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Science and Art of the Brain

Nobel laureate and professor of brain science Eric Kandel describes how our perception of art can help us define a better functional map of the mind.

From the New York Times:

This month, President Obama unveiled a breathtakingly ambitious initiative to map the human brain, the ultimate goal of which is to understand the workings of the human mind in biological terms.

Many of the insights that have brought us to this point arose from the merger over the past 50 years of cognitive psychology, the science of mind, and neuroscience, the science of the brain. The discipline that has emerged now seeks to understand the human mind as a set of functions carried out by the brain.

This new approach to the science of mind not only promises to offer a deeper understanding of what makes us who we are, but also opens dialogues with other areas of study — conversations that may help make science part of our common cultural experience.

Consider what we can learn about the mind by examining how we view figurative art. In a recently published book, I tried to explore this question by focusing on portraiture, because we are now beginning to understand how our brains respond to the facial expressions and bodily postures of others.

The portraiture that flourished in Vienna at the turn of the 20th century is a good place to start. Not only does this modernist school hold a prominent place in the history of art, it consists of just three major artists — Gustav Klimt, Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele — which makes it easier to study in depth.

As a group, these artists sought to depict the unconscious, instinctual strivings of the people in their portraits, but each painter developed a distinctive way of using facial expressions and hand and body gestures to communicate those mental processes.

Their efforts to get at the truth beneath the appearance of an individual both paralleled and were influenced by similar efforts at the time in the fields of biology and psychoanalysis. Thus the portraits of the modernists in the period known as “Vienna 1900” offer a great example of how artistic, psychological and scientific insights can enrich one another.

The idea that truth lies beneath the surface derives from Carl von Rokitansky, a gifted pathologist who was dean of the Vienna School of Medicine in the middle of the 19th century. Baron von Rokitansky compared what his clinician colleague Josef Skoda heard and saw at the bedsides of his patients with autopsy findings after their deaths. This systematic correlation of clinical and pathological findings taught them that only by going deep below the skin could they understand the nature of illness.

This same notion — that truth is hidden below the surface — was soon steeped in the thinking of Sigmund Freud, who trained at the Vienna School of Medicine in the Rokitansky era and who used psychoanalysis to delve beneath the conscious minds of his patients and reveal their inner feelings. That, too, is what the Austrian modernist painters did in their portraits.

Klimt’s drawings display a nuanced intuition of female sexuality and convey his understanding of sexuality’s link with aggression, picking up on things that even Freud missed. Kokoschka and Schiele grasped the idea that insight into another begins with understanding of oneself. In honest self-portraits with his lover Alma Mahler, Kokoschka captured himself as hopelessly anxious, certain that he would be rejected — which he was. Schiele, the youngest of the group, revealed his vulnerability more deeply, rendering himself, often nude and exposed, as subject to the existential crises of modern life.

Such real-world collisions of artistic, medical and biological modes of thought raise the question: How can art and science be brought together?

Alois Riegl, of the Vienna School of Art History in 1900, was the first to truly address this question. He understood that art is incomplete without the perceptual and emotional involvement of the viewer. Not only does the viewer collaborate with the artist in transforming a two-dimensional likeness on a canvas into a three-dimensional depiction of the world, the viewer interprets what he or she sees on the canvas in personal terms, thereby adding meaning to the picture. Riegl called this phenomenon the “beholder’s involvement” or the “beholder’s share.”

Art history was now aligned with psychology. Ernst Kris and Ernst Gombrich, two of Riegl’s disciples, argued that a work of art is inherently ambiguous and therefore that each person who sees it has a different interpretation. In essence, the beholder recapitulates in his or her own brain the artist’s creative steps.

This insight implied that the brain is a creativity machine, which obtains incomplete information from the outside world and completes it. We can see this with illusions and ambiguous figures that trick our brain into thinking that we see things that are not there. In this sense, a task of figurative painting is to convince the beholder that an illusion is true.

Some of this creative process is determined by the way the structure of our brain develops, which is why we all see the world in pretty much the same way. However, our brains also have differences that are determined in part by our individual experiences.

Read the entire article following the jump.

Art

Old Masters or Dirty Old Men?

A recent proposal to ban all pornography across Europe has raised some interesting questions. Not least of which is the issue of how to classify the numerous canvases featuring nudes — mostly women, of course — and sexual fantasies hanging prominently in most of Europe’s museums and galleries. Are Europe’s old masters, such as Titian, Botticelli, Rubens, Rousseau and Manet, pornographers?

From the Guardian:

A proposal to ban all pornography in Europe, recently unearthed by freedom of information campaigners in an EU report, raises an intriguing question. Would this only apply to photography and video, or do reformers also plan to rid Europe of all those lewd paintings by Titian and his contemporaries that joyously celebrate sex in the continent’s most civilised art galleries?

Europe’s great artists were making pornography long before the invention of the camera, let alone the internet. In my new book The Loves of the Artists, I argue that sexual gratification – of both the viewers of art, and artists themselves – was a fundamental drive of high European culture in the age of the old masters. Paintings were used as sexual stimuli, as visual lovers’ guides, as aids to fantasy. This was considered one of the most serious uses of art by no less a thinker than Leonardo da Vinci, who claimed images are better than words because pictures can directly arouse the senses. He was proud that he once painted a Madonna so sexy the owner asked for all its religious trappings to be removed, out of shame for the inappropriate lust it inspired. His painting of St John the Baptist is similarly ambiguous.

This was not a new attitude to art in the Renaissance. As the upcoming exhibition of ancient Pompeii at the British Museum will doubtless show, the ancient Romans also delighted in pornography. Some pornographic paintings now kept in the famous “Secret Museum” of ancient erotica in Naples came from Pompeii’s brothel’s – which makes their function very clear. In the Renaissance, which revered everything classical, ancient Roman sexual imagery was well known to collectors and artists. A notorious classical erotic statue owned by the plutocrat Agostino Chigi caused the 16th-century writer Pietro Aretino to remark, “why should the eyes be denied what delights them most?”

