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Very cool, but OMG Microsoft have the cheesiest corporate aesthetic in the world. How do they manage to make something this great look so naff?
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Month: May 2007
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Self-Portraits from the Uffizi
The full title of this exhibition at Dulwich Picture Gallery is Artists’ Self-Portraits from the Uffizi. But I don’t think it’s overly pedantic to point out that self-portraits are pretty much always by and of artists. The Uffizi has a collection of 1600 self-portraits, apparently; 50 of them are currently in Dulwich, arranged in roughly chronological order from Filippino Lippi in 1485 to Mimmo Paladino in 2003.
The Uffizi isn’t apparently in any hurry to embrace the internet age, so I can’t illustrate this post with any pictures from the exhibition. Instead, here’s one by Gwen John which is in the Tate:
I wandered into the exhibition whimsically wondering if I was going to be able to see some kind of common trait in the portraits; some kind of physiognomical identifier of artiness. Well, if this exhibition is to be believed, artists are much more likely to be men, but apart from that they didn’t have much in common physically.
There was a certain kind of expression, though: whether the artists were presenting themselves as glamorous men of substance or bohemians or just unadorned faces, they all tended to share an expression of quizzical detachment.
It would be tempting to see this as indicating a painterly scepticism about portraits; the expression of someone who has seen behind the curtain and knows that a painting is deceptive: contingent, unreliable, manufactured.
In fact, though, it’s probably just the expression of someone examining his own face in the mirror.
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Links
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At Pruned: The curious inner world of the termite mound and what we can learn from it.
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early photography from Wales
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Wayne on contrasts and similarities between traditional world music and ‘new’ world music and issues of translation, appropriation etc. Interesting post, interesting comments.
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via designboom: ‘No longer limited to traditional birds and boats, origami—the art of paper folding—is evolving artistically and technologically, thanks to a small but growing number of mathematicians and scientists around the world, including Lang.’
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via Coudal: ‘Here’s a clever and useful little business card design that perfectly expresses the mission of the company it represents: landscape architecture firm Tur & Partner.’
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Those squiggly puzzles that you have solve to show you’re a human at many websites (called CAPTCHAs)….His idea is to use them to help digitise out-of-print books.
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another great photo at Shorpy: ’15-cent photo booth in the lobby at the United Nations service center at Washington, D.C. December 1943.’
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‘amongst other things’
Today’s entry from Darwin’s Beagle diary:
29th May 1832
Rio de Janeiro
Cloudy greyish day, something like an Autumnal one in England; without however its soothing quietness. I wanted to send a note this morning into the city & had the greatest difficulty in procuring anybody to take it. All white men are above it, & every black about here is a slave. This, amongst other things, is one great inconvenience of a slave country.
Darwin was in fact strongly anti-slavery. As a grandson of Josiah Wedgwood he was probably brought up that way, but his experiences visiting Brazil reinforced it and stayed with him for the rest of his life. Still, it’s not the most felicitous bit of phrasing.
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Links
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The national flags of the world rendered as pie-charts according to the proportion of different colours on the flag. via information aesthetics.
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‘Most octopus buffs, even in the West, are familiar with Kyōsai’s 1868 rendition of the Potato-Octopus Battle (芋だこ合戦) of the same year, but the broader context of the image remains poorly understood.’
Two Lives is a biography of Seth’s great-uncle and aunt. They met in the 30s in Berlin when Shanti Seth was studying dentistry and took lodgings with the (Jewish) Caro family. Henny Caro was one of the daughters of the house and at the time was engaged to someone else; but after the war they eventually got married and lived together in London.
In one way of another their lives and those of their friends touch on many of the key historical moments of the C20th, but most centrally the war and the Holocaust. I’m reluctant to give too many details because I think he intentionally reveals them slowly.
Seth writes well, of course, and I found it an engaging enough book. I still slightly wonder whether it would have been published if it wasn’t written by a famous novelist, though. Not because it’s badly written or not worth reading, but because it seems to lack focus somewhat. He started writing it after the death of Henny, intending really to write a book just about his uncle but found a stash of letters, mainly between Henny and her German friends after the war. So Shanti’s story is based on direct interviews as an old man, while hers is pieced together from old letters, and they don’t quite mesh, somehow. In fact, considering they were married for several decades, there’s an odd feeling that their lives as told in this book don’t overlap that much.
I don’t know. I’m not sure that the whole is more than the sum of the parts. Mind you, those parts are are often very good: interesting, moving, well written.
(this post also appears in my ‘What I’ve been reading‘ section)