Curatorialist

Lucky enough to have just returned from a great trip to Paris, my head is in an art history kind of place. Something dawned on me on this trip that I hadn’t really considered before – the important role of the Realists. I realized on this trip that I have an extremely simple view of art history. It breaks down into two distinct macro-movements for me: External Representation and Artist’s Impression. Everything before Realism sought, in some way, to reflect something outside ourselves: from animals to humans to stories, allegories and religion, this is the world outside people, represented. Post Realism, art began to take a different look. All of the sudden, it was the artist’s “impression” of the world that showed up on canvases and we have been on that trajectory ever since. Although an over-simplification of art history, it maybe says something that the two major museums of Paris (Louvre and D’Orsay) divide up art at exactly the point where art shifted from one to the other. That point was Realism.

Courbet is significant, in that regard, because he was the quintessential, and perhaps pioneering, artist/rebel. His desire to portray life as it really is was a major break from the uppity art snobs of the day and his rejection from the mainstream only spurred him on more. You could call him the first folk artist, in fact. And, in my opinion, he deserves more credit in the history of art than he gets. In particular, I think his contribution to art far exceeds, say, Picasso’s. But I’m sure I’m relatively alone in that view. Picasso is a whole other ball of wax.

When Courbet painted “A Burial at Ormans,” well known as the beginnings of Realism, Auguste Rodin was 9 or 10 years old. Exactly the years he started drawing. Only 4 years later, he’d be enrolled in art school and was considered a child prodigy. He, of course, was well aware of the Realists, but also reverential to Romanticism and what was still the more accepted art of his time. His temperament was different; less of a rebel, he did seek to bring his own sense of realism to sculpture, but he tried in much more earnestness to bridge the gap between old school and new school. And despite dealing with his own rejections from the Salon, in his lifetime he won over all critics.

The thought that kept going through my mind at the Museé Rodin was, “What if the future of art hinged more on Rodin than Courbet?” Rodin was a sculptor, though. Sculptors belong to their own long history that sits alongside, but just outside, the world of fine art. Sort of like motorcycles to cars. When discussing Rodin’s place in art, it is more likely to hear about sculptors from the 4th Century BC or Michelangelo than any of his contemporaries. That’s too bad. It seems to me that if you look at that first arc of art, according to my own view of it, External Representationalists, it never really peaked. What Courbet, or one of his contemporaries, should have done (if I may be so bold) is to have taken Realism to its natural end – to really capture the essence of another being. It stopped just short of that, choosing instead to make it political and, therefore, about real situations, not real people. It never got personal. Not Daumier, not Millet, not Whistler… and then, boom, it’s off to Impressionism. But Rodin…

Rodin studied the human form. I mean really studied it. Multiple sketches, paintings, maquettes, even whole sculptures of different sizes and expressions… all to get just the right one. Balzac, alone, took seven years. He worked on The Gates of Hell for 37 years, up until his death, and was never fully completed. All in the effort to accurately capture each and every form. To translate the human condition through an accurate depiction of flesh, muscle, bone, expression and the language of the body. He’s known for all that, sure, but in a vacuum, really. I am in love with art and have nothing but respect for modern artists, but I also think that if there is a way to express the inner mind of an artist, it has been done. We have had a good 100+ years of what amounts to not a whole lot more than a lot of really talented artists’ impressions of the world. I just can’t help but wonder what kind of more important place we might have ended up in had Rodin been the guy who took art into the 20th Century and beyond? Imagine a hundred years of artists thinking about the true essence of others, instead of just themselves. Worth considering.

Liu Bolin is the kind of artist who makes the kind of art that sort of demands you pass it along. It begs to be shared. It has an immediacy to it. Arresting from the moment you look upon it. And, like all great art, breaks through that initial impact to deliver something deeper than what you expected.

At first look, you get an astonishing trompe l’oeil, difficult to make out where surroundings end and the artist begins. He plays with colors, textures, imagery and anything else he can manipulate to make it apparent that this is a photo of him, but that he is inextricable from his environment. Points just for making something arresting and new. In this day of icons, logos and headlines, standing out in this kind of fashion is a feat in and of itself.

At second read, though, we’re looking at an artist making a statement about the world, about his place in society, about being overlooked, ignored and/or undefined. Symbolic gestures like these should reach you somewhere profound in your body because the notion is very human. He is depicting what it’s like, not just in China, but anywhere, everywhere. We all have one foot in the desire to stand out and be noticed, and another foot somewhere hidden, behind statues and other people, in walls and blended into the world.

Learn more about Liu Bolin here.

This is something I’ve been wanting to do on here for a long time, but hadn’t gotten around to. I was reminded, looking at that video of Marcel Duchamp that I posted last week – the music, the clothing, the film, the editing, even the way he talks; the turns of phrase, word choices and discussion points all hint at a world completely different than ours now. It’s a fantastic voyage in time and one we don’t take enough advantage of. This kind of video exists in droves, it’s just a part of a massive archive that can be pulled, but is rarely pushed. Maybe that’s where I can come in.

