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.

Here’s a strange one. It may help you become a better salesperson, and a stronger individual, but this technique is probably not long lasting.

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.

A huge crowd of happy, peaceful people gathered for the free concert celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Summer of Love that had a created a definitive home in the San Francisco Golden Gate Park neighborhood in 1967. Many from back in the day were there or honored and remembered, such as Chet Helms. The music and the vibes today were great. You had to be there. I shot nearly 2 hours of video and a few photos, to help preserve the mood.

As a dumbed down convenience, the mass media brands the celebration as just a bunch of old hippies, etc. I do not agree with SF Chronicle radio columnist Ben Fong-Torres, quoted in a CW Nevius article, “We anniversary everything to death. Hopefully this will be the last of it.” Whoa, cynical grinch! Where is your humanity, dude? This is a rallying occasion for many voices to speak out. Far more mindful than an everyday baseball game, football game, etc. This gathering has a serious tone, a seeking for answers and connections, since it is so abundantly clear this country has been misled in a ominously wrong direction.

Unfortunately, shallow reporters who are not truly engaged in events taking place in front of them miss the point. Forty years ago and today [enter cynical, negative label here] the movement holds many concerns far above music. There are many who seek positive solutions and a consciousness awakening. Embrace the light and shake off the dark, repetitive history of fear, hate and war!

Update: Joel Selvin of the SF Chronicle gives a well detailed review of the day at SFGate.com

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.

VentureBeat‘s article points out that Slide is contributing to the addition of one million new Flash widgets daily across all non-Facebook social networks, such as Myspace. Facebook is listed on the Slide web site, so I’m not sure what the distinction is that VentureBeat is making.

So what’s the big deal? Slide has created templates of clever skins and image processing tricks to enable non-Flash programmers to build slide shows and customized animations using their own digital images. You can take a Flickr photo or a YouTube video and jazz it up your way. Personalization is a big deal in the world of social hobnobbery.