Anatomy

Here’s a pdf of the exercise for Steve Weiss’ Anatomy class.

Anatomy Exercise

Hammershoi (M Hamme .H282 A4 2008)

From The Royal Academy “The first Vilhelm Hammershøi (1864-1916) retrospective in the UK, this exhibition features over 60 paintings spanning the career of this celebrated Danish artist. The works have been selected from museums and private collections in Europe, the United States and Japan.

Hammershøi’s most compelling works are his quiet, haunting interiors, their emptiness disturbed only occasionally by the presence of a solitary, graceful figure, often the artist’s wife. Painted within a small tonal range of implied greys, these sparsely-furnished rooms exude an almost hypnotic quietude and sense of melancholic introspection.

In addition to the interiors, the exhibition also includes Hammershøi’s arresting portraits, landscapes and his evocative city views, notably the deserted streets of London on a misty winter morning. The magical quietness of Hammershøi’s work can be seen in the context of international Symbolist movements of the turn of the last century but the containment and originality of his art makes it unique.”

Interactive graphic: ‘Interior with Woman at Piano, Strandgade 30′

California Video

California Video: Artists and Histories (N6512.5.V53 C35 2008)

Published to accompany a landmark exhibition on view at the J. Paul Getty Museum from March 15 through June 18, 2008, California Video presents the first comprehensive survey of the history of video art in California. Since the late 1960s, California artists have been at the forefront of an international movement that has expanded video into the realm of fine art. Whether designing complex video installations, devising lush projections, experimenting with electronic psychedelia, creating conceptual and performance art, generating guerilla video, or producing works that promote feminism and other social issues, these artists have utilized video technology to express revolutionary ideas.

 

This illustrated volume focuses on fifty-eight artists, from early video pioneers such as John Baldessari, Bruce Nauman, and William Wegman, to Martha Rosler, Diana Thater, Bill Viola, and other established and emerging talents. Thirty-seven recent interviews shed new light on these artists-their influences, creative processes, and impact. Together with commissioned essays, rare reprints, and previously unpublished video transcripts, California Video chronicles a distinctly West Coast aesthetic located within the broader history of video art.

exhibition website here.  New York Times article here.

Brice Marden

An hour with artist Brice Marden

Download bigger ARTstor images

We are very pleased to announce that over 95% of the images in the ARTstor Digital Library are now available for download at 1024 pixels on the long side. (they used to be available for download at only 400 pixels on the long side).

In response to feedback from our user community, and as a result of the relationships that we have been building with content owners, we are now making available approximately 95% of the images in the Digital Library available for larger download at 1024 pixels on the long side. This new download capacity is part of ARTstor’s ongoing effort to facilitate broad access to digital images for teaching and scholarship. Users will be permitted to download these large JPEG images for use in classroom presentation and for other noncommercial, educational uses in the software environment of their choice. Users can also continue to download images at up to 3200 pixels for offline presentations by using the ARTstor Offline Image Viewer (OIV).

The ARTstor Digital Library includes more than 80 collections totaling more than 700,000 images. To use ARTstor, sign up for an account on any computer on the Academy’s campus. Once you’ve done that, you can access your account from anywhere. If you have any questions, ask at the library.

$8,000 per gallon…for ink

via arstechnica:

“A Boston man has filed a class-action lawsuit accusing hardware maker HP and office supply retailer Staples of colluding to inflate the price of printer ink cartridges in violation of federal antitrust law. According to the suit, HP allegedly paid Staples $100 million to refrain from selling inexpensive third-party ink cartridges, although the suit doesn’t make it clear how plaintiff Ranjit Bedi arrived at that figure.

For most printer companies, ink is the bread and butter of their business. The price of ink for HP ink-jet printers can be as much as $8,000 per gallon [The Financial Times], a figure that makes gas-pump price gouging look tame. HP is currently the dominant company in the printing market, and a considerable portion of the company’s profits come from ink.

The printer makers have been waging an all-out war against third-party vendors that sell replacement cartridges at a fraction of the price. The tactics employed by the printer makers to maintain monopoly control over ink distribution for their printing products have become increasingly aggressive. In the past, we have seen HP, Epson, Lenovo and other companies attempt to use patents and even the Digital Millennium Copyright Act in their efforts to crush third-party ink distributors.”

