Posts Tagged ‘art history’
“Art is not what you see, but what you make others see”*…
Mason Williams recalls…
CLASSICAL GAS was written in August, 1967; recorded for THE MASON WILLIAMS PHONOGRAPH RECORD album in November, 1967; released as a single in February, 1968, and became a hit six months later in the Summer of 1968. It was also one of the earliest records that used a visual to help promote it on television, which probably qualifies it as one of the earliest music videos.
During the time that CLASSICAL GAS was a hit I was also the head writer for THE SMOTHERS BROTHERS COMEDY HOUR on CBS. I had seen a film titled “GOD IS DOG SPELLED BACKWARDS” at The Encore, an off beat movie house in L.A. The film was a collection of approximately 2500 classical works of art, mostly paintings, that flashed by in three minutes. Each image lasted only two film frames, or twelve images a second! At the end of the film the viewer was pronounced “cultural” since they had just covered “3000 years of art in 3 minutes!”
The film was the work of a UCLA film student named Dan McLaughlin. I contacted Dan and told him that I was interested in the idea of using his film as a visual for CLASSICAL GAS to air on THE SMOTHERS BROTHERS COMEDY HOUR. (His original sound track had been Beethoven’s 5th Symphony.) THE COMEDY HOUR offered him the money to finance a new film he wanted to make in exchange for the right to change the original soundtrack from Beethoven’s 5th Symphony to CLASSICAL GAS and air it on the show. As a “music video” it was first shown on THE SUMMER BROTHERS SMOTHERS SHOW (Glen Campbell was the host) in the summer of 1968.
The impact of the film on television opened the door to realizations that the viewer’s mind could absorb this intense level of visual input. It was a double shot of a hundred proof music and video that polished the history of art off in three minutes! It was also the beginning of the fast images concept now called kinestasis (a rapidly-moving montage technique set to music) that has over the years been exploited so effectively by television commercials, documentaries, etc. As a result of the response to the CLASSICAL GAS music video, in September of 1968 I wrote up a piece for The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, projecting the idea that someday VJ’s would be playing hit tapes on TV, (as well as DJ’s hit records on radio), a prophesy of what was, 13 years later, to become MTV…
[Dan McLaughlin went on to become head of UCLA’s animation program.]
* Edgar Degas
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As we bathe in beauty, we might spare a thought for Robert Alexander “Bumps” Blackwell; he died on this date in 1985. A bandleader, songwriter, arranger, and record producer, he was probably most impactful in his work overseeing the early hits of Little Richard, as well as in grooming Ray Charles, Quincy Jones, Ernestine Anderson, Lloyd Price, Sam Cooke, Herb Alpert, Larry Williams, and Sly and the Family Stone at the starts of their recording careers.
Blackwell, seated, with Rich Hall (of FAME Studios in Muscle Shoals) and Little Richard
“Oo ee oo ah ah ting tang walla walla bing bang”*…
On this most bizarre of days, an alternative: hours of fun at The New Yorker‘s “Cartoons at Random.”
* “The Witch Doctor”
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As we fight the urge to bury our heads, we might spare a thought for John Ruskin; he died on this date in 1900. Best remembered as the leading English art critic of the Victorian era, he was also an art patron, draughtsman, watercolourist, a prominent social thinker, and a philanthropist. He wrote on subjects as varied as geology, architecture, myth, ornithology, literature, education, botany, and political economy, and in styles and literary forms equally varied: Ruskin penned essays and treatises, poetry and lectures, travel guides and manuals, letters and even a fairy tale.
Ruskin was hugely influential in the latter half of the 19th century, and up to the First World War. After a period of relative decline, his reputation has steadily improved since the 1960s with the publication of numerous academic studies of his work. Today, his ideas and concerns are widely recognized as having anticipated interest in environmentalism, sustainability, and craft.
You may either win your peace, or buy it:—win it, by resistance to evil;—buy it, by compromise with evil.
