Great Museums: Great use of Youtube

GreatMuseums http://www.youtube.com/user/GreatMuseums
MOMA http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0oly6d0zlZM

Check out some of the other videos

Glitter, Doom, and the Weimar Republic

The exhibit, now archived, Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has an excellent set of accompanying web pages, as do most from this museum.

The Exhibition Overview describes the historical background of the era - the Weimar Republic in Germany which lasted from 1919 to 1933, and the response of the artists, here called the Verists, featured in this exhibition. For a brief history of that period, you have to read both the Wikipedia entry (above) and the description on the Met's page. Since the Weimar Republic followed Germany's defeat in World War I and preceded Nazi Germany and World War II, it was a period of discordance reflected in the art on display.

Surprisingly, Wikipedia doesn't have much of anything on the Verists, mentioning them under New Objectivity. The article has a few links but nothing extensive. The entries for three of the artists, Max Beckmann, Otto Dix, and George Grosz provide some useful links with images of their art.

In Janson's History of Art, 5th ed. rev., these three men are described as Expressionists who became the "principal representatives" of the New Objectivity, with " the meticulous verism" of Dix defining its "essential characteristics". [p. 816]. Incidentally, Google books has the 6th edition of this textbook, or at least parts of it. Anyone who has an earlier edition (or any edition) will know the real thing weighs a ton.

The NYT review 'Amid Shadows of War, a Cultural Decadence' by Roberta Smith has good descriptions of the art and artists, as well as an historical background of New Objectivity. The accompanying slide show has better, but not as many, images of the portraits than does the Met website, now found through the title link at the bottom of the page. As you can tell from the pictures, this art movement produced some bizarre portraiture, more than likely reflective of the time.

Is your mind elastic?

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2008/elasticmind/

videos at http://www.moma.org/explore/multimedia/videos/12/123

Try to describe how to get around the site - just exploring might be best. mention annoying beep.

Louis XIV

http://www.louisxiv-versailles.fr/versailles.html

Get history of king.

See if Versailles has past exhibition sites archived - perhaps start on French site.

Urs Fischer at the New Museum

http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/417/urs_fischer

A wide range of media for the exhibit - mention especially the tongue Noisette and the audio for it.

Halifax Explosion - N.S. Archives

http://www.gov.ns.ca/nsarm/virtual/explosion/

Site has film. Explore other parts of site and the main Archives pages.

Mirrors: Wooden and Otherwise

In Windows and Mirrors by Jay David Bolter and Diane Gromala, Daniel Rozin's interactive art piece, 'Wooden Mirror' is described as "a paradox ... a mirror made of the unlikely material of wood ... a digital artifact" [1].   Rozin's web page shows links to many mirrors, including the wooden one, with QuickTime movies for quite a few of the artworks. I'd have liked more detailed descriptions of how the mirrors work but the images are quite good and, since there are a good number of separate artwork pages, I suppose he couldn't go into great detail for each one.

One of the works, 'Paint Cam', listed under "Video Painting", is truly interactive, if you have Shockwave installed. It enables you to paint with images from webcams "from around the world". A problem I encountered was that the sites kept asking to be allowed to be seen. Part of the experience, I think, given the need for caution about allowing access. Besides, it offers a chance to see where the the cameras are situated.

[1] Windows and Mirrors : Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency. MIT Press, 2003. p. 32. The link I give above to the title is on the MIT site and has a few sample chapters. The Google Book entry has no preview pages but does have a few reviews and other links. Searching the title through the WorldCat link on the sidebar of this blog will find locations of libraries where you can borrow the book. I bought the book years ago and I would certainly recommend it as providing a brief history of the Web and a description of digital art at the time the book was published, especially at SIGGRAPH 2000.

Salvador Dali exhibit and film

NYT review

Film Un Chien Andalou at veoh.com
Film description at Wikipedia. While the synopsis describes the film and is helpful in explaining some of the stranger scenes, quite a few parts of the film are left undescribed.

MOMA exhibit  Check under related content - there's a video of a program in four parts that looks interesting - sound is a bit iffy.

American Voices at the Whitney Museum

The American Voices audio tour at the Whitney Museum is likely a better resource if you are actually at the Museum in front of the work being discussed. The images that go along with the online tour are pretty small. The advantage of the site is that you can hear the narration at the same time that you read the text.

You can always search the web for a better image of the artwork - this often leads to more art-related sites and more links but that's part of the fun.

