Art

In which coloured diagrams and symbols are used instead of letters for the greater ease of learners.

Concrete poetry is an arrangement of linguistic elements in which the typographical effect is more important in conveying meaning than verbal significance.

Designed by Scott Morgan (aka Loscil) and Craig McCaffrey, [the Colours of Air album cover]'s background fades downward from a light pink to a deep magenta, atop which is a dense field of horizontal white lines whose various contortions subtly suggest folds in a piece of paper. I spoke with Scott over email about how he arrived at this image, and while his process was more subconscious than strategic, the result feels entirely representative of the music in some ineffable way.

I stared at it a lot, fascinated by how these simple, mechanical lines not only introduce an uncanny third dimension, but also evoke striations in muscle tissue, geological formations, and topographic maps. Inevitably, I wondered if a system could be extrapolated from it to generate variations, and I soon found a path forward.

It is desirable to bear in mind—when dealing with the human maker at any rate—that his chosen way of revelation is through his works. To persist in asking, as so many of us do, “What did you mean by this book?” is to invite bafflement: the book itself is what the writer means.

Minimator is a minimalist graphical editor.

All drawings are made of lines in a grid based canvas. The lines are limited to vertical and horizontal lines, and quarter circles.

Commenting on artists such as Avedon, Clifford, Mapplethorpe, and Nadar, Barthes presents photography as an art outside the codes of language or culture, an art uniquely in touch with the experience of loss.

People are alive -- they behave and respond. Creations within the computer can also live, behave, and respond... if they are allowed to. The message of this talk is that computer-based art tools should embrace both forms of life -- artists behaving through real-time performance, and art behaving through real-time simulation. Everything we draw should be alive by default.

Part 1 talks about the potential of the computer as a new visual art medium. I show a collaboration between art and artist, with the art behaving through simulation, the artist behaving through performance, and the two of them working together, responding to each other.

Part 2 demonstrates a tool for "programming" how art should behave and respond. The artist directly manipulates art objects on the canvas, the way that visual art has always been created since the time of cave paintings. The tool is based around direct, geometric construction rather than indirect, algebraic "code".

to re-enchant the egg feels powerful at this moment. today more than ever, we need its patient, protected optimism.

for me, “egg” is most importantly a metaphor for nurturing structures we provide others and sometimes ourselves. it’s not always easy to create our own eggs, or self-nurturing containers. studying eggs helps us create better ones in the future. others might call it a support structure, as édouard tweeted, “more often than not, the most meaningful human activity boils down to providing support structures for one another.”

if there is anything specific i learned from curating my collection of eggs and sharing these thoughts and anecdotes on them, it’s that the word “honor” is important to me. as i mentioned, i have this theory that when artists use eggs in their work, often they are simply honoring them. in other words, they are shining a light on the egg somehow: so that we can see it anew, as if for the first time.

I used to be very interested in the fact that anything, no matter how rough, rusted, diffy, or otherwise discredited it was, looked good if you set it down on a stretch of white cloth. Because anytime you set some detail of the world off that way, it was able to take on its true stature as an object of attention.

According to patent drawings, it's a cloud, or a bean, or a web, or an explosion, or a highway, or maybe a weird lump.

As they work, the experience of the material under the artist's fingers subtly interacts with the idea in their mind to give the finished work some quality that was rarely fully anticipated. A few artists seem to have such a feeling for their materials that the prevision needs little modification; most say that the idea grows as they work experimentally.

The mere exposure to masterworks does not suffice. Too many persons visit museums and collect picture books without gaining access to art. The inborn capacity to understand through the eyes has been put to sleep and must be reawakened.

...The delicate balance of all a person's powers which alone permits him to live fully and to work well-is upset not only when the intellect interferes with intuition, but equally when sensation dislodges reasoning. Groping in vagueness is no more productive than blind adherence to rules. Unchecked self-analysis can be harmful, but so can the artificial primitivism of the person who refuses to understand how and why he works. Modern man can, and therefore must, live with unprecedented self-awareness. Perhaps the task of living has become more difficult-but there is no way around it.

It is the purpose of this book to discuss some of the virtues of vision and thereby to help refresh and direct them.

An archive of artist' homes and studios around the world.

There are many ways of learning and traveling. We found that we navigated towards destinations where we gain insight into our own time by transcending ourselves and experiencing other people’s lives in different times in history.

Whether it’s Georgia O’Keffee’s home and studio in the desert in New Mexico,
the Eames’s modernistic home in the hilly sides of LA,
or Philip Johnson’s the Glasshouse in Connecticut,
we learn from the places we visit.

We are fascinated by their life work, the aesthetics and details of their places, the philosophy they lived by and the conversations we imagined they had with like-minded artists and friends.

To start very generally, taste is a mode. It’s a manner of interpretation, expression, or action. Things don’t feel tasteful, they demonstrate taste. Someone’s home can be decorated tastefully. Someone can dress tastefully. The vibe cannot be tasteful. The experience cannot be tasteful.