– Ruskin, The Work of Iron, in Nature, Art, and Policy. Lecture at Tunbridge Wells, February 16, 1858
“You cannot get a grip on blue… blue is sly, slick, it slides into the room sideways, a slippery trickster”*…
Vermeer, Girl with a Pearl Earring, ca. 1665
Michelangelo couldn’t afford ultramarine. His painting The Entombment, the story goes, was left unfinished as the result of his failure to procure the prized pigment. Rafael reserved ultramarine for his final coat, preferring for his base layers a common azurite; Vermeer was less parsimonious in his application and proceeded to mire his family in debt. Ultramarine: the quality of the shade is embodied in its name. This is the superlative blue, the end-all blue, the blue to which all other hues quietly aspire. The name means “beyond the sea”—a dreamy ode to its distant origins, as romantic as it is imprecise…
The whole fascinating story at “True Blue- a brief history of ultramarine.”
* Christopher Moore, Sacré Bleu: A Comedy d’Art
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As we dip our brushes, we might recall that it was on this date in 1886 that a gift from France was formally received in the U.S.: it was on this date that year that “Liberty Enlightening the World”– a token of friendship from the French to the U.S. better known as the Statue of Liberty– was dedicated by President Grover Cleveland.
Designed by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, a French sculptor, it was built by Gustave Eiffel (his Eiffel Tower served as the statue’s armature), who had it shipped from France encased in more than 200 crates, then reassembled it and placed on its pedestal on (what was then known as) Bedloe’s Island, where Cleveland took her in.
“The word ‘happiness’ would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness”*…
A new Instagram account by Australian artist Damien Rudd, @sadtopographies, is collecting Google Map screenshots of the world’s grimmest-sounding places, which makes for an excellent collection of weird travel destinations.
Read more at “This Instagram account collects the saddest-sounding places on Earth“; then take the tour on Rudd’s Instagram feed.
* Carl Jung
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As we pack extra tissues, we might spare a thought for Lucas Cranach the Elder; he dies on this date in 1553. A German Renaissance painter and printmaker, he was court painter to the Electors of Saxony and is known for his portraits, both of German princes and those of the leaders of the Protestant Reformation (including his close friend, Martin Luther)…. though, as evidenced below, he treated more secular subjects as well. The most successful German artist of his time, he operated a large workshop, which continued after his death under the guidance of his sone, son Lucas Cranach the Younger.
Cranach’s “The Ill-Matched Couple”
“Chelsea, please let your art speak for itself”*…
The Artspeak Incinerator Project is an interactive video installation created by artist Bill Claps. This video documents the Artspeak Incinerator in action at the MOMA, Guggenheim, Whitney, New Museum, ARTFORUM, Gagosian Gallery, and other locations.
During Armory Arts Week Claps utilized crowdsourcing and a technology interface connected to Twitter to source examples of artspeak from various art fairs, publications, and institutions throughout New York City. The artspeak was translated into Morse code (representing the art world’s distinct coded language) and digitally incinerated while being projecting onto the facades of art institutions throughout the city, releasing it into the atmosphere in a purified state…
email readers click here for video
See more– and more of Claps’ other wonderful work– at his site.
* “Ms. Patuto,” season 3 of Disney Channel’s That’s So Raven
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As we connect with our inner connoisseur, we might send bold birthday greetings to Willem de Kooning; he was born on this date in 1904. After Jackson Pollock, de Kooning was the most prominent and celebrated of the Abstract Expressionist painters, and with his wife, Elaine, Pollock, Rothko, and Kline, was at the core of what has become known as the New York School.
de Kooning has been the subject of reams of artspeak.
de Kooning’s Woman III, 1951-53
de Kooning in his studio, 1961
“I’d rather create a miniature painting than a Taj Mahal of a book”*…
South African artist Lorraine Loots agrees…
365 Postcards for Ants is the second phase of a project started on 1 January 2013, which involved me creating a miniature painting every single day for the entire year.