One warning - do not click on the link at the upper left of the screen. It leads to a blank screen. It's better to go back to the introduction page, or click on the index. There you'll find a chronological listing of the artwork in the tour along with thumbnails. I found this intriguing since I hadn't heard of many of the artists (for instance, Elsie Driggs) so seeing a striking image first, and then discovering the artist was part of the adventure.

The National Screen Institute's Film Festival

Japan is one of the current crop of films being shown  at the National Screen Institute's Online Short Film Festival. Filmmakers are encouraged to leave their films on the site after the current festival play is finished and, since this is a really lovely film, I hope it remains there.

The film archive has films from the last five years so there is quite a variety to choose from. Films can be chosen by genre or sorted by director or title. I'd like to see an index by province as well, so I can see which films are included from Nova Scotia. I found the animated film Watchmaker because it was mentioned in an article in the local newspaper but that doesn't help me find other films from this area.

Damien Hirst and that diamond skull

Now, Damien Hirst would be the type of artist who I would expect to dislike instantly, since he's done such outrageous works. Except I like the idea that he calls a dead shark in a tank art, and he gets away with it. The Wikipedia entry about Hirst is really quite good and has links to longer articles about several of his artworks.

I sort of thought Hirst would be like those art students (anyone who has taken an art class has met at least one) who are so pretentious that you want to tell them that their art is really awful. Then I found a couple of videos showing interviews with Hirst, and surprisingly, I liked him. First is a BBC interview about the diamond and platinum skull he did in 2007. The second, embedded below,  is a 2008 Channel 4 interview about the Golden Calf.

Ron Mueck at the Brooklyn Museum

The webpage for the Ron Mueck exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum has only large three images of sculptures for the show from 2006/2007. The other resource material provides some really useful links, accompanied by 'explicit nudity' warnings.

'Behind the Scenes' links to a Flickr album with details of several of the installations. 'Teacher Packet' "provides detailed information about the sculpture Two Women and about Ron Mueck". 'Q&A' allowed people to ask questions of the artist. 'Video' links to a short Quicktime movie about another sculpture. (No, I'm not giving the URLs. Go to the exhibition page and explore from there.)

There once was a link to the full video at blip.tv.  As for the video, I'm not quite sure why the Brooklyn Museum link is no longer active, or why it's where it is on blip.tv, but it gives a great, detailed description of the construction of one of the sculptures in the show. It seems like Mueck's sculptures generally are either oversize or undersize, but the amount of work he puts into accurately depicting the human form is quite marvellous.

The review in the New York Times is still on the web and it gives a helpful description of the exhibit.
The Wikipedia entry for Mueck is quite brief but it has at least one very good image. Some of the links are worth exploring.

A Google search found a few good things, especially this video at metacafe, which would be embedded below except that Blogger didn't like the code I copied .

Mexican Photographs at the Getty

I found this online exhibit Mexico: From Empire to Revolution on the Getty Museum website, by reading  their newsfeed on Facebook. It is actually "extends the two-part exhibition held at the Institute between October 2000 and May 2001" so this website has been around for a while.

What with all the whining about Facebook, some of it justified, you seldom hear that it is an excellent resource for art lovers. Many galleries and museums have a presence on Facebook, and it is [whatever].

The site itself has a few problems but I found that the best way to see the photos was to use the html version and then click through the photographers. The enlargements here are quite good.

videos

YouTube for Whitney videos URL http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=WhitneyFocus&view=videos
Check again for copyright.
Holzer Video from Whitney site is as important for the information provided about the concept behind the art as the art itself.
Embedded -

Color Chart at the Tate

Compare this site to the exhibition site for the same show at MOMA - Nov. 19/2009. One instance is Marcel Duchamp - MOMA shows a good magnification of the image. Tate has an audio/video description, but shows a different artwork.

Testing expression

Note here the history of Expression - check Fractal Design and then who - see box.

I am quite proud of these very simple images because I used  Microsoft Expression Design to create the swirls and then Microsoft Expression Web to show me how to make the tables correctly so I could insert the swirls into this blog entry and show that one image had a transparent background and one didn't. This is likely quite elementary for someone who learned CSS and all the new-fangled coding, but I learned html using a text editor and once upon a time knew the codes. Now it's almost impossible to find a simple way to code html.

Actually, check the Wikipedia links for this.

Josef Albers, László Moholy-Nagy and the Bauhaus

The website for the 2006 exhibit Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World at the Tate Modern in London looks pretty blah until you start clicking on some of the links. The room guide seems to be just a line drawing of the exhibit space, but if you click on a room number, then you get to see a short description of the collection in that room, and some small images. If you're lucky, there will be some larger images on a separate page. Unfortunately, there are quite a few 'not available' images, but the ones that are there are quite good, although they could be larger.

