10 items tagged “art”
2024
Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. […] to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.
If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making.
Ralph Sheldon’s Portrait of Henry VIII Reidentified (via) Here's a delightful two part story on art historian Adam Busiakiewicz's blog. Adam was browsing Twitter when he spotted this tweet by Tim Cox, Lord Lieutenant of Warwickshire, celebrating a reception.
He noticed a curve-framed painting mounted on a wall in the top left of the photo:
Adam had previously researched a similar painting while working at Sotheby's:
Seeing this round topped portrait immediately reminded me of a famous set of likenesses commissioned by the local politician and tapestry maker Ralph Sheldon (c. 1537--1613) for his home Weston House, Warwickshire, during the 1590s. Consisting of twenty-two portraits, mostly images of Kings, Queens and significant contemporary international figures, only a handful are known today.
Adam contacted Warwickshire County Council and was invited to Shire Hall. In his follow-up post he describes his first-hand observations from the visit.
It turns out the painting really was one of those 22 portraits made for tapestry maker Ralph Sheldon in the 1590s, long thought lost. The discovery has now made international news:
2023
Floor796 (via) “An ever-expanding animation scene showing the life of the 796th floor of the huge space station” by Russian artist 0x00, who built their own custom browser-based pixel animation tool with which they are constructing this project. Absolutely crammed with pop culture references and easter eggs. The “Changes” link at the top shows almost daily updates, with links to jump to the latest content.
2019
In the five years since the shark was erected, no other examples have occurred … any system of control must make some small place for the dynamic, the unexpected, the downright quirky. I therefore recommend that the Headington Shark be allowed to remain.
I commissioned an oil painting of Barbra Streisand’s cloned dogs
Last year, Barbra Streisand cloned her dog, Sammie.
[... 517 words]2018
Datasette: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (via) The Metropolitan Museum of Art publish a CSV file on GitHub with details of 464,360 items from their collection. I turned it into a searchable Datasette instance.
2017
Game developer’s guide to graphical projections (with video game examples), Part 1: Introduction. Absolutely delightful series of illustrated essays by Matej ‘Retro’ Jan explaining how different graphical projections can be used for video game art. Each concept is illustrated by screenshots or gifs from a mixture of games spanning four decades. Reading this was a real treat.
2016
Practical gift ideas to positively improve a friend’s life and hobbies
I’m a big fan of the Dorling Kindersley travel books, which are chock full of photos, maps, diagrams and illustrations. Thanks to the internet there’s really not much point carting around a reference-style guidebook like Lonely Planet—TripAdvisor etc will always be more comprehensive and up-to-date. This makes guidebooks more important for general inspiration and browsing.
[... 75 words]2009
Panic’s lost 1982 artwork. Found. Jaw-droppingly beautiful re-imagination of Panic’s software line-up as Atari console products, complete with box art and 80’s watercolour illustrated posters.
2008
Beware the time-eater: Cambridge University’s monstrous new clock. Beware the Chronophage, my son.