Content tagged with “art”

“I absolutely loved this book. It explains the world of contemporary art – who buys it, how it sells, and why it becomes valuable. Lots of books seek to explain things like this, but they think they can do it through anecdotes and vignettes. The books spend each chapter focused on a person. They…”

“This is a fun book that celebrates the packaging and advertising art of the early Atari video games of the 80s. And this is important, because – let’s face it – those games sucked . The graphics were horrible and abstract, and what you were seeing on the screen had very little relation to…the…”

“ It’s literally French for ‘workshop,’ which comes from another word meaning ‘woodpile,’ meaning a carpenter’s workspace. ”

“I did find some references to ‘aubergine purple,’ which is more specifically the color. If you do an image search for ‘ aubergine purple ’ you get all sorts of shades, even drifting into brown. I also found Pantone 229, which someone claimed was ‘aubergine.’ That’s the color swatch embedded at…”

“This is a sculpture style where the art is mostly two-dimensional (meaning, it could be hung on a wall), but the foreground is raised slightly from the background. The design is carved into a substance. ‘Relief’ originally meant ‘raised,’ and ‘bas’ means ‘low’ in French, so the art is literally…”

“ A wonderful documentary explaining the business of contemporary art, and the intersection of artists, dealers, collectors, auction houses, and art fairs. It’s a deeply odd mix of emotion, ego, and big business. ”

“This is a term from the arts which means creating a mixed media work out of whatever materials you can find. However, it’s been expanded to mean assembling something – anything – together from disparate parts. It’s borrowed from the French bricoler which means ‘to tinker’ or ‘to putter’ and…”

“ Apparently it comes from the same root as ‘broccoli.’ ”

“ A new trend in art is the sale of encrypted files which are guaranteed to be unique and only have a single unencrypted copy. ”

“This book tries to answer the question: will AI ever be able to emulate human creativity? It never really answers the question, but it’s still very, very interesting. Each chapter covers a different type of creativity: writing, music, art, etc. It’s full of examples and anecdotes about the advances…”

“These are a series of museums – existing, closed, or planned – which were funded by the Solomon Guggenheim Foundation. Guggenheim was a wealthy patron of the arts whose family made its fortune in mining and gold exploration. He died in 1949. Guggenheim created the foundation that bears his name in…”

“ This was a Dutch painter from the 1400s and 1500s. He was famous for several triptych works which depicted scenes of heaven and hell. ”

“ A lovely look at how art moved from realism to abstraction. Beautifully edited and narrated with 100-ish shots of abstract art. ”

“I have no idea why I bought this – I think I just wanted to know how writing about art would be different than anything else. And it was quite good. It very much becomes a general book about writing, especially later in the book, but the early sections have a lot of examples about art writing and…”

“ A good explainer of how art gets to auction, how that market is structured, and how people spend eight figures on a painting. ”

“ An artist has finally revealed a massive sculpture he spent half a century working on. ”

“ An argument that the Louvre should remove the Mona Lisa because it causes enormous logistical problems and disappoints almost everyone. ”

“This a classic art coffee table book. It’s huge – 11 x 14, I think, and it weighs maybe 10 pounds? It’s the kind of book you set on your coffee table just to look at. (True story: when I first picked it up at a used bookstore in Minneapolis, I aggravated a back injury, forcing me to withdraw from…”

“ An analysis of Last Supper paintings show the depicted portion size growing, which likely parallels dietary trends of the time the painting was created. ”

“ Someone noticed a painting in the background a scene of ‘Stuart Little,’ and it turned out to be a long-lost painting that a set decorator bought at a second-hand store. ”

“I’ve become a little obsessed with the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum heist lately, after listening to the ‘Last Seen ‘podcast. This book is by the definitive reporter to cover the crime – he’s been reporting on it, on and off, for 25 years. Sadly, the book is scattered. It’s not a…”

“Curiously, it’s not object (with a ‘c’), it’s objet . It’s French for ‘object or art’ or ‘art object’ or ‘work of art.’ The Wikipedia page notes: The term is somewhat flexible, and is often used as a broad term for ‘everything else’ after major categories have been dealt with. The key is ‘object.’…”

“It’s literally French for ‘work.’ So, to discuss ‘Picasso’s oeuvre’ is to simply discuss Picasso’s work. It’s pronounced differently in English and French, and, honestly, I got a lot of different opinions on it. The two most popular: One syllable, rhymes with ‘swerve’ (take away the ‘sw’) Two…”

“This is a description or name applied to any painting from an known painter in Europe before ‘about 1800,’ according to Wikipedia . Merriam-Webster says: a work of art by an established master and especially by any of the distinguished painters of the 16th, 17th, or early 18th century But what’s an…”

“ An oddly haunting performance art piece consisting of people acting on a spinning platform, set to Frank Sinatra. ”

“What the Anglo world knows as ‘paisley’ is actually an Asian design motif called the boteh or buta . This is the common teardrop-ish shape that’s repeated in a pattern. Scholars differ on where the shape design originated. It might represent something in nature, or be a symbol of life. The Anglo…”

“ A guy plays with Photoshop’s new AI filters, and – while laughing hysterically – shows that Photoshop can estimate and apply how emotions might appear in a picture. ”

“This is more of an essay, than a book. It’s quite short. It reads a bit stream-of-consciousness, with no chapter headings. Each chapter seems to have a cultural theme, but I’d be lying if I told you they were perfectly clear. The author – Dan Fox, editor of a literary and art magazine – seems to be…”

“ When wealthy people buy art as an investment, they often never even see it. Special facilities exist to store the art, tax-free, under their ownership. ”

“This is an odd book. John McPhee is a journalist. I read his book – Draft No. 4 – about writing (I didn’t love it). This is essentially an expansion of a long article McPhee did for The New Yorker . It tells the story of Norton Dodge , who was an economist and professor. He wrote his thesis in the…”

“ A European art thief was unsophisticated but effective, stealing hundreds of items out of under the noses of museums across the continent. He never sold any of them. ”

“ Swiss mapmakers have an odd habit of hiding secret images in maps, for no particular reason. ”

“ A museum for a lesser-known artist in France grapples with the revelation that most of its works were fakes, and some of them blatantly so. ”

“ A group of artists collaborated with the showrunner of Melrose Place to insert Leftist political art as props in the show. ”

“ A video supposedly about where the thousands of Bob Ross paintings went. But it’s really about the history of the Bob Ross phenomenon with lots of unknown backstory tidbits. ”

“ Out in the middle of the Arabian desert is a house disguised as a pickup truck. ”