ONE: Picturing Ad Reinhardt

TWO: Morgan Meis on experiencing Robert Irwin’s acrylic columns

THREE: Three: Stereo Sue’s first letter to Oliver Sacks on Stereoscopic Vision

Everything.can.be.scanned is part of a long lineage of what I would call “stunts of tedious comprehensiveness”...

[Kenneth Goldsmith]'s work—especially at the time that we crossed paths—was also part of this cultural landscape. His schtick was retyping or recontextualizing an existing thing and calling the copy a poem. The result was not meant to be read but discussed, and when it was discussed, the emphasis was always on the every: every word of an issue of the New York Times, every movement his body made in a day, every word he spoke for a week, every radio weather forecast for a year, every page of the internet.

When his work was interesting, I would argue that it was not for its tediousness but for its attentiveness. When it wasn’t, it was because there wasn’t enough attention being paid, or because the attention was being directed towards the wrong thing.

The labour of two days, is that for which you ask two hundred guineas!

No, I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.

So much about [Gerhard Richter's painting process] reminds me of designing and building for the Web: The unpredictability, the peculiarities of the material, the improvisation, the bugs, the happy accidents. There is one crucial difference, though. By using static wireframes and static layouts, by separating design and development, we are often limiting our ability to have that creative dialogue with the Web and its materials. We are limiting our potential for playful exploration and for creating surprising and novel solutions. And, most importantly, we are limiting our ability to make conscious, well-informed decisions going forward. By adding more and more layers of abstraction, we are breaking the feedback loop of the creative process.

AI-generated artwork is the same as a gallery of rock faces. It is pareidolia, an illusion of art, and if culture falls for that illusion we will lose something irreplaceable. We will lose art as an act of communication, and with it, the special place of consciousness in the production of the beautiful.

…Just as how something being either an original Da Vinci or a forgery does matter, even if side-by-side you couldn’t tell them apart, so too with two paintings, one made by a human and the other by an AI. Even if no one could tell them apart, one lacks all intentionality. It is a forgery, not of a specific work of art, but of the meaning behind art.

Based on the 1972 BBC series and comprised of 7 essays, 3 of which are entirely pictoral, Ways of Seeing is a seminal work which examines how we view art.

How do artists and scientists work? The same.

Upon stumbling upon it, you might imagine a story of a college athlete who fell from society’s grace, but rumor has it, this unusual sight is actually an art installation that just “popped up” in May of 2014 and has been steadily expanding and attracting visitors who sometimes add their own trophies to the collection. Although the trophies are not bolted to the four metal shelves in any way, free to be taken, people just don’t.

Inventing kindergarten is the first comprehensive book about the origin of kindergarten, a revolutionary educational program for children that was created in the 1830s by charismatic German educator Friedrich Froebel. Froebel's kindergarten was the most successful system for teaching children about art, design, mathematics, and natural history ever devised. Kindergarten changed the world, and this book tells its story.

Truchet tiles are square tiles decorated with patterns that are not rotationally symmetric. When placed in a square tiling of the plane, they can form varied patterns, and the orientation of each tile can be used to visualize information associated with the tile's position within the tiling.

This book is intended for all who feel in need of some first orientation in a strange and fascinating field.

Since the Macintosh team were artists, it was only appropriate that we sign our work. Steve came up with the awesome idea of having each team member's signature engraved on the hard tool that molded the plastic case, so our signatures would appear inside the case of every Mac that rolled off the production line. Most customers would never see them, since you needed a special tool to look inside, but we would take pride in knowing that our names were in there, even if no one else knew.

Progress is an ongoing act of myth-making. Most of the time the true story is a mixed one. Things are lost. Others gained. A happy ending is when you come out ahead. A story full of setbacks is a tragedy.

It feels like we’re experiencing more setbacks than progress in software and tech at the moment.

...Between the obvious cycle triggered by the lay-offs and the generally inhospitable environment that the software industry has evolved into, it’s hard to feel excited or motivated by software development.

And we do need to feel motivated, at least in part. The word “passion” is almost always a red flag for any given industry, but software development is a creative business. You may all go around cosplaying engineers, but your average coder is about as close to being an engineer as a fan cosplaying as Hugh Laurie playing House is to being a medical doctor.

Software is a creative industry with more in common with media production industries than housebuilding.

As such, a baseline intrinsically-motivated curiosity about the form is one of the most powerful assets you can have when doing your job. It helps you solve problems and come up with new ideas.

The current cycle of decline and disinvestment in people makes that hard – probably next to impossible – but we can try to find our own ways forward where we can.

Repetition has a bad reputation. Doing the same thing over and over every day conjures images of Sisyphus rolling his boulder up the hill.

But as Camus wrote, “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

Or as Prince put it, “There’s joy in repetition.”

The Gallery of Concept Visualization features projects which use pictures to communicate complex and difficult ideas, the same way data visualizations use pictures to make sense of data.

At the end of 2023 I bought a one-in-a-million find from Japan: it’s a postcard from Barbara Nessim’s residency at The Ginza Art Space, September 26 thru October 19 1986. This residency came on the back of her breakthrough early computer art that was done on a Telidon system, a type of Teletext graphics system that displayed rudimentary vector graphics.

