Entries Tagged 'Art & Photography' ↓

In a recent book review discussing a book on lonliness and its negative impact on health, there was this curious passage.

If subjects are told for the purposes of experiment that they will face a lonely future, they score lower on intelligence tests and abandon tasks sooner. If cookies are set before subjects who have been told that no one else in the experiment wants to work with them, they eat twice as many as those who have been told that everyone else in the experiment wants to work with them.

I’ve always argued against the idiocy of half the ethics guidelines but this seems a good case for a query. Its not hard to imagine a long lasting, let’s say a haunting continuing echo, of a directive that you are lonely and will die alone in your apartment, your body not being discovered for days, and possibly being partially eaten by cats.

And in other health related news…

This courtesy of InventorSpot
…the shopping cart wash…capitalizing on all the germophobes out there.

You gotta end with something good…great animal portrait from the best nature photography of the year at NationalGeographic

A recent NewScientist reported that contemplating art could allay pain.

The subjects rated the pain as being a third less intense while they were viewing the beautiful paintings, compared with contemplating the ugly paintings or the blank panel. (Link here).

Recently I’ve been spending more and more time taking photographs and I’ve noticed that when I am looking for shots my mind seems to move into a realm where worries do not intrude. I’ve found this with very few other things. Because I shoot for composition rather than content, there is some kind of a mathematical aesthetic processing going on; the search for balance and beauty seems to push everything else aside. This only happens when I am actually looking for the shot.

After taking pictures the common concerns come back, like the one where I realize that I am developing another skill just to the level before you can actually make any money from it.

On another note, just watched True Romance again and caught the brilliant quote:

I’ve lived in America all my life; I’d like to see what TV in other countries is like. (See here).

And finally: I’ve already mentioned the loss of David Foster Wallace but among the many accolades and remembrances perhaps the most fitting was the Onion one on the cancellation of Nascar in his honour (Link here).  Its seems rude but I suspect it really was a homage by someone who read him.  It is exactly the sort of piece he would have written.

And then damn it, James Crumley too.

At the Guardian, Robert Hughes goes after Damien Hirst, and it is one of those articles that has me cheering once more someone’s common sense in this age of absurdity. Hirst is not only derivative but represents the capitulation of art to money. An excerpt:

Actually, the presence of a Hirst in a collection is a sure sign of dullness of taste. What serious person could want those collages of dead butterflies, which are nothing more than replays of Victorian decor? What is there to those empty spin paintings, enlarged versions of the pseudo-art made in funfairs? Who can look for long at his silly sub-Bridget Riley spot paintings, or at the pointless imitations of drug bottles on pharmacy shelves? No wonder so many business big-shots go for Hirst: his work is both simple-minded and sensationalist, just the ticket for newbie collectors who are, to put it mildly, connoisseurship-challenged and resonance-free. Where you see Hirsts you will also see Jeff Koons’s balloons, Jean-Michel Basquiat’s stoned scribbles, Richard Prince’s feeble jokes and pin-ups of nurses and, inevitably, scads of really bad, really late Warhols. Such works of art are bound to hang out together, a uniform message from our fin-de-siècle decadence.

and

One might as well get excited about seeing a dead halibut on a slab in Harrods food hall. Living sharks are among the most beautiful creatures in the world, but the idea that the American hedge fund broker Steve Cohen, out of a hypnotised form of culture-snobbery, would pay an alleged $12m for a third of a tonne of shark, far gone in decay, is so risible that it beggars the imagination. As for the implied danger, it is worth remembering that the number of people recorded as killed by sharks worldwide in 2007 was exactly one. By comparison, a housefly is a ravening murderous beast. Maybe Hirst should pickle one, and throw in a magnifying glass or two.

Of course, $12m would be nothing to Cohen, but the thought of paying that price for a rotten fish is an outright obscenity. And there are plenty more where it came from. For future customers, Hirst has a number of smaller sharks waiting in large refrigerators, and one of them is currently on show in its tank of formalin in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Inert, wretched and wrinkled, and already leaking the telltale juices of its decay, it is a dismal trophy of - what? Nothing beyond the fatuity of art-world greed. The Met should be ashamed. If this is the way America’s greatest museum brings itself into line with late modernist decadence, then heaven help it, for the god Neptune will not.

The now famous diamond-encrusted skull, lately unveiled to a gawping art world amid deluges of hype, is a letdown unless you believe the unverifiable claims about its cash value, and are mesmerised by mere bling of rather secondary quality; as a spectacle of transformation and terror, the sugar skulls sold on any Mexican street corner on the Day of the Dead are 10 times as vivid and, as a bonus, raise real issues about death and its relation to religious belief in a way that is genuinely democratic, not just a vicarious spectacle for money groupies such as Hirst and his admirers.