Aretino was a libertarian campaigner long before today’s ethical and political conflicts over pornography. He helped get the engraver Marcantonio Raimondi released from prison after the artist was jailed for publishing a series of erotic prints called The Positions – they depict various sexual positions – then wrote a set of obscene verses to accompany a new edition of what became a European bestseller. Aretino was a close friend of Titian, whose paintings share his licentious delight in sexuality.

Read the entire article following the jump.

Image: Venus of Urbino (Venere di Urbino), 1538 by Titian, Courtesy of Uffizi, Florence / Wikipedia.

Art

Video Game. But is it Art?

Only yesterday we posted a linguist’s claim that text-speak is an emerging language. You know, text-speak is that cryptic communication process that most teenagers engage in with their smartphones. Leaving aside the merits of including text-speak in the catalog of around 6,600 formal human languages, one thing is clear — text-speak is not Shakespearean English. So, don’t expect to see a novel written in it win the Nobel Prize for Literature, yet.

Strangely though, the same cannot be said for another recent phenomenon, the video game. Increasingly, some video games are being described in the same language that critics would normally reserve for a contemporary painting on canvas. Yes, welcome to the world of video game as art. If you have ever played the immersive game Myst, or its sequel Riven (the original games came on CDROM), you will see why many classify the beautifully designed and rendered aesthetics as art. MoMA (Museum of Modern Art) in New York thinks so too.

[div class=attrib]From the Guardian:[end-div]

New York’s Museum of Modern Art will be home to something more often associated with pasty teens and bar scenes when it opens an exhibit on video games on Friday.

Tetris, Pac-Man and the Sims are just a few of the classic games that will be housed inside a building that also displays works by Vincent Van Gogh, Claude Monet and Frida Kahlo. And though some may question whether video games are even art, the museum is incorporating the games into its Applied Design installation.

MoMA consulted scholars, digital experts, historians and critics to select games for the gallery based on their aesthetic quality – including the programming language used to create them. MoMA’s senior curator for architecture and design, Paola Antonelli, said the material used to create games is important in the same way the wood used to create a stool is.

With that as the focus, games are presented in their original formats, absent the consoles that often define them. Some will be playable with controllers, and more complex, long-running games like SimCity 2000 are presented as specially designed walkthroughs and demos.

MoMA’s curatorial team tailored controls especially for each of the playable games, including a customized joystick created for the Tetris game.

Some of the older games, which might have fragile or rare cartridges, will be displayed as “interactive emulation”, with a programmer translating the game code to something that will work on a newer computer system.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Myst, Cyan Inc. Courtesy of Cyan, Inc / Wikipedia.[end-div]

Art

A Peek inside Lichtenstein’s Head

Residents and visitors to London are fortunate — they are bombarded by the rich sights, sounds and smells of one of the world’s great cities. One such sight is Tate Modern, ex-power station, now iconic home to some really good art. In fact, they’re hosting what promises to be a great exhibit soon — a retrospective of Roy Lichtenstein from February 21 to May 27.

[div class=attrib]From the Telegraph:[end-div]

Black paintwork, white brickwork, in tree-lined Greenwich Village. We’re spitting distance from Bleecker, whose elongated vowels once made music for Simon and Garfunkel and Steely Dan. When the floodwaters of the nearby Hudson inched upward and east during Hurricane Sandy, they ceased their creep yards from the steps outside.

Inside are the wood floors and fireplace of the area’s typical brownstone, but the cosy effect ends when an alcove ‘bookcase’ turns revolving door, stairway leading downwards. It’s straight from the pages of Agatha Christie, even Indiana Jones.

This is one of two entries (the other far less thrilling) to the cavernous room beneath that was once Roy Lichtenstein’s studio. The house above was used as a bolthole for visiting friends and family, ensuring he could work undisturbed, day in, day out. His watch was rigorous: 10 to 6, with 90 minutes for lunch.

The building is now home to the Lichtenstein Foundation, where every reference to his work, even wrapping paper, is assiduously filed away alongside the artist’s sketchbooks, scrapbooks and working materials. The studio is set up as it was when he was alive. Charts by the sink show dots and lines in every size, colour and combination. The walls have wooden racks designed to tip forward, preventing paint drip. One of his vast murals still hangs there – an incongruous combination of Etruscan meets Henry Moore meets a slice of Swiss cheese.

Aside a scalpel-scored table worktable stands the paint-splattered stool at which the artist whilst drafting and redrafting his compositions. And this is the thing about Lichtenstein. His finished works look so effortless, so without their maker’s mark that we rarely think of the hours, methods and materials that went into their producing. He sought to erase all trace of the selective artist engaged in difficult work. He is as apt to slip through our pressing fingers, as one observer put it, as drops of liquid mercury.

Roy Fox Lichtenstein had a long, uncommonly successful career, even if he did spend most of it in his studio rather than out basking in its rewards. With a retrospective of his work – the first since his death from pneumonia in 1997 aged 73 – opening at the Tate this month, comes the chance to assess the painterly approach behind the Pop inspired sheen, and it isn’t so hands-off after all.

Lichtenstein, born and raised in 1930s Manhattan, began his creative career at a time when Abstract Expressionism reigned supreme, emotional work predicated on a belief that each work is impossible to repeat. Artists sought to impress upon their public a unique signature that would reveal their inner sensibility. Brushwork, the hand-drawn line – these were the lauded aim.

Now, exiting the woodwork, were artists like Claes Oldenburg and Andy Warhol, using banal subjects to skewer such bloated clichés. The Pop crew drew plugs, step-on trash cans, dollar bills and Don Draper’s fizzy saviour, Alka Seltzer. But while most still used a grainy, obviously hand-drawn hatching or line to convey realism, Lichtenstein went a step further.

“I’d always wanted to know the difference between a mark that was art and one that wasn’t” he said, “so l chose among the crudest types of illustration – product packaging, mail order catalogues.” It provided the type of drawing that was most opposite individual expression and its lack of nuance appealed greatly. “I don’t care what a cup of coffee looks like” he said. “I only care about how it’s drawn.”

