Why is this guy still in business?
Sheriff Joe Arpaio's volunteer investigation into documents pertaining to President Barack Obama's place of birth and citizenship now includes the services of a taxpayer-funded ...
The lies roll off the man's lips like music off Yo-Yo Ma's cello. Both are virtuosos - one a cellist, the other a liar.
A partial list.
Bush had nothing to do ...
Happy Friday.
The best from Political Humor‘s collection of the week’s late night political humor.
"Barack Obama supports same-sex marriage. Mitt Romney doesn't even support same-sex car pools." –David Letterman
"The head of ...
Republican Rep. Mike Coffman at a Saturday afternoon fundraiser in Colorado.
I don't know whether Barack Obama was born in the United States of America. I don't know that. But I ...
Rand Paul:
Call me cynical, but I didn’t think his [Obama's] views on marriage could get any gayer.
We won't call Rand cynical. Ignorant, bigoted asshole is more fitting. An adult using ...
Happy Friday.
The best from Political Humor‘s collection of the week’s late night political humor.
"President Obama came out with approval of same-sex marriage. He said that over the years, he has ...
I've never understood Log Cabin Republicans - gay conservatives who give their support to a homophobic political party that derides their sexuality and refuses to grant them equal rights under ...
Finally.
“I have to tell you that over the course of several years as I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own ...
Election roundup:
Indiana.
As polls forecast, the Tea Party's efforts to cleanse the GOP of any impure conservatives has Dick Lugar out and teabagger Richard Mourdock in. Mourdock is the new Republican ...
There are lies...and then there are lies.
My own view, by the way, was that the auto companies needed to go through bankruptcy before government help. And frankly, that’s finally what ...
From the papers captured last year at Osama bin Laden's Pakistani hideout comes this.
Like any public figures, bin Laden and his advisers were mindful of the media. Adam Gadahn, one ...
The best from Political Humor‘s collection of the week’s late night political humor. Happy Friday.
"Today Mitt Romney visited a firehouse here in New York City. Of course, he was disappointed ...
It happened to Kerry. Can it happen to Obama? Nope says Margaret Carlson.
Obama’s belief system -- in that hopey-changey business and the post-partisanship thing -- has been altered by reality. ...
Sullivan:
What do Republicans call a gay man with neoconservative passion, a committed relationship and personal courage?
A faggot.
Exactly right, but then could one expect anything different from a political party that ...
And they claim that atheists are immoral?
The ugly side of religion shows its face once again. The words below were spoken at a Sunday sermon by Sean Harris, a pastor ...
It's been fun watching conservatives and Romney twist themselves into pretzels trying to undo Mitt's past words on GM and bin Laden.
Romney, April 2007:
It’s not worth moving heaven and earth ...
In an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, a couple of scholars from liberal and conservative think tanks, discuss the state of American politics.
We have been studying Washington politics and ...
Romney's VP-in-waiting, Marco Rubio, is perfecting the conservative sleaze play.
He has proposed his version of the Dream Act in which people who entered the country illegally as children will be ...
Beyond the rhetoric, the political BS, the lies - that is, the concerted effort by the right-wing noise machine to distort and misinform at every opportunity - is the very ...
One of the more memorable experience’s in my life was attending an Impressionist art exhibit at Canada’s National Gallery in Ottawa and spending a joyous afternoon in the company of works by Monet, Degas, Gauguin and other Impressionist masters. Loved it which is what makes uncovering stuff like this so interesting.
Late in his life, Claude Monet developed cataracts. As his lenses degraded, they blocked parts of the visible spectrum, and the colors he perceived grew muddy. Monet’s cataracts left him struggling to paint; he complained to friends that he felt as if he saw everything in a fog. After years of failed treatments, he agreed at age 82 to have the lens of his left eye completely removed. Light could now stream through the opening unimpeded. Monet could now see familiar colors again. And he could also see colors he had never seen before. Monet began to see–and to paint–in ultraviolet.
The human eye’s lens blocks ultraviolet wavelength. With the lens from his left eye removed (aphakia), Monet…
… continued to paint. Flowers remained one of his favorite subjects. Only now the flowers were different. When most people look at water lily flowers, they appear white. After his cataract surgery, Monet’s blue-tuned pigments could grab some of the UV light bouncing off of the petals. He started to paint the flowers a whitish-blue.
Which brings us to Monet’s 1922-1924 series “The House Seen From the Rose Garden“.
