▲Visual Arts▼

Amazing pictures!! - Sepi ⌘ سپی

"The new museum artfully traces his vivid path from ambitious provincial to renegade Parisian luminary to the political outcast he became in his final years. It also locates the artist securely within his native locale. One can glimpse from its windows the same chalky, limestone cliffs that Courbet painted with a palette knife and thick slabs of pigment. \\ In the aftermath of the French Commune (1871), the artist fell into disgrace. Implicated in the infamous destruction of the Vendome Column in Paris, Courbet was imprisoned. In the final galleries, Courbet's tragic last chapter is poignantly set forth. His "Self Portrait at St. Pélagie" (c. 1872), one of the true treasures given to Ornans by his sister, Juliette, depicts the artist in prison—emaciated, melancholic but still youthful and sporting the symbolic red scarf of a Communard." http://online.wsj.com/article... - Adriano

"While Picasso’s oeuvre technically falls outside of the Frick’s traditional exhibitions of Italian Renaissance, the exhibition draws parallels between the two. Not only does the showcase underscore parallels between Picasso’s work and his favorite later influences Paul Cézanne and Paul Gauguin, but Curator Susan Galassi explains in the accompanying catalog essay that Picasso may have attended the Old Master Drawings exhibition at the Louvre. Also on view in France at the time were the drawings of Jean-Auguste Dominque Ingres, which continued to inform Picasso’s work for many years." - Adriano

"Ses tableaux sur la mythologie grecque foisonnent et renvoient aux thèmes déjà repris par la Première Renaissance et le néo-classicisme, périodes qui ont influencé sa peinture, il a notamment abondamment traité des sujets allégoriques. De nombreuses scènes idylliques, champêtres et bucoliques constituent son répertoire. Entre toutes ses peintures, l'exclusivité revient à l'image de la femme, avec Cabanel, Gervex et Gérome son nom est associé au genre du nu académique. Sa Naissance de Vénus est emblématique, d'une peinture sensuelle profondément influencée par les vénus d'Ingres. Après le deuil qu'il subit en 1877 il se tourne vers une peinture à thème religieux et délaisse les thèmes en rapport avec l'Antiquité de ses débuts." - Adriano

"Born in Leipzig in 1960 (formerly of East Germany), Rauch experienced the turbulence of the Cold War and the reunification of Germany firsthand, the imagery of which thoroughly informs his work. While his style and approach remains firmly contemporary, the ghosts of communist Germany seem to float freely in and out of focus." - Adriano

"Collaborative duo Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla’s interdisciplinary body of work permeates the realms of sculpture, photography, video, social interventions, and performance, engaging with both art and activism. Now at Lisson Gallery in London is “Vieques Videos 2003–2010,” three video works addressing the island of Vieques, shown together for the first time. From 1941 until 2003 Vieques, an island off the coast of Puerto Rico, was occupied by the US Military and used as a weapons testing range. A grassroots civil disobedience campaign, led by inhabitants of Vieques, gained international support and led to the eventual evacuation of the military, though environmental and political concerns remain largely unresolved." - Adriano

Lagerfeld demonstrates how he works with the iPad, four iPhones, and a multitude of iPods -- from his mini-briefcase. He shows his sketch of Steve Jobs (and himself in real-time) made on the iPad which is used also for his designs and video shorts for commercials. Thoughts on fashion... fight banality! #karl #leweb - Adriano

"2011 in cinema could be called, with apologies to Joan Didion, the year of magical thinking. Many of the year’s best movies exalt the metaphysical, the fantastical, the transformative, the fourth-wall-breaking, or simply the impossible, and—remarkably—do so (following Didion’s theme) in response to loss, grief, mourning. These films depart from “reality” (or what is often offered up as such with a stern reproach to the ostensibly frivolous alternatives) not in order to forget the irrefutable but in order to face it, to think about it, to act on it more freely." - Adriano

