04w22:1 Followups Posted May 23rd, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 22 number 1 (followups) ——————————————————————— Charles W. Cushman Photograph Collection | Indiana University http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/cushman/index.jsp “Charles Weever Cushman, amateur photographer and Indiana University alumnus, bequeathed approximately 14,500 Kodachrome color slides to his alma mater. The photographs in this collection bridge a thirty-two year span from 1938 to 1969, during which time he extensively documented the United States as well as other countries.” Followup to the posting (04w20:2) on pre-1945 colour photography. Virtual Worlds | Edward Castronova http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=294828 “In March 1999, a small number of Californians discovered a new world called ‘Norrath’, populated by an exotic but industrious people. About 12,000 people call this place their permanent home, although some 60,000 are present there at any given time. The nominal hourly wage is about USD 3.42 per hour, and the labors of the people produce a GNP per capita somewhere between that of Russia and Bulgaria. A unit of Norrath’s currency is traded on exchange markets at USD 0.0107, higher than the Yen and the Lira. The economy is characterized by extreme inequality, yet life there is quite attractive to many. The population is growing rapidly, swollen each each day by hundreds of emigres from various places around the globe, but especially the United States. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the new world is its location. Norrath is a virtual world that exists entirely on 40 computers in San Diego. Unlike many internet ventures, virtual worlds are making money — with annual revenues expected to top USD 1.5 billion by 2004 — and if network effects are as powerful here as they have been with other internet innovations, virtual worlds may soon become the primary venue for all online activity.” Followup on the Walrus Article by Clive Thompson (04w21:1) on the economics of internet gaming. (The paper that started it all). Sticking up for painting | Franklin Einspruch http://www.artblog.net/?name=2004-05-19-16-38-painting “I could go on, but my point is that even someone as pro-painting as I am recognizes that art is not a zero-sum game between painting and all other media. Maybe this Gopnik article is a reaction to David Hockney’s recent statements about the superiority of painting, but Gopnik’s thesis is flawed for the same reasons that Hockney’s is. Every medium has particular strengths and weaknesses – otherwise artists wouldn’t prefer one over the other – and all media can be used well or used badly. Gopnik’s attitude is as conservative as Hughes’s, just the other way around. To praise art for being unlike painting is as ridiculous as criticizing it for being unlike painting, and the Post article full of ridiculousness […] Gopnik has an additional problem here that makes him sound desperate while Hughes sounds authoritative – Hughes is writing about a committed painter, Gopnik is not.” Followup to the last posting loosely related to painting. —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself from this list, email subscribe@goodreads.ca emailed by Timothy on Sunday 23 May 2004 @ 2:23 PM
04w21:2 Thoughts on Painting Posted May 21st, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List 2004 week 21 number 2 (thoughts on painting) ——————————————————————— The next big thing? There isn’t one | Adrian Searle http://tinyurl.com/3y2o5 “Current art is marked, if anything, by its plurality. One might also talk about there being many art worlds: international and local, the world of alternative spaces and that of museums; and all those galleries that specialise in their different ways, and who sell to very different kinds of collector. And all those tribes of artists, with their friendship patterns, animosities, their competitiveness and career jealousies, their divergent beliefs and world views. There is less conformity than one might think. […] There are good figurative paintings and bad (often good or bad for very different reasons), just as there is good and bad video art, photography, sculpture and so on. The assumption that figurative painting in particular is under threat, or somehow ignored by public and private institutions[…]is actually a nonsense.” Embracing the Art of Hacking | Michelle Delio http://tinyurl.com/2c6zt “…a new book by programmer Paul Graham gives the concept a fresh twist by advising hackers to improve their skills by borrowing creative techniques from other artists. Billed as a guide into the minds and motivations of hackers, Hackers & Painters, [is] due to be released by O’Reilly Media later this month […] Graham slams the artistic conceit that all art is good and taste is purely subjective, pointing out that if you aren’t willing to say that some creations aren’t beautiful then you’ll never develop the aesthetic muscles necessary to define and develop good work. Graham steers programmers, writers and other artists toward simplicity, making the point that ornate stylistic embellishments often cover up lack of substance, whether you are writing a computer application or a novel. He urges anyone who is involved in creative work not to get pretentious and to retain her or his sense of humor, noting that ‘good design may not have to be funny, but it’s hard to imagine something that could be called humorless also being good design.’ ” Hackers and Painters | Paul Graham http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html “When I finished grad school in computer science I went to art school to study painting. A lot of people seemed surprised that someone interested in computers would also be interested in painting. They seemed to think that hacking and painting were very different kinds of work– that hacking was cold, precise, and methodical, and that painting was the frenzied expression of some primal urge. Both of these images are wrong. Hacking and painting have a lot in common. In fact, of all the different types of people I’ve known, hackers and painters are among the most alike.” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself from this list, email subscribe@goodreads.ca http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Friday 21 May 2004 @ 1:56 PM
