S. Weasel goes to an art show

A Norman Rockwell exhibition, to be exact. Turns out it's his first in England. Her review is here. Short version: "Superb."

Some discussion of the shortcomings of critics is included. Special credit to Uncle Badger, in comments. I find that if I am acquainted with the work of a critic, I can figure out whether he or she is likely to like a work that I am likely to like. But it's too much trouble to become acquainted with the work of every critic. And most art criticism, especially, is pretentious hooey.

"The Gravestone Carver"

John Benson, stonecarver, calligrapher, sculptor, singer, fiddler, friend, narrates a short video about himself and his work.

The stone-carving shop in the video is the John Stevens Shop in Newport, Rhode Island.

John will be showing some of his work at Imago Gallery in Warren, Rhode Island, starting today, August 27.

Update, Sept 29: John's son, Nick Benson, who has run the John Stevens Shop since John retired a decade or so ago, has been named a MacArthur Fellow. He speaks about it in this video.

Buried treasure!

"Archaeologists yesterday unveiled the largest and most valuable hoard of Saxon gold in history."

The discovery took place on July 5. I haven't heard about it till now, but I'll link it anyway. Why is this back in the news? Some artifacts will be going on exhibit at the Birmingham Museum, starting tomorrow.

A couple of links that have pictures:

Pensioner strikes ancient gold.

Largest hoard of Saxon gold unearthed.

Oh, wait, look: there's a website! The Staffordshire Hoard.

Also, Flickr.

design classics only

Here. Elegance, occasional weirdness; things I'd seen before, things I hadn't. Cars, computers, telephones, china. Everything manufactured is designed.

Found this as a result of looking at this collection of East German artifacts, via Althouse.

At the art show

But is it art? If the committee says so.

Banksy's pet shop

British artist Banksy has opened up a pet shop in New York City. It's called the Greenwich Village Pet Shop and Charcoal Grill. Of course there's a website. A little coverage from the BBC. And a blog post.

A timeless work of art

Received in email, the following:

Carey Orr in the Chicago Tribune, 1934. Click to see it bigger.

Everything old is new again, right down to the "pinkies from Columbia and Harvard." There is a little about the cast of characters here. The fellow down in front there, writing up the plan, looks like Trotsky.

The clock-work heart

See it here.

Jessica Palmer says, "What does it signify? Does it represent the gradual replacement of the natural world around us with technology, to the point where our own bodies become artificial? Is it critiquing the reductionist tendencies of neurobiologists who believe our deepest emotions are complex but purely chemical reactions? Is it a steampunk Valentine?"

An enigmatic image. Meaning? You, you human beings, you make the meaning. You create the meaning. So be careful, be mindful, of what you are creating.

***

Abrupt shift in tone:

19th-century pacemaker, that's my guess. Maybe the thing under the floor that so upset [the character written by] Edgar Allan Poe.

Harry Reid -- he'll stick it to ya

This could go viral.

Image created by Chip Ahoy, and posted to Althouse on March 27, 2009.

Already picked up by Power Line. How many more, how soon?

The image is so powerful, all by itself, that the context — Reid accusing Chief Justice Roberts of lying about, uh, what, exactly was that? is irrelevant.

For the benefit of the search engines: Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, American Gothic, Grant Wood, fork, pitchfork.

Alternate title: Reid and Pelosi to America: "Get Forked!"

Update: Obama has started talking about pitchforks, leading to another version of the image. More to come before it's done.

Stir over artwork in Brussels

From Radio Praha:

Shock, anger, laughter at David Černý “art hoax” in Brussels

David Černý has been called the enfant terrible of the Czech art world, and so when the government commissioned him to oversee an installation for the EU Presidency, several eyebrows were raised. Earlier this week a brochure containing sketches of the piece was distributed by the Czech EU Presidency, who initially praised the artwork, saying the best way to destroy Europe's prejudices was to laugh at them. That was before they saw the finished result, which went on display on Monday.
The giant sculpture, called Entropa, shows the EU's 27 members as larger-than-life plastic parts of the sort used in modelling kits. Each represents a country according to the crudest national stereotypes. Bulgaria is depicted as a Turkish squat-toilet, Germany is shown as a network of motorways which faintly resembles a swastika, while Denmark appears - at a distance at least - to be a rendition of the Prophet Mohammed caricature in Lego.