One of the pleasant surprises on the site is found under the 'Online film' tab. Four different people discuss the work of both artists, and, if some of their words are hard to understand, there is a transcript so you can read along as they speak. In fact, most tabs link to actual useful content - the teachers pack (in PDF format) has material which is not just for teachers school children. It poses questions and suggests activities that help any aspiring artist explore their own creative process. The Resources tab leads to a list of writings by Albers and Moholy-Nagy and works at the Take by the artists. Unfortunately, there is only one by Moholy-Nagy and there are many by Albers that are not online.

The best resource listed is the TATE ETC magazine. The links listed here are to those articles about the two artists in the exhibit, but when you click on those links, they lead to more articles and other collections. The magazine is available in paper by subscription but the articles are also available online back to the first issue in 2004. The Wikipedia entry for the magazine lists articles (with links) from an early version as well. Another absolutely wonderful online journal I found is Tate Papers, which also goes back as far as 2004 and is available in full text online. It is comprised of research papers and would be really valuable to students writing their own papers.

Back to the artists who are in the Tate exhibit: The very good site of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation includes just about everything you would want to know about both of these artists and an exhaustive set of galleries of their work. The Moholy-Nagy Foundation site has lots of images of work (again not large enough), but I would have liked to see better (at least some) linking to exhibits.

The New York Times published an article about this same exhibit when it appeared at the Whitney Museum of Modern Art - which has no online resources for this show - they didn't really start doing online exhibits until early this year.

George Eastman House Photography Collections Online:

The George Eastman House Photography Collections Online is in a state of flux as of today. It seems to be somewhere in between the old site, and the new one, which is in beta. And not very far into beta, I'd guess, since the search function doesn't seem to work very well. What's there is quite nice though. I'm guessing that everything that is on the old site hasn't been transferred to the new site as yet.

I know, for instance that there are 12 Rayographs by Man Ray and 71 'selected images' of work by László Moholy-Nagy on the old site, but they don't show up in a search on the new site although the search terms are present. No matter when the sites get straightened out, the material there is quite marvellous. There are images from 1839 to the present, and you could spend hours looking at work by well-known photographers and those who are obscure.

The main George Eastman House website has a variety of links - blog, podcast, Twitter, Flickr, and much more. Unfortunately, the exhibitions links don't have much extra material about the photographs exhibited.

The Société Anonyme

The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America has been shown, and will be showing, at several venues between 2006 and 2010.

At first glance, the site at the Yale University Art Gallery, looks very well organized, and it is. Just don't try using the 'magnify' icon - at best you'll be sent to a window that immediately closes. The coverage of art and artists is very good though, even if the art can't be examined closely. There are a few extras as well; for instance, under Artists - Duchamp and Dreier, there is a short film of Duchamp's Rotary Glass and a radio interview with Katherine Drier [sic] which, dated in 1937 as it is, has some hilarious moments, and some insight into the early opinions on abstract art.

Some links and hints to help you explore the site (which I think is a bit outdated - at least IE doesn't like it very much; maybe it will be updated when the show returns to Yale in 2010) and get a variety of information about the show: -

Under the 'Resources' tab on the main website there are good links, especially the Exhibition Catalogue. I found it easier to see if I went directly to the Resources page rather than using the tab link. The Press Release has some good information as well.

A New York Times review by Roberta Smith contains a description of the relationship between Marcel Duchamp and Katherine Dreier.

KCRW's Politics of Culture podcast did a very good discussion and description of the Société Anonyme and the shows at Yale and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles in July 2006.

The Hammer show was the only one which I could find, of the several venues that were part of the U.S. national tour, that had a half-decent webpage.

Incidently, through the Wikipedia entry for Dreier, I found an excellent resource - the papers of the Société Anonyme Archive at the Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. There you will find photos of artists and their art, among other things. Archives like this one, which show very good virtual reproductions of their contents, are the reason that the Web is such a marvellous invention. The Digital Images collection of the Beinecke is beyond marvellous.

Dan Flavin - fluorescent lights can be beautiful

When I first saw the webpage for Dan Flavin: A Retrospective at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, back in 2006, I thought it was an excellent example of an archived exhibit. While it's not horrible, and it does have quite a bit of text, it doesn't display the artworks as well as it could be done.

