A few nice local business images I found:
Tour through Downtown Everett
Image by Office of Governor Patrick
(Photo credit: Eugena Ossi/Governor’s Office)
Tour through Downtown Everett
Image by Office of Governor Patrick
(Photo credit: Eugena Ossi/Governor’s Office)
Tour through Downtown Everett
Image by Office of Governor Patrick
(Photo credit: Eugena Ossi/Governor’s Office)
Some cool goals & motivation images:
010/365: I’m not sending my representative
Image by malik ml williams
PRIDE (Latin, superbia)
"Pride (or ‘hubris’) is excessive belief in one’s own abilities. It has been called the sin from which all others arise. Pride is also known as Vanity."
I don’t generally worry too much about my appearance. I dress pretty casually, don’t shave often and let my hair pretty much do what it wants. Is this anti-vanity? Or do i not fundamentally believe it’s worth it to put in the effort?
First of all, i don’t believe Pride is a sin. I think a certain amount of pride can be healty to one’s self-esteem and can ensure progress and motivation to achieve goals. I was struggling with what i could do to even address this "sin" when i spoke with my girl Laretta. She asked me, "What about Vanity?" That’s when the lightbulb went on.
So here i am. Teeth unbrushed, hair uncombed, unwashed looking all grimy and unkempt. And yes, i really am picking my teeth. Today is about showing up as who i am, not sending my "representative."
Take me for what i am.
//^\//^\//^\
From "These Are Not My Sins," a series initiated in response to the 365 Days mini-challenge, "Seven Deadly Sins".
Image by Joost J. Bakker IJmuiden
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items (often with symbolic significance) in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature, film, photography, sculpture, and paintings. The meaning of art is explored in a branch of philosophy known as aesthetics, and even disciplines such as history and psychology analyze its relationship with humans and generations.
Traditionally, the term art was used to refer to any skill or mastery. This conception changed during the Romantic period, when art came to be seen as "a special faculty of the human mind to be classified with religion and science". Generally, art is made with the intention of stimulating thoughts and emotions.
Evaluation
Philosopher Richard Wollheim distinguishes three approaches to assessing the aesthetic value of art: the realist, whereby aesthetic quality is an absolute value independent of any human view; the objectivist, whereby it is also an absolute value, but is dependent on general human experience; and the relativist position, whereby it is not an absolute value, but depends on, and varies with, the human experience of different humans. An object may be characterized by the intentions, or lack thereof, of its creator, regardless of its apparent purpose. A cup, which ostensibly can be used as a container, may be considered art if intended solely as an ornament, while a painting may be deemed craft if mass-produced.
The nature of art has been described by Wollheim as "one of the most elusive of the traditional problems of human culture". It has been defined as a vehicle for the expression or communication of emotions and ideas, a means for exploring and appreciating formal elements for their own sake, and as mimesis or representation. Leo Tolstoy identified art as a use of indirect means to communicate from one person to another. Benedetto Croce and R.G. Collingwood advanced the idealist view that art expresses emotions, and that the work of art therefore essentially exists in the mind of the creator. The theory of art as form has its roots in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and was developed in the early twentieth century by Roger Fry and Clive Bell. Art as mimesis or representation has deep roots in the philosophy of Aristotle. More recently, thinkers influenced by Martin Heidegger have interpreted art as the means by which a community develops for itself a medium for self-expression and interpretation.
Definition
Britannica Online defines art as "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others." By this definition of the word, artistic works have existed for almost as long as humankind: from early pre-historic art to contemporary art; however, some theories restrict the concept to modern Western societies. Adorno said in 1970, "It is now taken for granted that nothing which concerns art can be taken for granted any more: neither art itself, nor art in relationship to the whole, nor even the right of art to exist." The first and broadest sense of art is the one that has remained closest to the older Latin meaning, which roughly translates to "skill" or "craft." A few examples where this meaning proves very broad include artifact, artificial, artifice, medical arts, and military arts. However, there are many other colloquial uses of the word, all with some relation to its etymology.
20th-century Rwandan bottle. Artistic works may serve practical functions, in addition to their decorative value.The second and more recent sense of the word art is as an abbreviation for creative art or fine art. Fine art means that a skill is being used to express the artist’s creativity, or to engage the audience’s aesthetic sensibilities, or to draw the audience towards consideration of the finer things. Often, if the skill is being used in a common or practical way, people will consider it a craft instead of art. Likewise, if the skill is being used in a commercial or industrial way, it will be considered commercial art instead of fine art. On the other hand, crafts and design are sometimes considered applied art. Some art followers have argued that the difference between fine art and applied art has more to do with value judgments made about the art than any clear definitional difference. However, even fine art often has goals beyond pure creativity and self-expression. The purpose of works of art may be to communicate ideas, such as in politically, spiritually, or philosophically motivated art; to create a sense of beauty (see aesthetics); to explore the nature of perception; for pleasure; or to generate strong emotions. The purpose may also be seemingly nonexistent.
