Art Things

Banksy's 'Valentine's day mascara' mural freezer removed

Feb 2023, CNN Style

https://www.cnn.com/style/article/banksy-valentines-day-mascara/index.html

The mural shows a 1950s housewife with a swollen eye apparently pushing a man into an abandoned chest freezer, but the chest freezer was real, while the rest was painted on the wall. Then the freezer was stolen. So now the refrigerator is a work of art, in part, and art history is being re-written by the day. This was done for Valentine's Day, 2023.

Banksy: Artist confirms new London tree mural is his own work

Mar 2024, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-68596824

Islington Council said its graffiti removal team is aware of the artwork and won't remove it.

I'm not even sure how to say this without it coming out wrong, but like you know your society is fucked up when the people are so wholeheartedly supporting illegal activity:

Crowds have gathered to see the mural, with one local saying they were "proud" their street had been chosen.

"It feels like a personal message to us residents, we just feel so proud," said Wanja Sellers, who lives along the street from the mural.

I am left wondering if there is no such thing as public art anymore? Public anything? What happens when there's no more public assets (public art, public music, public space, public parks, public restrooms, public water fountains, public benches, public transit, public public)? People start making their own, illegally, and the rest of the people start supporting it. Please rewind to the movie Death Wish, when hoodlums used a spraycan to terrorize, vandalize, rape and murder a middle class architect and his family living on the Upper West Side of New York City in 1974. Graffiti, and the spraycan specifically, was the ultimate symbol of societal dysfunction, collapse even. It was the mark of the beast, the trumpet of the apocalypse. Today, well things are much different. (Then again, Angela Davis's afro was scary as hell to a lot of Americans and now it's a Halloween costume.)

Post Script: 

The council believes the cherry tree in the foreground of the artwork is around 40-50 years old and is in declining health, with decay and fungi damage. It says it has been maintaining and pruning the tree for some time - both for safety, and to help prolong its lifespan - and will continue working to keep the tree alive. A resident says "It's spring now, and this tree should be bursting forth with leaves, but Banksy must have cycled past and thought how miserable it looks."

Examining why egg yolk was used in Old Masters' oil paints

Mar 2023, phys.org

https://phys.org/news/2023-03-egg-yolk-masters-oil.html

The work involved creating two types of oil-based paints, both with yolk added. One mixture consisted of nothing but yolk and oil. The other had yolk, oil and pigments to add coloring. The team also created similar paints without using egg yolk. The group then used the paints to create paintings that could be used for testing purposes. Such tests included taking measurements of moisture amounts and movement, oxidation, time to dry and heat capacity.

• stronger bonding between pigment particles for stiffer paint
• reduced wrinkling of the paint to protect the paint against high humidity
• antioxidants in the yolk prevent yellowing
• more pigment to the oil to create more vivid images

via Institute for Mechanical Process Engineering and Mechanics at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, Department of Chemistry and Industrial Chemistry and at University of Pisa, Institute of Chemistry of Organo Metallic Compoundsin Pisa, and Doerner Institut in Munich: Ophélie Ranquet et al, A holistic view on the role of egg yolk in Old Masters' oil paints, Nature Communications (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41467-023-36859-5

https://dx.doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-36859-5

Louise dancing on her 60th birthday - art by Jillian Edelstein  for Breast Cancer Now in Gallery of Hope at London's Saatchi Gallery - Apr 2024

AI photos show people with secondary breast cancer their lost future

Apr 2024, BBC News

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-68609431

I'm sure there's a history for this, but I'm not familiar with it. People have been aware of their own impending death for a long time, not just because of advances in cancer diagnoses (the guy with the "black spot" in Treasure Island anyone?). And artists have been making shit up forever, it's kind of what they do. All that being said, wow this is bonkers -

Using AI and photos taken by renowned photographer Jillian Edelstein, the images make up the Gallery of Hope at London's Saatchi Gallery.

Louise Hudson, from Caldicot, Monmouthshire, is one of those who took part.

Now 58, she was first diagnosed with breast cancer in July 2022 which then spread to her liver. In February an MRI scan showed lesions on her brain and she was told she had a life expectancy of about six months.

