The Skill of Composition

One of the skills a good artist should develop is that of composition. This is how a BBC TV show called "Sketch Club" attempted to present it in 1957.

Can Joy Exist without Sadness?

Can Joy Exist Without Sadness by Michael Smith on Scribd

The limitations of Language in Art

Stanley Kubrick: "There are certain areas of feeling and reality—or unreality or innermost yearning, whatever you want to call it—which are notably inaccessible to words. Music can get into these areas. Painting can get into them. Non-verbal forms of expression can. But words are a terrible strait jacket."

Art and the Artist

Art and the Artist by Michael Smith on Scribd

Phoney Art ('Phart')

The Scotsman today reported the story of two students who placed a pineapple on a table in an art gallery which was then mistaken for an exhibit. Ruairi Gray and friend Lloyd Jack put the fruit on display at Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, and later returned to find it displayed in a glass case.

Squiggle Birds

David Hockney on Conceptual Art

I've posted before about the thoughts of artist David Hockney on the work of Damien Hirst. In this article he elaborates on his belief that our modern obsession with conceptual art is leading us to lose sight of ... art.

Hockney on Modern Art

The Changing Face of Art over 500 Years

Banksy

Art vs. Telly

Rubbish Artwork

Cleaner Throws Out Artwork

Is There Beauty in Mathematics?

Beauty in Mathematics

Is a Photorealistic Drawing Really Art?

Philosophy Postcards

As tweeted by Richard van de Lagemaat on his TOK Tweet this week, here is a series of images by graphic designer Genís Carrerasin in which he uses simple images to describe many philosophical concepts covered in TOK. In describing his work, Carrerasin says “I wanted to make philosophy look better, to feel more contemporary and relevant. For me shapes and colors are a way to communicate, a way that can break through language and age barriers. As a graphic designer, this is the only way I knew.”

Best viewed full screen in order to make out the written definitions.

Tok postcards from Michael Smith

The World's Smallest Movie

Researchers at IBM have created an stop-motion animation using individual carbon atoms as pixels. The atoms were moved around between frames using a scanning tunneling microscope.

Perception and Art

Eric Kandel (born November 7, 1929) is an American neuropsychiatrist. He specialises in research into the nature of memory, for which he received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 2000. Here he talks about the links between art, perception, emotion and biology:

The Art of Photography

Joel Meyerowitz (born March, 1938) is a New York street, portrait and landscape photographer. He began his career in 1962 and was an early advocate of the use of color photography at a time when there was significant resistance to it acceptance as serious art.
Here he talks about photography as an art form:

Vandalising Art

Last week a man strolled into the Tate Modern Gallery in London and wrote a message (including his name) on a Mark Rothko painting. Vladamir Umanets is now waiting to be arrested, but in the meantime has contacted the BBC to explain his actions. He claims to be the founder of a new art movement which he calls 'yellowism'. He says he was making an artistic statement, and (comparing himself to Marcel Duchamp) that "Art allows us to take what someone's done and put a new message on it."

A BBC article that I read related to this story shows that it is not unusual for great works of art to be targeted by people usually intent on making either artistic or political statements. One of the most famous instances (although by no means the first) occurred at the Tate Gallery in 2000 when two performance artists, Yuan Chai and Jian Jun Xi, jumped onto Tracey Emin's Bed in their underpants and began a pillow fight, to applause from onlookers, before being removed by the gallery's security guards. They called their work Two Naked Men Jump Into Tracey's Bed.
Vandalism of Art

The Power of Shakespeare

Robben Island lies 6.9 km west of the coast of Cape Town, South Africa. It has been used to jail political prisoners since the seventeenth century and it was there that Nobel laureate and former President of South Africa, Nelson Mandela, was imprisoned for 27 years (together with many other opponents of apartheid).

I listened to a BBC podcast recently (see below) which told the story of a copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, belonging to one of the prisoners, Sonny Venkatrathnam.



He disguised it as a religious book by decorating it with pictures of Hindu gods in order to avoid it being confiscated by prison guards (inmates were allowed to keep only religious texts), and it became known, somewhat spuriously, as The Robben Island Bible. As he served his sentence, between 1972 and 1978, Venkatrathnam passed the book between the inmates and they signed their names next to their favourite passages.

This has been seen as a vindication the power of Shakespeare (and language) and the book has been hailed as a modern icon, not least by the British Museum which is displaying it as part of its exhibition, Shakespeare: Staging the World.

It is very poignant to read the passage highlighted by Mandela (from Julius Caesar), knowing in hindsight that he would leave prison, unbroken, to become president of his country. At the time, he, himself, might have expected to die on Robben Island, and there was no prospect of release. However, I have also read comments from a number of his fellow prisoners (including some high ranking members of the African National Congress) who don't regard the book as iconic (as reported in the Toronto Star below). Some of those who signed it saw it merely as a 'study aid', and it is perhaps understandable that some apartheid prisoners failed to develop a deep reverence for these pieces of European literature.
Robben Island Bible

Fountain

I saw this piece of art at the Tate Gallery, Liverpool, UK this week, and failed to be really blown away by it.

Despite the fact that it is now accepted as one of the most influential pieces of art of the twentieth century (and the first piece of conceptual art), the original was lost soon after it was originally exhibited in 1917 and there are now only a few copies in art collections in galleries around the world. These were officially sanctioned by the artist, Marcel Duchamp, in the 1960s.

The Liverpool Tate made an interesting study recently by exhibiting some of their most famous acquisitions in public places around the city. Fountain, for example, was shown in a public toilet. Here is a short film which explores the reactions of some local people to it:


The Fountain