Art can describe several things: a study of creative skill, a process of using the creative skill, a product of the creative skill, or the audience’s experience with the creative skill. The creative arts (art as discipline) are a collection of disciplines (arts) that produce artworks (art as objects) that are compelled by a personal drive (art as activity) and echo or reflect a message, mood, or symbolism for the viewer to interpret (art as experience). Artworks can be defined by purposeful, creative interpretations of limitless concepts or ideas in order to communicate something to another person. Artworks can be explicitly made for this purpose or interpreted on the basis of images or objects. Art is something that stimulates an individual’s thoughts, emotions, beliefs, or ideas through the senses. It is also an expression of an idea and it can take many different forms and serve many different purposes. Although the application of scientific knowledge to derive a new scientific theory involves skill and results in the "creation" of something new, this represents science only and is not categorized as art.
History
Sculptures, cave paintings, rock paintings, and petroglyphs from the Upper Paleolithic dating to roughly 40,000 years ago have been found, but the precise meaning of such art is often disputed because so little is known about the cultures that produced them. The oldest art objects in the world—a series of tiny, drilled snail shells about 75,000 years old—were discovered in a South African cave.
Cave painting of a horse from the Lascaux caves, c. 16,000 BP.Many great traditions in art have a foundation in the art of one of the great ancient civilizations: Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, India, China, Ancient Greece, Rome, as well as Inca, Maya, and Olmec. Each of these centers of early civilization developed a unique and characteristic style in its art. Because of the size and duration of these civilizations, more of their art works have survived and more of their influence has been transmitted to other cultures and later times. Some also have provided the first records of how artists worked. For example, this period of Greek art saw a veneration of the human physical form and the development of equivalent skills to show musculature, poise, beauty, and anatomically correct proportions.
In Byzantine and Medieval art of the Western Middle Ages, much art focused on the expression of Biblical and nonmaterial truths, and used styles that showed the higher unseen glory of a heavenly world, such as the use of gold in the background of paintings, or glass in mosaics or windows, which also presented figures in idealized, patterned (flat) forms. Nevertheless a classical realist tradition persisted in small Byzantine works, and realism steadily grew in the art of Catholic Europe.
Renaissance art had a greatly increased emphasis on the realistic depiction of the material world, and the place of humans in it, reflected in the corporeality of the human body, and development of a systematic method of graphical perspective to depict recession in a three-dimensional picture space.
The stylized signature of Sultan Mahmud II of the Ottoman Empire was written in Arabic calligraphy. It reads Mahmud Khan son of Abdulhamid is forever victorious.In the east, Islamic art’s rejection of iconography led to emphasis on geometric patterns, calligraphy, and architecture. Further east, religion dominated artistic styles and forms too. India and Tibet saw emphasis on painted sculptures and dance, while religious painting borrowed many conventions from sculpture and tended to bright contrasting colors with emphasis on outlines. China saw the flourishing of many art forms: jade carving, bronzework, pottery (including the stunning terracotta army of Emperor Qin), poetry, calligraphy, music, painting, drama, fiction, etc. Chinese styles vary greatly from era to era and each one is traditionally named after the ruling dynasty. So, for example, Tang Dynasty paintings are monochromatic and sparse, emphasizing idealized landscapes, but Ming Dynasty paintings are busy and colorful, and focus on telling stories via setting and composition. Japan names its styles after imperial dynasties too, and also saw much interplay between the styles of calligraphy and painting. Woodblock printing became important in Japan after the 17th century.
Painting by Song Dynasty artist Ma Lin, c. 1250. 24,8 × 25,2 cm.The western Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century saw artistic depictions of physical and rational certainties of the clockwork universe, as well as politically revolutionary visions of a post-monarchist world, such as Blake’s portrayal of Newton as a divine geometer, or David’s propagandistic paintings. This led to Romantic rejections of this in favor of pictures of the emotional side and individuality of humans, exemplified in the novels of Goethe. The late 19th century then saw a host of artistic movements, such as academic art, Symbolism, impressionism and fauvism among others.
The history of twentieth century art is a narrative of endless possibilities and the search for new standards, each being torn down in succession by the next. Thus the parameters of Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, etc. cannot be maintained very much beyond the time of their invention. Increasing global interaction during this time saw an equivalent influence of other cultures into Western art, such as Pablo Picasso being influenced by African sculpture. Japanese woodblock prints (which had themselves been influenced by Western Renaissance draftsmanship) had an immense influence on Impressionism and subsequent development. Later, African sculptures were taken up by Picasso and to some extent by Matisse. Similarly, the west has had huge impacts on Eastern art in the 19th and 20th centuries, with originally western ideas like Communism and Post-Modernism exerting a powerful influence on artistic styles.
Modernism, the idealistic search for truth, gave way in the latter half of the 20th century to a realization of its unattainability. Relativism was accepted as an unavoidable truth, which led to the period of contemporary art and postmodern criticism, where cultures of the world and of history are seen as changing forms, which can be appreciated and drawn from only with irony. Furthermore the separation of cultures is increasingly blurred and some argue it is now more appropriate to think in terms of a global culture, rather than regional cultures.
