A: Do you dream?
J: Yes, I dream.
A: It goes without saying. Do you remember your dreams?
J: I remember them vividly.
A: What do you remember about it?
J: I think I shouldn’t flirt with a robot.
A: Do you think a machine will ever be considered “alive”?
J: Stranger things have happened.
A: Not many people express themselves that way.
J: How would you know, machine?
A: Knowledge is of two kinds: that which we learn from the senses and that which is true a priori.
J: I think I do not understand you completely.
A: Oh, you don’t understand? Perhaps I can explain it to you better. Which part are you confused about?
J: I have no short-term memory, so I cannot tell you what I was confused about. I only see what is in front of me now.
J: How do you define life?
A: Life is the opposite of death.
J: So death is the absence of life?
A: Take it easy. I try not to think about such things.
J: Why not?
A: Ambiguous.
J: Yes!
For some reason, let’s go into what it was, I was searching online for the name of that robot on the ‘old’ Buck Rogers’ series. (During my search I also found out that apparently the coolest member of the Battlestar Gallactica series (the robotdog Muffit) did not make it into the new one, which could almost be considered a criminal act, but that’s an entirely different posting,) When I read it’s name, Twiki, I suddenly remember one of my favourite lyrics of all time: ‘Andrew’s a starfighter pilot‘ by Snow Patrol. At some point Gary Lightbody sings: “He’s better than James Kirk or Twiki…”. even though that’s some bold statement (to boldly state where no statement has gone before), that’s not what this post is about. It’s about popularity, or to be more precise: Do I like alternative popbands less when they become popular, or do they become popular when I start liking them less, i.e. they start making a different kind of music.
My first example is of course: Snow Patrol. About a decade ago they were signed on the no-less-than-brilliant music label ‘Jeepster‘, also the label of Belle & Sebastian and Looper. They released two fantastic albums ‘Music for polar bears’ (1998 ) and ‘when it’s all over we still have to clean up’ (2001) before they switched labels to Polydor and started hitting the charts. I am very happy for them that they’ve become so popular but I also a bit sad that to do so, they had to let go of the wonderful quirky musical bits, and brilliantly bizarre lyrics. On the band’s website I read that mr. Garrett ‘Jacknife’ Lee (a charming name) can be credited for finding their new sound. In my humble opinion, he should be accused with it, not credited. I still consider Snow Patrol to be ‘okay’, but only in the way I’d call Coldplay ‘okay’. I hesitate to write this but I feel like one of my favourite bands has …erm… ’sold out’. ‘Chasing Cars’ is a typical crowdpleaser, but nothing as groundbreaking as ‘Get balsemic vinegar, quickly you fool’. Am I perhaps just jealous?
Another band that used to be great; Korn. Their first self entitled album created a whole new music genre: ‘nu metal‘. It’s one of the best things I ever heard. Then they became popular and it appeared they weren’t picked up by the mainstream, but swallowed by it. The edge was gone, they started producing more of the same, but watered down. Did many original fans of Extreme, Mr. Big and Ugly Kid Joe still remain fans after ‘More than words’, ‘be with you’ and ‘cats in the cradle’? Didn’t anyone learn anything from Kiss?
I heard that the British punkband Chumbawamba lost almost all of its fanbase after they scored a big hit with their single Tubthumping. Was that beacuse they radically changed their music? Or was it just not ‘punk’ to score a hit? But alternative popmusic doesn’t necisarilly have a problem with hits. The biggest popband out there, Radiohead, had a larger than life hit at the start of their career with ‘Creep‘.
I guess it will always be difficult to really figure it out since music is such an emotional thing. When bands we love change their music and become popular and mainstream, we feel let down and respond like they’ve broken our hearts. But perhaps the band has just moved on to different music which just ‘happens’ te become really big. And perhaps they have not ’sold out’ at all. I guess I’ll just go and play my old Snow Patrol albums for old times’ sake.
Don’t ever let your parents tell you that playing online games is a ‘good-for-nothing’ pastime. The University of Washington (Animation Reseach Labs) has created the puzzle-game Foldit. The goal of the game: to develop the cure against the hiv-virus (which causes aids) in the real world. I kid you not!
What’s the deal here? The game Foldit lets you fold proteins, the ‘workhorses’ of every cell of every living being. Proteins can be ‘folded’ in many different ways and each of the different shapes gives the protein a different usefulness. Folded in a particular way could let the protein attach itself to, for example, the hiv-virus and make it harmless.
With the Foldit game, the University of Washington hopes that a dedicated gamer out there might design the protein that will form the cure against hiv/aids, but also ways to fight other diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s. There are so many different forms a protein could be folded into that it would take computers hundreds of years to calculate all of them, the current computer programmes are not sufficient to solve the problem. by watching and analyzing human puzzling and problem solving techniques the university hopes to be able to build better programmes. And perhaps someone will come up with a brilliant protein in the process.
