Thoughtful Preparations: Media Spin Blog

What is art? What is fine art? Are the visual fine arts at opposition with visualization? If a picture communicates, provides information, tells too much of a story, is to be cast out from the fine art museum?

This argument is not new to the modern world, and covered well by blogger David Apatoff’s Fine Art vs. Art That’s Mighty Fine. Another excellent analytical article by Donald Pittenger compares the commercial illustration work of N.C. Wyeth with his fine art paintings. This article explains why I tend to imagine myself someday painting fine art pictures in the far away Elsyian Fields of retirement.

Recently when exploring UC Berkeley’s MFA program I was advised by one of their faculty members that my work in medical illustration was too much in the visualization category of art, and that I would have to undergo a “transformation” to fit into Cal’s MFA in Art Practice program. Since I believe I have already achieved a high level of practical art practice, I take no interest in this transformation. Imagine the remolding of an artist into the university’s image. Would I emerge as a UC Berkeley artistic Frankenstein?

Agreeably, my medical animation is not fine art, and yet I see no strict borders, and I am open to exploring and experimenting with a wide range of visual styles and techniques. Picture a lordly professor advising a young Leonardo da Vinci, “Stick with those religious portraits, and forget about those anatomy drawings. Take it from me kid, there’s more money in the Church anyway.”

Back to illustration, take for example The New Yorker’s Covers. You will find an excellent mixture of medium and message. I tend to enjoy this kind of picture making, going back to my early appreciation of the art of Mad magazine. The blog article, Illustration is to Fine Art as Poetry is to Prayer provides additional illumination on this topic.

I recall seeing a retrospective exhibition of the works of “bad boy painter” Peter Saul at the Madison, WI Art Center’s Swen Parson Gallery. Shocking and perhaps lacking the craftsmanship required to be a professional illustrator, and yet free and radical. Saul is one of a handful of modern pop art painters whom I admire for their talent for merging the editorial cartoon into fine art painting (George Bush at Abu Ghraib by Peter Saul below).

Enough of this topic for now. I have commercial art to make!

With the lunatics still running the asylum, the film No End In Sight documents the serious missteps of how we have become mired in this long, hard slog of a mess in Iraq.

Le Roi de CÅ“ur the French anti-war film, named The King of Hearts in the USA, played for five years at the Central Square Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was a short walk from where I lived, and it was a cheerful play on how much fun it might be if the lunatics were released from an asylum to run a small village while World War One combat raged elsewhere in the countryside.

If only No End In Sight could be a light-hearted romantic comedy, but it is real, and the poor deciders for many Americans' futures are stubbornly still at work. Heaven help us all.

Here is an experiment using Slide to build a slideshow from my Photoshop collages posted on this blog.

Worried about the endless day to day grind of tasks? Perhaps if you had time to study the design of these tasks you might work smarter, not harder. Maybe you have an invention idea and you would like to build a prototype before going into mass production. UC Berkeley Computer Science Graphics Group Professor Carlo H. Sequin offers a course in procedural modeling that may help.

Reports of a suicide attempt by Owen Wilson are all over the news. Poor guy, maybe sometimes he felt like he was tied to the whippin’ post. The pain was great, he felt the urge, but only went part of the way… a suicide chump.

Let’s face it, we’ve all contemplated Death. Do we wait it out, it may surprise us too early, or do we take life into our own hands?

To take your own life, I can only imagine, would require the ultimate careful planning and discipline of execution. If your intent is half-hearted or sloppy, you will certainly botch it. You could enlist the help of others: park on a railroad track, drive into on-coming traffic, thus taking the innocent others with you on your sad trip.

There was the recent hip double suicide of Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake, writer and artist. Frank Zappa did not choose to die, cancer got him.

My guidelines for suicide prevention are as follows (listen up Owen):

1. If it gets really bad, travel someplace far, far away and see if a new perspective helps.  Consult your travel agent for places that are still fun: Norway? Thailand? Hawaii?

2. Get outside yourself. Get a pet. Make new friends. Do charity work like Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. Owen, come hang out with me a few days. Let’s party. Then kill yourself.

Seriously Owen, since Bottle Rocket, I like you, so before checking out, give me a call and let’s get things right.

The documentary film Who the #$&% Is Jackson Pollock? is an arresting study of whether or not a found object is worth over $20,000,000, and how to go about proving it. The documentary gets better and better as art critics, art dealers, and art experts try and determine whether a dumpster diving, truck driving woman really has possession of an original Jackson Pollock painting.

Part of the film shows the floor of Pollock’s studio where he was the software engine that threw the paint onto the horizontally reclining canvas. Gravity, excitement, gesture, inspiration, knowledge and whim played a part in the programming of the painter’s mind as he cast dripping paint noodles onto the awaiting virgin canvas. While in the excited solitude of his studio, did Pollock ever masturbate on any of his canvases? That would truly provide the DNA link that Teri Horton seeks for her painting in question. Some paint drip!

Jackson Pollock stands as a giant of real physical painting. Here is jacksonpollock.org to honor him with Flash-induced dripping pixels. Take note that these are flat 2 dimensional pixels of computer encoded light.

Brian Eno calls his current touring exhibition, 77 Million Paintngs. I say that Eno has perhaps rendered 77 million musical notes resonationg in the physical airspace over time, but these are not paintings.

Eno has for a long time been a maker of stylish relaxed “ambient” music and art, sort of non-intrusive, office art without balls.

Spot Draves has been developing this idea long before Eno in his Electric Sheep project, as documented in my Tubular TV interview. Spot’s pixel throwing algorithms have been 10 years in the making, and are highly sophisticated.

To see the full text of the C.I.A.’s recently released, yet censored, documents go to The National Security Archives. The National Security Archives web site was written about on this blog in an earlier post about the Nixon-Elvis photo session.

Ugly Dog
Originally uploaded by michvet3

Photos from a World’s Ugliest Dog Contest held recently in Petaluma, CA.   This year’s winner, Elwood (right).

See the SF Chronicle article for more details and photos from this unusual pet show.

2005 newspaper article about Sam (below) from the Ugliest Dog show of that year.  Sam has championship ugliness!

Sam, World’s Ugliest Dog Champ
Originally uploaded by lmennuti