"1. "The Future": Miranda July is the Marguerite Duras of 2011: she infuses her movie with literature in order to make it more truly cinematic, reveals a choreographic precision that evokes physical intimacy and remoteness better than any other film this year, bares her metaphysical strivings in order to explore her most practical and venal fears and desires, fulfills the promise of her film’s exquisite title." - Adriano

"Rooney Mara plays Lisbeth Salander in the new adaptation of Stieg Larsson's novel... [and] it changes the book’s ending, renders one of the two chief villains more creepy and seductive, and makes Mikael Blomkvist [Daniel Craig], a journalist who is one of the story’s two main characters, less of a male bimbo. That the movie also enlarges and deepens the role of the book’s other main character, Lisbeth Salander — an androgynous, punkish computer hacker with a photographic memory and a shortage of social skills — will probably come as welcome news to most fans of the Millennium trilogy, of which “Dragon Tattoo” is the first volume." - Adriano

"The two remaining novels, “The Girl Who Played With Fire” and “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” will be shot starting in the next year or year and a half, and if a messy dispute over the estate of Larsson, who died in 2004, can ever be resolved." NB - Swedish film adaptation of the trilogy already exists... where Noomi Rapace plays the role of Lisbeth Salander. - Adriano

1. The Clock, Christian Marclay \\ 2. The Chauvet Cave Paintings, in 3-D (Werner Herzog’s astounding Cave of Forgotten Dreams) \\ 3. “De Kooning: a ­Retrospective,” ­­ at MoMA ... - Adriano

"This year, the institution-­critiquing art known as Relational Aesthetics—essentially audience-participation art, often work that moves, lights up, or involves living nude beings—entered its decadent phase. Many museums are drawing audiences with art that is ostensibly more entertaining than stuff that just sits and invites contemplation. Interactivity, gizmos, eating, hanging out, things that make noise—all are now the norm, often edging out much else. [O]stensible populism masquerades as collectivity. All of it says that too many museums now equate happy crowds with quality and experimentation. These shows serve the museums, curators, and trustees. They no longer serve art. In fact, this sensationalism implies that many museums have now fallen behind art." - Adriano

"Neuroscience has yet to frame anything like an adequate biological or “naturalistic” account of human experience — of thought, perception, or consciousness. We really ought to say that it is the normally embodied, environmentally- and socially-situated human animal that thinks, feels, decides and is conscious. But once we say this, it would be simpler, and more accurate, to allow that it is people, not their brains, who think and feel and decide. It is people, not their brains, that make and enjoy art. You are not your brain, you are a living human being." cf. Francis Crick and his “astonishing hypothesis.” - Adriano

"An account of how the brain constrains our ability to perceive has no greater claim to being an account of our ability to perceive art than it has to being an account of how we perceive sports, or how we perceive the man across from us on the subway." - Adriano

The graphics grabbed my attention... - The Neurocritic

The Beautiful Brain gives a paragraph by paragraph response to Noë:http://thebeautifulbrain.com/2011... - The Neurocritic

"Bringing miniaturized samples of his outdoor pieces into the gallery, the exhibition features many of the TED prize winner's previous projects including Women are Heroes and Wrinkles in the City, along with works from his global tour in China, Africa and the Middle East." See also "Wall and Paper" in Miami, http://perrotin.com/exhibit... < 10 Dec 2011 - Adriano

"For the first time at the Guggenheim Museum, the exhibition is not mounted on its winding ramp; instead, Cattelan has designed a site-specific installation. Virtually everything created by the artist since 1989 dangles from the large oculus, chaotic and seemingly random. There are no labels or wall texts, only a large foldout map identifying the names and dates of each sculpture, with each turn up the ramp revealing new views and details." Must see video at http://www.guggenheim.org/new-yor... - Adriano