Three (3!) stories and a slideshow at the Grauniad: Why the EU artwork is not what it seems, David Cerny's EU artwork might be a hoax, but it is still art, and EU artwork shines new light on member countries.

Duet for paint pot and politics

At American Digest.

Van der Leun establishes the theme, Sippican takes the cadenza.

"Tools for Fools:" ought to be a series.

States of consciousness

Have you ever wondered: What Does Your Drink Say About You? If I ever hear my drink talking about me, I'm going to obliterate it so fast… The link in this article to "Ten Drinks Men Should Never Order" doesn't work, go here instead. The link to "Ten Things Your Bartender Won't Tell You" is still good. And a commenter there links to Top Ten Myths About Bartenders, which includes

Myth 3: You can out-drink the bartender.

A more wrong statement has never been uttered; you can't, so don't even try. But, if you're buying, I'll certainly entertain the challenge. I don't care how much you think you can drink—any bartender anytime, anywhere can put you under the table, period.

Words to remember.

But then, some bartenders may take a different approach:

Strict Wildness

Music so poignant it wakes the dead,
We passion poets eke it from wine, not bread;
From wonder, not logic; heart, not head,—
But need clear heads to mix your heady brew.
We kitsch it if we swig it too.
Inspired insanity won't do.
Nor thin-lipped sane respectability.
Rigor lone is rigor mortis.
Rigor-plus-wild is the right-bank tortoise
That beats the chic hare of Rive Gaucherie.
Are poems magic? Sure. Till magic
Believes itself. Then it's bunk.
Art, being bartender, is never drunk.

— Peter Viereck

Before I Google'd up that poem, I had remembered that last line as "Art, like the bartender, is never drunk." Now I suppose I'll be the only source for that quote on the whole darn Interweb. Is that actually a different line, from another work? Anyone who can set me straight on this, please do.

All this brings to mind the ancient Persian custom of considering decisions in different states of consciousness:

It is also their general practice to deliberate upon affairs of weight when they are drunk; and then on the morrow, when they are sober, the decision to which they came the night before is put before them by the master of the house in which it was made; and if it is then approved of, they act on it; if not, they set it aside. Sometimes, however, they are sober at their first deliberation, but in this case they always reconsider the matter under the influence of wine.

If Iranians would still do this today, they might have a more sensible take on the world. Do MADD and their prohibitionist fellow-travelers ever notice how toxic becomes the worldview of whole societies where drink is prohibited? I suspect not.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden recently linked to a description of Narcissistic Personality Disorder. She was intending to say that Internet trolls display this syndrome, and I'm sure that many of them do. But as I look through the document, I see Arafat and Ahmadinejad in every paragraph. I wonder if an entire culture can suffer from a personality disorder.

=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=

Update, Nov. 2009: Aha! It was Fritz Leiber who misquoted the Viereck line, in The Pale Brown Thing, which appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction in January


and February of 1977. That's where I would have read it. The longer, full version of the novel was later published as Our Lady of Darkness. Cover image swiped from SciFi Buys, an amazing (!) source of vintage magazines, to which I shall be returning, now that I've found it.

Gleanings

Beginning with the gruesome, moving on to the funny.

This seems to be a custody dispute. From Saudi Arabia: Toddler beheaded in supermarket. Arab News: Man Butchers 15-Month-Old Nephew in Jeddah Supermarket. Follow-up from Saudi Gazette: Dad Denies He was there at Son’s Beheading. (via)

Terri Irwin and Australia Zoo are in trouble with the tax authorities in Australia.

I knew I had seen FDR with a halo, or at least a nimbus, in old movie shorts. Lileks has found one of these, in which Jimmy Durante sings "Give a Man a Job." The post includes some commentary on the NRA (not the National Rifle Association, the other one.) (via)

If you have a copy of Love and Consequences by Margaret B. Jones, hang on to it. It's going to be a rare book. (via)

New supersonic business jet on the way. Shiny! (via)

Unusual instruments: I suppose this is a form of glass harmonica, but what a form! Michel Lauzière plays Mozart on wine bottles, on rollerblades. (via)

A new typographical term: keming. I have been having trouble with modem and modern for years. Though one can usually tell by context, with that pair. (via)

Photoshopped comics, not a new idea but very well done indeed: Rampant plagiarism. (via)