The "Exhibition Feature" link has the best display of the artist's paintings and his fluorescent pieces, along with descriptions of his art, divided under seven headings. What works well here is that there are links to other artists' work within the text, so that you can see illustrations of the points the writer is making.

What the NGA did include in its overview of the exhibit was a list of other galleries which had it scheduled. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has a wonderful website with a slideshow (including a zoom feature that doesn't lose definition with magnification).

Art Knowledge News, which, incidentally, is an absolutely marvellous resource, has a nicely illustrated article about the German exhibit of Retrospective. And YouTube, bless them, has a good long search result list for Flavin.

Gilded Splendor: at the Asia Society Museum

The website for the exhibit Gilded Splendor: Treasures of China's Liao Empire (907 - 1125) at the Asia Society Museum is a bit tricky to negotiate but there is an excellent display of art objects from the Liao dynasty of China. To start off, you need to click on the boots in the lower right corner, then on 'image gallery', then on one of the titles to see thumbnails of objects. Sometimes you have to guess which links to follow but patience will be rewarded. There are gorgeous images of 800-1000 year old art objects here, and they can be magnified and moved around, most of the time. You can go on a virtual tour of some of the tombs, although this is by looking at the pictures on the wall, or objects on the floor. The New York Times had a short review of the exhibit back in 2006.

Webpages for past exhibits are available back to 2000, and complete sites are still maintained, but not for every show, sadly.

The Asia Society site itself contains just about anything you would want to know about any country in Asia - even recipes. The "For Kids' link made my anti-virus software have hysterics, though.

This pathetic video ...

is my first attempt at making something in Poser 7, now distributed by Smith Micro. The Wikipedia article about Poser has a good description of the program and its long and tortuous history.

I decided to put this video in my blog because I have once again bought a graphics/3d program that I might not use very much, same as the previous 5 or 6 versions I bought. So this is my attempt to at least make something and show it, as amateurish as it may be.

The skeleton started out as one of the included Poser anatomy figures. Then I squished it a bit and added hair - not a lot but then a skeleton wouldn't have very much hair, would it. The animation isn't very smooth but it's a lot better than it was when I started.

Testing Zemanta

I read Blogger Buzz for June 10, 2009 and saw that they recommended Zemanta, which is supposed to help enhance content. So I installed it and am giving it a test run. It should find relevant links and pictures but it didn't find the Buzz article. It did find itself though. It also shows images I might want to use, although I have to figure out what the copyright permissions are.

So now I'll try a few words - Cornwallis Park, Nova Scotia, is where I live. Zemanta found the Wikipedia entry, and also a rather useless Google Map so I deleted that.

University of Saskatchewan Library where I worked before I retired - Zemanta found a photo from Flickr which has a Creative Commons license. Note the little popup attribution for the photographer at the bottom of the picture, which doesn't actually link to his Flickr page where he has some very good photos of Saskatoon and the University.

Image by daryl_mitchell via Flickr

This is actually a good photo. The dark area at the bottom of the library is the loading dock. Oddly enough, Zemanta didn't find a link to the library website so I inserted that myself.

So we'll see how good Zemanta is at finding stuff about artists - Marcel Duchamp, for example. Found the Wikipedia article and some photos including this one from Wikipedia, which according to them is in the public domain.

Image via Wikipedia

It's a photo of Duchamp as Rrose Sélavy taken by Man Ray in 1921. It comes from the Philadelphia Museum of Art collection and as far as I can tell is shown in several other places on the web.

I had to rearrange the photos so Marcel wouldn't be in the library space and vice versa. I'm still not sure how much help Zemanta is, but I guess I'll find out in future posts. It does tend to insert links whether they make sense or not and put images in odd places.

Connect the dots (or clicks)

So I'm trying to actually read Randall Packer's book Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality. [July 29/09 - The website, which has lots of interactive material, disappeared temporarily and reappeared at the linked site. Part of the text of the book, just enough to whet your appetite, is on Google Books.] I have the paper copy and the website supplements it with audio and video and photos. Earlier posts in 2004 and 2006 discuss my progress, which isn't happening because I keep getting distracted.

As in I start to read the chapter by Dick Higgins, do a search for Higgins and find an interview with him from 1995. Then come across a mention of "a visual poet", Kenny Goldsmith, with a link to a radio station WFMU which I'm listening to right now - not always my type of music but it is different than the usual stuff on radio today. I did a search for Goldsmith on WFMU, found his page and listened to a bit of his program (which is just silly and hilarious and has some very different music).

