Plato argued that “the true, the good, and the beautiful” are all things that have value in themselves. Beauty has a value in its own right, not because it serves some other purpose. We do good for its own sake, and so on. In order for a machine to make its own fine art, it needs to satisfy Plato’s dictum, and create without any utilitarian purpose. The open question is whether machines will ever be able to do so.
Author: Douglas McLennan
The Secrets Science Is Revealing In Picasso’s Work
Picasso painted La Misereuse Accroupie in 1902, and it is currently on display at the Art Gallery of Ontario. The researchers used a non-invasive technique called x-ray fluorescent spectroscopy to analyze the painting. It turns out that the artist painted his work on top of another unknown artist’s painting of a landscape, and incorporated the landscape’s forms into the woman’s figure. You can sort of see the landscape by flipping the painting 90 degrees to the left.
Obama Portrait Debate Shows Americans Have Difficulty Talking About Art
“The general public tends to assume that contemporary paintings should be easily understandable for anyone with eyes to see them (and for more sophisticated audiences, for anyone who spends time and attention on the work). But this is not the case. Even if you are familiar with the moods, settings and styles of portraits you have previously seen, you are not necessarily equipped to understand Kehinde Wiley’s work.”
Who’s Not Enrolling In America’s Colleges? Rural Students
The reality that has gotten lost in the impassioned debate over who gets to go to college, which often focuses on racial and ethnic minorities and students from low-income families is: The high school graduates who head off to campus in the lowest proportions in America are the ones from rural places.
Opera’s White Bread Problem
“There may be a fundamental weakness in the way opera companies present new work: There is so much pressure on each single piece to get white-bread eaters to magically develop a new palate that it becomes somehow less appetizing. What stimulates the appetite is the sight of a rich assortment of different kinds of flours and seeds and rolls, sweet and savory — what you see when you go into any bakery.”
UK Museums’ Collecting Crisis
The implications for collecting are stark. Only half of the UK’s museums and galleries have money to make acquisitions, and “they often failed to obtain the art or the objects they sought, either because they lacked sufficient funds, or because the prices were too high.”
More On UK Museum Funding Crisis
David Cannadine points out that the price of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi, which sold for £333m last November, represents over half of central government’s total funding for museums last year. Of 266 museums he surveyed, only half had a dedicated acquisitions budget and in most cases it was less than 1% of their expenditure. The Art Fund report, entitled Why Collect?, calls for a national debate on the challenges over museum acquisitions.
The Culture Of Jazz Is Finally Changing
For me as a DJ, it’s especially exciting to see the new connections being made between club culture and live jazz. It’s a link I’ve been trying to make, in one way or another, for the past 30 years. Now more than ever before, it feels as if that boundary is finally being broken down.
Cowboy Poetry Ain’t What It Used To Be… And It’s Thriving
Cowboy poetry goes as far back as the late 19th century, when herders were known to recite original poems sitting around their campfires at night. Those poems mimicked the popular verse of their day, at least in form—they never veered into free verse, and they featured a singsong rhythm. Cowboy poetry continued for the next 100 years or so in this fashion, confined to fleeting performances in hushed fields, until 1985, when a group of folk historians used a small grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to create the Gathering in Elko with a simple purpose: to bring together men and women who craved poetry that valued and found beauty in their rural existence.
Instead Of Turning Away, Perhaps The Arts Ought To Be Challenging Us On Our Guns Identity
Philip Kennicott: “One fundamental strategy of political art is to say: This ugly image is who we are, and then challenge the audience to deny that, in word and deed. By forcing us to confront the great fetish of American culture, its slavish worship of the gun, the Hirshhorn could dramatize a choice we face, and a decision we have avoided for generations now. There has never been a more urgent moment to project that challenge at Americans, and hope they finally are sickened by the idea.”