One of the things that made seeing this painting a valuable experience for me was the plentiful background material it was shown next to… drawings, paintings, sketches etc. it showed the depth of creative process that Picasso employed.
One thing I have not seen discussed here is the fact that this painting was commissioned by the (Spanish) Republican government. Effectively, there is a degree of propaganda to the painting. No shade on the guy… my other favorite war crime painting is the executions of the third of may by Goya, and it was also a political commission.
In Madrid’s military museum there is a little known painting done as a right wing responce to Guernica - The Paracuellos Massacres" (Las matanzas de Paracuellos) by José Gutiérrez Solana. The subject is the massacre of Spanish civilians by the Republican forces. It is almost as large as Guernica and done in a realistic style. As an obscure counterpoint to Guernica it has a curiosity value. It borrows heavily from the magnificent Executions of the Fifth May by Goya. Btw… All three paintings were commissioned as political statements. I remember seeing all three in one day when I was a young art student. A decidedly odd experience.
Good point - our understanding of this time period has been clouded by knee-jerk hatred, with few willing to admit that there was violence on all sides. It takes bravery to admit that a proportionate and measured response was warranted (within the bounds of international rule of law and order), given the pressures and incentives that communists were putting on Franco.
I teach design and art and routinely supervise photo projects. The low level of expectation that even the best students have of color editing amazes me. Few can think further than brightness/contrast adjustments. Lightroom is seen as the pinnacle yet its hue tools are beyond dreadful. The hue curves in DaVinci are pretty much the only act in town for sophisticated hue adjustments.
> it's rare for photographers to use scopes for color
True, but that is there loss. A scope is a visualization of the color properties of a photo and any problem-solving individual should value visualization highly. I am certain that Rembrandt would have murdered to get his hands of a histogram.
> I'm looking for something novel and interesting, that isn't absolutely crowded that I could meaningfully contribute to.
I would say that a hobby is a bit like a fetish in that it is derived from our interior psychology. My father’s hobby was repairing old scientific instruments, which was perfectly suited to his disposition for quantifying everything in his life, including his family (bless you dad).
The most available lidar is found on your iPhone, but the results are orders of magnitude less detailed than that derived from photogrammetry. How ever an advantage is that lidar is not confused by reflections.
Huh? LIDAR absolutely is confused by reflections. Not always the reflections you can see (because often it’s using IR wavelengths) but nonetheless, reflections.
I wrote some teaching material on the rise and fall off Palm for which I produced a graphic showing how the palm split and merged over the years. Quite honestly it's one of the most complex and insane graphics i have ever made.
One early tool in this space was Navipress (which AOL bought out and made into AOLpress) which is notable for having been used by a certain Tim Berners-Lee to write a book:
Artist speaking. A similar scheme was employed by Holland for many years. The state committed to buy at least one artwork from each artist per year and predictably their warehouses became filled with crap art that no one wanted.
That being said, wise governments recognize the value of some kind of support of the arts. One reason for the incredible esteem that Korean culture is held in within Asia is the Korean government's active support of its filmmaking, TV and music industry. This was also true in Renaissance Italy (courtesy of the Medici family) and in 17th Century France (courtesy of Louis XIV). It was even true of the CIA's active support of abstract expressionism. The payoff of such support is soft power, which is a very real force.
Even in the US we see cities becoming desirable place to live when they successfully cultivate a film scene, or an art school, and being dead when they don't. But this feels like a better approach than a basic income (which is an invitation to idleness)--make it easy to use the environs for film, streamline permitting, provide cheap capital, solicit locals for public installations.
Through the kunstuitleen they leased and sold art to galleries and private homes. It was like a library for contemporary art which paid struggling artists and their families, while also exposing the public to more art.
To say that "no one wanted" is a massively overblown. Thousands of art pieces lived happily in many Dutch homes.
OK, maybe my use of that phrase was a bit ill-judged. However, aside from supporting artists, what did the initiative achieve? Keeping artists off the dole should not be, IMHO, a goal in itself. The reputation of Dutch culture at the time was not brilliant, though neither was it bad. A strategic attitude would have been more effective... maybe target one or two artists and promote them.
The Young British Artists (YBA) boom of the 80s was a product of the innovative teaching environment of Goldsmiths' college plus the drive of people like Damien Hirst, who organized the ground-breaking Freeze exhibition. The British Council did their best to capitalize on this.
but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health... what have the Romans ever done for us?
I used to live next to Borough market and saw it devolve from a genuine working class market to a chi-chi hive. The old pie and mash shop was replaced by offices and high-end trinket shops, as were all the other old-school business. It was like watching someone you love being embalmed whilst still alive. I now live in Asia where the market tradition are still vivid and alive.
Eh I live in the UK (wasn't born here) and I think they hold onto too much for too long here. How many "examples of a Victorian house" do you really need?
Japan is a perfect example of picking and choosing, keeping the very important things and building new things everywhere else.
How long will the UK keep all of these decrepit buildings? 100 more years? 1000? 10000?
And what a loss to history, in trying to keep "the good old days" alive that you don't allow current and future generations to also leave a mark in history, as if one era is more significant than the other.
Thats my only real gripe with the culture here. Too much looking back and not enough looking forward.
To a degree you have a point. Indeed, this is exactly one of the points of attraction that Asia holds for me. Anecdote: my Japanese girl friend showed me a bunch of Japanese coins. I thought they were cool and asked if I could have one. She agreed and I selected the oldest, to which her response was 'that so British'.
However.... the point I was making was somewhat different. The buildings of Borough market are still there. What has changed is the community, which has been replaced outright. Moreover, it has been replaced with a 'pseudo community' akin to what you might find in an airport - transient office workers looking for somewhere a short distance from city center. It is the commodification of community - sold to the highest bidder.
That transience, ironically, comes from the regulatory structure we try to use to protect community by trying to protect the buildings themselves. The things we've done that make it hard to build end up preventing new downtowns and markets in places that don't have them today, like residential areas. So then everyone's forced to the old markets for all their new needs, transforming them. If we let go, we'd see new downtowns and new markets in places that might be suburbs today, just like the old markets happened - organically, where a developer thinks they'll make money on one.
One thing I have not seen discussed here is the fact that this painting was commissioned by the (Spanish) Republican government. Effectively, there is a degree of propaganda to the painting. No shade on the guy… my other favorite war crime painting is the executions of the third of may by Goya, and it was also a political commission.
reply