I very much like the point about the greater power of the Mexican skulls. But perhaps the ultimate irony of the shark piece, not unlike that now near forgotten artist who sold collectors his own canned feces, (see here for that story) is that even though he did not catch this fish, he caught many other fish, rich and tasteless collectors who blundered into his clever net. At least the crap artist was honest enough to state his goal as one of exposing the rotten state of modern collection whereas Hirst who though I’m sure is quite aware that he is gulling the lot, really shares the same values as his marks.

From Trendir Modern House Designs

Also from Trendir

From Book Arts: artist Barton Lidic

From OddityCentral: the ultimate car audio system

Also from OddityCentral: Russian Ice Sculptures

And finally, the work of Jason de Caires Taylor: underwater sculpture

and close up

I’m not much for the armchair sports but I am a true Olympics junkie.  Day and night until they are over.  But the opening ceremonies have never been a highlight for me until now.

The Beijing production near struck me dumb.

What I found so remarkable was that there was such a different aesthetic than I had seen before.  This production could only have taken place in such a culture.  The hundreds of drummers in unison were moving in a way that a single performer could not have been.  That complemented by the precision fireworks were something I felt could only have taken place in a culture that treasured mass movement and a communitarian ideal.  It was something that just would not work in the west.  We are much too obsessed with the singular talent, the one rising above the mass, the god.

For those who missed it and are interested, here are a few links though they may not last forever.

I saw only a few minutes of the closing ceremonies and what I saw was part of the British look to the next games, and what I saw was so sad, so high school in comparison, embarrassing really, Jimmy Page doing Whole Lotta Love with a singer belting it out and all a little blurry.

What London has to do, because they will never match the majesty of Beijing is go the whole other direction and do a futuristic industrial/punky Olympics. Get Banksy as the chief talent and go gritty. Tattoo the athletes. Go street.

Check out the great Banksy archive at WebUrbanist (also the source for all these images).

Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona is a very good film. It reminded me a little of Manhattan and even more of Jules and Jim. The latter because of the voice over throughout; the telling of a story of three people, within a European sensibility, and the former because it also was about the conflict between the heart and the head.

Two good friends, Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Christina (Scarlett Johansson),  are in Barcelona for the summer. Whereas Christina is a self described free spirit, Vicky is more of a life planner and is engaged to be married (known as the sensible one). There they run up against the romantic painter Juan Antonio (Javier Bardem) and eventually his tempestuous ex-wife Maria Elena (Penelope Cruz).

Both of the friends end up involved with the painter, and both find their world’s in some disarray. Like the people in Manhattan, these people find themselves confronting their ideas of who they thought they were and the place of passion in their lives.

I’ll leave the rest for you to see for yourselves because this is a film that should be seen. It is a triumphant return of the erratic genius of Allen; the writing ranks with his best, and every actor in it perfect. It is his perfect European film and though on the surface it plays like a romantic holiday comedy it is a little melancholy at its core.

Rebecca Hall is a true discovery and Bardem is acting miles above his sombre take in No Country for Old Men. Much more than that, this deserves recognition. Johansson too is wonderful and Cruz note perfect. And while many films shot in interesting places only hint at them, this incredible city is no small part of this film.

After the cheap thrills of the Dark Knight, this brought back to me what movies were really about.  It is deceptively light but does what those even accomplished superhero movies don’t - make you actually think about your own life.  Its a feel good and a feel deep movie.

Slight conflict of interest here in the sense that I may have enjoyed the film a little more than I might have was I not already enthralled with Barcelona and did I not have a good friend who seemed to me very like Vicky.

And in other media, and perhaps to be expanded later:

Just saw Memories of Murder - a phenomenal Korean murder mystery, beautifully shot with uncharacteristically subtle performances (the best Korean movie I have seen I think); and just read Karin Fossum’s Broken - continues her unbroken string of great books, this time slightly postmodern.

1. Via DeZeen: Marianne Maric’s Lamp Girls

2. Via Consciencious: Benoit Vollmer photographs

3. Via DailyDoseOfImagery: Gehry’s Disney Building

4. Via DeputyDog: the Nouvel tower in Barcelona

Not long ago, this blog published Frank Grisdale’s Saltspring Island photograph (see here). Turns out it was selected as an entry for the PX3: Prix de la Photographie Paris.

See here for the six photographs that were selected as worthy of honourable mention.

Street Trees #3

1. Frank told me about starting a new series photographing trees. This is one of the pictures he sent me and I was utterly blown away by it. I have tried many a time, and I have failed many a time, to get a decent picture of a tree. Anyway, I asked if he minded if I put it up here and he said, no problem.

2. He also pointed me toward the intriguing portfolio of this Russian painter, photographer and digital artist, Katerina Tumarova.