Higgins' interview, by the way, has some quite relevant things to say about the internet, and I will explore some more of his links (remember this was 1995) and maybe report on them in another post.

Kenny Goldsmith, incidentally, is the founding editor of UbuWeb.

Courbet and the Modern Landscape at three galleries

The website for the 2006 show at the Getty, Gustave Courbet and the Modern Landscape
is well-thought out and detailed. Several of the sections have audio and video to accompany the images, which can be zoomed and moved around. The reproduction quality of the paintings is very good except at higher magnification. One warning: the audio pieces are quite long, so don't click away from them unless you really don't want to finish listening, or from the video pieces either, for that matter. There is no way to get back to a particular spot without listening to the whole audio file. The good thing is that they are separate from the image, so that you can listen and examine the image at the same time.

An article titled "A Burly Father of Modernism ..." by Roberta Smith in the New York Times reviewed the show of the same name at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore. The Walters' web exhibit includes a video explaining the way the museum set up the exhibit and a selection of Courbet's work with accompanying music files. Not necessarily the kind of music I'd want to listen to while I was looking at paintings but at least there was original content meant to enhance the viewing experience.

Banksy in Bristol

and neither are billions of other people.

The real Banksy has just installed an exhibit at Bristol's City Museum & Art Gallery. Evidently, the preparation was done in deepest secrecy, as thoroughly described in this BBC News article. Luckily, the article is accompanied by some very good video, image, and audio files. Banksy's site currently has only a link to a YouTube trailer for the show - I can only hope that in the future it will return to its former state and display his art.

Robert Adams at the Getty

The Robert Adams exhibit at the Getty Center in 2006, entitled "Landscapes of Harmony and Dissonance" was accompanied by a website that contains text, photos that can be enlarged, and links to audio and one video file. The setup feels just a bit awkward - maybe separate pages for each section would have been better, but the linked files are all there even if my Internet Explorer really didn't like the RealPlayer audio files. Never mind, Chrome played them without whining.

The site follows Adams' theme of "joy" and "dismay" in the contrasts between beauty and ugliness, loneliness and community.

The Getty began accompanying their exhibitions with an online component in 2000, pretty much keeping to the same format. So kudos to them for keeping content online for up to nine years.

Incidently, I added a Google Blog search gadget to the sidebar. I'm not sure that it searches the blog very well (the search box at the top left does that better), but it does find some very good sources under the "Linked from here" and "Art galleries, etc." tabs.

Ellsworth Kelly and others at Matthew Marks Gallery

The Matthew Marks Gallery has an excellently organized website as far as displaying exhibits and artists' works. When I looked at it on October 21, 2006, one of the current shows was by Ken Price. Clicking on the show name takes you to the press release. Links to the right go to thumbnail images from the current show, or to the artist's page. Click on one of these to go to larger images with previous, up, and next links. Sounds simple, and it is, but many gallery websites make navigation way too complicated, or just too frustrating to get around.

On this site, the design is simple, elegant, and effective, except for an occasional warning about incorrect links, which nevertheless doesn't seem to stop you from getting to the correct page.

The best way to get to see online exhibitions is to go to the main Gallery Exhibitions page and wander around, virtually, from there. One of the artists with an extensive gallery presence is Ellsworth Kelly. His Wikipedia entry has some good links but Matthew Marks has been exhibiting his works since 1991, and accompanying most of the shows with web pages, which are listed under Gallery Exhibitions for this artist. The online gallery entries are a bit spotty as far as showing works for the earlier shows but they get better for latter years.

In order to find a video that I could display in this post, I checked YouTube for Ellsworth Kelly. I found several videos, one of which I've embedded below. This video shows Kelly's work at three of the Matthew Marks galleries. Another video I found is of an interview done with Kelly for vernissage tv which does online videocasts of artists and shows. It may show up in the thumbnails that appear at the end of this video. The quality of the videos is somewhat better if watched directly on YouTube.

Mark Grotjahn and others at the Saatchi Gallery

The Saatchi Gallery does an excellent job of exhibiting artist's works, especially for these paintings by Mark Grotjahn, from an exhibit in 2006. Because of the nature of most of the works - receding and expanding painted and drawn lines - viewing them on full screen, while scrolling up and down, actually enhances the viewing experience. The lines move, the artworks morph toward and away from the viewer as in this work Untitled (White Butterfly Blue MG).