Marketing The Arts

via The Resource Shelf:

New Webcast Available from MIT: Marketing the Arts: The Secret Weapon
Presentation by Michael Kaiser, President, John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
Recorded on June 9, 2007, Running Time: 52 Minutes.

Kaiser’s talk focuses on marketing, the kind that “creates excitement around an organization.” In his efforts to restore flagging dance, theater and opera groups, Kaiser often contends with boards that assume paring down performances and cutting labor costs is the only way back to fiscal health. Kaiser advocates a contrary strategy: an artistic group can thrive only by taking artistic risks, investing in bold ventures and communicating inventively to the public, what he calls “dense institutional marketing.”

He offers a case in point: the Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, which in 1991 was $1.5 million in the red, and on the verge of laying off dancers. He generated a series of special events to spotlight the dancers and choreography. The two-year effort included landing prime appearances on the Phil Donahue show and at Bill Clinton’s first inaugural gala, an exhibition at the Smithsonian, a sponsored performance in Central Park, and multiple books, including one edited by Jackie Onassis. Kaiser’s persistence paid off, with a doubling of private fundraising.

He frets that a lot of arts organizations in the U.S. began “falling down after 9/11, pulling back on creativity and innovation, afraid of losing their audience.” Kaiser is emphatic: “When you pull back on risk taking, you pull back on the revenue stream. That’s why arts are suffering today.”

Source: MIT World

“Flat Art” from The British Musem

From the Guardian:

“The British Museum [has] quietly launched its comprehensive website of what it calls flat art: mostly so far its enormous collection of prints and drawings. The drawings, 50,000 of them, have all been catalogued; the prints, by no means.

The effort goes back a long way. In 1990 a team of four staff began cataloguing the drawings. It took them 10 years. At present there are on any given day eight people at work on the online catalogue, plus volunteers. What they are feeding into the system is not just the subject, author, dimensions and technical details, but also, where relevant, the scholarly literature on a given drawing, its full provenance, who gave it to the museum and when. From any entry you can then find out, for instance, what is known about the donor of the object (many of the gifts go back to the 18th century).

If you look up everything under, say, Hockney, you find a Rembrandt drawing included, on the grounds that Hockney once waxed lyrical about it. If you look up Rembrandt you will find prints and drawings made by him, fakes, copies after him, images of him and so forth. …

The website is unrestricted and you can print off any image. A battle was won before this was allowed to happen, and the result is that anyone – student, teacher or amateur – can get hold of a decent A4 reproduction of the drawing or print they are interested in, for personal use. For scholarly use, there will shortly be an automatic downloading option that gives a free image (for use in a scholarly article or book) of a suitable quality for reproduction. This is going to make an amazing difference in academic life, and it is part of a general trend (begun by Mark Jones at the V&A) of public institutions not charging for educational use of copyright material.”

Stefan Kurten

Stefan Kurten : Shadowtime (M Kurte .K875 A4 2008)

Stefan Kürten’s paintings investigate the house as site of warmth and comfort, as idyll and symbol of a desirable lifestyle. He works from black-and-white photographs, changing the motif in order to emphasise the illustrative aspect. He adds different colours, and places ornamentation onto the silver and gold shimmering ground of his paintings. The real house becomes an archetype that has no concrete location. The human being as narrative figure is permanently absent from his interiors. Thus, these views of houses with interior spaces, gardens and endless details become a projection plane for the viewer’s own fantasies and ideas about life.

The illustrated book was published on the occasion of the exhibitions “Stefan Kürten. Shadowtime”, 2007, Museum Haus Esters, Krefelder Kunstmuseen.

Google

Some facts about Google via Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine

Google is the “fastest growing company in the history of the world.” – Times of London, 1/29/06
• Google controls 65.1% of all searches in the U.S. at the end of 2007 and 86% of all searches in the UK, according to measurement company Hitwise.
• Google was searched 4.4 billion times in the U.S. alone in October, 2007 (three times Yahoo), says Nielsen. Average searches per searcher: 40.7.
• Google’s sites had 112 million U.S. visitors in November, 2007, says Nielsen.
• Google’s traffic was up 22.4% in 2007 over 2006, according to Comscore.
• Google earned $15 billion revenue and $6.4 billion profit in 2007, a profit margin of 26.9%. Its revenue was up 57% in the last quarter of 2007 over 2006, says Yahoo Finance. As of late 2007, its stock was up 53% in a year. The company has a market capitalization of $207.6 billion.
• Google controls 79% of the pay-per-click ad market, according to RimmKaufman. It controls 40% of all online advertising, according to web site HipMojo.
• Google employed almost 16,000 people at the end of 2007, a 50% increase over the year before.
• Google became the No. 1 brand in the world in 2007, according to Millward Brown Brandz Top 100.