...My ongoing research into early Japanese pixel art software shows that Barbara most likely used ASCII’s エアーブラシ “Airbrush” painting software on the NEC PC-100, as it is the only graphics software for that platform I’ve been able to find advertised for sale or featured in period literature.

‘Often the most appropriate frame is the most invisible frame,’ says Peter Schade, head of framing at the National Gallery in London. The sentiment points to a paradox: the more Schade excels at his work, the less people will notice it. It’s only when tastes run counter to his own that we are reminded that how paintings are framed is always a choice, not an inevitability.

To get to our interview, I’m escorted through a discreet door in a gallery café into corridors rather like a hospital’s and then into a windowless workshop. Here, with the rumble of tube trains passing underneath, Schade creates, repairs and fits the frames that will protect masterpieces while also colouring our perceptions, whether we notice their effect or not.

...This work is a delicate balance of art and craft: the skill to create a perfect imitation of a carved baroque cherub, for example, and the aesthetic sensitivity to anticipate what effect it will have on an artwork.

1. You draw one single line. It can be as long as you like.
2. To start the line, you put your pen down.
3. You can make right-angle turns only, either 90 degrees or -90 degrees.
4. You cannot back up. You must always move forward.
5. You don’t lift your pen until you’re ready to stop. When you lift the pen, the doodle is done.

Steve Jobs showing Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf how to use a Macintosh Computer

One of the surest of tests is the way in which a poet borrows. Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different from that from which it was torn; the bad poet throws it into something which has no cohesion. A good poet will usually borrow from authors remote in time, or alien in language, or diverse in interest. Chapman borrowed from Seneca; Shakespeare and Webster from Montaigne. The two great followers of Shakespeare, Webster and Tourneur, in their mature work do not borrow from him; he is too close to them to be of use to them in this way.

How to describe a scintillating scotoma? It’s one of the most common symptoms of a migraine, but unless you’ve had one, it sounds unreal. A scintillating scotoma is like a barbed ripple in the pool of sight. It’s a skeletal Magic Eye raised up from the flatness of the world. It’s a glare on the tarmac as you drive West at sunset on a rain-slick freeway—only when you turn your head, it’s still there, so you have to pull over, close your eyes, and wait out the slow-motion firework working its way across your brain.

...It’s true that migraines offer a rare vantage on the brain and its mysteries. As the scotoma’s shining edges recede across your field of vision, they trace a corresponding wave of electrical activity, a “spreading depression” crossing the cortex at 3 millimeters per minute. You can watch it happen in real time, as you might watch a cloud track across the sky on a windy day. You might even have time draw a picture of the scotoma as it passes overhead—a landscape en pleine tête.

The brain doesn’t just store a blurry picture of the light in peripheral vision, it summarizes it with statistical measurements. At this statistical encoding can mix things together, losing information about which letter is which when there are multiple letter.

I hypothesize that for the illusions on this page, the fact that things look different when viewed directly, versus in peripheral vision, suggests that peripheral visual encodings cause the illusions.

It’s not easy to understand or visualize peripheral visual encodings. It seems that the brain is converting light measurements into a high-dimensional feature space of summary statistics, and these do not have easy visual interpretations.

Vision scientists visualize these encodings with spatial metamers: pictures that have visually equivalent statistics to a given image, for a given fixation. That is, you pick an eye gaze location in a picture, and a metamer can be generated that jumbles up the image in a way that is not noticable when fixating on that location. These metamers illustrate that peripheral vision isn’t just blurry vision.

As many of you will have by now heard, the artist Robert Irwin, my dear longtime friend (coming on almost fifty years now) and in many ways my originary subject (the principal, for starters, of my very first book, Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees, from back in 1980, with a second edition in 2007) died peacefully last Wednesday, at age 95, his wife Adele at his side, following a short illness. I’d visited with him myself the week before at his hospital bedside in La Jolla, where he drifted in and out of copresence, though at moments he grew piercingly, almost achingly himself.

Why is it that so much of what is commonly called AI “art” is kitsch? 

In part this is because users of AI image generators fancy themselves as artists even though few of them have any art training. This is common in photography. Wealthy individuals purchase camera gear based on reviews claiming that some camera or lens has greater technical abilities to reproduce reality faithfully and then apply complicated methods to assure that their photographs demonstrate technical proficiency. High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography is the leading example of this. Popular with amateurs with no aesthetic training, HDR is an attempt to capture a scene in which the range of luminance exceeds the dynamic range of the camera sensor, and often even the human eye itself. The results typically have too much detail in the shadows, dark skies, unnatural colors, the hyperrealistic effect of an acid trip. 

These sorts of photographers, along with individuals who produce digital illustrations for consumption on platforms like Artstation and DeviantArt, 3D printing enthusiasts, makers, indie musicians working with samplers and synthesizers, vloggers creating content for YouTube, gamers streaming on Twitch and YouTube, and fashion enthusiasts showcasing their work on social media are “prosumers,” a term coined by futurist Alvin Toffler in his 1980 book The Third Wave. Toffler’s “prosumer” merges the roles of producer and consumer, suggesting a shift in the economy and society. In this model, individuals are not only consumers of products and services but also take on an active role in their production. This concept was revolutionary at the time, predicting the rise of customization, personalization, and participatory culture facilitated by technological advancements, particularly in digital technology and the Internet.