"Listening Post is an art installation that culls text fragments in real time from thousands of unrestricted Internet chat rooms, bulletin boards and other public forums. The texts are read (or sung) by a voice synthesizer, and simultaneously displayed across a suspended grid of more than two hundred small electronic screens." - Adriano

"An intriguing combination of programmers, artists, and philosophers, these creators embrace a process that delegates essential decisions to computers, data sets, or even random variables." Specific examples, https://friendfeed.com/search... - Adriano

cool screensaver... "It's run by thousands of people all over the world, and can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac [or Linux]. When these computers "sleep", the Electric Sheep comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as "sheep". Anyone watching one of these computers may vote for their favorite animations using the keyboard. The more popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a GENETIC ALGORITHM with mutation and cross-over. You can also design your own sheep and submit them to the gene pool. The result is a collective "android dream", blending man and machine to create an artificial lifeform." - Adriano

"Lt. John Pike, the U.C. Davis campus police officer who pepper-sprayed passive student protesters, is popping up in some of the world’s most famous paintings as part of an Internet meme intended to shame him for his actions. On Friday, Pike casually pepper-sprayed protesters in a video that quickly went viral. “The apparent absence of empathy from the police officer, applying a toxic chemical to humans as if they were garden pests, is shocking,” The Post’s Phil Kennicott wrote." Here's the defining photo at the actual scene: http://ff.im/OhHSc - Adriano

Lt Pike https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/-60c76r... - Amira

"Here are some images you may take a "shining" to: In 1946, a teenage Stanley Kubrick landed his first job, as a staff photographer for Look magazine in New York. For five years, the film-director-to-be chronicled the city and its characters, amassing approximately 12,000 black-and-white negatives that landed in the archives of the Museum of the City of New York. Twenty-five of those negs are being resurrected as fine-art prints by the museum and VandM, an online shop of rare and vintage goods. Among them is a shot of Kubrick himself with showgirl Rosemary Williams mid-primp." via WSJ, 19 Nov 2011 - Adriano

"The arrows have eaten into the tense, fragrant, youthful flesh and are about to consume his body from within with flames of supreme agony and ecstasy. But there is no flowing blood, nor yet the host of arrows seen in other pictures of Sebastian’s martyrdom. Instead, two lone arrows cast their tranquil and graceful shadows upon the smoothness of his skin, like the shadows of a bough falling upon a marble stairway." —from Confessions of a Mask (1958) by Yukio Mishima. - Adriano

A thriller that revolves around the key people at a investment bank over a 24-hour period during the early stages of the financial crisis circa 2008. With Kevin Spacey and Jeremy Irons. http://www.imdb.com/title... \\ Metacritic=76, a high score, given the poor state of cinema lately :( http://www.metacritic.com/browse... - Adriano

A paranoid mathematician searches for a key number that will unlock the universal patterns found in nature. http://www.imdb.com/title... Aronofsky's directorial debut earned him the Directing Award at the 1998 Sundance Film Festival. - Adriano

Another best of 2011... "Candid snapshot of a single day on planet Earth: 24 July 2010. Compiled from over 80,000 YouTube submissions by contributors in 192 countries, Life in a Day presents a microcosmic view of our daily experiences as a global society. From the mundane to the profound, everything has its place as we gain greater insight into the lives of people who may be more like us than we ever suspected, despite the fact that we're separated by incredible distances." - Adriano

"Walton Ford has been likened to 19th century naturalist John James Audubon for his realistic old-master style watercolors, but while the nine works on view now at Paul Kasmin may resemble Audubon in style, they go much further in content. Ford’s second series of watercolors is based on a passage from Audubon’s memoirs that Ford found particularly disturbing. In the passage (quoted in full on the exhibition’s web page), Audubon describes witnessing a full-grown monkey murder his pet parrot. “He certainly showed his supremacy in strength over the denizen of the air, for, walking deliberately and uprightly toward the poor bird, he at once killed it, with unnatural composure,” writes Audubon." - Adriano