I am too a special snowflake
One of the art bloggers I read is having a bit of a hissy about negative criticism from commenters (not going to link — blog feuds are the lowest form of traffic whoring). Made me think for the umpty-umpth time about how big the internet is. And how, on the one hand, it allows any old Joe Schmoe to show his wares to the world. On the other, it allows any old Joe Schmoe to find your stuff and inform you that it sux dix.
Even harder to take, though — it puts you in direct competition with, like, the whole world. If you’re a one in a million talent, there are still thousands of others in your league. I don’t care how good you are — If you don’t find trawling the internet humbling, you don’t go to enough places.
Long ago on the header of Christopher Taylor’s blog, he said there were 90 million blogs on the ‘net. I don’t know where he got that number, but I suspect it got away from him pretty quick (like McDonald’s — remember when the signs bragged about the actual number of millions of burgers sold? Eventually, they gave up and put “metric asswad burgers sold”). That was a pretty daunting competition then, whatever it is now.
I got curious about the current number of connected world citizens, but I’m not good at math (I think “umpty-umpth” and “metric asswad” are actual mathematical concepts). So check me here. Wikipedia says the world population is 7.1 billion of which 61% are not using the internet. So, that means 39% are using the internet, and 39% of 7.1 billion is…2.77 billions, yes? Which looks like 2,770,000,000 writ out with all them zeroes, yes? And if you’re a picture blog, you’re pretty much accessible to all of them, regardless of language.
I’m thinking it’s going to be pretty easy to find people who don’t like your stuff.
March 12, 2014 — 11:45 pm
Comments: 20
I don’t even…
I was going for “laughing weasel.” Man, I suck at cute…
January 24, 2014 — 12:04 am
Comments: 19
birds and artards
So, ten white Gibson Les Paul electric guitars, four white Thunderbird basses, 70 zebra finches. It’s art. Or, if you’re called something gay like Céleste Boursier-Mougenot, it’s music.
If you’re anywhere near Salem, MA, you can go see it at the Peabody Essex Museum. NPR is all over it, of course. The installation requires a highly controlled environment, an on-call veterinarian and a staff of full-time behind-the-scene poop-wipers. The result sounds like somebody absent-mindedly tuning up before a gig (the guitars are clearly open-tuned to a chord). It has all the soothing, pleasant mindlessness of several wind chimes in a light breeze.
Reddit has a subforum called /r/mildlyinteresting where an awful lot of official state-sanctioned art seems to belong these days.
January 22, 2014 — 11:29 pm
Comments: 15
Or maybe not
Still working my way slowly through Norman Rockwell’s autobiography (it’s an actual paper book; I’ve kind of forgotten how to use those). Early in his career, nearly all his commissions were for kids’ magazine. He describes how he would hang around elementary schools for hours checking out children, then approach the ones he favored and asked them back to his studio.
I thought what a quaint and innocent time, until I got here:
Four ground-glass windows faced the hallway leading to the other offices. When Billy and Eddie saw the shadow of a passing person on the glass, they’d shuffle their feet and scream, “Oh, Mr Rockwell, don’t. Please. Oh, Mr Rockwell, we didn’t know you were that kind of man.” And I could see the person stop and turn his head to listen. Then Billy and Eddie would fall silent and the person would put his head close to the window so he could hear better. But Billy and Eddie always ruined their own game at this point by breaking into shouts of laughter.
Billy was Billy Paine, Rockwell’s favorite model. The illustration above was Rockwell’s very first Saturday Evening Post cover, and Paine was the model for all three boys. Here’s Billy’s sad end:
When he was thirteen Billy was climbing out of a window in the second story of Edgewood Hall with a girdle he’d stolen from a lady’s room, and lost his footing, falling to the sidewalk below. A few days later, he died
A more innocent time, my ass.
Right. Back here tomorrow, 6 sharp WBT. Dead Pool Round 58!
January 16, 2014 — 11:21 pm
Comments: 14
Yep, still phoning it in
I went to lunch with the neighbors today (Uncle B couldn’t come; he had too much work) and those wiley old coots drank me under the table. Why am I always the youngest person in my cohort?
Man, those old wrinklies can put it away!
Anyway, my hostess’ sheep were just back from the Winter pasture, so here’s a painting of a ewe I did a long time ago. I don’t know if they always moved sheep around all year (you’d have to think in the days before truck transport it would be a real chore), but they all do it here.
Good weekend, everyone!
January 11, 2014 — 12:00 am
Comments: 9
In case you didn’t know where the Pixar logo comes from
Last week, I got caught up on a couple of Pixar flicks I missed on release (Tangled and Brave). A great joy. I’ve been a huge animation fan since forever and a computer graphics perfeshunal since pretty much the beginning, so it’s a cinch I’m a ginormous fan of 3D animation.
Damn, but the early stuff was awful. I had a friend who dated a guy who wrote software for 3D modeling in the early 80s. I thought that was the shit. They had this big expensive rig that built and animated a 3-D teapot. I think it took, like, three days to render a single freaking teapot. And it looked like ass. I loved it.
In 1988, I got to go to SIGGRAPH for the first and only time, and there I saw my very first Pixar film. Which was THE very first Pixar film — or at least the first one released under the name Pixar.