The paintings above are of the same scene. The red and yellow version is painted as seen through his left eye, limited to the wavelengths allowed by his cataract. The painting on the right is deep blue and violet, as seen through an eye with no lens. Who can imagine how those colors appeared to his eye while being mixed on his palette?
As an investment, cash is considered a conservative bet. Tonight in Melbourne, a confident buyer took a punt that sometimes, in certain company, cash is worth more as art than money in the bank.
As the opening lot of the Deutscher and Hackett auction, a single wad of $20,000 cash – an artwork called Currency – was sold for $17,500. When the 22 per cent buyer’s premium is added, the total cost comes to $21,350.
The work – by Sydney artist Denis Beaubois, and brought to life with a $20,000 grant from the Australia Council – was divided into two lots of 100 uncirculated $100 banknotes.
So, an artist is given $20,000 and he decides to rebrand the cash as art and put it out to auction where someone purchases it for $1,350 more than its cold cash value. OK.
What I’d be interested in knowing is the mindset of both the artist and the purchaser. The dreamer in me would like to believe that the artist was conducting a grand social experiment with the goal of finding out if “placing [cash] within an art context will elevate the value or degrade it.” Interesting enough although I’m not sure it would pass the Tolstoy litmus test of what can be regarded as art. In his essay, ‘What Is Art‘, Tolstoy describes true art as one which transfers the artist’s feelings over to the viewer in a clear, purposeful manner.
Art begins when one person, with the object of joining another or others to himself in one and the same feeling, expresses that feeling by certain external indications.
That being so, what feelings are invoked by seeing two stacks of $10,000 sitting under a glass cover and, more to the point, what emotion(s) was the artist attempting to convey? This is where the cynic in me emerges. It is quite possible that the only intent the Sydney artist had in mind was to garner publicity for himself…and if that is the case, he was successful.
As for the buyer, I have no idea what her/his thinking might be. There might be some deep, emotional rationale behind the purchase or it might simply be a case of a person hoping to make a dollar by reselling the ‘art’ at a higher price. How that might be accomplished in this case, I don’t know, but keep in mind that we’re dealing with the art world here. Conventional patterns of thought and conduct are not always applicable.
Whatever the case, this quote from the artist sums it up nicely.
“It’s one of those things where money means different things to different people.”
Yes it does and buyers of Andy Warhol’s art understand the value of money as art only too well. Warhol’s 1962 “200 One Dollar Bills” sold for $43.8 million in 2009. The seller had purchased it in 1986 for $385,000.
And while we’re discussing money-as-art, take a look at this.
(Image at top of post: Deutscher and Hackett executive director Damian Hackett with Denis Beaubois’s artwork titled Currency. Picture: Sam Mooy Source: The Australian)
Leonardo Da Vinci’s 500-year-old Renaissance masterpiece has long been steeped in mystery, and even today the true identity of the woman with the alluring smile still far from certain.
Now members of Italy’s National Committee for Cultural Heritage have revealed that by magnifying high resolution images of the Mona Lisa’s eyes letters and numbers can be seen.
In the right eye appear to be the letters LV which could well stand for his name Leonardo Da Vinci while in the left eye there are also symbols but they are not as defined.
And they said Dan Brown’s DaVinci Code was fiction. Fools.
As for what my La Giosarah illustration has to do with this story…not much, but I had been working on a post a while back on Palin the media whore which I never finished. The Mona Lisa story was a close enough fit for the pic.
Damn. I was so close. I thought I had it at $95 million.
A 1932 Pablo Picasso painting of his mistress has sold for $106.5 million, a world record price for any work of art at auction.
“Nude, Green Leaves and Bust,” which had a pre-sale estimate of between $70 million and $90 million, was sold at Christie’s auction house on Tuesday evening to an unidentified telephone bidder.
There were nine minutes of bidding involving eight clients in the sale room and on the phone, Christie’s said. At $88 million, two bidders remained. The final bid was $95 million, but the buyer’s premium took the sale price to $106.5 million.
It bugs me that art of this sort, although on loan to museums from time to time, for the most part sits in some rich person’s vault. In a perfect world, all art would be available for the masses to experience.
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“Nudity is evil. If God wanted us to run around naked, we would have been born that way.” -Just Sayin’
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Think what you will but if the purpose of art is expression, then on what grounds do you not call this art? Nudity in art was seldom an issue until the Church got involved in the censorship game during the Renaissance when it deemed that exposed genitals was an affront to all good Catholics. Say hello to the bobbitization of male statues at the Vatican and the appearance of fig leaves.
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Statue of Mercury
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