I am going to start curating videos that capture/curates a great time in history. We’ll call it, “Time Machine.” This one is Chicago, circa 1948 (you’re welcome, Chuck). Besides the cars, the suits, the trains and countless other gorgeous remnants of a bygone era, it marks a momentous time in America’s history of success. These are the glory days of Chicago, post 20’s Gangster Era, but they are America’s glory days, too. Just prior to this video, Chicago housed the “great migration” of Southerners, looking for work and the city flourished as a center for Jazz, architecture, fine living and much more. My grandparents (always the picture of success) met and married in Chicago, in 1928. My grandfather looked like a gangster, actually, and my grandmother was a beautiful, successful dancer and although they left for Los Angeles by 1930. But this great city, depicted in this video, is the one they made.

I’m also taken by the writing of this tour. It’s selling the city, sure, but in a voice you don’t hear anymore. It’s verging on poetic. In fact, at one point, the narrator just gently recalls a Henry Austin Dobson poem:

“TIME goes, you say? Ah no!

Alas, Time stays, we go.”

How true. Enjoy.

It’s funny. With advertisers leaving magazines these days, I am reminded of the Renaissance. That’s actually not funny, everything reminds me of the Renaissance. If you recall from history class, it went: Middle Ages, Black Plague, Renaissance. Some say that the plague left people thinking about their own mortality, empathetic to the human plight and that set the stage for more humanistic movements in art and patrons with the hearts to fund it. We might be in that Black Plague right now.

Nobody seems to be making this connection, but both music and magazines are both artistic expressions that have relied on some kind of business arrangement. As those arrangements and our economic structure unravel, the art just might be getting to a better place. The next stage very well could be patronage, especially if the art gets very good and reaches some kind of new height of personal expression.

This new book out, “We Make Magazines,” highlights a number of independent magazines who are doing their thing outside the mainstream. No coincidence that the sub-title of the book is “Inside the Independents” and that you could very well put that line underneath many of the new venues for music and film, as well. People are doing it on their own these days and, since the tools are all at our disposal, we simply don’t need the business to get published. And the decisions are, therefore, all our own. When you have a job working for someone else, you make what you make according to their vision. This is the draw of independent _____-making, be it film, music, magazines or whatever. We make whatever we want, according to our own vision. It’s a great time to be an artist, but what will you make? What is the new renaissance about? How will you be part of it?

More info on the book here.

You either start loving cars really early, or most likely you never really get that obsessed over them. I was an early obsessor: Matchbox to kit cars to remote controls to, eventually, my first car. A Dodge Dart. It was a hand-me-down, but it was mine. I came across this emblem and it took me back, not just to my first car, but to a day when car badges weren’t so squared off and corporate. These guys had verve. Panache. Style.

Take a trip down Highway Awesome over at this guy’s Flickr page of Cool.

Like everyone, I have a special place in my heart for Duchamp. I simply love his story, love his character, love his role in art history. He was a joker, a chess player, a true lover of art, imagery and critical thinking. He also loved Cezanne and was influenced heavily by him in his seminal days and that, to me, is the sign of someone who has art inside. To truly love Cezanne is to truly love fine art. And Duchamp did both, in spades – even if he remained very non-reverential of art to his last day. And wasn’t that really his gift?

Strangely, despite all that, I never really adored Duchamp’s work. He tried Impressionism, he tried Cubism and none of it really was as good as the major artists of those movements. And for the movement that he did start, my personal taste was for what happened later on with it, even though I know he paved that road. That is neither here nor there, though. What is here and there is that Duchamp changed the course of art history and few people in the world can lay claim to that. He understood what was so great about Impressionism and Cubism and he honored it by moving it forward into the next place it could go. I love how artists work like this over time, like relay racers, each with their particular leg of the race to run, handing off batons to each other to propel the entire world forward.

I really enjoyed finding this video of him describing himself. It has a bit of an off-kilter feel to it in the pacing and music, but also in the cut and paste style of the dialogue. Despite that, the video is filled with life and does a not-bad job of capturing a bit of his spirit, and it was inspiring to me to watch this and consider all that he contibuted.

This image is super arresting. I think it is a woman in the throws of some kind of palsy or tantrum. I downloaded it a few days ago and can’t stop looking at it. A person struggling with inner demons is just a delicate place that we all skate on the surface of. Well, one of us does.