At the same time, prosumers largely create kitsch, characterized by an appeal to popular tastes and a frequently derivative nature. Kitsch thrives in environments where production is geared towards mass appeal and immediate consumption rather than nuanced artistic merit or innovation. For traditional modernist critics, such as Clement Greenberg, kitsch represented the antithesis of genuine culture and the avant-garde. Kitsch, Greenberg explained in his seminal 1939 essay “Avant Garde and Kitsch,” is produced by industrialization, designed to satisfy the tastes of the least discerning audience without intellectual or emotional challenges. Greenberg associated kitsch with the replication of traditional art forms and aesthetics, but emptied of genuine meaning or complexity, offering immediate gratification rather than enduring value or depth.

After the Fair puts in focus the Yugoslavian Pavilion at the International Vienna Fair and recalls absent images of the pavilion and the absence of an euphoric projection of a happier future which should be built after the recent historic trauma. The exhibition in its archtectonically determined space of the Georg Kargl BOX cannot reconstruct these 'events', however it can bring up questions as a kind of an inventory making.

For his part, Gehry has noted in defense of his recent museum extravaganzas: "artists want to be in an important building, not a neutral one." At Dia:Beacon, Irwin pursued the opposite logic. As Govan has pointed out: "The money was spent to make it look like nothing was done to the building." Or, as a partner from Open Office observes: "We talked often about the idea of doing nothing with precision. Do it right and they'll never know we were here." As one critic has written, what the result showed was, as he puts it, "Irwin's unwavering conviction that museum spaces should serve the art and not the other way around."

“Possibly Real Copy Of ‘Fairies’ by Andy Warhol” is a series of 1000 identical artworks. They are all definitely by MSCHF, and also all possibly by Andy Warhol. Any record of which piece within the set is the original has been destroyed.

LoveFrom,
is a creative
collective.

Pablo Picasso famously said:

“The world doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?”

A sensible approach to something that can’t be explained is to express it.

Rather than giving you explanations or “saying something”, most artists are concerned with what I like to call “room for interpretation”. They create platforms that trigger thoughts, feelings, emotions, and ideas.

Instead of trying to explain the inexplicable artists express their view of it. They don’t want to tell you what to think, they invite you to respond.

I am fascinated by the Farmer’s Almanac, and the “Planting by the Moon” guide in particular, which has advice such as: “Root crops that can be planted now will yield well.” “Good days for killing weeds.” “Good days for transplanting.” “Barren days. Do no planting.”

I think it’d be funny to make up an almanac for writers and artists, one that emphasized the never-ending, repetitive work of the craft.

As the folks at Christie’s are delighted to point out, it marks the only time Hockney combined two of his most popular subjects: a swimming pool, that is, in the context of a double portrait. For indeed, swimming pools had transfixed Hockney ever since he first arrived (out of cold grey Northern England) in sunny Los Angeles, in 1964, and, as with so much else about LA, the young artist began seeing, as if for the first time, the artistic potential in things which everyone else in the Southland had been taking for granted.

Different from the typical website whose URLs act as persistent indexes to a page and its contents, Tokenize This destroys each work right after its creation. While the unique digital object remains viewable by the original visitor for as long as they leave their browser tab open, any subsequent attempt to copy, share, or view that URL in another tab, browser, or system, leads to a “404 Not Found” error. In other words, Tokenize This generates countless digital artifacts that can only be viewed or accessed once.

Recently there is a tendency to pursue distortion in art, but in the case of this jar, natural deformation has raised distortion to the level of spontaneous beauty.

A 215-page comic book about comics that explains the inner workings of the medium and examines many aspects of visual communication.

Topics include:

• Definitions, history, and potential.
• Visual Iconography and its Effects.
• Closure, reader participation between the panels.
• Word-picture dynamics.
• Time and motion.
• The psychology of line styles and color.
• Comics and the artistic process.

Andrei Tarkovsky shot the Stalker 3 separate times in abandoned nuclear power plants in Russia across multiple decades. It ended up killing him.

The Clock is an art installation by video artist Christian Marclay. It is a looped 24-hour video supercut of scenes from film and television that feature clocks or timepieces. The artwork itself functions as a clock: its presentation is synchronized with the local time, resulting in the time shown in a scene being the actual time.

People who make works of art, whatever they might be, have gone to great trouble to make something unique which is embodied in the form that it is, and not in any other form, and that it transmits things that remain implicit

...Works of art are not just disembodied, entirely abstract, conceptual things. They are embodied in the words they’re in or in paint or in stone or in musical notes or whatever it might be.