Saatchi Online has such a wealth of features that you could take days to explore it all. At least I think so - I just spent an hour or so finding some that I liked. The current exhibit Unveiled: New Art from the Middle East has a well arranged webpage, so that you can select an artist, go to full screen, and then click through the works.

Finding previous exhibitions is sort of hard work, since one link sends you to a short list of exhibits and a list of artists exhibited without any links to their exhibition. Another link to contemporary artists takes you to an A-Z list of all artists, which has very good resources.

There are extensive display areas for new artists and long lists of artists who have uploaded their stuff in a variety of formats in the online magazine - also blogs, TV, etc, etc.

Out of Time: Contemporary Art from the Collection of MoMA New York

So I may be getting a little obsessive about finding art exhibits on the web, because now I'm determined to track down an online exhibit that was easier to get around back in 2006 when I first started this post. MoMA New York had a good online exhibit for the "Out of Time" show back then but when they revised their site it got a bit fragmented.

The real exhibit got a negative review in the New York Times, for the most part, in Roberta Smith's Power, Injustice, Death, Loss: At Sea in the Here and Now.

It is still easy to switch back and forth between the review, and a view of the critiqued pieces in the exhibit. I found it easiest to do this by going to the "Selected works" page and finding the artwork from there. Then I could see the work that was being described and see if I agreed with the review. Most of the works shown here have text about the work in the show and then links to other works by the artist.

Some of the images had an audio file attached in 2006, but now those six files are found in another exhibition page which has a picture of the art work being discussed. Oddly, the piece by Rachel Whiteread, Untitled (Paperbacks), has a picture of Jeff Koons' work but the correct picture can be found in "Selected works" along with a transcript of her talk.

So, the exhibit is still on the web; it just takes some doing to put it all together.

ArtBabble Goodies

ArtBabble has a Goodies page where you can download badges of all sizes for your blog, Facebook page, etc. My favourites are:
this

or this but there are several more.

And you must try typing and copy/pasting all of the above while holding an annoyed cat in one arm.

Betye Saar - Assemblage/Collage Artist

Back in 2006 I found this NYT article, The Artist Who Made a Tougher Aunt Jemima Hasn’t Softened With Age, about Betye Saar, who was exhibiting her works in a show entitled Betye Saar: Migrations/Transformations at the Michael Rosenfeld Gallery. There are six pages showing the works in this exhibition, but better images of some of Saar's mixed media work can be fond by selecting her name on the artist's search page. Actually, the images for many artists'works are nicely magnified so you can examine them closely.

A search at SFMOMA finds at least one image of of Saar's work, and some very good interactive features. One of them, Voices and Images of California Art, has profiles of eleven artists, including Saar and Imogen Cunningham. This is a very well done online exhibit, with a wealth of information. The other section, which includes one piece by Betye Saar, is ArtThink, SFMOMA's "curriculum site" which provides ideas and inspiration for students and anyone who might want to explore art-making.

The Wikipedia entry for Saar has some very good links, including my very first Wikipedia correction.

NPR has an excellent article from 2006 available in text with pictures and also in audio, so you can look at the art while listening to the artist - actually there is more to the audio than what is in the transcript.

In the absence of oil tanks

Although this webpage is called "a 360-degree view of the oil tanks" at the Tate Modern, it is really a view of the spaces left after the oil tanks were removed.

You need Flash installed to view the space, and then you can move around and through the "underground chambers". The best way to do this is at full screen since the resolution of the photos is really high quality. Ordinarily, I wouldn't want to wander around large vacant spaces, but this is a really neat way to do it.

ArtBabble begins!

This is so what the Web is about - sharing of information, and art-related sources, and spreading it around to as many places as possible.

I learned of ArtBabble because I got a tweet from the Brooklyn Museum on my Twitter account. I read the New York Times article, visited ArtBabble, became a fan on Facebook (which means I can see other people who are interested in the same things I enjoy), joined ArtBabble so I can save the videos I like to my profile there and promote my blog (although ArtBabble is much, much better and will be even more marvellous once it includes material from around the world.)

The embedded video shown below explains what ArtBabble is all about.



Behind the Babble; now with more art is provided under a Creative Commons license. ArtBabble's terms of use are fairly generous as long as there is no copyright infringement.

ArtBabble originates at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. They have a serious web presence, described on their Interact page.

ArtBabble is different from Europeana since it concentrates on art-related video produced in art galleries and other art sites in the United States. Europeana, by the way, is now fully functional although it still has a Beta sticker on its webpages. There, too, you can have a 'My Europeana' section where you can save searches, links to images, and tag images however you want. Europeana provides information about many types of materials and links to the originating source - if the source doesn't provide free or easily viewable material, you're out of luck. It's still pretty great though.