In celebration of our city’s designation as World Design Capital 2014, I’ve decided to do it all over again, and this time all the paintings will be Cape Town themed…
Learn- and see– more at Lustik, at her site, and on Loots’ Tumblr.
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As we get small, we might send patronizing birthday greetings to Cosimo di Medici; he was born on this date in 1389. The first of the Medici political dynasty, de facto rulers of Florence during much of the Italian Renaissance;, he was known as “Cosimo ‘the Elder'” (“il Vecchio”) and “Cosimo Pater Patriae” (“father of the nation”). A fabulously-wealthy banker, he was a powerful patron of learning; he funded Ficino’s Latin translation of the complete works of Plato, and supported the work of scholars like Niccolo Niccoli and Leonardo Bruni. But he is perhaps best remembered as a patron of the arts: he supported Fra Angelico, Fra Filippo Lippi, and Donatello, whose David and Judith Slaying Holofernes were Medici commissions; he commissioned Michelozzo Michelozzi‘s Palazzo Medici; and he enabled Brunelleschi to complete the magnificent dome of Santa Maria del Fiore (the “Duomo“).
Bronzino’s (posthumous) portrait of Cosimo de’ Medici
“In economics, the majority is always wrong”*…
“Grumpy Cat,” whose image has flown across the internet– and graced the front page of the Wall Street Journal
One may imagine that economics has little bearing on the more frivolous frontiers of everyday life; but in fact it explains why one consumes so much “animal antics” online and so little Shakespearean seriousness…
Economics sometimes has surprising applications. One example is the Alchian-Allen theorem, an observation that came from a footnote in an economics textbook in the 1960s about how quality demand is affected by transport costs…
The Allen-Alchian theorem explains why places with high-quality produce (Allen and Alchian had in mind apples in Seattle, which is where apples come from in the US) nevertheless do not always get to consume that same high quality (they pointed to the market for apples in New York city, where no apples grow) because of the relative costs faced by consumers in each case (for New York consumers, a high-quality apple, once you account for transportation costs, was actually relatively cheaper than a low-quality apple compared to relative prices in Seattle). Hence the market sent the high-quality apples to New York.
You’re still with me? It’s all about relative costs. When you move something, or impose any fixed cost, the higher-quality item always wins, because it now has a lower relative cost compared to the lower-quality item.
The interesting idea is that this also applies in reverse – namely when we remove a fixed cost. The internet does this: it removes a cost of transport, and it does so equally for high quality and low quality content. Following the Allen-Alchian theorem, this should mean the opposite. Low-quality items are now relatively cheaper and high-quality items are now relatively more expensive. This idea was first explained by Tyler Cowen, but the upshot is that the internet is made of cats…
The internet lowers the cost of “transport” for every idea, high and low quality alike. It’s the opposite of the apples situation. It means that low quality apples are now relatively cheaper. It means that cats-doing-funny-things is now relatively cheaper than say German Opera. Economics insists that when demand curves look like this we can expect more cat watching, and less German opera watching.
This theorem means that we expect a lower quality, “bittier” consumption to proliferate on the internet (as a technology that lowers transport costs of high-quality and low-quality ideas alike). Which is what we observe. So that’s a win for micro-economic demand theory.
Is this really what’s happened? Have we all gotten dumber? Read more– including the arguments, pro and con– at “The internet is made of cats – and you can blame economists“: and read the paper the lays out the “economics of cute” in “The Alchian-Allen Theorem and the Economics of Internet Animals.”
* John Kenneth Galbraith
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As we come to terms with the fact that all our bases are belong to them, we might spare a slightly skewed thought for Giuseppe Arcimboldo; he died on this date in 1593. An Italian painter best known for creating partraits composed entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books, he is considered a Mannerist… though he might well be the first Surrealist. He was certainly cited by many– from Dali through Ocampo to Švankmajer– as an influence.
Arcimboldo’s portrait of Rudolf II, Holy Roman Emperor, painted as Vertumnus, the Roman God of the seasons, c. 1590-1
Self-portrait
