Only one school of contemporary art has retrieved an idea of geometrical harmony, reminiscent of the aesthetics of proportion, and that is abstract art. By rebelling against both subjection to nature and to everyday life, abstract art has offered us pure forms, from the geometries of Mondrian to the large monochromatic canvases of Klein, Rothko…
Armed men stormed into an art museum Sunday, threatened staff at gunpoint and stole Edvard Munch’s famous paintings “The Scream” and “Madonna” before the eyes of stunned museum-goers. The thieves yanked the paintings off the walls of Oslo’s Munch museum and loaded them into a waiting car outside, said a witness, French radio producer Francois…
“Art often gets taken down when the school is painted and they don’t get put up again. So many valuable and important works were forgotten in boiler rooms, locked closets, bicycle rooms,” Bernhardt-Hidvegi said. […] “We went through every building, every classroom, every basement, every boiler room, every closet, and under every stage” in Philadelphia’s…
ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies is a web journal dedicated to furthering comics scholarship in a variety of disciplines and theoretical perspectives. —ImageText 1:1 (University of Florida) Via join-the-dots. Bobby, take note!
Be careful what kind of art you make. The Feds may come a knockin’? —Michael Mateas —Feds can’t tell art from terrorism (Grand Text Auto) I’d heard about this story in passing, but now that I see how few degrees of separation I am away from the artists in question, I see the situation in a…
Video-game characters in a comic strip were not unheard of, but the remarkable thing about Anez’s comic was that rather than using drawings of the characters, he used the actual video-game character art — “sprites” in programming jargon — along with some simple backgrounds and word balloons. The effect re-created the feel of the game…
In Dragon’s Looking Glass world, inanimate objects speak in tongues; cups, saucers, hammers, and styrofoam are endowed with the gift of speech; and the babble of a brook is literal, not metaphorical. It’s personification (and heteroglossia) taken to an extreme. It strikes me that this peculiar propensity for hearing the cacophony of voices in anything…
Effie is an old jade of 50 summers, Jessie a frisky filly of 40, and Addie, the flower of the family, a capering monstrosity of 35. Their long, skinny arms, equipped with talons at the extremities, swung mechanically, and soon were waved frantically at the suffering spectators. The mouths of their rancid features opened like…
Instead of simply cruising the distant reaches of other worlds in search of alien targets, Red Vs. Blue zeroes in on the small gangs of soldiers and gets into their heads. “This is what happens when the game’s off, basically,” said Mike `Burnie’ Burns, 31, one of the Red Vs. Blue‘s creators. “They’re chatting away,…
—After some discussion all the outstanding issues in game studies had been settled. (Barry Atkins | Yahoo! Photos) A great collection of cartoons… I do wish the captions were searchable. This one about a deep space anomaly is also good. Atkins is the video game scholar whose talk at the Princeton video game conference, amplified by…
The hand is the great symbol of man the tool-maker as well as man the writer. But in our super-mechanized era, many young people have lost a sense of the tangible and of the power of the hand. A flick of the finger changes TV channels, surfs the web, or alters and deletes text files.…
—Graphical User Interface Gallery Guidebook (Politechnika Szczecinska, Akademickie Centrum Informatyiki) Here’s part of a screen capture, showing the development of the “file manager” icon in Windows, from the original release to today. (On the site, clicking the icon takes you to another page that has screen captures of the interfaces for the various applications.) The development…
44% of Internet users have created content for the online world through building or posting to Web sites, creating blogs, and sharing files In a national phone survey between March 12 and May 20, 2003, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more than 53 million American adults have used the Internet to…
[O]bjective achievements in the arts are demonstrable?and if they can be historically established for the arts, then they are even more clearly identifiable for the sciences. These two spheres of human endeavor represent two kinds of potential objectivity: there is as little chance of the human race giving up Homer or the Beethoven symphonies as…
The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings…
And if they were in the habit of conferring honours among themselves on those who were quickest to observe the passing shadows and to remark which of them went before, and which followed after, and which were together; and who were therefore best able to draw conclusions as to the future, do you think that…
Light playing on water drops, dust or ice crystals in the atmosphere produces a host of visual spectacles – rainbows, halos, glories, coronas and many more. Some can be seen almost every day or so, some are once in a lifetime sights. Find out where to see them and how they form. Then seek and…
Today, 30 years into feminism, we have models who look not just weak and unsophisticated, but also dumb and victimized. Academic feminists haven’t complained because the models are supposedly playing a subversive role and subversion is inherently politically correct. Moreover, many of the young photographers are female. But now we?ve moved into ?fashion vérité? and…
Suddenly the cold white marble warmed up and flushed a deep golden brown, and the cold white pupils were suddenly swept by a wash of black. They turned to stare at the sculptor who was still kneeling in supplication. When he felt a warm hand upon his shoulder, he jumped back with alarm, but when…
Pygmalion is a legendary sculptor (whose role as King of Cyprus seems unimportant to most versions of the story) known for carving Galatea, a statue of a woman so beautiful he is no longer interested in real women. Moved by his devotion, the goddess of beauty Aphrodite brings the statue to life, and the artist…