Global.

Global Feminisms: New Directions in Contemporary Art (N 8354 .G56 2007)

“In celebration of the opening of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the Museum presents Global Feminisms, the first international exhibition exclusively dedicated to feminist art from 1990 to the present. The show consists of work by approximately eighty women artists from around the world and includes work in all media—painting, sculpture, photography, film, video, installation, and performance. Its goal is not only to showcase a large sampling of contemporary feminist art from a global perspective but also to move beyond the specifically Western brand of feminism that has been perceived as the dominant voice of feminist and artistic practice since the early 1970s.This exhibition is arranged thematically and features the work of important emerging and mid-career artists.”

Illustrated checklist here.  New York Times review here.

Design and Art

From the Documents of Contemporary Art series (MIT Press) comes Design and Art (NK 1505 .D465 2007) “This reader in Whitechapel’s Documents of Contemporary Art series investigates the interchange between art and design. Since the the Pop and Minimalist eras–as the work of artists ranging from Andy Warhol to Dan Graham demonstrates–the traditional boundaries between art and architectural, graphic, and product design have dissolved in critically significant ways. Design and Art traces the rise of the “design-art” phenomenon through the writings of critics and practitioners active in both fields.The texts include writings by Paul Rand, Hal Foster, Miwon Kwon, and others that set the parameters of the debate; utopian visions, including those of architect Peter Cook and writer Douglas Coupland; project descriptions by artists (among them Tobias Rehberger and Jorge Pardo) juxtaposed with theoretical writings; surveys of group practices by such collectives as N55 and Superflex; and views of the artist as mediator–a role assumed in the past to be the province of the designer–as seen in work by Frederick Kiesler, Ed Ruscha, and others. Finally, a book that doesn’t privilege either the art world or the design world but puts them in dialogue with each other.”

Also from the same series is Participation (NX456.5.I57 P37 2006), with essays by Umberto Eco, Bertolt Brecht, Roland Barthes, Peter Bürger, Jen-Luc Nancy, Edoaurd Glissant, and Félix Guattari, as well as the first translation into English of Jacques Rancière’s influential “Problems and Transformations in Critical Art.”

More titles from the series are on the way.

New Books

Matthias Weischer: Malerei by Rudij Bergmann, Matthias Weischer, Jean-Christophe Ammann, and Markus Stegmann (M Weish .W3985 A4 2007)

Mexico and Modern Printmaking: A Revolution in the Graphic Arts, 1920 to 1950 by John Ittmann (NE544.4 .M495 2006) exhibition from the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews by Jeff Wall and Peter Galassi (N7475 .W35 2007) in conjunction with the MoMA exhibition

John Singer Sargent: Figures and Landscapes, 1874-1882; Complete Paintings: Volume IV by Richard Ormond, Elaine Kilmurray, and Warren Adelson (M Sarge .S27 O76 2006) from Yale University Press

Sickert: Paintings and Drawings by Wendy Baron (M Sicke .S54 .B37 2006)

Winner….

Below is the “winning” design for the new National Library of the Czech Republic.  Looks like a monster from ’70’s Doctor Who.

Times Select no more…NYT Archives Now FREE

As pointed out in Library Crunch, the pay TimesSelect feature of The New York Times is dead:

“It simply couldn’t work, and now the New York Times has seen the writing on the wall and cancelled their TimesSelect subscription service.

We have ended TimesSelect. All of our Op-Ed and news columns are now available free of charge. Additionally, The New York Times Archive is available free back to 1987.

Two years ago the New York Times decided to hide their best and brightest behind a wall of greed, forcing loyal online readers to pay for the witty words of numerous editorial and feature writers. But the Times did not see (or refused to see) that the changing Internet marketplace was based more and more on free (read: ad driven) content.”