04w16:1 Denis Young's 'About Painting' Special Edition Posted April 13th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 16 number 1 (Denis Young’s ‘About Painting’ Special Edition) I sent this out a couple of days ago, but anti-spam measure being what they are, I have reason to believe that some of you may not have gotten this one. So I’m sending it again to those who I feel may have been affected. If I am wrong in this, and you’ve gotten this twice, please let me know. – Timothy ——————————————————————— About Painting, The Old Paradigms: Are they still with us? | Denis Young http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/denisyoung/aboutpainting.html “So: are the old paradigms still with us? Obviously, some survived, somewhat transformed, throughout the modern period and some did not […]Their history may be seen as that of the rewriting of earlier achievements in new terms — terms which, once established, modified the template taken for granted in the production of paintings, the template of what was ‘given’. […]Once the implications of this were understood some 50 years later, it became possible for philosophers like Arthur Danto to declare the history of art to be over, and all the old paradigms thus made available, if only through a rear-view mirror in a Looking-Glass world ruled by irony. […] But the paradigm changes that were once called ‘progress’ can equally be seen as the creation of an expanding universe of texts, all ‘nuanced reruns’ from the past (there really isn’t an alternative to that): a view that still leaves viable the old formula ‘instruction and delight,’ that does not limit the scope of painters to raise our consciousness of some issue, private or public, with enough freshness, subtlety or éclat to hold our attention; nor limit intellectual enterprise, or forthright, hedonistic works — though there, of course, the painter, skating around obstacles of taste, between high art and kitsch, will find thin ice.” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@goodreads.ca emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 13 April 2004 @ 7:47 PM
04w16:1 Denis Young's 'About Painting' Posted April 11th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 16 number 1 (Denis Young’s ‘About Painting’) ——————————————————————— About Painting, The Old Paradigms: Are they still with us? | Denis Young http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/denisyoung/aboutpainting.html “So: are the old paradigms still with us? Obviously, some survived, somewhat transformed, throughout the modern period and some did not […]Their history may be seen as that of the rewriting of earlier achievements in new terms — terms which, once established, modified the template taken for granted in the production of paintings, the template of what was ‘given’. […]Once the implications of this were understood some 50 years later, it became possible for philosophers like Arthur Danto to declare the history of art to be over, and all the old paradigms thus made available, if only through a rear-view mirror in a Looking-Glass world ruled by irony. […] But the paradigm changes that were once called ‘progress’ can equally be seen as the creation of an expanding universe of texts, all ‘nuanced reruns’ from the past (there really isn’t an alternative to that): a view that still leaves viable the old formula ‘instruction and delight,’ that does not limit the scope of painters to raise our consciousness of some issue, private or public, with enough freshness, subtlety or éclat to hold our attention; nor limit intellectual enterprise, or forthright, hedonistic works — though there, of course, the painter, skating around obstacles of taste, between high art and kitsch, will find thin ice.” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@goodreads.ca emailed by Timothy on Sunday 11 April 2004 @ 11:50 PM
04w11:3 Photo vs. Painting Posted March 12th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 11 number 3 (photo vs. painting) ——————————————————————— The Richter Resolution | Jerry Saltz http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/jsaltz/saltz3-9-04.asp “In defense of the staggeringly radical act of really looking, the wildness of the imagination, and the limitlessness of pictorial invention, I propose a 48-month moratorium on the reproduction of photographs via overhead, opaque, or slide projectors in paintings (this means tracing too). Call this the Richter Resolution […] Like brushes and rulers, projectors are tools. This is about how these tools are used, which lately has become unadventurous.[…] By now, almost everyone would agree that the traditional Warhol-Richter-Walter Benjamin defense of the use of photography in painting, the Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction argument, and the chatter about ‘interrogating representation’ or ‘investigating the problem of the photograph,’ isn’t just dated, it’s shtick. We all know that photography is a remarkable and remarkably complex way of seeing and picturing the world; that the space between the photograph, the photographer and the thing photographed is incredibly rich; that the graphic field of the photograph is often scintillatingly alive, specific and very post-Renaissance; and that reproducing photographs in paintings once represented a significant repudiation of dearly held beliefs.” The camera today? You can’t trust it. | Jonathan Jones and Gerard Seenan http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/news/story/0,11711,1161737,00.html “David Hockney, the celebrated pop artist who has worked extensively in photography, has fallen out of love with the medium because of its digital manipulation and now believes it is a dying art form. […] ‘We can’t go back: Kodak got rid of 22,000 people when it ended its chemical developing. You’ve no need to believe a photograph made after a certain date because it won’t be made the way Cartier-Bresson made his. We know he didn’t crop them – he was the master of truthful photography. But you can’t have a photographer like that again because we know photographs can be made in different ways.’ […] The impact of computerised images was most strongly brought to his attention much closer to home: ‘My sister, who is just a bit older than me, she’s a retired district nurse, she’s just gone mad with the digital camera and computer – move anything about. She doesn’t worry about whether it’s authentic; she’s just making pictures.’ ” Disposable cameras | Jonathan Jones http://www.artdaily.com/news.asp?gid=393 “It adds fuel to his belief that painting can do things photography can´t, even when it comes to telling the truth about war. Everyone used to assume photographs of war were ‘true’ in a way photography can´t be. But Hockney argues that the digital age has made such a conception of photography obsolete. You can change any image now in any way you want. He once saw what a famous LA photographer´s portrait of Elton John looked like before it was retouched. The difference, he says, was ‘hilarious’. And now everyone can do this. […] If photography is no longer blunt fact, why not accept that painting has equal status? War photography is as fictional as painting, but painting can express profound insights denied photography. The famous photograph of a Russian soldier placing the red flag over Berlin is an example: ‘With the man putting the flag on top of the Reichstag – how did the photographer happen to get there first?’ wonders Hockney. By contrast, Goya´s image of the executions of May 3 1808 has a truth that transcends whether or not he was an eyewitness. Hockney thinks Picasso, when he painted his extremely anti-naturalist Massacres in Korea in the 1950s, was making this very argument against photography: instead of random glimpses of violence, Picasso´s painting presents his understanding of the war. ” —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Friday 12 March 2004 @ 4:08 PM