Louise's image at the exhibition shows her celebrating her 60th birthday by performing with her amateur dance company Chelsea Ballet, while her husband of 30 years Barry looks on with pride.

Michel-Marie Carquillat - Joseph-Marie Jacquard woven in silk on a Jacquard loom, 55 x 34 cm - 1839 

The Most Famous Image in the Early History of Computing : History of Information

https://www.historyofinformation.com/

Just in case this gets lost in the oncominig artificial info wars and subsequent death of the internet, I copy here:

In 1839 weaver Michel-Marie Carquillat, working for the firm of Didier, Petit et Cie, in Lyon, France wove in fine silk a Portrait of Joseph-Marie Jacquard. The image, including caption and Carquillat’s name, taking credit for the weaving, measures 55 x 34 cm.; the full piece of silk including blank margins measures 85 x 66 cm.

This image, of which perhaps only about 20 examples survived, was woven on a Jacquard loom using 24,000 Jacquard cards, each of which had over 1000 hole positions. The process of mis en carte, or converting the image details to punched cards for the Jacquard mechanism, for this exceptionally large and detailed image, would have taken several workers many months, as the woven image convincingly portrays superfine elements such as a translucent curtain over glass window panes.

The Jacquard loom did no computation, and for that reason it was not a digital device in the way we think of digital today. However the method by which Jacquard stored information in punched cards by either punching a hole in s standardized space in a card or not punching a whole in that space is analogous to a zero or one or an on and off switch.

• The Jacquard method was used by Charles Babbage
• It confirmed the potential of using punched cards for the input, programming, output and storage of information in the design and conception of the first general-purpose programmable computer the Analytical Engine.
• It also challenged existing notions that machines were incapable of subtlety, and blurred the clear lines between industrial production and the arts. 
• See Swade, The Cogwheel Brain. Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer. 2000. 107-8.
• More than once this woven image was mistaken for an engraved image.
• In 2012 the only publically recorded examples were those in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Science Museum in London, The Art Institute of Chicago, and the Computer History Museum, Mountain View, California.
• The image was the subject of the book by James Essinger entitled, Jacquard's Web. How a Hand Loom led to the Birth of the Information Age (2004).

Just the Facts

Using math to study paintings to learn more about the evolution of art history

Oct 2020, phys.org

https://techxplore.com/news/2020-10-math-evolution-art-history.html

Here's a great description of how the program works:

The work involved digitally scanning 14,912 paintings—all of which (except for two) were painted by Western artists. The data for each of the paintings was then sent through a mathematical algorithm that drew partitions on the digital images based on contrasting colors. The researchers ran the algorithm on each painting multiple times, each time creating more partitions. As an example, the first run of the algorithm might have simply created two partitions on a painting—everything on land, and everything in the sky. The second might have split the land into buildings in one partition and farmland in another.

-Bob Yirka, phys.org

Conclusions? The horizon line has gone up since the 17th century (from halfway to one-third), and using two horizon lines became more common over time, and abstract art isn't compositionally biased to either the horizontal or the vertical. They also have less large-scale partitions. Think Pollock's drip-paintings and allover De Koonings). They call it lack of macroscopic structure. Also, all this transcends nationality. Doesn't matter where you're from, we're all sipping the same juice.

They also note however that the trends they see could also be a curatorial thing, where the dataset they're using, large as it is, was chosen by someone to be in each book they used, hence their collective bias.

Image credit: My favorite horizon line of all time -- Piet Mondrian, Dune Landscape, 1911

Notes:

Byunghwee Lee et al. Dissecting landscape art history with information theory, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2020). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2011927117

Agamemnon's Mask

The Mask of Agamemnon represents one of the greatest discoveries of modern times, as it verified that the Trojan War recounted in the Iliad actually happened.

German archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann found the mask in 1876. He was an amateur archaeologist fascinated with ancient times and convinced he knew where the city of Troy was located. He took his life's fortune made in the import/export business and set for Troy, and found it. And it turned the Troy of Homer's Iliad from legend into history.

Although the way the mask was found is a great story, the truth is always the best.

Science later found that the mask was 300 years older than previously thought.

