I Want to Make Beautiful Things
Art
The Absurdity of the Art Market & The Price of Everything
A Documentary Lays Bare the Absurdity of the Art Market
The Price of Everything, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, looks at the trends and gambles of the art market.
Hyperallergic “Of course, actual beauty, talent, and innovation only factor marginally in this. Rather than deny this, the art dealers interviewed for the film are remarkably candid about how coldly they approach their trade. Seemingly everyone almost gleefully acknowledges that they’re riding a bubble.”
I watched it on HBONOW. Not sure how long it will be around for streaming, but definitely worth the price of admission.
Puzzle Montage Art
Tim Klein is the analog GAN maker. “Jigsaw puzzle manufacturers often use the same die-cut pattern for many different puzzles. This makes the pieces interchangeable. As a result, I sometimes find that I can combine portions from two or more puzzles from the same publisher, to make a surreal picture that the publisher never imagined.”
Sean Dorrance Kelly argues that an AI can’t be an artist
MIT Technology Review “So too with art and music and philosophy and literature. If we allow ourselves to slip in this way, to treat machine “creativity” as a substitute for our own, then machines will indeed come to seem incomprehensibly superior to us. But that is because we will have lost track of the fundamental role that creativity plays in being human.”
Beauty is in Your Mind, Not in the Rose
“When a beautiful rose dies beauty does not die because it is not really in the rose. Beauty is an awareness in the mind. It is a mental and emotional response that we make. We respond to life as though it were perfect. When we go into a forest we do not see the fallen rotting trees. We are inspired by a multitude of uprising trees…The goal of life is happiness and to respond to life as though it were perfect is the way to happiness. It is also the way to positive art work.”
‘Beauty is the Mystery of Life’, 1989
Agnes Martin: the artist mystic who disappeared into the desert
The Agnes Martin Gallery at the Harwood Museum of Art is an octagonal gallery with an oculus installed overhead, and four yellow Donald Judd benches placed directly under the oculus. The gallery was designed according to the artist’s wishes in order to accommodate Martin’s gift of seven large paintings made between 1993 and 1994, when Martin returned to Taos.
Your Most Loved Poets
The Red Hand Files
“I try to read, at the very least, a half-hour of poetry a day, before I begin to do my own writing. It jimmies open the imagination, making the mind more receptive to metaphor and abstraction and serves as a bridge from the reasoned mind to a stranger state of alertness, in case that precious idea decides to drop by.”
– Nice Cave
Artificial Intelligence and the Art of Mario Klingemann
Sotheby’s Contemporary Art Day Auction on March 6 features a unique creation by artist Mario Klingemann. Memories of Passersby I is a machine installation that uses neural networks to generate an infinite stream of portraits.
Sotheby’s Is Entering the AI Art Fray, Selling a Surreal Artwork by One of the Movement’s Pioneers This Spring
The technology used in the artwork heading to auction is cutting-edge, as no one else has been able to create a machine that can work to create portraits at such speed and at such a high resolution (and that can also fit into a small box to boot).
“I guess I have to thank everyone who plays computer games,” Klingemann says. “Thanks to the high demands of games, graphics cards have become extremely powerful and versatile.” He likens the power consumption of the system to the energy needed to run a fridge. That said, the real-time aspect and the high resolution took “quite some time” to perfect, according to the artist. All in all, he says, he spent about three months training the models, writing the code, and designing the installation.
Old GAN Masters
There is so much great work being produced right now from artists and designers who are using neural networks, code and algorithms to create. Sergio Albiac created this portrait series using a custom Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to produce a model from a deep learning system trained on a set of (mainly) dutch masterpieces. Via @DynamicWebPaige
Old Maps, New Data
Designer Scott Reinhard creates maps and visualizations with elevation data. Some of them are combined with old geological and topographic maps. All of them are pretty stunning and wonderful to see. I think the Great Lakes Bathymetry map would look great hanging on the wall.
