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Your question about taking photos to art galleries has already been addressed, but I'll just add that it's often not allowed because the exclusive reproduction rights have already been assigned to somebody else. You buy the book of prints in the gift shop, and the artist gets a cut. By the way, something similar happens with TV shows -- if you see a piece of framed art blurred in a reality show, it's often because they don't want to bother getting the rights to reproduce it. In the cases where artwork is prominently featured on a set (such as the paintings in Frasier), the rights were acquired.

Anyway, the big difference between taking a snapshot of a piece of art and P2P is that a P2P download is an effective substitute for a purchase. Yes, yes, I know this is Slashdot, were we all download music purely as a "try before you by" and we are always very careful to purchase legitimate copies of the music we download, but outside of this realm, most people who tell you this are lying. On the other hand, I might have a (licensed or otherwise) photo of Thibaud's Cakes, but I would still very much like to have the original.

As I believe the latest sale price for that particular piece of art was somewhere around $25MM, this is a bit of an extreme example, but put it in the realm of a framed original photograph selling for $200, and it makes more sense.

Salvador Dali already used this idea in a well-known painting of his. Some people may think it sounds a bit blasphemous, but I don't think it is, really.

As an art major in college roughly ten years ago, we ran into some problems when the I.T. department installed Novell's Border Manager software to filter naughty HTTP traffic. Whenever you went to look at, say, Hieronymus Bosch's The Garden of Earthly Delights, you would instead be presented with an obtuse Border Manager error page stating that you were restricted from viewing that web page.

Now, art history classes typically involve sitting in a dark lecture room and viewing hundreds of slides of artwork while a professor (or TA) talks about them in excrutiating detail. As you might expect, a lot of this artwork involved nudity in some way. So the obvious answer to this situation was to take a screen shot of the Border Manager error page, turn it into some slides, and slip them into the slide reel when the professor wasn't looking: "The next image [click] is Botticelli's famous Birth of Venus, which... what the hell?"

I suggest you try this yourself if your art history professor still uses slides. It will be funny at least once.

Having looked at The Escape Ladder, Nocturne, and The Beautiful Bird..., I don't see where they "incorporated images" directly from any of these paintings. Certainly the style is the same, but that is the purpose of the tribute.

The sad part is I'd never heard of Miro before and usually enjoy learning from the little sporadic tidbits Google provides. It would be a shame if Google decided to stop including artists because ARS is over-protective. I could understand their point if Google was trying to profit from using Miro's art in any way, but it just seems to be a fun way to raise awareness.

Does anyone else find it ironic that you can't buy advertising on Google's front-page and people who get some free publicity on one of the most-visited pages on the 'net are complaining.

Have you seen the Mona Lisa lately? A face lift wouldn't hurt at this point.

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/M/malevich/b_circ le.jpg.html See down there in left corner! Liers!

Regarding the Colossus you may have a point, but what about "Saturn"? I would hardly want that up in my dining room.

The Cult of Objective-C was founded in a flurry of dynamism intended to bring application programming into the modern age by combining the object-orientedness of Smalltalk with the strange pointer language of C hacks. They can often be found speaking sentences such as "Your small text parsing tool would have been far more elegant if you had used the model-view-controller design pattern" and "there's no sense in reinventing the hydrogen-powered kitchen sink with nanorobotic food-synthesis technology when the kit provides it for you."

Also known for other ostensibly unintelligible lines of code that, read aloud, sound like "NSKitchenSink kitchenSink equals NSKitchenSink kitchenSink" they are fond of the fact that what would be a three-hundred-line error in C++ involving templates of templates of templates becomes a mere warning in Objective-C, or, even worse, a runtime error to be discovered in three weeks' time. They also abhor the excessive parentheses caused by Java's strong compile-time type checking, far preferring three-hundred-character lines involving method names longer than Clinton's average State of the Union address.

Their number having dwindled to a small band of NeXT aficionados and other offshoot cults, the Cult of Objective-C has infiltrated Apple and has been thus growing its ranks through the use of shiny hardware and software lures.

OpenGL 2.0 isn't a 'wow' if you're looking for pretty pictures, but it's what's going to make most of the realtime-rendering 'wow' moments possible for the next 10-15 years.

Maybe it's less interesting if you're not a coder, but personally this has got me seriously stoked - it is a big, big, big step forward. Huge. Really.