I still think Luxo jr is a masterpiece of character animation. I’m not alone. When it first started to roll — given when this was made — I think most of us just expected a render test (Pixar made their money selling dedicated animation hardware and software in those days). I was not expecting a clean, simple, brilliant short film.
Sadly, this was 1988, so I also got to see Pixar’s second and third releases at the same sitting — Red’s Dream and Tin Toy. Oh, jesus, that godawful clown! Oh god, that hideous lumpy baby! Brrrrrrr.
Even now. Every single time Pixar tries to do realistic humans — oh that Uncanny Valley!
November 15, 2013 — 12:33 am
Comments: 16
Lookit the little tiny life preserver in the water
Ha! Ha! I bet you thought this was an Obamacare metaphor.
Nope. Four generations of the Gibson family from the Islands of Scilly were photographers, and 125 years of their shipwreck pictures are going to auction at Sotheby’s.
THE COMPLETE EXTANT PHOTOGRAPHIC ARCHIVE OF SHIPWRECK AND RELATED IMAGES BY FOUR GENERATIONS OF THE GIBSON FAMILY OF PHOTOGRAPHERS, 1872 TO 1997, COMPRISING:
585 glass plate negatives (214: 12 x 10in. and 382: 8 x 6in.) housed in 16 original wooden boxes and one cardboard box, a few plates with cracks, or loss to glass or image, some boxes worn; 407 glass plate copy negatives (6½ by 4¾in.) in 4 cardboard boxes; 179 glass plate negatives (4¼ x 3¼in.); 198 film negatives (5 x 4in.) in three boxes; 335 cut film negatives (various sizes); and 39 (35mm.) film negatives 97 original photographs of shipwrecks (silver prints, 12 x 10in.) manuscript ledger by Alexander and Herbert Gibson on the shipwrecks of Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly (folio, 330 x 205mm.; approximately 149pp. of notes on wrecks and 32pp. of records of telegraph messages sent from the Isles of Scilly, 1876-77) a collection of books by John Fowles, John Arlott, John Le Carré, and Rex Cowan on the Gibsons of Scilly (see detailed list below), together with newspaper and magazine articles
WANT. Well worth clicking the first link and browsing the photographs. Or this slide show in the Telegraph with larger pictures and longer descriptions.
Oh, but hey…it makes a pretty good Obamacare metaphor, too.
October 23, 2013 — 8:03 pm
Comments: 11
*insert metaphor here*
Holy cow — I’ve just discovered that my current Photoshop will import video and snip it into frames for export as animated .gif. That’s…well, if you can’t see how unspeakably exciting that is, I feel sorry for you. I’m having fun, fun, fun.
Well, fun, fun, drudgery, fun. Even a little bitty animation like this runs to 110 frames and takes considerable fussing and fluffing.
This is a clip from an 1897 Edison film called Seminary Girls. In the full version, the headmistress comes in and gives them all hell. Please note, the girl with the longest hair — the one who has her back to us most of the time — is smoking a cigarette. Nice touch.
You can find the whole thing at archive.org (and you can lose whole days of your life to archive.org, fair warning).
October 15, 2013 — 10:18 pm
Comments: 20
Dang!
So Michelle O’s “Let’s Move” postage stamp series was pulled and will be destroyed because some of the children weren’t wearing safety equipment. Dumb. But that’s not what I want to talk about. I want to talk about how godawful ugly these fucking stupid things are (click the pic to see the whole set in color).
This isn’t loose. Or naive. Or graphic. Or playful. This is awful. It’s terrible. It’s shit. It’s just unspeakable. Who approved this crap?
It’s tempting to say that all government art is bad, but it’s not. I love a lot of classic propaganda art — the stuff that’s competently executed and way, way over the top. Bad guys, good guys — they all did some awesome posters back in the day. When I was a little girl, I secretly wanted to be a propagandist. Or a comics artist, before that became quite such a thing. Much similarity.
But this stuff, it’s just bad on all levels. What is it with this lot, that they see citizens as faceless nonentities?
October 10, 2013 — 11:02 pm
Comments: 28
Shiny
A hundred and one years ago, workmen demolishing Wakefield House in Cheapside, London swung a pickaxe into the cellar floor and heard it thump against a wooden box. Inside, they found almost 500 rings, broaches, gems, watches and other awesome examples of the jeweler’s art. They stuffed their hats, pockets and hankies and ran to everyone’s favorite local fence, Stoney Jack.
Fortunately for history, Stoney Jack wasn’t a thug, but a respectable antique dealer named G.F. Lawrence — also head of acquisitions for the brand new London Museum. Which, you’ll be astonished to learn, ended up with 99% of the collection.
Among the jewels was a broach engraved for the first Viscount Stafford, which neatly dates the collection after 1640 when he took the title but before the Great Fire of London in 1666. Why the hoard was buried and never retrieved, no one knows but, as a jeweler’s working stock, it proved priceless to historians. If you’re at all interested, do hit the links (especially the first one; that’s the best article I read).
The hoard is (finally!) going on display in the Museum of London this Friday. Why they didn’t have it ready for the 100th anniversary, I do not know.
That thing in the picture, by the way, is a tiny watch…inside a single enormous hollowed-out emerald. A Google image search is highly recommended.
October 8, 2013 — 10:13 pm
Comments: 7