Rudy Burckhardt

Rudy Burckhardt is the first artist mentioned in a New York Times review of "Subterranean Monuments: Burckhardt, Johnson, Hujar" at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center. Back in 2006, the exhibition page had only a few images and it's no longer available. The article in the NYT does give a short biography of Burckhardt.

A Google search found an excellent website for a MOMA 2002 exhibition of A Walk through Astoria and Other Places in Queens: Photographs by Rudy Burckhardt. This is truly a wonderful and well set up website, except that it is not evident when you first click the 'enter' button that there are two exhibits.

For "An Afternoon in Astoria" you are able to leaf through the pages of the photograph album and zoom in and out with ease (as long as you are using a browser that recognizes that it has a Flash viewer).

Once you are in the album, you can see that there is also a film "Under the Brooklyn Bridge" which is set up so that you can watch film stills and clips from two sequences. Depending on which exhibit you are watching, there are really two 'introductions' to the shows.

Also found on a Google search - Rudy Burckhardt’s Maine - "An exhibition of photographs, paintings, and films presented by the New York Studio School in 2003". This is another example of a very good exhibition site which has been maintained past the closure of the physical exhibition.

Signs of Spring

These are just a few of the pictures of crocuses I posted on my Facebook page. They've been much cropped and sharpened to hide the grubby ground they are sitting on. As of this morning the real flowers were also covered with snow but they are starting to peek out again.

MIT World

The subtitle for MIT World is "Distributed Intelligence". And that is truly what it is. It is the kind of thing that more universities and other centres of learning should be doing. As stated on their web page, "These free, on-demand videos, available 24/7 to viewers worldwide, reflect and extend MIT’s educational mission—to provide the best education in science, technology, and related fields—to engaged learners anytime, anywhere."

As of today, there are 626 videos covering a variety of topics from arts and science and eighteen other topics. The presenters include Nobel Laureates, authors, and artists, among others. The videos can be watched online at the site (Flash needs to be installed on your computer), or they can be placed on a website for viewing.

The video I'm watching now is Fractals in Science, Engineering and Finance (Roughness and Beauty), a lecture from 2001 by Benoit B. Mandelbrot and it should be showing below. Mandelbrot is sort of a hero of mine so I was delighted to find this site, and to be able to include the lecture video in this blog entry.



For more information about this lecture, here is the URL.

Adding Twitter to the Digital Stage

... or is it vice versa? In any case, I decided to use Twitter while checking links in old blog posts. So instead of going back and editing the posts, I'll just post the updates to Twitter and they should show up in the link at the bottom of this page. Or at least you can follow me on Twitter.

"About a million images"

The Prints & Photographs Online Catalog at the Library of Congress is one of those marvellous websites that have a great deal of content if you know what to search for. In one of my rambles through an essay on the history of photography, The Machine in The Garden Revisited (PDF, author's website is here), I found a reference to Ansel Adams’s Manzanar photographs.

So I did a Google search, found the Wikipedia entry on Adams, found a photo from Manzanar, followed the link from there to Ansel Adams’s Manzanar Photos, clicked on 'new search' and then previewed all the images. From there, I could look at thumbnails of the 244 photos in the collection, and also see a larger jpeg copy.

The main online catalogue has "about a million images". You can browse by collection, or do a search. I did a search for Dorothea Lange and found that some records had no images, some had only a thumbnail, and some had a link to a larger image. Not all collections have viewable photos but those that do are quite marvellous.

Ceramics Points of View at the V&A

The Victoria & Albert Museum has a set of podcasts, although I found their podcast page more than a little confusing. It's just easier to go to iTunes, search for Victoria & Albert, and go from there. If you want to hear just the episodes for Ceramics Points of View, this is the link, sort of.

I did the direct iTunes route, listened to the podcast for each piece, while going to the Ceramics Points of View website to see each piece in a larger format. Then I figured out that if I clicked on the Quicktime/video link below each speaker's photo I could see what they were doing while they were speaking. I like listening to the commentator's voice in the iTunes podcast, hearing the snarky remarks of some of the speakers, and then seeing them handle the ceramics in the video as they spoke. In most cases, all six experts had a wide range of criticisms or praise for the ceramics they commented on.

Jean-Étienne Liotard at the Frick Collection

There are so many artists I have never heard of, and whose work I would never have seen if not for reviews in the New York Times and other places.