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Ohhh…Alright… by Roy Lichtenstein, 1964. Courtesy of Roy Lichtenstein Foundation / Wikipedia.[end-div]

 

Art

Lego Expressionism: But is it Art?

Lego as we know it — think brightly colored, interlinking, metamorphic bricks – has been around for over 60 years. Even in this high-tech, electronic age it is still likely that most kids around the world have made a little house or a robot with Lego bricks. It satisfies our need to create and to build (and of course, to destroy). But is it art? Jonathan Jones has some ideas.

[div class=attrib]From the Guardian:[end-div]

Lego is the clay of the modern world, the stuff of creativity. You can shape it, unshape it, make worlds and smash them up to be replaced by new ideas. It’s a perpetual-motion machine of kids’ imaginations.

Today’s Lego is very different from the Lego I played with when I was eight. For adults like me who grew up with simple Lego bricks and no instructions, just a free-for-all, the kits that now dazzle in their bright impressive boxes take some adjusting to. A puritan might well be troubled that this year’s new Christmas Lego recreates the film The Hobbit in yet another addition to a popular culture repertoire that includes Marvel Superheroes Lego and the ever-popular Star Wars range.

The Danish toymaker is ruthless in its pursuit of mass entertainment. Harry Potter Lego was a major product – until the film series finished. This summer, it suddenly vanished from shops. I had to go to the Harry Potter Studios to get a Knight Bus.

Cool bus, though. Purple Lego! And it fits together in such a way that, when dropped or otherwise subjected to the rigours of play, the three floors of the bus neatly separate and can easily be reconnected. It is a kit, a toy, and a stimulus to story-telling.

Do not doubt the creative value of modern Lego. Making these kits isn’t a fetishistic, sterile enterprise – children don’t think like that. Rather, the ambition of the kits inspires children to aim high with their own crazy designs – the scenarios Lego provides stimulate inventive play. Children can tell stories with Lego, invest the fantastic mini-figures with names and characters, and build what they like after the models disintegrate. Above all, there is something innately humorous about Lego.

But is it art? It definitely teaches something about art. Like a three-dimensional sketchpad, Lego allows you to doodle in bright colours. It is “virtual”, but real and solid. It has practical limits and potentials that have to be respected, while teaching that anyone can create anything. You can be a representational Lego artist, meticulously following instructions and making accurate models, or an abstract one. It really is liberating stuff: shapeshifting, metamorphic. And now I am off to play with it.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article following the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of Nathan Sawaya, the Lego brick artist.[end-div]

Art

Black and White or Color

Please forget Instagram, Photoshop filters, redeye elimination, automatic camera shake reduction systems and high dynamic range apps. If you’re a true photographer or simply a lover of great photography the choice is much simpler: black and white or color.

A new photography exhibit in London pits these contrasting media alongside each other for you to decide. The great Henri Cartier-Bresson would have you believe that black and white images live in a class of their own, far and above the lowly form of color snaps. He was vociferous in his opinion — that for technical and aeasthetic reasons only black and white photography could be considered art.

So, curators of the exhibition — Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour, have juxtaposed 10 of Cartier-Bressons prints alongside the colorful works of 15 international contemporary photographers. The results show that “the decisive moment”, so integral to Cartier-Bresson’s memorable black and white images, can be adapted to great, if not equal effect, in color.

The exhibit can be seen at Somerset House, London and runs from 8 November 2012 to 27 January 2013.

[div class=attrib]From Somerset House:[end-div]

Positive View Foundation announces its inaugural exhibition Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour, to be held at Somerset House, 8 November 2012 – 27 January 2013. Curated by William A. Ewing, the exhibition will feature 10 Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs never before exhibited in the UK alongside over 75 works by 15 international contemporary photographers, including: Karl Baden (US), Carolyn Drake (US), Melanie Einzig (US), Andy Freeberg (US), Harry Gruyaert (Belgium), Ernst Haas (Austrian), Fred Herzog (Canadian), Saul Leiter (US), Helen Levitt (US), Jeff Mermelstein (US), Joel Meyerowitz (US), Trent Parke (Australian), Boris Savelev (Ukranian), Robert Walker (Canadian), and Alex Webb (US).

The extensive showcase will illustrate how photographers working in Europe and North America adopted and adapted the master’s ethos famously known as  ‘the decisive moment’ to their work in colour. Though they often departed from the concept in significant ways, something of that challenge remained: how to seize something that happens and capture it in the very moment that it takes place.

It is well-known that Cartier-Bresson was disparaging towards colour photography, which in the 1950s was in its early years of development, and his reasoning was based both on the technical and aesthetic limitations of the medium at the time.

Curator William E. Ewing has conceived the exhibition in terms of, as he puts it, ‘challenge and response’. “This exhibition will show how Henri Cartier-Bresson, in spite of his skeptical attitude regarding the artistic value of colour photography, nevertheless exerted a powerful influence over photographers who took up the new medium and who were determined to put a personal stamp on it. In effect, his criticisms of colour spurred on a new generation, determined to overcome the obstacles and prove him wrong. A Question of Colour simultaneously pays homage to a master who felt that black and white photography was the ideal medium, and could not be bettered, and to a group of photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries who chose the path of colour and made, and continue to make, great strides.”

Cartier-Bresson: A Question of Colour will feature a selection of photographers whose commitment to expression in colour was – or is – wholehearted and highly sophisticated, and which measured up to Cartier-Bresson’s essential requirement that content and form were in perfect balance. Some of these artists were Cartier-Bresson’s contemporaries, like Helen Levitt, or even, as with Ernst Haas, his friends; others, such as Fred Herzog in Vancouver, knew the artist’s seminal work across vast distances; others were junior colleagues, such as Harry Gruyaert, who found himself debating colour ferociously with the master; and others still, like Andy Freeberg or Carolyn Drake, never knew the man first-hand, but were deeply influenced by his example.

[div class=attrib]Find out more about the exhibit here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image Henri Cartier-Bresson. Courtesy of Wikipedia.[end-div]

Art, Technica

Scientifiction

Science fiction stories and illustrations from our past provide a wonderful opportunity for us to test the predictive and prescient capabilities of their creators. Some like Arthur C. Clarke, we are often reminded, foresaw the communications satellite and the space elevator. Others, such as science fiction great, Isaac Asimov, fared less well in predicting future technology; while he is considered to have coined the term “robotics”, he famously predicted future computers and robots as using punched cards.