“Thirst for knowledge.” That actually turns out to be completely true, studies prove it. The human (and other animal) brain signal the body to release a stimulant as a reward for learning. Pinker’s “if you were to design a being, you’d give it the same qualities” math applies here, too – a system that rewards continued learning, guessing, probing and speculation keeps a species safe from predators. In the end, perhaps, it is not a thirst for knowledge so much as a love of life, but at least I feel a little better about my 2 hour jaunts on Wikipedia. This is life or death, ppl!

Here’s an excerpt:

“Dopamine neurons are thought to be involved in learning about rewards – by adjusting the connections between other neurons, they “teach” the brain to seek basic rewards like food and water. Bromberg-Martin and Hikosaka think that these neurons also teach the brain to seek out information so that their activity becomes a sort of “common currency” that governs both basic needs and a quest for knowledge.”

Read more here.

The best math class I ever took was the very last math class I ever took: Statistics. That was 1987. I remember remarking that if math had been this interesting in High School, I might actually have enjoyed it. And who KNOWS what would have happened to me if I had enjoyed math. But math was horrendously boring in my high school and I couldn’t see the magic in it, despite teachers who tried to speak of it romantically. In practice, they crammed formulas down our throats and lost us with ugly overhead projections and grease pens.

By college, I had sworn that I would be done with math as soon as humanly possible and Statistics was my random sampled swan song of choice. From there on out, I would concentrate on only things that had pictures. But in that class, I discovered something interesting – math can tell a story. The single moment that opened my mind (I can remember the classroom, I can even remember what seat I was in ) was the day the professor explained the fallacy of the phrase “3 out of 5 dentists recommend.”  “Which 5 dentists?” He asked. It was like the sound of one hand clapping. The class, for me, became a study in skepticism. Numbers never lie, but numbers can be used by liars, to tell lies. To this day, anyone who tells me something is a “fact” is immediately suspect. If you listen to Steven Pinker speak (from my earlier post), you see that he hardly ever uses “facts” and yet he is so clearly knowledgeable. Reason, I have found, is much better than math, in almost every instance.

Over the last few years, though, there has been a merging of math and reason, and it has happened through a technique known as “data visualization.” A quick sequence of events has lead us to a very interesting place in history, where we can now “see” math. The metaphorical operating system (desktop, folders, etc.) introduced us to this notion that code could be translated into something more humanly accessible. Then an important thing happened: the evolution of interface design merged with the evolution of the database. This was most prevalent in Website design, where engineers and designers worked side-by-side with each other, merging their talents to create online business solutions for people. One of the major discoveries during this time was the activity of “tagging,” which, in essence, was people filling up databases themselves. Imagine one guy at Flickr putting tags on photos as opposed the current practice of people putting tags on the photos themselves. Same with Facebook. Information started streaming in. Now, all of the sudden, we have a generation of people who are adept and trained to fill out database questions: from logins and passwords to cities and friends’ names to preferences and personal information. And we are starting to discover exactly how interesting math can actually be.

It used to be that visualizing data was was Excel did – you fill in the database and then it spits out a pie chart. Now, though, people are finding newer and more exciting ways of showing data visualized. Perhaps you’ve seen The Visual Thesaurus. Or tag clouds a sites like TwitScoop. Check out this site that maps Renaissance artists and writers on a timeline, as well as an overlay on Google Maps. During all the talk about “earmarks” in the debates, I used this website to get a better idea of what’s really going on, all done through data visualization. Or this guy, who has decided to log just about every activity in his life and rather than create a new kind of visualization mechanism, has just cleaned up the old one in kind of a fascinating way.  And we’re using it in marketing all the time, from Sprint’s “Now Network” Website, to our own “Health Footprint Calculator” for Anthem. And this site gives a whole overview of different data visualization techniques. A macro of the macro.

If I were teaching a math class in High School today, I would be teaching kids with these tools. Sure, the building blocks of basic arithmetic is necessary, but geometry, algebra, trigonometry and calculus are probably not the right set of tools for today’s little minds. Many of those math languages are as dead as Latin in terms of their importance in the actual application of math in most of the world. The excuse that schools use is that the process of learning formulas, equations and proofs creates great minds – I challenge that notion. The best applications of math are happening in the fieds of data strategy and programming. Let’s flip the math on math and assume that the greatest impetus for a great mind is excitement. I don’t have stats to prove that, but it sure stands to reason.

There is a 3-DVD program on the “Genius of Darwin” that came out last year and, thankfully, someone has posted up the uncut interview with Steven Pinker, my pick for smartest man alive. I’ve read two of his books: “How the Mind Works” and “The Language Instinct” which are such amazingly straight forward and sensical looks at the human brain that it becomes immediately difficult to think about ourselves any differently than how he lays it out. Much of the thinking of both books are laid out in this video.

This is over an hour of footage and has a hard time competing with more entertaining uses of time, like a Michael Mann video essay for example, but if you have any kind of interest in human evolution, psychology, biology, linguistics or the human brain then this will be immensely interesting to you.