Tagclouds may be revealing and all that, but they’re also quite boring. Visually I mean. Fortunately, there’s something you can do about it with Wordle. IBM programmer Jonathan Feinberg wrote some algorithms for laying out and displaying words. His site reads the content directly from your blog or you can copy and paste text from your site, to make your own, cool wordcloud.
Loads of possibilities with fonts, colourschemes and layouts will make it a lot prettier to look at I tell ya…
Just look at that beautiful CultBlender Blog Wordle… I’m especially happy with the prominent place the word ‘pigeons’has…
‘Everybody’s a photographer‘ is just about as big a mistake as ‘everybody’s an artist‘. I am sympathetic towards the thought, but it’s just all wrong, dude. Photography is hard. It’s difficult to get a good shot with an intruiging subject, exciting composition… or just something that worth looking at. But since everyone is capable of the act of pushing the shutter button everybody’s able to make a registration of an image through a lens. And if the end result sucks… Let’s call it art.
Well… let’s not call it art. Let’s call it ‘crap’. Which is what it is, most of the time. With the rise of the digital camera, photography courses have been flooded and one amateur photography exhibition after the other has been organised. Flickr was worth millions when it was bought by Yahoo and why? Because everyone is a photographer.
I’ve just been leafing through the photography special of Juxtapoz, which is always a beacon of good taste in a world that’s becoming increasingly amateur-image-crazy, but in a lot of cases… I just don’t see it. Could it be that the photographer that managed to get his image up in a gallery and published in this magazine is way better at his/her PR than his/her photography work? I’d imagine so. Fortunately there are also a lot of gems to be discovered. Beautiful heart stopping images that made me gasp for air when I looked at them. My faith in photography as a mature art-form has been restored. With this posting, a couple of wonderful examples. Please click on images for links to the photographer’s websites.
Credit: all pictures published in the Juxtapoz photo-issue 2008 and taken from the Juxtapoz website. Photocredits top to bottom: Aaron Hobson, Patrick Smith, Alex Prager and Graham French (click on photos for their websites).
We’ve known it for a long time and we stood by, watching it happen. The Chinese are coming. And they’re ready to take over. Bad news? Not really. Okay, so there’s a lot ‘not quite right’ yet about China and the Chinese politics… that does not mean it’s all bad over there. And you certainly can’t blame all Chinese. Especially not the Chinese citizens I would like to discuss here; Chinese artists.
Fact: China is a big place. And there are a whole lotta Chinese people. So, statistically, there should be quite some very good Chinese artists among them. for the last couple of years we’ve been seeing more and more of them, their works are no longer a rarity in Western contemporary art galleries. And that’s not just because the works are, by default, politically charged since they’re from China (although it does help: paint a building with some Chinese writing on it and the work immediately gains in meaning when it is shipped to the western hemisphere, deny it as much as you like).
Too much talk, not enough images. For your enjoyment, some images of talented and hyped Chinese painters. (click on artist’s name for a link)
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.
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.
I’ll admit it right up front; my computer and laptop run on Microsoft software. I do not own an Apple notebook, nor am I a hip Ubuntu user and I don’t even have a clue about what Unix is. however, I do believe I’m a slight notch higher up the os-foodchain for not having installed Vista and specifically asking for XP. And when I saw the below video on the Wired Gadget Lab blog… I could not have been happier. The thought to be linked to that awful piece of video. To quote mr. Brando: “The horror, the horror…” Would someone slap the makers of that clip with a wet fish please?
I know for a fact that a lot of artlovers out there are mostly interested in art featuring women (as the Guerilla Girls pointed out: 83% of all nudes in the Met feature women, whereas only 3% of all artists featured in the Met actually are women). Looking at the tags and search queries people use to get to my blog clearly points that out. The popularity of the picture with my post about the work of Eric Bailey, which is still one of the most popular posts I’ve written is also a clear indication in that direction.
BLK/MRKT gallery in Los Angeles always seems to showcase artists that I, and this is truly a matter of personal opinion, think are more or less brilliant and quite inspiring (at the same time, I must admit I have never actually physically been there yet… they say their coffee is great). A recent virtual wander about on their website revealed to me the magnificent works of Canadian artist Ben Tour.
We are very familiar with the use of the female figure in art. Porn did not only help the VHS system be victorious, but the (ab)use of the nude female body has made a good living for many painters, sculptors and other artists. They figured out a long time ago that sex sells. But the female nude is no longer synonymous with ’sex’. Works by South African artist Marlene Dumas are often so confrontational and graphic that her works are uncomfortable to even look at. Her works make clear, even more than a photograph could, how women can be exploited and degraded in this oversexed world. The audience feels even more embarrassed by watching her works than they would be when they had rented a piece of ‘adult entertainment’. Another artists that has been on top of the artistic food chain for quite a while is Lucian Freud. Freud also paints nudes. And, of course, also female nudes. Just as with Dumas’ works, his nudes aren’t meant to sexually arouse and they don’t.
Ben Tour’s work is very different from both artists mentioned. His works breathe that ’streetart’ atmosphere, and the way he incorporates letters and numbers give his works the feeling of even deeper lying mythical meaning. The serie that touched me most was his blue wash series. Tour has painted several women with crayon and ink that are both beautiful and tragic. It’s uneasy to look at them. And you just know that pretty girls aren’t supposed to look like that. that;s not the image Hollywood has taught us. Pretty girls have fun. But Ben Tour will have none of that. you just hope that the artists comforted them after he took their misery and poured it out on paper.
Ben Tour’s repertoire goes a lot further than these ‘tragic sirenes’. All his works seem to have a sort of lightness in colors, you feel you can see right through them. For me this also meant that I actually looked into his works. The way he chooses his subjects and compositions make that his works look both very contemporary (like I said: streetart feel) as well as timeless. You can’t date his works. But then , that only helps to see his works as instant classics.
A quite nice read, the Ben Tour interview on fecalface.com.
And a movieclip by WalrusTV featuring some of Ben Tour’s works, can be found here.
Being a genius is not about very difficult things, but about very simple things. This is especially true for contemporary art. Brilliant art, more often then not, has an end-result that seems very obvious. Stuff about which many people would say ‘my kid could do that’… Think the readymades by Duchamp, the prints by Warhol or the drip paintings by Pollock. Yes, your kid could probably do all of those… if your kid was a genius. Which he or she most likely is not.
I am not a hundred percent Belgian curator Jan de Nys is a genius, but I do consider the outdoor exhibition ‘Utopia’ which he curated for the Cultural Center ‘Scharpoord’ to be a brilliant idea. The exhibition is called Utopia and consists of several works all revolving around the ’suburban ideal’. And what depicts the suburban families pastime more than minigolf? Several European (Belgian, Dutch, German, Austrian and French) artists created their own minigolf track, which are all used as minigolf tracks as well, thereby involving and attracting audiences that would otherwise never show any interest in art. Plus, since the exhibition is situated in one of the poorer areas of Belgian city Knokke, it sort of adds an extra layer of meaning to the exhibition; The ‘have nots’ acting out the suburban dream.
Hopefully the exhibition will travel outside of the Netherlands and Belgium as well.
Contributing artists: Eric Angenot (B), Bisscherouw-Voet (NL), Franck Bragigand (F), Nick Ervinck (B), Sonja Gangl (A), Loek Grootjans (NL), Frank Halmans (NL), HAP (B), Thomas Huyghe (B), Jean Bernard Koeman (B-NL), Fabian Luyten (B), Xavier Mary (B), David Neirings(B), Regine Schumann (D), Lionel Scoccimaro (F), Kevin van Braak (NL), Veronika Veit (D)