Illustrations of our future from the past are even more fascinating. One of the leading proponents of the science fiction illustration genre, or scientifiction, as it was titled in the mid-1920s, was Frank R. Paul. Paul illustrated many of the now classic U.S. pulp science fiction magazines beginning in the 1920s with vivid visuals of aliens, spaceships, destroyed worlds and bizarre technologies. Though, one of his less apocalyptic, but perhaps prescient, works showed a web-footed alien smoking a cigarette through a lengthy proboscis.

Of Frank R. Paul, Ray Bradbury is quoted as saying, “Paul’s fantastic covers for Amazing Stories changed my life forever.”

See more of Paul’s classic illustrations after the jump.

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of 50Watts / Frank R. Paul.[end-div]

Art

Famous Artworks Inspired by Other Famous Works

The Garden of Earthly Delights. Hieronymous Bosch.

The Tilled Field. Joan Miró.

[div class=attrib]From Flavorwire:[end-div]

We tend to think of appropriation as a postmodern thing, with artists in all media drawing on, referring to, and mashing up the most influential works of the past. But we forget that this has been happening for centuries — millennia, actually — as Renaissance painters paid tribute to Greek art, ideas circulated within the 19th-century French art scene, and Dada hijacked the course of art history, mocking and inverting everything that came before it. After the jump, we round up some of the best, most famous, and all-around strangest artworks inspired by other artworks. Some are homages, some are parodies, some are responses, and a few seem to function as all three.

Joan Miró’s The Tilled Field, inspired by Hieronymous Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights

The resemblance between Joan Miró’s Surrealist painting and Bosch’s Early Netherlander triptych may not be as clear as the parallels between some of the other works on this list, but when you know what to look for, the resemblance is certainly there. Besides the colors, which do echo The Garden of Earthly Delights, Miró placed in his painting many objects that appear in Bosch’s — crudely sexualized figures, disembodied ears, flocks of birds. Although the styles are different, both have the same busy, chaotic energy.

[div class=attrib]More from this top 10 list after the jump.[end-div]

Art

First Artists: Neanderthals or Homo Sapiens?

The recent finding in a Spanish cave of a painted “red dot” dating from around 40,800 years ago suggests that our Neanderthal cousins may have beaten our species to claim the prize of “first artist”. Yet, evidence remains scant, and even if this were proven to be the case, we Homo sapiens can certainly lay claim to taking it beyond a “red dot” and making art our very own (and much else too.)

[div class=attrib]From the Guardian:[end-div]

Why do Neanderthals so fascinate Homo sapiens? And why are we so keen to exaggerate their virtues?

It is political correctness gone prehistoric. At every opportunity, people rush to attribute “human” virtues to this extinct human-like species. The latest generosity is to credit them with the first true art.

A recent redating of cave art in Spain has revealed the oldest paintings in Europe. A red dot in the cave El Castillo has now been dated at 40,800 years ago – considerably older than the cave art of Chauvet in France and contemporary with the arrival of the very first “modern humans”, Homo sapiens, in Europe.

This raises two possibilities, point out the researchers. Either the new humans from Africa started painting in caves the moment they entered Europe, or painting was already being done by the Neanderthals who were at that moment the most numerous relatives of modern humans on the European continent. One expert confesses to a “hunch” – which he acknowledges cannot be proven as things stand – that Neanderthals were painters.

That hunch goes against the weight of the existing evidence. Of course that hasn’t stopped it dominating all reports of the story: as far as media impressions go, the Neanderthals were now officially the first artists. Yet nothing of the sort has been proven, and plenty of evidence suggests that the traditional view is still far more likely.

In this view, the precocious development of art in ice age Europe marks out the first appearance of modern human consciousness, the intellectual birth of our species, the hand of Homo sapiens making its mark.

One crucial piece of evidence of where art came from is a piece of red ochre, engraved with abstract lines, that was discovered a decade ago in Blombos cave in South Africa. It is at least 70,000 years old and the oldest unmistakable artwork ever found. It is also a tool to make more art: ochre was great for making red marks on stone. It comes from Africa, where modern humans evolved, and reveals that when Homo sapiens made the move into Europe, our species could already draw on a long legacy of drawing and engraving. In fact, the latest finds at Blombos include a complete painting kit.

In other words, what is so surprising about the idea that Homo sapiens started to apply these skills immediately on discovering the caves of ice age Europe? It has to be more likely, on the face of it, than assuming these early Spanish images are by Neanderthals in the absence of any other solid evidence of paintings by them.

For, moving forward a few thousand years, the paintings of Chauvet and other French caves are certainly by us, Homo sapiens. And they remind us why this first art is so exciting and important: modern humans did not just do dots and handprints but magnificent, realistic portraits of animals. Their art is so superb in quality that it proves the existence of a higher mind, the capacity to create civilisation.

Is it possible that Neanderthals also used pigment to colour walls and also had the mental capacity to invent art? Of course it is, but the evidence at the moment still massively suggests art is a uniquely human achievement, unique, that is, to us – and fundamental to who we are.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: A hand stencil in El Castillo cave, Spain, has been dated to earlier than 37,300 years ago and a red dot to earlier than 40,600 years ago, making them the oldest cave paintings in Europe. Courtesy of New Scientist / Pedro Saura.[end-div]

Art

Burning Man as Counterculture? Think Again

Fascinating insight into the Burning Man festival courtesy of co-founder, Larry Harvey. It may be more like Wall Street than Haight-Ashbury.

[div class=attrib]From Washington Post:[end-div]

Go to Burning Man, and you’ll find everything from a thunderdome battle between a couple in tiger-striped bodypaint to a man dressed as a gigantic blueberry muffin on wheels. But underneath it all, says the festival’s co-founder, Larry Harvey, is “old-fashioned capitalism.”

