Miscellany and Apocrypha

Olympic Gold

Did you know they used to have Olympic medals for artists?

Grown-up punk rockers

Want to be young and bad-ass forever? Take a cue from this invest banker, barrister, and vicar.

The Cistern is finally going to open to the public!

I'd like to try all--ok, most--of these exercises.

I've given the "Look really, really slowly" assignment to Art History students before, only for me it was 20 or 40 minutes, not three hours.

"Repeat your viewpoint" reminds me of some pivotal moments in The Wind-up Bird Chronicle.

I think the one I'm going to try immediately is the "Misuse a tech tool" with the compass.

Panama Papers, Modigliani, and Nazis

I've been a bit confused about all the hubbub surrounding "The Panama Papers." Yes, the leaked documents has shown precisely which wealthy people have used precisely which off-shore tax havens, but it's certainly not news that tax havens exist and are used by wealthy people for a number of reasons. Two of the most popular tax havens are the state of Delaware and the City of London. You don't have to actually go off shore to go off-shore.

But anyway.

One interesting thing that has turned up is the ownership of a Modigliani painting allegedly looted by Nazis and possibly being reclaimed. If I'm reading the news reports correctly, the Nahmad family has claimed that they do not own the painting in question, but that it is owned by a company called IAC. Only ow it's been leaked that IAC is owned, and has been owned for decades, by the Nahmad family.

Why not make art funny?

These GIFs make funny little cartoons out of a few of art's most somber pieces. Enjoy.

A new painting from Rembrandt

The Next Rembrandt is a project that used a lot of data and algorithms to make a very good, and original, Rembrandt painting. I have to say the product looks pretty good.

It's an interesting (and scary) project. Be warned, though: the video and project are basically an ad for ING and Microsoft.

GTA Deer

I don't quite know how this all works, but an artist inserted a wandering and unstoppable deer into a famous video game. So, you know, yeah.

Art and politics

1. A competition in which architecture is influenced by politics.

2. A list of times that politics were influenced by art.

Lost Wax

I've seen (and drawn) plenty of vaguely helpful illustrations of how lost wax bronze casting works. But the Israel Museum did it right and made a fun video.

I don't think these really count as secrets

For this year's Museum Week, museums around the world were asked to post secrets. Some of these are pretty cool, and I guess it would be unfair to ask institutions to tell their actual secrets.

Big sales at the art auction

Not Christie's or Sotheby's. The Rodeo.

Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees

I started reading Lawrence Weschler's book about the artist Robert Irwin, and it's one of those books I wish I had read years ago.

Originally published in 1982, the book has been expanded several times to almost double its original length. It's part biography and part critical history of Irwin, an artist I'd never heard of, even though I've admired his work before.

I can't wait to finish it and reconsider a giant portion of all the art I've ever considered.

What is statistics good for?

Among other things, identifying Banksy.

Vantablack

Yves Klein famously had his own color, and now Anish Kapoor does as well. Kapoor has somehow got the exclusive rights to a high-tech nano-pigment called Vantablack. It absorbs more than 99.9% of light, and Kapoor is the only artist who can (legally) work with it.

What does an artist do with a virtual black hole? Let's find out.

Dion McGregor

Years ago on ktru I heard a really weird story, involving a hot-air baloon, that went on for much too long. But then the DJ said it was from a recording of a man sleep-talking. Now, thanks to BBC, I know who that man was and how that eery story ended up as part of my morning commute. The article has several of his recordings.