The general public, or general population, was so overcome with elation at the discovery of all this that once the true owner of the mask was revealed (by science, years later) they simply decided, en masse, that they would continue to call it the mask of Agamemnon.


Despite the findings of science, the public continues to call it the Mask of Denial, I mean the Mask of Agamemnon.

Art and AI

Frederic Bazille’s Studio 9 Rue de la Condamine (1870) and Norman Rockwell’s Shuffleton’s Barber Shop (1950)

When A Machine Learning Algorithm Studied Fine Art Paintings, It Saw Things Art Historians Had Never Noticed
The Physics arXiv Blog via Medium, Aug 2014
Source document: Toward Automated Discovery of Artistic Influence

There's some stirring in the dusty world of art history, with the rise of encultured robots threatening human livelihoods. A promising young algorithm is set upon the world, fed with centuries of art imagery, design principles, and historical documentation. Our little algorithm then grows up and learns how to identify patterns in the art world better than its teacher.

In the two compared images above, this little art-historian algo recognized similar compositional patterns that had never been seen before - a hidden Norman Rockwell, see above.

First of all, as an art history major in college, I look at all the compared/related images discovered by the AI, and I am not so impressed. Maybe the general concept is what fails to impress me. When you follow the art world long enough you get to know something about how influence works, and about the power that one thing can have on an artist's work. And I say that there is no such thing as one thing.

The nature of the artist is to take the world at large, a fuck-tonnery of pre-filtered miasma, and to make sense, or at least to fight with it in a way that leaves a record of the battle, and for the benefit of humankind. To say that one painting influenced another because they have similar stylistic elements or design principles is kind of silly. I do understand that subconscious influence has its way with the creative process. But that refers to life as well as art. The new style checker cab, or Triangle shirtwaists, or bubble tea or middle-hipster Americana folk music or The Beatles or African masks or even syphilis could influence an artists' work.

Charge of the Lancers - Umberto Boccioni - 1915

Take ^Futurism, for example. It is inspired by, among other things, the fragmentation of society, be it from national upheaval circa the World Wars, or from the way the landscape looks while riding a speeding train which propelled people faster past the countryside than they had ever moved before. How does an algorithm find that?

I heard Picasso's mistress Françoise Gilot, in her bio of Pable Picasso, say some of his lobster paintings were a response to her hard-shelled personality which came to a head prior to their separation. Algorithms can see that? Nah man.

I know someone can come on here and argue with me, successfully, that artists do influence each other in simple visual ways, and at times, the visual connections can supplement a lack of historical data surrounding their work. But still, there is a need for socio-biographical data in all this, and I wonder if our little algo could be even better trained.

Now, all this having been said, I just finished watching this: Davos talk about the future of artificial intelligence, with IBM CEO Ginni Rommetti. She says that the goal of IBM's artificial intelligence (Watson, by the way, in case you forgot) is to extend human faculties, not replace them. According to her premonitions, the art historian is not doomed, rather it will be enriched and extended by our algorithmic overlords.

Architrays

Architecture inspired concrete desk accessories - The Islam. 

The artist/teacher/architect/art historian in me is really excited about this project that recently debuted - Architrays are an art history lesson in the form of indulgent decoration. These concrete trays are designed and fabricated by 7thFl, an industrial design duo (from the New Jersey Institute of Technology, same place I spent a good 5 years of my life learning about sustainable design). Each tray they make represents a historical period of architecture, from Gothic to Roman to the Islam tray pictured above. When it comes to geometric design, Islam knows what's up.

Here you see an example of how this kind of design is developed from a very simple algorithm, genius in its simplicity. You start with a circle, then you draw another circle so that its center lies anywhere on the first circle. Then you draw a third circle, again so that its center lies on the first circle, BUT so that the center of all three circles now make an equilateral triangle with 60 degree angles.

If you repeat this pattern all around the first circle, you get a hexagon. Look at the points of the image in the upper left, and see that they can make equilateral triangles and a hexagon. This is the starting point for the most complex, most beautiful of patterns.  And this is the theme cast into concrete by 7thFl for their Islamic Architray. In other words, these 'architrays' are a beautiful reminder of a rich history of art, design, and architecture. Check it out