990 was soon undone by scandal, criminally sanctioned and died. His collection was sold by a bank and the Gachet was acquired by an Austrian financier who soon found that he too could not afford to keep it. In 1998, the van Gogh was sold privately to an undisclosed party. Since then the trail has run cold. At least publicly. […]

    All parties had an opinion on the core question that drives such a quest: Do collecting families have any responsibility to share iconic works of art with the broader public? … “People are allowed to own things privately,” said Michael Findlay, who was involved as a specialist for Christie’s in the 1990 auction sale of the Gachet. “Does it belong to everybody? No, it does not.”

    , ,

  • The 30 best art books of 2024 – Hyperallergic

    By recontextualizing the Renaissance in downright gothic terms, Bosch becomes the primogeniture of an alternative school of the period that is marked by the monstrous as much as the humanistic. Aikema and Cremades’s argument isn’t a boring rehash of the Northern versus the Italian Renaissance debate. This alternative school isn’t marked by geography as much as it is by perspective, so that Giuseppe Arcimboldo joins Netherlandish counterparts like Pieter Brueghel in their turn towards the bizarre.

    , , ,

  • National Gallery mixtape – Google Arts & Culture

    Mix a personalized soundtrack inspired by paintings from the National Gallery with the help of Google AI.

    , , , ,

  • A miracle: Notre-Dame’s astonishing rebirth from the ashes – The New York Times

    And wood rafters, protected by modern fire suppression systems, could last virtually forever. The original trusses had lasted for the better part of a millennium, the very definition of sustainable architecture. Restoring the roof would also enlist skilled carpenters, stone workers and artisans trained in ancestral techniques with roots in French and European history. Notre-Dame could help rejuvenate these fragile but precious crafts.

    After Macron’s announcement, a French organization of artisans called the Compagnons du Devoir, dating back to the 12th century, began receiving thousands of applications. “In France, as in America,” one of its former leaders, Jean-Claude Bellanger, told me at the time, “those who go into manual trades today tend to be considered failures by the elites. Notre-Dame has reminded everyone that such work is a path to dignity and excellence.”

    , , , ,

  • Rhythmical Lines – The Paris Review

    In his treatise, he attaches great value to his interest in aesthetics amid such political uncertainty, writing, The very fact of the author’s interest remaining so resolutely focused over the period of many years, the care with which he preserved his sketches through the ravages and challenges of two world wars, suggest that he attached great importance to his pursuits although they might have seemed so trifle in the context of the turbulent historical events that were going on. It is upon the viewer to decide whether the author’s opinion of his linear ideas is justified.

    Though this text is aimed at an imaginary future viewer, Szpakowski could never have anticipated the particular tensions of the twenty-first-century gaze: our initial suspicion that the designs, for their perfection, must be computer generated; and, upon discovering that they’re not, our fetishizing his hand-drawing technique. Szpakowski took issue, in his lifetime, with the swallowed-whole way of looking that rendered his designs mere decorations, perhaps drawing on older referents like the ancient Greek meander motif or textile patterns. He insists that “a single glance would not be enough,” and that his were in fact “linear ideas,” with “inner content” accessible only to those who follow the line with their eyes on its journey from left to right: a process not unlike reading.

    , ,

  • Electric Dreams: Art and technology before the internet – Tate

    As the field gained international popularity in the 1960s, second-generation cyberneticists introduced principles of ‘observation’ and ‘influence’. This allowed them to link systems together into complex ecologies. Cybernetics became applied more widely to various social, environmental and philosophical contexts. It developed a cultural dimension among the 1960s hippie counterculture. They experimented with new technologies alongside their interest in alternative lifestyles and mind-altering experiences.

    Many artists and thinkers turned to cybernetics to make sense of a newly interconnected world, increasingly driven by technological development and interactions with machines. As a field concerned with constructing systems, cybernetics also holds the potential to dismantle existing structures and rebuild them anew. Artists responded to these ideas by creating systems-based works that performed creative acts with minimal human intervention, or which responded in real-time to the interactions of their viewers

    , , , , ,

  • See the light pour through: how art can free us from the exhaustion of smartphone addiction – The Guardian

    As the writer Iris Murdoch said in an interview: “Most of the time we fail to see the big wide real world at all because we are blinded by obsession, anxiety, envy, resentment, fear. We make a small personal world in which we remain enclosed. Great art is liberating, it enables us to see and take pleasure in what is not ourselves.” Art reminds us to look up from the tiny world we’ve made on the black mirror that lives in our pocket. It helps us to understand our place in the universe, and look out to the expanse, rather than into our filtered selves through tech. It’s time to take back our attention; and to give it to the things we deserve and that matter.

    , , , , , ,

  • Photographs of sunsets as reflected through shattered mirrors by Bing Wright – Colossal

    Broken Mirror/Evening Sky is a series of images by New York photographer Bing Wright who captured the reflections of sunsets on shattered mirrors. The final prints are displayed quite large, measuring nearly 4′ across by 6′ tall, creating what I can only imagine to be the appearance of stained glass windows.

    , ,

  • Lynn Hershman Leeson predicted our digital hellscape – Hyperallergic

    Another work, “CybeRoberta” (1996), comprised of a seemingly ordinary doll sitting inside a glass vitrine, allows viewers to access a designated website via a QR code displayed on the wall and then to change the position of “Roberta”’s digital eye to see real-time images of themselves in the gallery. Needless to say, finding myself so thoroughly surveilled by a seemingly benign toy was morbidly riveting, but also genuinely disconcerting.

    , , , ,

  • The Painted Protest: How politics destroyed contemporary art – Harper’s Magazine

    It was the most depressing exhibition I had ever seen at the gallery, hardly worth a visit, let alone losing one’s legs. While Unravel pretended to be politically radical—even revolutionary—it didn’t seem to stand for much beyond liberal orthodoxy and feel-good ambient diversity. It offered fantasies of resistance, but had little to offer in terms of genuine, substantive social change or artistic experimentation. The works were almost entirely produced with traditional methods and materials, in recognizable aesthetics, and might as well have dated from half a century ago, if not much earlier. […]

    The extent to which the art world has taken up these concerns raises another question: When the world’s most influential, best-funded exhibitions are dedicated to amplifying marginalized voices, are those voices still marginalized? They speak for the cultural mainstream, backed by institutional authority. The project of centering the previously excluded has been completed; it no longer needs to be museums’ main priority and has by now been hollowed out into a trope. These voices have lost their own unique qualities. In a world with Foreigners Everywhere, differences have flattened and all forms of oppression have blended into one universal grief. We are bombarded with identities until they become meaningless. When everyone’s tossed together into the big salad of marginalization, otherness is made banal and abstract.

    , , ,

Tags

AI Amazon Apple archives art book reviews books chatbots children China classical commerce computing copyright culture data design Donald Trump economics education Elon Musk environment ethics fakes future gadgets galleries Google health history history of technology humour illustration internet jobs journalism Leeds LLM mental health metaverse mobile phones movies music NASA painting photography politics productivity psychology robots satire schools science sculpture search Second Life social media society software space standards technology television time truth video video games VR watches writing

Archives