There’s not a corporate logo in sight at the countercultural arts festival, and nothing is for sale but ice and coffee. But at its core, Harvey believes that Burning Man hews closely to the true spirit of a free-enterprise democracy: Ingenuity is celebrated, autonomy is affirmed, and self-reliance is expected. “If you’re talking about old-fashioned, Main Street Republicanism, we could be the poster child,” says Harvey, who hastens to add that the festival is non-ideological — and doesn’t anticipate being in GOP campaign ads anytime soon.

For more than two decades, the festival has funded itself entirely through donations and ticket sales — which now go up to $300 a pop — and it’s almost never gone in the red. And on the dry, barren plains of the Nevada desert where Burning Man materializes for a week each summer, you’re judged by what you do — your art, costumes and participation in a community that expects everyone to contribute in some form and frowns upon those who’ve come simply to gawk or mooch off others.

That’s part of the message that Harvey and his colleagues have brought to Washington this week, in his meetings with congressional staffers and the Interior Department to discuss the future of Burning Man. In fact, the festival is already a known quantity on the Hill: Harvey and his colleagues have been coming to Washington for years to explain the festival to policymakers, in least part because Burning Man takes place on public land that’s managed by the Interior Department.

In fact, Burning Man’s current challenge stems come because it’s so immensely popular, growing beyond 50,000 participants since it started some 20 years ago. “We’re no longer so taxed in explaining that it’s not a hippie debauch,” Harvey tells me over sodas in downtown Washington. “The word has leaked out so well that everyone now wants to come.” In fact, the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management that oversees the Black Rock Desert recently put the festival on probation for exceeding the land’s permitted crowd limits — a decision that organizers are now appealing.

Harvey now hopes to direct the enormous passion that Burning Man has stoked in its devotees over the years outside of Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, in the U.S. and overseas — the primary focus of this week’s visit to Washington. Last year, Burning Man transitioned from a limited liability corporation into a 501(c)3 nonprofit, which organizers believed was a better way to support their activities — not just for the festival, but for outside projects and collaborations in what festival-goers often refer to as “the default world.”

These days, Harvey — now in his mid-60s, dressed in a gray cowboy hat, silver western shirt, and aviator sunglasses — is just as likely to reference Richard Florida as the beatniks he once met on Haight Street. Most recently, he’s been talking with Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos, who shares his vision of revitalizing Las Vegas, one of the cities hardest hit by the recent housing bust. “Urban renewal? We’re qualified. We’ve built up and torn down cities for 20 years,” says Harvey. “Cities everywhere are calling for artists, and it’s a blank slate there, blocks and blocks. … We want to extend the civil experiment — to see if business and art can coincide and not maim one another.”

Harvey points out that there’s been long-standing ties between Burning Man artists and to some of the private sector’s most successful executives. Its arts foundation, which distributes grants for festival projects, has received backing from everyone from real-estate magnate Christopher Bently to Mark Pincus, head of online gaming giant Zynga, as the Wall Street Journal points out. “There are a fair number of billionaires” who come to the festival every year, says Harvey, adding that some of the art is privately funded as well. In this way, Burning Man is a microcosm of San Francisco itself, stripping the bohemian artists and the Silicon Valley entrepreneurs of their usual tribal markers on the blank slate of the Nevada desert. At Burning Man, “when someone asks, ‘what do you do?’ — they meant, what did you just do” that day, he explains.

It’s one of the many apparent contradictions at the core of the festival: Paired with the philosophy of “radical self-reliance” — one that demands that participants cart out all their own food, water and shelter into a dust-filled desert for a week — is the festival’s communitarian ethos. Burning Man celebrates a gift economy that inspires random acts of generosity, and volunteer “rangers” traverse the festival to aid those in trouble. The climactic burning of the festival’s iconic “man”— along with a wooden temple filled with notes and memorials — is a ritual of togetherness and belonging for many participants. At the same time, one of the festival’s mottos is, ‘You have a right to hurt yourself.’ It’s the opposite of a nanny state,” Harvey says, recounting the time a participant unsuccessfully tried to sue the festival: He had walked out onto the coals after the “man”was set on fire and, predictably, burned himself.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of Jailbreak.[end-div]

Art

Painting the Light: The Life and Death of Thomas Kinkade

You’ve probably seen a Kinkade painting somewhere — think cute cottage, meandering stream, misty clouds, soft focus and warm light.

According to Thomas Kinkade’s company one of his cozy, kitschy paintings (actually a photographic reproduction) could be found in one of every 20 homes in the United States. Kinkade died on April 6, 2012. With his passing, scholars of the art market are now analyzing what he left behind.

[div class=attrib]From the Guardian:[end-div]

In death, the man who at his peak claimed to be the world’s most successful living artist perhaps achieved the sort of art-world excess he craved.

On Tuesday, the coroner’s office in Santa Clara, California, announced that the death of Thomas Kinkade, the Painter of Light™, purveyor of kitsch prints to the masses, was caused by an accidental overdose of alcohol and Valium. For good measure, a legal scrap has emerged between Kinkade’s ex-wife (and trustee of his estate) and his girlfriend.

Who could have imagined that behind so many contented visions of peace, harmony and nauseating goodness lay just another story of deception, disappointment and depravity, fuelled by those ever-ready stooges, Valium and alcohol?

Kinkade was a self-made phenomenon, with his prints (according to his company) hanging in one in 20 American homes. At his height, in 2001, Kinkade generated $130m (£81m) in sales. Kinkade’s twee paintings of cod-traditional cottages, lighthouses, gardens, gazebos and gates sold by the million through a network of Thomas Kinkade galleries, owned by his company, and through a parallel franchise operation. At their peak (between 1995 and 2005) there were 350 Kinkade franchises across the US, with the bulk in his home state of California. You would see them in roadside malls in small towns, twinkly lights adorning the windows, and in bright shopping centres, sandwiched between skatewear outlets and nail bars.

But these weren’t just galleries. They were the Thomas Kinkade experience – minus the alcohol and Valium, of course. Clients would be ushered into a climate-controlled viewing room to maximise the Kinkadeness of the whole place, and their experience. Some galleries offered “master highlighters”, trained by someone not far from the master himself, to add a hand-crafted splash of paint to the desired print and so make a truly unique piece of art, as opposed to the framed photographic print that was the standard fare.