I found out about the Jean-Étienne Liotard exhibit at the Frick Collection through an article, Jean-Étienne Liotard, the Unrelenting Eye of the Enlightenment, in the NYT from 2006. Written by Holland Cotter, it is a pleasure to read - he likes the art, he likes the artist, and he isn't afraid to say so.

The web exhibit at the Frick has quite a bit of detail about the paintings shown but the images themselves aren't very big.

To see how Liotard paints portraits, visit the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, which has a good collection of Liotard's works, especially pastels - the captions are in Dutch, but the magnification is excellent as long as you click the text link "Bekijk het object extra groot". You will have to search to find Liotard's pastels - this link may work. The text here is in Dutch, but other parts of the site are in English.

A photography blog/podcast the way it should be done

There are many blogs and podcasts on the web that offer educational components. Some of them are good and some aren't.

One good (wonderful!) podcast that I have found that offers education in a painless way, along with good graphics and a supportive and organized blog (not all that common, unfortunately), is the History of Photography Podcasts "Class lectures with Jeff Curto from College of DuPage". You can subscribe through iTunes, watch sessions online, or download to your QuickTime Player. I prefer listening in iTunes because I can stop the sessions where I want and restart from that point. Also the images are a bit larger than on the webpage sessions. Using both methods (and depending on the quirks of your browser), you can click back and forth between the podcast and the other material on the blog.

I'll leave it to you to work your way through the blog entries. I started with the first one from February 24, 2008, and will work through the rest eventually, maybe.

In a later blog entry, I want to post about what I found about some of the photographers Curto mentioned in the first podcast. There is a long list of them in the handout for the February episode but I will look up a few of those working more recently. Given that I get easily distracted, it may take a while to do that, but I'll try.

This Land is Your Land

This video is of the crowd at the "We Are One: The Obama Inaugural Celebration" concert which is available online at HBO only to watchers in the U.S. and territories (darn!). HBO took down the original YouTube video which was a copy of part of their coverage of the concert. The video shown here, by KevanAndJessica, is the best I saw on YouTube of the concert from the audience viewpoint. A search on YouTube for will likely find many more versions of the song - the best search is on 'This Land' since it will give you a list of videos as well as other search terms to try. I found a video of the song by Woody Guthrie, who wrote it, as well as one sung by Pete Seeger and Arlo Guthrie, Woody's son.

There are many other versions of the song shown on YouTube but none so moving as the rendition by Springsteen and Seeger at the Inaugural Celebration.

I watched the concert live on HBO Canada, which is showing it several times this week. The highlight, for me, was the appearance of Pete Seeger, doing his thing and looking pretty happy about it. If you watch to the end of this video (or any of the videos that are still there) and click on the 'This is Your Land' link, you will see links to other videos of the concert, most taken from the crowd's perspective. You will also see that the comments include much discussion about the correct words to the song.

So I did a Google search and found the Wikipedia entry which has the lyrics and a discussion of alternate lyrics. It also includes a link to the 1956 copyright version of the lyrics on the Woody Guthrie Foundation's website. As you will see, the lyrics have changed over the years, depending on who is singing it.
[edited December 30, 2009]

Mark Lewis

Mark Lewis is a Canadian artist now working and teaching in London, England. It seems that most of his work is in film - wonderfully understated pieces that document ordinary scenes. I love the way the artist allows the camera to just follow what is happening, allowing the viewer to make up their own stories about what is going on.

Lewis' website has high-quality full length copies of his video works going back to 1995 so it's possible to see the progression of his craft. And, he has been selected as "Canada’s official representative at the 2009 Venice Biennale of Visual Art".

I tried a search on YouTube for Lewis's videos just so I could show one here. Unfortunately, 'Mark Lewis' is a pretty common name and the quality of the few I found that I could be sure were his was much worse than what is on his website. So go there and have a look around.

Marcel Duchamp and Andrew Stafford

Among other projects, Andrew Stafford has created this marvellous site, Making Sense of Marcel Duchamp, as well as adapted Aspen magazine for the web. Be sure to go to the last page of the website, to the 'Notes' section, since there are some extremely good links to works by and about Duchamp.

So, who is Andrew Stafford? A bookseller according to this NYT article. And a very conscientious one, I would say, since he went to a lot of work to get the essence of the magazine online. These types of magazines, by the way, may be available in the Special Collections (or similar department) in your local university or public library and are worth looking for, especially as an inspiration.

In case the link above doesn't work, I found the article by doing a search in the New York Times on Stafford's name.