3. And finally the astonishing and strange body of work of Ronald Mueck. A good set of images over at InventorSpot. Or in other words, Holy Gulliver’s Travels, Batman!!

I’m back.

Above, is a Joan Miro sculpture that stands outside the Fundacio Joan Miro in Barcelona. In later posts I will be writing about all that but my energy level is still a little under par, (great trip but bad sleeps), and I have my roughly 800 photos to organize, over 1000 postings for the last couple of weeks on my GoogleReader (not going to read all those), and a slightly neurotic post kennel Siberian to attend to. But today was an interesting day.

Yesterday, at Heathrow, I picked up a copy of Ben Elton‘s latest novel, Blind Faith. Below is the jacket copy, and it describes this book nicely. It is a smarter version of Idiocracy (which I thought, ironically, was made for a dumbed down audience). It has a good go at reality TV, FaceBook, blogging, The Secret and many more elements of current culture. Its a novelistic rant against modern mass culture, and both bitter and funny.

As Trafford Sewell struggles to work through the usual crowds of commuters, he is confronted by the intimidating figure of his Parish Confessor. Why has Trafford not been streaming his every moment of sexual intimacy onto the community website like everybody else? Does he think he’s different or special in some way? Better than his fellow man and woman? Does he have something to hide?Imagine a world where everyone knows everything about everybody. Where what a person ‘feels’ and ‘truly believes’ is protected under the law, while what is rational, even provable is condemned as heresy. A world where to question ignorance and intolerance is to commit a Crime against Faith. Ben Elton’s dark, savagely comic novel imagines a post-apocalyptic society where religious intolerance combines with a confessional sex obsessed, self-centric culture to create a world where nakedness is modesty, ignorance is wisdom and privacy is a dangerous perversion. It offers a chilling vision of what’s to come? Or something rather closer to what we call reality?

I mention the novel because it gets one thinking about how much nonsense is out there. And after attuning to Spain, and while thinking overall that it is a much saner culture than my own, the television viewing indicated that there were some curious parts of that culture that weren’t quite obvious from wandering around. Exhibit Number One:

This odd duck is an astrologer and one of the many various psychics encountered at any given time on Spanish television (in our room, out of the 20 or so stations, 3 had psychics, 2 had fulltime lottery shows, 1 switched to porn after supper and about 3 switched to porn after midnight, as well as more Walker Texas Ranger than anyone could wish for). Exhibit Number Two:

I do have more pictures but on to the point at hand. This and some very odd informercials led me to think that I was returning to normalcy on the reentry to Canada but today, trundling down to Zellers to pick up some dog bones and an extension cord, I was behind a woman in line who was buying a new type of toilet paper. There was some issue about a two for one deal and how to ring it through the register, so while waiting for a manager to call back, the till operator and the customer talked about the toilet paper. The operator said the paper looked good and the customer said that she had first used it in Hawaii and really loved it. And then the operator replied “and wasn’t it great that it had added vitamin E?” At first I thought they must be talking about a second item of some kind, a food product perhaps, but no, the packaging on the asswipe boldly proclaimed added aloe vera and vitamin E. To my mind, you would probably have to stuff the whole roll up the old sphinctre and leave it there for a fortnight to get any benefit accruing.

Reeling from this insanity, I staggered out to my car, and as I pulled out, on the radio, long time respected CBC host Shelagh Rogers was seriously discussing listeners’ letters and call-ins telling how dead loved ones had caused trees and flowers to bloom after their passage from this world.

(When I was on the way to the store, the same show was discussing a government health commission looking into reported (reported but not proven) high cancer rates in Fort Chipewyen. It was worried about the effects, should the commission not find evidence for the link with the oil sands that the local population were certain of. That in itself is not odd but it was stated quite bluntly that the locals had determined the cause, and if the science didn’t show it, or came up with another reason, the science was insufficient. They had decided what was real and the evidence was not going to get in the way of that. (A lot of this sort of thing in the Ben Elton novel as well). The thing about cancer is that it is both a very difficult causation to pin down and it is remarkably amenable to woowoo thinking (that is, making connections either without basis or without having the background to accurately determine the cause but not letting that stand in your way). Now, I am not saying that the oil sands aren’t a factor but there is every possibility of an alternative explanation or two, and some objective inquiry is necessary to determine the likely cause of the higher rate, and in fact, if there is a higher rate.)  Added note: this was radio…the later report in the newspaper was much saner in all respects.

Its always been a little fuzzy out there but it may be getting worse. Kind of natural really. Most people are not that good at processing information, and now that there is so much more of it, the odds of doing a good job of that are decreasing, and the sheer mass of infocrap hurled at us every day along with the proven lower efficiency associated with multitasking, renders even good processors more vulnerable to lapses of judgment.