Since the fall of 1965, I have been using eighteen or nineteen stories (their selection varying from one performance to another) as the irrelevant accompaniment for Merce Cunningham’s cheerful dance, How to Pass, Kick, Fall, and Run. Sitting downstage to one side at a table with microphone, ashtray, my texts, and a bottle of wine, I tell one story a minute, letting some minutes pass with no stories in them at all. Some critics say that I steal the show. But this is not possible, for stealing is no longer something one does. Many things, wherever one is, whatever one’s doing, happen at once. They are in the air; they belong to all of us. Life is abundant. People are polyattentive. The dancers prove this: they tell me later backstage which stories they particularly enjoyed.

Most of the stories that are in this book are to be found below. (The first thirty formed the text of a lecture titled Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music, which I delivered at the Brussels Fair in 1958)

The poetry of music, Copland intimates, is composed both by the musician, in the creation of music and its interpretation in performance, and by the listener, in the act of listening that is itself the work of reflective interpretation. This makes listening as much a creative act as composition and performance — not a passive receptivity to the object that is music, but an active practice that confers upon the object its meaning: an art to be mastered, a talent to be honed.

Once, Robert Rauschenberg erased most of a drawing by Willem de Kooning, and then named it Erased de Kooning Drawing.

I am in no way certain what this is connected to either, but I suspect it is connected to more than I once believed it to be connected to.

For others, perhaps especially those artists who worked with light and transparency and were involved in the birth of the Light and Space Movement, an immaculate surface is a prerequisite. Helen Pashgian explained this very clearly:

“On any of these works, if there is a scratch... that’s all you see. The point of it is not the finish at all – the point is being able to interact with the piece, whether it is inside or outside, to see into it, to see through it, to relate to it in those ways. But that’s why we need to deal with the finish, so we can deal with the piece on a much deeper level”.

The importance of a pristine surface calls for a very low tolerance to damage by the artists. The feeling is shared by Larry Bell:

“I don’t want you to see stains on the glass. I don’t want you to see fingerprints on the glass... I don’t want you to see anything except the light that’s reflected, absorbed, or transmitted”

On a visit to the British Museum last week, Zihan Guo spotted this captivating relief in the Assyrian collection.

...I asked Hiroshi Kumamoto what's up with writing all over the artwork?

He replied:

The picture seems to be one of the panels in the NW palace of Nimrud. The inscription must be the so-called "Standard Inscription" which is repeated with little variation.

...Chinese officials, scholars, artists, and emperors did the same thing to the most famous art of their land.

Presumably, their imprimaturs (!) enhanced the value of the work.

All the unimportant details that matter the most—paying attention to these details are precisely what make Bokunatsu, from its backgrounds to the narrative itself, so plainly striking.

The backgrounds are complimented by the soundscapes. These are, in my opinion, the best part of the game.

Of all the characteristics of summer, it may be the sounds which I most associate with the season. I grew up in the rural south, and Bokunatsu manages to capture the droning sounds of summer in a way I’ve never experienced before in media.

At times, I’ve let the game run in the background just to listen to the soundscapes.

Your first thought is to just let the beauty score of song X be the average of all the users’ ratings. But on a moment’s reflection you realize the problem. Total beauty then equated with having broad appeal. By this metric, mainstream art is by definition always the best art. But you, having some obscure tastes, know that good art can be highly polarizing. Great art is often loved by a relatively small group of people and ignored (or even despised) by the rest. You’d like to discover masterpieces of this type as well.

So your second thought becomes to instead measure the beauty of a song by setting its beauty score equal the maximal rating that it gets by some user. But of course, this fails too. If a song gets enough listens, even if the song is junk, some weirdo is probably gonna rate it 10/10, so practically everything becomes maximally beautiful.

Hmm. Presumably we want something in between the first and the second proposal. Let’s consider the following. Pick a number N. Now collect the N ratings that are the highest and take the average over these. Let us call this N-beauty. Now, in case where N=1, you just get the measure proposed in the previous paragraph. For N=(total number of users on your platform), you get the average of all listener scores, as proposed first. But for N somewhere in between, something more interesting happens.

In the last half of Brosterman’s book...things really start to take off. Because that’s where he starts placing images of constructions or parquet work or sewing pages by unknown five-year-olds of the 1880s side by side with avant-garde masterpieces from the 1910s and 1920s—works by Albers and Mondrian and Kandinsky and Klee and Frank Lloyd Wright and Gropius and Le Corbusier and Buckminster Fuller—and you can hardly tell the difference.

And indeed, as Brosterman mines the biographies and memoirs and late-career interviews of all of these twentieth-century masters, it turns out that, in case after case, they had a hugely influential mother or uncle or neighbor who taught kindergarten, that they’d all attended kindergarten, and each one in his own way testified that the germ of his entire vocation had been planted in those kindergarten experiences

...What we are given to understand across Brosterman’s and now Wertheim’s and Kuhn’s work is nothing less than the way many of the greatest avant-garde breakthroughs of the twentieth century were being incubated in the kindergarten classrooms of the nineteenth.

I don't envision a very long life for myself.
Like, I think my life will run out before my work does, you know?
I've designed it that way.

The Basic Course was a general introduction to composition, color, materials, and three-dimensional form that familiarized students with techniques, concepts, and formal relationships considered fundamental to all visual expression, whether it be sculpture, metal work, painting, or lettering. The Basic Course developed an abstract and abstracting visual language that would provide a theoretical and practical basis for any artistic endeavor.