The artistic credo was expressed best in the 2008 movie Thomas Kinkade’s Christmas Cottage. Peter O’Toole, earning a crust playing Kinkade’s artistic mentor, urges the young painter to “Paint the light, Thomas! Paint the light!”.

Kinkade’s art also went beyond galleries through the “Thomas Kinkade lifestyle brand”. This wasn’t just the usual art gallery giftshop schlock: Kinkade sealed a tie-in with La-Z-Boy furniture (home of the big butt recliner) for a Kinkade-inspired range of furniture. But arguably his only great artwork was “The Village, a Thomas Kinkade Community”, unveiled in 2001. A 101-home development in Vallejo, outside San Francisco, operating under the slogan: “Calm, not chaos. Peace, not pressure,” the village offers four house designs, each named after one of Kinkade’s daughters. Plans for further housing developments, alas, fell foul of the housing crisis.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of Google search.[end-div]

Idea Soup

Bike+GPS=Map Art

Frank Jacobs over at Strange Maps has found another “out in leftfield” map. This cartographic invention is courtesy of an artist who “paints” using his GPS-enabled bicycle.

[div class=attrib]From Strange Maps:[end-div]

GPS technology is opening up exciting new hybrid forms of mapping and art. Or in this case: cycling, mapping and art. The maps on this page are the product of Michael Wallace, a Baltimore-based artist who uses his bike as a paintbrush, and the city as his canvas.

As Wallace traces shapes and forms across Baltimore’s street grid, the GPS technology that tracks this movements fixes the fluid pattern of his pedalstrokes onto a map. The results are what Wallace calls GPX images, or ‘virtual geoglyphs’ [1].

These massive images, created over by now three riding seasons, “continue to generate happiness, fitness and imagination through planning the physical activity of ‘digital spray-painting’ my ‘local canvas’ with the help of tracking satellites 12,500 miles above.”

Wallace’s portfolio by now is filled with dozens of GPX images, ranging from pictures of a toilet to the Titanic. They even include a map of the US – traced on the map of Baltimore. How’s that for self-reference? Or for Bawlmer [2] hubris?

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

Art

Religious Art: From Faith or For Money?

Over the centuries many notable artists have painted religious scenes initiated or influenced by a very deep religious conviction; some painted to give voice to their own spirituality, others to mirror the faith of their time and community. However, others simply painted for fame or fortune, or both, or to remain in good stead with their wealthy patrons and landlords.

This bring us to another thoughtful article from Jonathan Jones over at the Guardian.

[div class=attrib]From the Guardian:[end-div]

“To paint the things of Christ you must live with Christ,” said the 15th-century artist Fra Angelico. He knew what he was talking about – he was a Dominican monk of such exemplary virtue that in 1982 he was officially beatified by Pope John Paul II. He was also a truly great religious artist whose frescoes at San Marco in Florence have influenced modern artists such as Mark Rothko. But is all holy art that holy?

From the dark ages to the end of the 17th century, the vast majority of artistic commissions in Europe were religious. Around 1700 this somehow stopped, at least when it came to art anyone cares to look at now. The great artists of the 18th century, and since, worked for secular patrons and markets. But in all those centuries when Christianity defined art, its genres, its settings, its content, was every painter and sculptor totally sincerely faithful in every work of art? Or were some of them just doing what they had to do and finding pleasure in the craft?

This question relates to another. What is it like to live in a world where everyone is religious? It is often said it was impossible to even imagine atheism in the middle ages and the Renaissance. This is so different from modern times that people do not even try to imagine it. Modern Christians blithely imagine a connection when actually a universal church meant a mentality so different from modern “faith” that today’s believers are as remote from it as today’s non-believers. Among other things it meant that while some artists “lived with Christ” and made art that searched their souls, others enjoyed the colours, the drama, the rich effects of religious paintings without thinking too deeply about the meaning.

Here are two contrasting examples from the National Gallery. Zurbarán’s painting of St Francis in Meditation (1635-9) is a harrowing and profoundly spiritual work. The face of a kneeling friar is barely glimpsed in a darkness that speaks of inner searching, of the long night of the soul. This is a true Christian masterpiece. But compare it to Carlo Crivelli’s painting The Annunciation (1486) in the same museum. Crivelli’s picture is a feast for the eye. Potted plants, a peacock, elaborately decorated classical buildings – and is that a gherkin just added in at the front of the scene? – add up to a materialistic cornucopia of visual interest. What is the religious function of such detail? Art historians, who sometimes seem to be high on piety, will point to the allegorical meaning of everyday objects in Renaissance art. But that’s all nonsense. I am not saying the allegories do not exist – I am saying they do not matter much to the artist, his original audience or us. In reality, Crivelli is enjoying himself, enjoying the world, and he paints religious scenes because that’s what he got paid to paint.

By smothering the art of the past in a piety that in some cases may be woefully misplaced, its guardians do it a disservice. Is Crivelli a Christian artist? Not in any sense that is meaningful today. He loves the things of this life, not the next.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Annunciation with St Emidius, Crivelli Carlo, 1486. National Gallery, London. Courtesy of Wikipedia / National Gallery.[end-div]

Arts and Letters

Hitchcock

Alfred Hitchcock was a pioneer of modern cinema. His finely crafted movies introduced audiences to new levels of suspense, sexuality and violence. His work raised cinema to the level of great art.

This summer in London, the British Film Institute (BFI) is celebrating all things Hitchcockian by showing all 58 of his works, including newly restored prints of his early silent films, such as Blackmail.

[div class=attrib]From the Guardian:[end-div]

Alfred Hitchcock is to be celebrated like never before this summer, with a retrospective of all his surviving films and the premieres of his newly restored silent films – including Blackmail, which will be shown outside the British Museum.

