PhotoDude.com

Selah, HST. May Saint Peter sprinkle the welcome mat with ether in your honor.

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Web Busking – I woke up this morning, and my ears were burning. ”Reid Stott – MR. Photodude- are you out there?” OK, is this one of the voices in my head, or a legitimate request? ”I want to hear from you on ’busking for dollars’ regarding internet content. Why? Because I imagine that’s a topic on which you have a well thought out and considered opinion – one I’d like to hear.”

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Walkin’ A Fine Line – I’ve talked about this before (more than once), noting the anecdotal evidence that ”Impaired judgement + poor social skills + inappropriate behavior + dementia = Artist.” Now scientists are refining that formula.

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E-Mailed Request for Submissions – “We are particularly interested in encountering centripetal sentiment that might derive from true events in one’s life (both physical and metaphysical).”

“We invite submissions in the form of cross-cultural art or performance, genre-crossing, experimental ethnographic prose, graphic design, traditional/non-traditional paintings, handcrafted sculptures or models, photography, and literary and visual discoveries of the unknown. All channels of rhetoric are welcome.”

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Passing for Art – It’s a question to which we return again and again … “what is art?” The inside joke answer is, “whatever you can get away with.”

Last week, you may have heard about the art museum in the news because their display got them criminal charges: “A Danish art museum director was acquitted of animal cruelty charges Monday after a court ruled that a display featuring goldfish inside working blenders was not cruel [...] The installation was the work of Chilean-born Danish artist Marco Evaristti.

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Digital Ripples – It would appear that maybe someone unintentionally struck a nerve with an e-mail, or at least inspired some self assessment. And maybe the same has been done in return, again, unintentionally. It’s all very vague, since we’re dealing with those infernal and sensitive creative types.

Over at TheWriteCourse.com (May 1 entry), we read, “When I recently heard from a stranger to whom I’d written a fan letter, he said ’you’re a published writer,’ and my reaction was, ’yeah, so?’ [...] I’m not making a living writing. If I was, maybe I’d be finding enough satisfaction in the work—and in the fact I was being read, to tell the truth—to shut up about it and just do it. The guy who said to me ’you’re a published writer’ makes a living doing his art—which isn’t writing. He writes (on the web) as a hobby, or as he put it, ’one man venting.’”

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“With the inspiration of The Mirror Project, many people have created art in a room designed for flushing crap.” It’s an expansion of The Imposter Syndrome: now, I’m A Curator! Enjoy the Art Potty.

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Philosophy of Framing – (via Dangerousmeta) Frames mean different things to different people. “Major living artists such as David Hockney and Howard Hodgkin still believe frames serve a purpose beyond the purely practical. ’They’re where the picture stops and the world begins,’ Hodgkin says. When he paints, he carries his brush strokes over from the canvas on to the frames themselves ’to make them part of the picture’.”

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Inner Artist Revealed in Man with Dementia – In essence, this story is about a man with a brain disorder that “impairs abstract thinking, judgment and language abilities, and may lead to inappropriate behavior. By age 70, the man’s dementia had progressed to the point that he was no longer responsive to others, and he had trouble understanding words and sentences.”

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And the winner is… – (via Dangerousmeta) It’s a fascinating story, one that oddly made me think of Photoshop Tennis, but with real talent, and real acrimony. There’s much much more detail, but the gist of it is: "At the beginning of the 16th century, in this same room, side by side on the same wall, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo Buonarroti were hired to paint vast battle scenes in direct competition with one another [...] Vasari is explicit that this was a contest. He emphatically says that Michelangelo was commissioned ’in competition with Leonardo’. With competition came paranoia, hatred."

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Does a Painter With a Camera Cheat? – An interesting article about a century old technique that was once ”taboo,” but now looks tame in the world of digital manipulation. "In different ways, they are making a similar point: that art, whether it’s a photograph or a painting, involves manipulation of color, perspective, scale which becomes the true measure of its ingenuity and content [...] Realism is a moving target. Skill is more than manual dexterity. Tools are tools, whether they are brushes or lenses. What artists make of them is the issue."

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I Walk The Line – "...few controlled studies have been done to build the link between mental illness and creativity. Now, Stanford researchers Connie Strong and Terence Ketter, MD, have taken the first steps toward exploring the relationship. Using personality and temperament tests, they found healthy artists to be more similar in personality to individuals with manic depression than to healthy people in the general population."

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Prank-N-Art – Creative people are, well, strange sometimes. I’m not sure if the act described in this article is art, or a prank, or a public service, but it definitely speaks to our times, for better or worse.

To begin, the LA artist: "From his tiny Brewery Art Complex loft, [Richard] Ankrom said he tries to use his work to comment on current trends [...] To pay the bills, he is also a freelance sign maker." One day, those two skills had a chance to mingle, to solve a public problem that had bothered the artist.

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The Leonardo Cover-Up – A great tale about Maurizio Seracini, who you might call an art archaeologist, and how his devotion to Leonardo Da Vinci ended up revealing a fraud hundreds of years old. "Nearly a year ago, the Uffizi brought Seracini in again, to help settle an international brawl over whether Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished masterpiece, ’’The Adoration of the Magi,’’ one of the two or three most important paintings in Italy, was too fragile to be restored."

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Drained of Art (via dangerousmeta) – I used to hear that land was a great investment, because they’re not making it anymore. Apparently the same is true of traditional art: "Call it the endgame of the traditional art market. A 300-year long phase of Western cultural history, during which the paintings, the sculptures and the objets d’art of earlier times were avidly collected by hosts of connoisseurs, is slowly winding down. Supplies are simply running out [...] For connoisseurs, the shrinking of supplies means that the basis of their knowledge, which is directly proportioned to the number and diversity of the works they see, is being irrevocably chipped away. For auction houses, the benefit of higher prices, which generate larger commissions, is offset by the rising costs incurred in competing to get goods for sale."

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”An inhabitable cloud whirling above a lake” – The Blur Building by is a media pavilion for Swiss Expo 2002 now under construction at the base of Lake Neuchatel in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland [...] The pavilion is made of filtered lake water shot as a fine mist through 13,000 fog nozzles creating an artificial cloud that measures 300 feet wide by 200 feet deep by 65 feet high.

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Reclamation – Among the many dilemmas in our country today, this one might seem somewhat trivial. The 5,000 or more that are dead, and the difficult tasks ahead for this country have got to be the focus. But getting past this is also a very individual process, and for those with a creative mindset, it’s been very tough. As James Woods explains, “Artists try to experience life and then through aesthetic means turn those experiences into feelings. How they will try to understand these events, among the most horrendous I’ve ever seen, I have no idea.”

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What is Art? – In his recent moosive, um, I mean missive in which the Talking Moose expounds on how managers might fare better by treating their programmers as ”software artists,” he’s sparked a sidebar debate that I doubt he intended. A debate that has raged quite a bit this century, particularly with regards to photography. What is ”art”? Merriam Webster has definitions of the many applications of the word ’art,” but this is the one I think is applicable: ”the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects; also : works so produced.”

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