In this paper, we aim to answer a long-standing open problem in the programming languages community: is it possible to smear paint on the wall without creating valid Perl?

George Peter Lanyon (8 February 1918 – 31 August 1964) was a Cornish painter of landscapes leaning heavily towards abstraction. Combining abstract values with radical ideas about landscape and the figure, Lanyon navigated a course from Constructivism through Abstract Expressionism to a style close to Pop.

(we)bsite is a living collection of internet dreams from people like you, inhabitants of the internet. It aims to create space to hold, show, and uplift everyday visions and hopes for the internet.

Most AI images look like shit. AI “artists” are quick to lecture me that generative tools are improving every day and what they spit out won’t always look this way – I think that’s beside the point. What makes AI imagery so lousy isn’t the technology itself, but the cliché and superficial creative ambitions of those who use it. A video of a cyber-punk jellyfish or a collie in sunglasses on a skateboard generated by Open AI’s new video-to-text model Sora aren’t bad because the animals in them look unrealistic; they’re bad because they’re mind-numbingly stupid. AI image generation is essentially a truncated exercise in taste; a product of knowing which inputs and keywords to feed the image-mashup machine, and the eye to identify which outputs contain any semblance of artistry. All that is to say: AI itself can’t generate good taste for you.

Ma is a Japanese reading of a Sino-Japanese character, which is often used to refer to what is claimed to be a specific Japanese concept of negative space. In modern interpretations of traditional Japanese arts and culture, ma is taken to refer to an artistic interpretation of an empty space, often holding as much importance as the rest of an artwork and focusing the viewer on the intention of negative space in an art piece.

In college, I took a class called The Letters of Paul.

...I didn’t figure it was an especially practical course. It was for fun, for the challenge, for the cultural knowledge, for the pleasure of doing it.

The class turned out to be more or less “A Letter (singular) of Paul:” we spent the semester reading Paul’s letter to the Romans, at a rate of about 3 sentences per week. Per week! Why so slow? Because we read multiple translations of each of those sentences, and multiple commentaries on them, spanning many centuries — plus a bit of social and historical context. Slow, diligent, careful. And…

We asked, over and over: What do we think Paul was thinking, given that he chose those words? What do we think each translator and each commentator thought Paul was thinking? Why do we think they thought he was thinking that? Does it really make sense for Paul to have thought that? For us to think they thought he thought that? A theory of mind hall of mirrors!

At the heart of the course was this question: What can we learn about what other people are thinking, about their mental models of the world, by paying very careful attention to the words they use?

The great misinterpretation of twentieth-century art is the claim advanced that many people, especially critics, that cubism of necessity led to abstraction. But on the contrary, cubism was about the real world. It was an attempt to reclaim a territory for figuration, for depiction. Faced with the claim that photography had made figurative painting obsolete, the cubists performed an exquisite critique of photography; they showed that there were certain aspects of looking—basically the human reality of perception—that photography couldn't convey, and that you still needed the painter's hand and eye to convey them.

Taught that programming—or the worse "developing software"—is like a routine engineering activity, many find difficulty seeing writing as a model or even a metaphor for programming. Writing is creative, it is self-expression, it is art, which is to say it isn't a science and unlike science and engineering, it isn't a serious activity. Judgments like this, though, are easiest made by people who don't seriously engage in making both science and art. Art, engineering, and science are—in that order—part of a continuum of finding truth in the world and about ourselves.

Sitting there in the Whitney's coffee shop, Irwin pointed through the glass wall up at the play of shadows on a building facade across the street. "That the light strikes a certain wall at a particular time of day in a particular way and it's beautiful," he commented, "that, as far as I'm concerned, now fits all my criteria for art."

At the terminus of Irwin's trajectory, when all the nonessentials had been stripped away, came the core assertion that aesthetic perception itself was the pure subject of art. Art existed not in objects but in a way of seeing.

Oh no, someone used a checks notes digital art tool to win the checks notes digital art contest at the state fair, this is TEH END OF ART. Brief thread, since people have asked me to weigh in on this.

Irwin's terms of sudden, physical realization – bam! – call to mind the suddenly enlightening Zen slap or rap on the forehead. It also calls to mind [Philip Guston]'s own remark...

Look at any inspired painting...it's like a gong sounding; it puts you in a state of reverberation.

Reverberation is another way of suggesting a kind of sudden, energetic, physical experience.

To see with fresh, uninstructed eyes and an open mind requires a deliberate, self-aware act by the observer. Abstract artworks represent themselves and should be first viewed for themselves. When looking at outdoor abstract pieces, concentrate initially on the unique optical experience produced by the artworks. See as the artist saw when making the piece.

A focus on optical experience does not deny stories, it postpones them. Viewing an artwork may evoke interesting narratives – or just tedious artchat recalling similar art or artists, concocting playful tales, realizing how scrap metal was repurposed into art, making judgments about the artist's intentions or character, or contemplating an artwork's provenance, price, politics. Let the artwork stand on its own. Walk around fast and slow, be still, look and see from up down sideways close afar above below, enjoy the multiplicity of silhouettes shadows dapples clouds airspaces sun earth glowing. Your only language is vision.