I can't wait to get playing with this; I've been revisiting all those old papers I mentally flagged as 'not realtime friendly', and a big proportion of them suddenly become possible.

Anyway, if you think FSAA is a bigger wow than this then you know nothing about graphics coding...you can find the non-photorealistic 'wow' images you crave here.

He seems far from undertalented. Just because later in life he preferred to paint in styles that don't appeal to you certainly doesn't mean he had no classical talent.

Sorry, I don't think there is an equivalent sound in english for "Ingres". Try somethinq between "On-Gre" and "Inn-Gre", but with no "S" (the final "S" is never pronounced in French).

Comments by ACs are usually as useful as a skipping rope to the Venus De Milo

I want high-resolution (as high as possible) image files of famous/classic paintings.

Try Artchive.

The paintings obviously aren't copyright controlled

You'd be surprised. Some paintings made in Europe in the 19th century are still copyrighted in Europe because not only does Europe have a copyright term of life plus 70 years, but some nations also tack on extra extensions for pre-WWI and pre-WWII works. So unless you block European IPs, you have to follow life-plus-85.

I have thought about how to implement this and found that Escher's Print Gallery brought me my knees ... why ? here is the story in brief ...

a workflow that involves a myriad of data types, including:

• two-dimensional concept sketches;
• computer-rendered images;
• animations and movies of cars in various environments;
• 3-D clay and computer models at various scales;
• interior textures and fabrics;
• and engineering data.

The basic problem is to be able to show the data in 1D, 2D and 3D. Then, there are pseudo dimensions that give rise to 1.5D, 2.5 D, and finally the element of Time T has to be taken into each of these spaces. The crux of the problem is to maintain continuity of "something" that flows between each of these spaces - often in an iterative and recursive fashion. This something can be abstracted as an object (which I call the Bubble, hence my domain name BubbleUI !) and the authors say

... environment can be conceptualized as running an object-oriented simulator in which each computational element is abstracted into an object. Objects dynamically enter and leave the environment .... We envision a usage scenario that involves coordinated use of all these terminals. While they are all interconnected at the systems level, from the user's perspective, a seamless mechanism for transporting work from one device to another is highly desirable.

To be able to visualize this the best I can do is suggest that you look at the Paint Gallery by MC Escher . and here Just Imagine that the paintings in the Gallery are not Static paintings, but are actually windows looking into the Real World. As the Real World is dynamic, when you revist a given window, it is possible that things might have changed. Then, you will have a good idea of what you mind has to get a handle on, before a user can have "sentient data access."

The concept of visualling the Prints in the Print Gallery as Windows is not too off-base because the Article describes that there is a desire to integrate the physical with the visual ....

An advantage to using bar codes is that we can also integrate physical assets into our system.

And the article also says that there are more than just Static Screens that have to be incorporated

The different tasks in this workflow are typically performed

• by different people,
• at different locations,
• and often using very different and specialized hardware and software.

So accomodate the above requirement, imagine now that there is not a single Spectator in the Gallery, but there are many people looking at many "Windows" at the same time. And like in real life these Spectators interact with each other inside the Print Gallery (FIGURE), just as the Real World visible from the Windows is interacting in the background (GROUND)..

After all is said and done, the conclusion that I came up with in the 1st draft of my doctoral thesis (which was rejected and I then approached this subject different which was then accepted) was that the Glue to bind it all is the Cognition of the User - i.e. PortfolioBrowser==User

The glue that binds our diverse collection of terminals, containers, and identifiers is a software infrastructure we call PortfolioBrowser. ... the design of our PortfolioBrowser embraces our fundamental goal of minimizing transaction costs at all times, throughout the entire system.

The User, in my conception, is the PortfolioBrowser. And because of this choice at the center o

I thought the images were quite lovely! The images looked hand-drawn and seemed to express the volumes in a subtle and compelling way. Almost like an X-ray of a Rubens.

Here's a copy on Artchive. This site claims 25,000 hits a day, so they should be relatively Slashdot-Effect-resistent. Don't forget the tip jar!