Continuing the discussion from comments at BitMaelstrom on smart TV shows, Jennifer Ouellette, of Cocktail Party Physics, mentions a bit of genuine erudition on, not "Buffy," but "Angel." Close enough. Also: the music of the spheres. And from the same post at Flares into Darkness, some photographs whose intensity makes them dreamlike: 20 beautiful HDR pictures. (HDR = high dynamic range.) There's a lot of griping in the comments about how unreal they look; I would have thought that was the point. It would be easy to slip into Thomas Kinkade or Velvet Elvis land with this effect, but it's just another tool in the toolbox. Here's a Flickr group for this technique. Also on photos with dreamlike intensity, take a look at this. The reds on left and right seem to *pop*!

Speaking of photos, the Library of Congress has uploaded a large collection of images to Flickr. Two sets so far, 1930s-40s in Color, and News in the 1910s. From the LoC blog: My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven.

Gruesome, or funny? More on the funny side, I think: LOLTHULU: Cthulhu Fhtagn Cheezburger.

How did the Amazon reviews for Tuscan Whole Milk, one-gallon size, become a repository of gloriously absurd short fiction, and some poetry even? I have no idea. But I laughed and laughed. Look at the customer images too. (via)

Is music encoded in da Vinci's Last Supper?

From CNN:

Italian musician uncovers hidden music in Da Vinci's 'Last Supper'

ROME, Italy (AP) -- It's a new Da Vinci code, but this time it could be for real.

A laptop screen shows musical notes encoded in Leonardo Da Vinci's "Last Supper."

An Italian musician and computer technician claims to have uncovered musical notes encoded in Leonardo Da Vinci's "Last Supper," raising the possibility that the Renaissance genius might have left behind a somber composition to accompany the scene depicted in the 15th-century wall painting.

"It sounds like a requiem," Giovanni Maria Pala said. "It's like a soundtrack that emphasizes the passion of Jesus."

Painted from 1494 to 1498 in Milan's Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, the "Last Supper" vividly depicts a key moment in the Gospel narrative: Jesus' last meal with the 12 Apostles before his arrest and crucifixion, and the shock of Christ's followers as they learn that one of them is about to betray him.

Pala, a 45-year-old musician who lives near the southern Italian city of Lecce, began studying Leonardo's painting in 2003, after hearing on a news program that researchers believed the artist and inventor had hidden a musical composition in the work.

"Afterward, I didn't hear anything more about it," he said in an interview with The Associated Press. "As a musician, I wanted to dig deeper."

In a book released Friday in Italy, Pala explains how he took elements of the painting that have symbolic value in Christian theology and interpreted them as musical clues.

Pala first saw that by drawing the five lines of a musical staff across the painting, the loaves of bread on the table as well as the hands of Jesus and the Apostles could each represent a musical note.

This fit the relation in Christian symbolism between the bread, representing the body of Christ, and the hands, which are used to bless the food, he said. But the notes made no sense musically until Pala realized that the score had to be read from right to left, following Leonardo's particular writing style.

In his book -- "La Musica Celata" ("The Hidden Music") -- Pala also describes how he found what he says are other clues in the painting that reveal the slow rhythm of the composition and the duration of each note.

The result is a 40-second "hymn to God" that Pala said sounds best on a pipe organ, the instrument most commonly used in Leonardo's time for spiritual music. A short segment taken from a CD of the piece contained a Bach-like passage played on the organ. The tempo was almost painfully slow but musical.

You'd have to play it slow, to make it last 40 seconds. I suspect we have a case of the Law of Fives here, but maybe I've just seen too many conspiracy theories.

From Glenn Reynolds.

Did you ever see a dune ...

… walking?

Clear vision and chain reactions, and a sip of wine

From P.J. Doland, a NY Times Magazine article on highway signage and how a typeface evolves; and a pleasant timewaster, Boomshine. Also: how having more advice makes it worse, not better: How to Ruin a Web Design. Aaand furthermore, something significant about wine, and the making thereof: Two Buck Chuck takes a bite out of Napa.

Amazing photos from Iceland

TigerHawk links to an amazing set of photos of the Icelandic coast, by photographer Örvar Atli Þorgeirsson. Some of these are processed a bit. So? It's art. The original set is at Pbase. For laughs, some comments from the German site, Google-translated into something similar to English.