Art is everything you don’t have to do.

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them. Note to the artist: when the medium fails conspicuously, and especially if it fails in new ways, the listener believes something is happening beyond its limits.

Philippe: Tell me, Driss, why are people interested in art?
Driss: It's all business , I guess.
Philippe: No. It's the trace of our passage on this earth.
Driss: Bullshit. For 50 euros, I'll do you a trace of my passage. I'll even add some blue!

How do we know what’s the right direction [for computers to take]?

Ultimately it comes down to taste. It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done, and then trying to bring those things in to what you’re doing.

Picasso had a saying: “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” And we (at Apple) have always been shameless about stealing great ideas. And I think part of what made Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to have been the best computer scientists in the world. But if it hasn’t been for computer science, these people would all be doing amazing things in life in other fields. And they brought with them — we all brought to this effort — a very liberal arts air, a very liberal arts attitude, that we wanted to pull in the best we saw in these other fields into ours.

The Stones of Venice is a three-volume treatise on Venetian art and architecture by English art historian John Ruskin, first published from 1851 to 1853.

The Stones of Venice examines Venetian architecture in detail, describing for example over eighty churches. Ruskin discusses architecture of Venice's Byzantine, Gothic, and Renaissance periods, and provides a general history of the city.

By making it possible for the photographer to observe his work and his subject simultaneously, and by removing most of the manipulative barriers between the photographer and the photograph, it is hoped that many of the satisfactions of working in the early arts can be brought to a new group of photographers. The process must be concealed from—non-existent for—the photographer, who by definition need think of the art in taking and not in making photographs. In short, all that should be necessary to get a good picture is to take a good picture, and our task is to make that possible.

The Macintosh team came to share Jobs's passion for making a great product, not just a profitable one. "Jobs thought of himself as an artist, and he encouraged the design team to think of ourselves that way too," said Hertzfeld. "The goal was never to beat the competition, or even to make a lot of money. It was the do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater." He once took the team to see an exhibit of Tiffany glass at the Metropolitan Museum in Manhattan because he believed they could learn from Louis Tiffany's example of creating great art that could be mass-produced. Recalled Bud Tribble, "We said to ourselves, 'Hey, if we're going to make things in our lives, we might as well make them beautiful.'"

Some time ago, a friend insisted that people should not listen to practicing architects or read what they write. According to him, the lack of logic in our discourse, the incongruity of our words, and the overzealousness in readings brought about by the biographical revision of our work were of little value.

In his book The Eyes of the Skin, Juhani Pallasmaa approaches it from the opposite direction, but ultimately gives the same advice:

The verbal statements of artists and architects should not usually be taken at their face value, as they often merely represent a conscious surface rationalization, or defense, that may well be in sharp contradiction to the deeper unconscious intentions giving the work its very life force.

At bedtime, I told my daughter how much I enjoy making art with her. She said, “me too, Daddy.” And then she asked an interesting question: Is it art if it wasn’t your idea? I was glad to answer “yes,” and explain to her why — that all art is a copy of something — though I wish I’d had the presence of mind to ask her a question beforehand, like, “If I drew a picture of you, would it be art?” My explanation was that all art is a response to something. Sometimes an artist will see a beautiful landscape and try to express that beauty with paint on canvas or by taking a photograph. It’s a copy, in a way, that becomes something else because it goes through the mind, heart, and hands of the artist. What it’s really a copy of — bearing in mind the limits of the word copy — is how the artist feels about what they saw. I remind her how different what we made was from Vogel’s piece, and that because we were limited in what we could do, it had to become something else.

Now that the DALL-E has been successfully midjourneyfied, it is becoming apparent that instead of simulating all possible ›styles‹, AI is fostering the emergence of a distinct visual style, born out of popular aesthetic preferences dominating platforms like DeviantArt.

One of the oldest and most deeply ingrained of Japanese attitudes to literary style holds that obvious structure is contrivance, that too orderly an exposition falsifies the ruminations of the heart, that the truest representation of the searching mind is just to 'follow the brush.'

Hecomi, as I call it, are cracks and fissures or broken off and damaged areas, created by natural forces, on man-made surfaces such as roads or walls. By looking only at their shape one can see that even hecomi, which have a bad image of being old and dirty, have various attractive characteristics such as surprising novelty, heartwarming charm and overwhelming power. This may be because the voice that arose right at the boundary between humans and nature was given a visible form. Also, they are reminiscent of shapes seen on maps or remind us of creatures. Sometimes one may feel a sense of familiarity towards them.

The world doesn’t make sense, so why should I paint pictures that do?

It seems to me that many printmakers are suffering under a delusion. Looking at current trends, it appears that recent prints are simply copying fine art and painting. Some printmakers are working in the nanga style of painting. Others are attempting to reproduce the effects of oil. Some cleverly contrived prints are often difficult to distinguish from paintings done with a brush. The question arises: Why are these printmakers working in the medium of woodblock printing at all?