The BFI on Tuesday announced details of its biggest ever project: celebrating the genius of a man who, it said, was as important to modern cinema as Picasso to modern art or Le Corbusier to modern architecture. Heather Stewart, the BFI’s creative director, said: “The idea of popular cinema somehow being capable of being great art at the same time as being entertaining is still a problem for some people. Shakespeare is on the national curriculum, Hitchcock is not.”

One of the highlights of the season will be the culmination of a three-year project to fully restore nine of the director’s silent films. It will involve The Pleasure Garden, Hitchcock’s first, being shown at Wilton’s Music Hall; The Ring at Hackney Empire, and Blackmail outside the British Museum, where the film’s climactic chase scene was filmed in 1929, both inside the building and on the roof.

Stewart said the restorations were spectacular and overdue. “We would find it very strange if we could not see Shakespeare’s early plays performed, or read Dickens’s early novels. But we’ve been quite satisfied as a nation that Hitchcock’s early films have not been seen in good quality prints on the big screen, even though – like Shakespearean and Dickensian – Hitchcockian has entered our language.”

The films, with new scores by composers including Nitin Sawhney, Daniel Patrick Cohen and Soweto Kinch, will be shown the London 2012 Festival, the finale of the Cultural Olympiad.

Between August and October the BFI will show all 58 surviving Hitchcock films including his many films made in the UK – The 39 Steps, for example, and The Lady Vanishes – and those from his Hollywood years, from Rebecca in 1940 to Vertigo in 1957, The Birds in 1963 and his penultimate film, Frenzy, in 1972.

[div class=attrib]See more stills here, and read the entire article after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Robert Donat in The 39 Steps (1935), often hailed as the best of four film versions of John Buchan’s novel. Courtesy of BFI / Guardian.[end-div]

Art

Dissecting Artists

Jonathan Jones dissects artists’ fascination over the ages with anatomy and pickled organs in glass jars.

[div class=attrib]From the Guardian:[end-div]

From Hirst to Da Vinci, a shared obsession with dissection and the human body seems to connect exhibitions opening this spring.

Is it something to do with the Olympics? Athletics is physical, the logic might go, so let’s think about bodies… Anyway, a shared anatomical obsession connects exhibitions that open this week, and later in the spring. Damien Hirst’s debt to anatomy does not need labouring. But just as his specimens are unveiled at Tate Modern, everyone else seems to be opening their own cabinets of curiosities. At London’s Natural History Museum, dissected animals are going on view in an exhibition that brings the morbid spectacle – which in my childhood was simultaneously the horror and fascination of this museum – back into its largely flesh-free modern galleries.

If that were not enough, the Wellcome Collection invites you to take a good look at some brains in jars.

It is no surprise that art and science keep coming together on the anatomist’s table this spring, for anatomy has a venerable and intimate connection with the efforts of artists to depict life and death. In his series of popular prints The Four Stages of Cruelty, William Hogarth sees the public dissection of a murderer by cold-blooded anatomists as the ultimate cruelty. But many artists have been happy to watch or even wield a knife at such events.

In the 16th century, the first published modern study of the human body, by Vesalius, was illustrated by a pupil of Titian. In the 18th century, the British animal artist George Stubbs undertook his own dissections of a horse, and published the results. He is one of the greatest ever portrayers of equine majesty, and his study of the skeleton and muscles of the horse helped him to achieve this.

Clinical knowledge, to help them portray humans and animals correctly, is one reason artists have been drawn to anatomy. Another attraction is more metaphysical: to look inside a human body is to get an eerie sense of who we are, to probe the mystery of being. Rembrandt’s painting The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp is not a scientific study but a poetic reverie on the fragility and wonder of life – glimpsed in a study of death. Does Hirst make it as an artist in this tradition?

[div class=attrib]Read more after the jump.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image courtesy of Google search.[end-div]

Art

Spectres in the Urban Jungle

Following on from our recent article on contemporary artist Rob Mulholland, whose mirrored sculptures wander in a woodland in Scotland, comes Chinese artist Liu Bolin, with his series of “invisible” self-portraits.

Bolin paints himself into the background, and then disappears. Following many hours of meticulous preparation Bolin merges with his surroundings in a performance that makes U.S. military camouflage systems look almost amateurish.

Liu Bolin’s 4th solo exhibit is currently showing at Eli Klein gallery

Art

Spectres in the Forest

The best art is simple and evocative.

Like eerie imagined alien life forms mirrored sculptures meander through a woodland in Scotland. The life-size camouflaged figures are on display at the David Marshall Lodge near Aberfoyle, Scotland.

Contemporary artist Rob Mulholland designed the series of six mirrored sculptures, named Vestige, which are shaped from silhouettes of people he knows.

In Rob Mulholland’s own words:

The essence of who we are as individuals in relationship to others and our given environment forms a strong aspect of my artistic practise.

In Vestige I wanted to explore this relationship further by creating a group, a community within the protective elements of the woods, reflecting  the past inhabitants of the space.

…

The six male and female figures not only absorb their environment, they create a notion of non – space, a link with the past that forces us both as individuals and as a society to consider our relationship with our natural environment .

[div class=attrib]See more of Rob Mulholland’s art after the jump.[end-div]

Art

Everyone’s an Artist, Designer, Critic. But Curator?

Digital cameras and smartphones have enabled their users to become photographers. Affordable composition and editing tools have made us all designers and editors. Social media have enabled, encouraged and sometimes rewarded us for posting content, reviews and opinions for everything under the sun. So, now we are all critics. So, now are we all curators as well?

[div class=attrib]From dis:[end-div]

As far as word trends go, the word curate still exists in a somewhat rarified air. One can use curate knowingly with tongue in cheek: “Let’s curate our spice rack!” Or, more commonly and less nerdily, in the service of specialized artisanal commerce: “curating food stands” of the Brooklyn Flea swap meet, or a site that lets women curate their own clothing store from featured brands, earning 10% on any sales from their page. Curate used pejoratively indicates The Man- “If The Huffington Post wants to curate Twitter…” [uh, users will be upset]. And then there is that other definition specific to the practice of art curating. In the past ten years, as curate has exploded in popular culture and as a consumer buzz-word, art curators have felt residual effects. Those who value curating as an actual practice are generally loathe to see it harnessed by commercial culture, and conversely, feel sheepish about some deep-set pretensions this move has brought front and center. Simultaneously, curate has become a lightning-rod in the art world, inspiring countless journal articles and colloquia in which academics and professionals discuss issues around curating with a certain amount of anxiety.

