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Crazy/Nerdy Computer Art Installations
Gernot Ziegler writes "After having read a report on the fusion of Art and Technology, I somehow ended up on Perry Hoberman's page. I don't know this guy, but I've always been fascinated by techno art, and these ones are clearly intriguing.
There is the Workaholic, a pendulum with a bar code scanner over a carpet with bar codes and an attached projector that overlays images on the carpet, or the ZOMBIAC (Zone Of Monitor-Based Inter-Amnesiac Contact) that lures the visitors into thinking that the machines react to them directly. You might also want to have a look at this weird auction (that's where I got this link from) ! :)"
In the old days, art copied things - but as photography came about, the necessity of that dropped away, and art began to *comment* on things.
One thing that art looooves to do is to comment on art itself. (basically one generation of art comments on the previous generation: e.g. post-modernism art being mostly comments on the modernism, etc (for the nit-pickers - i really forgot which "ism" comments on modern-ism, so if the fact is a little off, don't flame, ja?))
What it really boils down to is that for many years now, art has been very seclusive stuff - stuff commenting on previous stuff which were themselves comments on ever earlier stuff. For the non artist, besides the above as a background, one very, very important word of caution - unless you intend to keep track of what is the current subject of comment, and understand all the crap that came before that, I'd seriously recommend against spending money on the stuff. Besides very few items that eventually ends up famous for famous' sake (Mona-Lisa, for example, is viewed to be "famous because of it's fame" - that's another thing I got out of the class, btw), all you will be receiving in the end is a comment without any context to go with it, kinda like spending money for a single comment of slashdot, without knowledge of all its beowulf cluster of running jokes, previous stories with evil bits set, and you bought it just because it was moderated highly.
anyway, for decoration purposes, there are many decorating art you get at even malls these days. let me repeat: don't ever spend money on what *real* artist produces, unless you are very sure of what you are doing. (this in response to the auction site)
not to mention, most of the real art nowadays are crap anyways...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
Bah. So hate that guy, don't generalize about the people working and educating those in the field. My girlfriend is a recently-graduated Art History major, with a secondary focus in studio art, specifically sculpture. She worked HARD for her degree, at a state school, in the art department...and got a good education under professors making a pittance and working in one of the most underfunded departments in the US. (Colorado state school art depts.)
I've seen her put more hours toward a sculpture piece than I ever put toward a program in the CS curriculum at the same school, one that is reasonably well-respected. I had the same disdain, until I found that most CS students were rock-stupid slackers, and most art students were rock-stupid slackers...
You'll find lazy people everywhere. Keep that in mind.
Modern art was invented by rich people to make poor people feel stupid.
Or something like that. It has been 16 years at least since I read Kurt Vonegut's "God Bless You Mr. Rosewater" in highschool, but I think that is a fair paraphrasing of a line in the book made after the city council spent 50 grand on a big green canvas with a stip of orange paint running down one side. Always struck me as quite funny
What changed under Obama? Nothing Good
Rand of course being an entirely unoriginal pseudo-philosopher ripped mind-body of descartes.
I think her reaction to all this would be somewhat around the reaction I got once trying to bring her up in a philosophy tute... Something like "Thats nice shayne, but Ayn Rand is not a philosopher, she was a cult leader."
Trust me, I dont think the serious world of art academics'd give a fuck what a half baked angerhead like rand would say.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I believe you're referencing Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions, in which exactly what you described occurs. Granted - I haven't read God Bless You Mr. Rosewater. I suppose it wouldn't surprise me much for Vonnegut to do something weird like placing the same event in two books, heh :P
Regardless, I find it mildly ironic that you reference Vonnegut for that point, considering his focus for at least the last decade. However, while I don't know Vonnegut's opinions on modern art, that sort of clever confliction would seem to almost typify him.
Well, I think painting's really a little bit different because for things like the XP dialog box he pointed out it's something that could have been done up in under an hour and also, unlike a painting an infinite number of copies of it can be reproduced looking exactly the same as the original.
Also, an artists time isn't really paid for the same way time at a regular job is, an artist might spend an hour on one piece of work and have it sell for tens of thousands of dollars whereas that same artist might make another piece that takes them hundreds or thousands of hours that they can't even sell for a few hundred. An artists time cannot be paid for in the same way an employee in other industries might be.
It takes all types to make the world go around. I'm growing bored of the elitest attitude that so many geeks sport twoards people who move towards a fine arts or a liberal arts field. Lazy and geek are not mutually exclusive just as it is possible for people who aren't in an engineering field to actually be *gasp* intelligent. Sorry for the rant. It's not directed at anyone specifically, just an overall attitude I've seen lately.
To someone with a third-grade math education, differential equations look like gibberish. It's called an education. Look into getting one.