For prints to follow in the footsteps of painting has very little meaning. The art of the brush and palette should be left to the brush and palette.

Monoskop is a wiki for the arts, media and humanities.

Normally after the design was built, you would find places for the art to be located and then you would go out and select the artist that you wanted. That is historically, the traditional way to go.

But this time, someone else was calling the shots. A planning official, basically, who comes along and says, “We want you guys to work with an artist.” And the architects are like, “Sure of course.” But then the official goes—“No, you don’t quite understand. We want you to use an artist as a co-equal member of the design team.” That is, the artists are going to have just as much control as the architects. It was really unheard of.

Robert MacFarlane writes “There is no lone tree language, but a forest of tree languages.”

In ABOUT TREES, Katie Holten invites us to enter some of these forests. She has created a Tree Alphabet and used it to translate a compendium of well known, loved, lost and new writing. She takes readers on a journey from ‘primeval atoms’ and cave paintings to the death of a 3,500 year-old cypress tree, from Tree Clocks in Mongolia and forest fragments in the Amazon to Emerson’s language of fossil poetry, unearthing a grove of beautiful stories along the way.

Everything points to the conclusion that the phrase 'the language of art' is more than a loose metaphor, that even to describe the visible world in images we need a developed system of schemata.

Experiences with great artworks deepen us in ways that are hard to describe. To have visited Chartres Cathedral or finished “The Brothers Karamazov” is not about acquiring new facts but to feel somehow elevated, enlarged, altered. In Rainer Maria Rilke’s novel “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” the protagonist notices that as he ages, he’s able to perceive life on a deeper level: “I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything penetrates more deeply into me and does not stop at the place where until now it always used to finish.”

...How does it work? How does culture do its thing? The shortest answer is that culture teaches us how to see. “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way,” the Victorian art critic John Ruskin wrote. “Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.”

Ruskin intuited something that neuroscience has since confirmed: Perception is not a simple and straightforward act. You don’t open your eyes and ears and record the data that floods in, the way in those old cameras light was recorded on film. Instead, perception is a creative act. You take what you’ve experienced during the whole course of your life, the models you’ve stored up in your head, and you apply them to help you interpret all the ambiguous data your senses pick up, to help you discern what really matters in a situation, what you desire, what you find admirable and what you find contemptible.

This sounds like a paradox, but a great painting has to be better than it has to be. For example, when Leonardo painted the portrait of Ginevra de Benci in the National Gallery, he put a juniper bush behind her head. In it he carefully painted each individual leaf. Many painters might have thought, this is just something to put in the background to frame her head. No one will look that closely at it.

Not Leonardo. How hard he worked on part of a painting didn't depend at all on how closely he expected anyone to look at it. He was like Michael Jordan. Relentless.

Relentlessness wins because, in the aggregate, unseen details become visible. When people walk by the portrait of Ginevra de Benci, their attention is often immediately arrested by it, even before they look at the label and notice that it says Leonardo da Vinci. All those unseen details combine to produce something that's just stunning, like a thousand barely audible voices all singing in tune.

Great software, likewise, requires a fanatical devotion to beauty. If you look inside good software, you find that parts no one is ever supposed to see are beautiful too.

It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.

There is a basic esthetic limitation on what can be done with cities: A city cannot be a work of art.

It is the artist who, more than other men, is able to create something out of nothing. A whole artistic work is immeasurably more than the sum of its parts.

“I mix it with two in my thought”; this is the statement of the fact of universal experience that the work of art has real existence apart from its translation into material form.

A specific type of metafiction in which the story is about the process of creation (sometimes the creation of the story itself).

The Chazen’s expansive two-building site holds the second-largest collection of art in Wisconsin, and is the largest collecting museum in the Big 10.

The object of art may be to seek the elimination of the necessity of it.

I do not listen to this kind of music for “fun” exactly, but to learn, to grow, and yes to be challenged. Good art can be challenging; the best art always challenges us, though not always in the same ways. Some books, some music, some poetry, is difficult merely for the sake of being difficult, and I have little positive to say about those works. Some art, though, is difficult because its subject matter demands it. Speaking truthfully — in verse or prose or harmonic structure — of the Son of God undergoing trial, crucifixion, death, and long lonely day in the tomb: this requires hard material to go with the hard matter at hand.

Not every work ought to be difficult. But some should.

AI or not, images should be given the same attention as text. Choose each visual carefully and place it in the right context. Don’t let AI do your job, use it as a tool. Ask yourself what your image means and how it adds to your message. This balance ensures both your words and visuals are powerful and meaningful. Images tell stories. Bad images tell lame stories. A good image tells a good story.

You can’t second-guess your own taste for what someone else is going to like. It won’t be good. We’re not smart enough to know what someone else will like. To make something and say, ‘well, I don’t really like it but I think this group of people will like it’, I think [that approach] is a bad way to play the game of music or art. Do what’s personal to you, take it as far you can go. Really push the boundaries and people will resonate with it if they are supposed to resonate with it. But you can’t get there the other way. The other way is a dead-end path.