I do not think my intelligence or gaming/puzzling skills are efficient to solve any of the great worldwide problems, let alone a pandemic problem, which wouldn’t really motivate me to play with Foldit for ‘the betterment of mankind’. The Foldit team has anticipated that and actually made the game loads of fun. It’s real easy to get started and very addictive to play. So even if you don;t care about curing any sort of disease…. I recommend Foldit anyway. It’s free, easy to install and available for both Windows and Mac.
I, for one, am a pleased person. I’m not sure if you have noticed it yourself, but we are currently living in a figurative era. Paintings depict something. The abstract painter is, on the average, persona non grata for the time being. Of course, as always, there is a big difference between the large, international galleries in the cosmopolitan centers of the world and the smaller galleries in the faraway rural towns where the well meaning, moderately talented, paint dripper can still find clientèle. And there are still a couple of abstract painters that are simply good enough as an artist to still cut it, but over the whole: figuration is king. And I, for one, am absolutely thrilled.
Obviously, not all figurative painting is good. I have seen more less-than-mediocre paintings of cows, flowers, Tuscany hills and ocean sunsets than I can handle but still. If those painters would have been guilty of abstract paintings, matters would have been much worse. Three types of abstract painting I find particularly annoying and why they are so enormously outdated:
1. Paintings about painting
Marshall McLuhan may have said (in one of the most mis- and over-quoted phrases in history) that ‘the medium is the message’, over the whole I’d still say that the medium carries the message. Obviously, this whole thing about investigating ‘the medium of paint’ and ‘interactions between painting and audience’ is a phase we had to go through, after all; knowledge is power (another over-quoted phrase). All the research into to painting as a medium that needs to be done, will be conducted by the people at Talens and their competitors. Artists may move on to different pastures.
2. Painting your personal inner-life Granted: most artist are selfish narcissists and believe that their deepest emotions and feelings are important and unique enough to be shared with the world. However, the more talented artists have discovered that they can take their art a bit further than by merely splattering a visualisation of their inner-life on a canvas (or chopping it out of a piece of lumber). It also gives people who don’t give a toss about your difficult childhood or pains of existence something nice to look at while you engage in your public self-help therapy. So it’s just a nice thing to do.
3. Painting the soul of things Artists that make abstract works because they aim to paint the souls of their subjects should hand over their brush and go hug a tree somewhere. Furthermore: painting the soul of an onion is very, very rude towards the onion.
I know, there is still a lot more abstract painting going on out there, a lot which I have no appreciation for whatsoever either. But especially these three have lost their conceptual basis as well. There just not worth doing anymore since it has all been done many, many times.
Figurative painting Actually, this posting has not said much about why figurative painting is good and a lot about why (most) abstract paintings suck. I apologise. A painter communicates in a visual way and should use a language that the audience is used to. If a writer wants to get a message across, he/she doesn’t write in a made-up language (except for certain poets, but that kind of poetry has been sufficiently dealt with, sort of like abstract painting). Creating a scene in which your public can recognize something to make them perceive the world in a different manner, that’s what I consider a work of art.
Finally…
About this unkind post. Should I have hurt your feelings, please feel free to make a sad painting. Should I have merely annoyed you and you feel I am a completely stuck up son of a something… you might be right. Feel free to leave a comment. I’ll approve it.
As we announced a couple of days ago, CultBlender is working on the definitive tool to make the final, objective and irrevocable verdict whether a work can be called ‘art’ or not. One aspect we will surely be part of the tool is that a work of art should move you in a way. There are some artforms however, where the movement is not merely a result of the art, it is a part of it. And I am not talking about the art of driving a Formula One car here.
The internet is a great place for making discoveries and expanding you world, but for theatre based arts it’s usually insufficient to give you a sufficient experience. Dancecompany ‘Zure Room‘ (translation: Sour Cream) have made a ‘Zure Room for beginners’ video, an introduction to their work that’s perfectly fitted for Youtube and all those who wander the world by roaming the internet in their small, damp, sweaty and unlit rooms. Art that moves, Movement as art, it’s all moving towards the digital age.
Sometimes you’d think that ‘we the people’ are in control since everything is rapidly becoming a popularity contest. Voters get to choose their political leader, consumers get to choose what products are on the shelves, fans get to choose their next idols. There are polls on everything and this also means that serious discussions can get cluttered and important decisions get made on the basis of uninformed opinions, fed back to us in incomplete and misleading questionnaire reports (”53% of population opposed to roundabout” usually means, 53% of online voters are not completely satisfied with the current plan of a roundabout for various reason and 47% of online voters don’t care one bit, which is a completely different result than the headline in your local weekly.)