Everyone’s a critic but who’s a curator?
In current usage, curating as discipline, which involves assembling and arranging artworks, has been usurped by curating as a nebulous expression of taste, presumed to be inherent rather than learned. This presumption is of course steeped in its own mire of regionalism, class bias and aspirations towards whomever’s privileged lifestyle is currently on-trend or in power. Suffice it to say that taste is problematic. But that curating swung so easily towards taste, indicates that it wasn’t a very hard association to make.

To some extent taste has been wedded to curating since the latter’s inception. A close forebear of the modern curated exhibition was the Renaissance cabinet of curiosities. The practice of selecting finely crafted objects for display first appeared in the 15th century and extended for several centuries after. A gentleman’s cabinet of curiosities showcased treasures bought or collected during travel, and ranged culturally and from collector to collector according to his interests, from mythical?/biblical? relics to artworks to ancient and exotic artifacts. As a practice, this sort of acquisition existed separately from the tradition of patronage of a particular artist. (For a vivid and intricately rendered description of the motivations and mindset of the 18th century collector, which gives way after half the book to a tour-de-force historical novel and then finally, to a political manifesto by a thinly veiled stand-in for the author, see Susan Sontag’s weird and special novel The Volcano Lover.) In Europe and later the United States, these collections of curiosities would give rise to the culture of the museum. In an 1858 New York Times article, the sculptor Bartholomew was described as having held the position of Curator for the Wadsworth Gallery in Hartford, a post he soon abandoned to render marble busts. The Wadsworth, incidentally, was the first public art museum to emerge in the United States, and would anticipate the museum boom of the 20th century.

[div class=attrib]Read the entire article here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: Dean&Deluca. Courtesy of dis.[end-div]

Art, BigBang

Can Anyone Say “Neuroaesthetics”

As in all other branches of science, there seem to be fascinating new theories, research and discoveries in neuroscience on a daily, if not hourly, basis. With this in mind, brain and cognitive researchers have recently turned their attentions to the science of art, or more specifically to addressing the question “how does the human brain appreciate art?” Yes, welcome to the world of “neuroaesthetics”.

[div class=attrib]From Scientific American:[end-div]

The notion of “the aesthetic” is a concept from the philosophy of art of the 18th century according to which the perception of beauty occurs by means of a special process distinct from the appraisal of ordinary objects. Hence, our appreciation of a sublime painting is presumed to be cognitively distinct from our appreciation of, say, an apple. The field of “neuroaesthetics” has adopted this distinction between art and non-art objects by seeking to identify brain areas that specifically mediate the aesthetic appreciation of artworks.

However, studies from neuroscience and evolutionary biology challenge this separation of art from non-art. Human neuroimaging studies have convincingly shown that the brain areas involved in aesthetic responses to artworks overlap with those that mediate the appraisal of objects of evolutionary importance, such as the desirability of foods or the attractiveness of potential mates. Hence, it is unlikely that there are brain systems specific to the appreciation of artworks; instead there are general aesthetic systems that determine how appealing an object is, be that a piece of cake or a piece of music.

We set out to understand which parts of the brain are involved in aesthetic appraisal. We gathered 93 neuroimaging studies of vision, hearing, taste and smell, and used statistical analyses to determine which brain areas were most consistently activated across these 93 studies. We focused on studies of positive aesthetic responses, and left out the sense of touch, because there were not enough studies to arrive at reliable conclusions.

The results showed that the most important part of the brain for aesthetic appraisal was the anterior insula, a part of the brain that sits within one of the deep folds of the cerebral cortex. This was a surprise. The anterior insula is typically associated with emotions of negative quality, such as disgust and pain, making it an unusual candidate for being the brain’s “aesthetic center.” Why would a part of the brain known to be important for the processing of pain and disgust turn out to the most important area for the appreciation of art?

[div class=attrib]Read entire article here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Image: The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli. Courtesy of Wikipedia.[end-div]

Art

Art Criticism at its Best

[div class=attrib]From Jonathan Jones over at the Guardian:[end-div]

Works of art are not objects. They are … Oh lord, what are they? Take, for convenience, a painting. It is a physical object, obviously, in that it consists of a wooden panel or a stretched canvas covered in daubs of colour. Depending on the light you may be more or less aware of cracks, brush marks, different layers of paint. Turn it around and it is even more obviously a physical object. But as such it is not art. Only when it is experienced as art can it be called art, and the intensity and value of that experience varies according to the way it is made and the way it is seen, that is, the receptiveness of the beholder to that particular work of art.

And this is why critics are the only real art writers. We are the only ones who acknowledge, as a basic principle, that art is an unstable category – it lives or dies according to rules that cannot ever be systematised. If you treat art in a pseudo-scientific way, as some kinds of art history do, you miss everything that makes it matter. Only on the hoof can it be caught, or rather followed on its elusive meanderings in and out of meaning, significance, and beauty.

Equally, an uncritical, purely literary approach to art also risks missing the whole point about it. You have to be critical, not just belle-lettriste, to get to the pulse of art. To respond to a work is to compare it with other works, and that comparison only has meaning if you judge their relative merits.

No such judgment is final. No critic is right, necessarily. It’s just that criticism offers a more honest and realistic understanding of the deep strangeness of our encounters with these mysterious human creations called works of art.

That is why the really great art historians were critics, who never fought shy of judgment. Kenneth Clark and EH Gombrich were extremely opinionated about what is and is not good art. Were they right or wrong? That is irrelevant. The response of one passionate and critical writer is worth a hundred, or a thousand, uncritical surveys that, by refusing to come off the fence, never get anywhere near the life of art.

[div class=attrib]Read more of this article here.[end-div]

[div class=attrib]Photograph of John Ruskin, circa 1870. Image courtesy of W. & D. Downey / Wikipedia.[end-div]