A couple of years ago there was a guy who had a painting he found in his garage for sale. Rumor started getting around that it might be a Richard Diebenkorn painting, and hence potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Of course, not only did the painting turn out not to be authentic, but the messages starting the rumor were planted by the seller, as were over half of the bids that drove the painting up to about $90,000 on speculation. The seller and his sidekick later pleaded guilty to fraud. It was subtle, though; the seller never claimed that the painting was authentic, they just planted the rumor externally.

maybe they were, but i still think that umberto boccioni made some great sculptures.

yeah, i guess even their predictions were pretty misguided, too. here we are 100 years later and technology hasn't solved our problems yet.

maybe they were, but i still think that umberto boccioni made some great sculptures.

yeah, i guess even their predictions were pretty misguided, too. here we are 100 years later and technology hasn't solved our problems yet.

Your post actually is actually more culturally relevant than you might think. Gustave Courbet painted in 1866 a work entitled 'L'Origine du monde' (The origin of the world), which was a detailed painting of the nether parts of a human female. It was a private comission (some rich business guy wanted it), but raises the stakes on the old pornography or art question at a far earlier date than many might realize, besides the interesting commentary of the work's title. For the curious and over 18, you can view the painting at the Artchive here.

Oh the things you learn in art history class.
-Wombat

There needs to be a moderation category of "OT -- but insightful".

Personally, I think it is the government that is screwing the Indians, based on what has been up until recently a widely held racist denigration of Indian rights, followed by indifference and lack of motivation to fix things.

Your view of the American Revolution is absolutely spot-on.

There's a famous portrait of Paul Revere that tells this story, if you know how to read it (see this link). Colonies were there to be sources of raw materials and markets for finished goods for the benefit of politically connected corporations. Revere's holding a silver teapot that he's presumably just made, and he's scratching is jaw as if he's weighing its quality. On the other hand, he's looking the viewer in the eye with a rather pugnacious expression. I think he's weighing the the value of British rule and finding it wanting.

In the computer world, in the 1960s the most widely available output device was a "line printer". This was a printer which printed up to 132 characters on each line of 11x17 paper. The printer could be told to stay on the same line, so text could be printer over other previously printed text. There were a large number of images developed to be printed out, including ones which were printed in several columns which had to be joined side-to-side (such as an image of a jet flying over the Golden Gate bridge). Both simple printing and overprinting were used. Here is an example circa 1973; it was such a popular technique that even self-portraits were done with it.

There were programs available for creating "printer art". You'd give the program a two-dimensional matrix of integers with the gray scale value desired for each pixel. The programs simply translated the gray scale numbers to the character (or characters) used for the nearest shade of gray. The programs were particularly convenient if you were one of the few people with some sort of image scanning device.

When ASCII became popular, with Teletypes and 72-80 character timesharing terminals becoming common, the same technology was used there. Some artists preferred to (or didn't know about the programs) manually create the art with text editors (or tools like a 1987 program for creating printer art). Some of the same images appeared on terminals.

Obviously, text characters were used simply for their gray-scale pixel value. The same technology can be used for images, by selecting component images based on brightness and color values.

There are now many ASCII Art sites on the Web. This Conversion Programs information is from this ASCII Art FAQ. An online example of a conversion program is GIF2TXT, which converts any online image -- try giving it that Slashdot logo at the upper left of this page. If you don't get enough ASCII Art links here, try the ASCII Art WebRing.

You mean something like this?

http://www.artchive.com/ftp_site.htm

--

"I'm surfin the dead zone

It's not just about pr0n though. It's the whole censorship thing. For instance, if you allow access to Altavista, kiddies can get access to banned literature. At least I'm guessing it's banned in the Holland Library. Next thing you know, it's showing up in a plain brown wrapper at the unsuspecting parents' house.

Open access can also lead to open research into crime. It's not all pipe bombs. You can actually get pictorial details of RAPE.

There are some arguments to be made in favour of the censorware. For instance, suppose your aging and unindoctrinated grandmother accidentally enters www.whitehouse.com thinking she's checking on the president's latest bout of good work... She's in for a surprise. With NetNanny, CyberSitter, SurfWatch, or CyberPatrol in place, she won't be shocked into cardiac arrrest. (And if she does survive, she'll NEVER get rid of the annoying pop-up windows that show up when you try to close the browser.)

Personally, I'm against censorware in general, but there are arguments to be made for it. Perhaps what's needed is a new dot-xxx domain for outright pron sites... But then who'll decide what is or isn't classified as such...?

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