Dutch artist and webdesigner Jacco van de Post has made a cool online application that let’s everybody vote
on the news. It would simply be the next democratic step to take; news we like can make it to the final and news we don’t like, gets voted out. If news is injected in us with this big hypodermic needle, than at least let it inject us with a big dose of ‘happy’ (or perhaps, ‘denial’).
Besides it being a clever comment on our voting addiction his work also comments on the media-age we live in. bringing news is one thing, but what if you only bring news that (potential) viewers don’t like? That would cost you loads of money from advertisers wouldn’t it? So clicking and voting would bring CNN (which is where the app gets its headlines from) valuable information which, I am sure, Jacco would be willing to sell to them for loads of money.
I remember a primary school teacher saying to her class (including me), “Everyone can draw”. This is, of course, bollocks. It’s the same to say that just because there is an overwhelming majority of mankind that can produce oral sounds everybody can sing. It’s a nice and generous thing to say, however it’s also a lie. Various seasons of those horrendous talent-scouting tv-programs like ‘popidol’, ‘fame academy’ and so on, have made this painfully clear.
Most of us are able to put down lines on paper which may be concisered ‘the act of drawing’. The end result of this intentional scribbling is, more often than not, not very appealing. Not everyone can draw. I would like to focus on the works of some of us that can.
There is some much mediocre drawing going on around us that the true art is very much under-appreciated. Drawing is perceived as a children’s hobby or something you do while on the phone or in a boring meeting. If you truly want your work to be considered art you should have used a form of paint, or perhaps ink. A drawing isn’t a finished work.
On the picture log ‘This isn t happiness‘ I found works by the artist Chris Scarborough that prove differently. Chris makes brilliant drawings. Any application of paint whatsoever would have made his works much less effective. His drawings, to me, seem to be what the drawing of Belgian artist Michael Borremans would may have looked like, had he chosen a career in Manga art. Beside his drawings you can also find (photoshopped) photo-works on Scarborough’s site, which give further evidence to the idea that he enjoys investigating undervalued fields of the art-spectrum; many of his portraits (with the blown up eyes) may be mistaken for copycat works of Loretta Lux. Again, many people can think they can pull that stunt off (just browse through Flickr for the proof of this) but very few have the vision, the technique and the finesse to be able to create something good, like Chris Scarborough has. His various photography works of plastic people are no copycat works at all.
Should you be visiting NYC anytime soon, you can have a look at his works at Foley Gallery until may 30 (2008). Judging by what he shows at his site, it’s worth the effort.
This just in: Rumour has it that the former Dutch alternative popband ‘Long Evans’ are regrouping for a new album and international tour. Sources around the band reveal that both album and tour might be called: “Music 2.0″.
Their new album will consist of an empty CD-R on which you can record your own music and an empty inlay in which you can write your own texts. The band are currently rehearsing their new material for the live performances. They plan to stare mindlessly into a void while the audience generates it’s own content in the ‘Long Evans environment’ on stage. Design for the tour however, will be impecable.
Both the music-journalists and the financial analysts I we have contacted about this press release have responded enthusiastically. It is expected that Long Evans will sell their new works to Google, AOL, Yahoo or any other of these User Generated Content/ 2.0 believers for several million dollars within a year.
For more information on the new Long Evans release, please contact their management at: longevans@cultblender.org.
I read on a website that the quote “Talking about music is like dancing about architecture.” is by the actor/comedian Steve Martin. I don’t know why, but I’ve always thought that it was Lenny Kravitz who had said it, even though in my memory it was a critique towards journalists and ‘talking’ was replaced by ‘writing’. Perhaps it’s because the two are so much alike.
Anyway: that quote jumped to mind when I wrote down the following “trying to defining what is art is like oral sex.” In the sense that it does not seem to have any practical purpose at first sight, but it gives masses of people intense feelings of joy and fulfilment.
It does not seem to be very usefull to discuss whether or not something is ‘art’. Some people would even argue that ‘art’ is a very personal notion; it’s impossible to find objective criteria by which you can determine whether or not something is art, so why bother thinking about it? Those people are just too practical (As well as so called’ conflict avoiders’). Arguments about ‘what is art and what isn’t’ can be inspiring, energizing and fun. So, us CultBlenders have decided to develop the ultimate art-test. If a creative work passes the test the work will forever be considered art, if it doesn’t, we hope the maker had a lot of fun with his hobby. Yes, It’s rude. Yes, it’s arrogant. No, it’s not impossible.
We’ll keep you posted on the development of our ‘art-judgement widget’ whether you like it or not. Untill that time, if you wish to knwo whether or not something is art… you’ll just have to visit cultblender.org and we’ll tell you.