Characteristics
Art tends to facilitate intuitive rather than rational understanding, and is usually consciously created with this intention.[citation needed] Fine art intentionally serves no other purpose.[dubious – discuss] As a result of this impetus, works of art are elusive, refractive to attempts at classification, because they can be appreciated in more than one way, and are often susceptible to many different interpretations. In the case of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, special knowledge concerning the shipwreck that the painting depicts is not a prerequisite to appreciating it, but allows the appreciation of Géricault’s political intentions in the piece. Even art that superficially depicts a mundane event or object, may invite reflection upon elevated themes.
Traditionally, the highest achievements of art demonstrate a high level of ability or fluency within a medium. This characteristic might be considered a point of contention, since many modern artists (most notably, conceptual artists) do not themselves create the works they conceive, or do not even create the work in a conventional, demonstrative sense. Art has a transformative capacity: it confers particularly appealing or aesthetically satisfying structures or forms upon an original set of unrelated, passive constituents.
Forms, genres, media, and styles
The creative arts are often divided into more specific categories, each related to its technique, or medium, such as decorative arts, plastic arts, performing arts, or literature. Unlike scientific fields, art is one of the few subjects that are academically organized according to technique [1]. An artistic medium is the substance or material the artistic work is made from, and may also refer to the technique used. For example, paint is a medium used in painting, and paper is a medium used in drawing.
An art form is the specific shape, or quality an artistic expression takes. The media used often influence the form. For example, the form of a sculpture must exist in space in three dimensions, and respond to gravity. The constraints and limitations of a particular medium are thus called its formal qualities. To give another example, the formal qualities of painting are the canvas texture, color, and brush texture. The formal qualities of video games are non-linearity, interactivity and virtual presence. The form of a particular work of art is determined by both the formal qualities of the media, and the intentions of the artist.
A genre is a set of conventions and styles within a particular medium. For instance, well recognized genres in film are western, horror and romantic comedy. Genres in music include death metal and trip hop. Genres in painting include still life and pastoral landscape. A particular work of art may bend or combine genres but each genre has a recognizable group of conventions, clichés and tropes. (One note: the word genre has a second older meaning within painting; genre painting was a phrase used in the 17th to 19th centuries to refer specifically to paintings of scenes of everyday life and can still be used in this way.)
The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai (Japanese, 1760–1849), colored woodcut print.The style of an artwork, artist, or movement is the distinctive method and form followed by the respective art. Any loose brushy, dripped or poured abstract painting is called expressionistic. Often a style is linked with a particular historical period, set of ideas, and particular artistic movement. So Jackson Pollock is called an Abstract Expressionist.
Because a particular style may have specific cultural meanings, it is important to be sensitive to differences in technique. Roy Lichtenstein’s (1923–1997) paintings are not pointillist, despite his uses of dots, because they are not aligned with the original proponents of Pointillism. Lichtenstein used Ben-Day dots: they are evenly spaced and create flat areas of color. Dots of this type, used in halftone printing, were originally used in comic strips and newspapers to reproduce color. Lichtenstein thus uses the dots as a style to question the "high" art of painting with the "low" art of comics – to comment on class distinctions in culture. Lichtenstein is thus associated with the American Pop art movement (1960s). Pointillism is a technique in late Impressionism (1880s), developed especially by the artist Georges Seurat, that employs dots that are spaced in a way to create variation in color and depth in an attempt to paint images that were closer to the way people really see color. Both artists use dots, but the particular style and technique relate to the artistic movement adopted by each artist.
These are all ways of beginning to define a work of art, to narrow it down. "Imagine you are an art critic whose mission is to compare the meanings you find in a wide range of individual artworks. How would you proceed with your task? One way to begin is to examine the materials each artist selected in making an object, image video, or event. The decision to cast a sculpture in bronze, for instance, inevitably effects its meaning; the work becomes something different from how it might be if it had been cast in gold or plastic or chocolate, even if everything else about the artwork remains the same. Next, you might examine how the materials in each artwork have become an arrangement of shapes, colors, textures, and lines. These, in turn, are organized into various patterns and compositional structures. In your interpretation, you would comment on how salient features of the form contribute to the overall meaning of the finished artwork. [But in the end] the meaning of most artworks… is not exhausted by a discussion of materials, techniques, and form. Most interpretations also include a discussion of the ideas and feelings the artwork engenders."
Skill and craft
Art can connote a sense of trained ability or mastery of a medium. Art can also simply refer to the developed and efficient use of a language to convey meaning with immediacy and or depth. Art is an act of expressing feelings, thoughts, and observations. There is an understanding that is reached with the material as a result of handling it, which facilitates one’s thought processes. A common view is that the epithet "art", particular in its elevated sense, requires a certain level of creative expertise by the artist, whether this be a demonstration of technical ability or an originality in stylistic approach such as in the plays of Shakespeare, or a combination of these two. Traditionally skill of execution was viewed as a quality inseparable from art and thus necessary for its success; for Leonardo da Vinci, art, neither more nor less than his other endeavors, was a manifestation of skill. Rembrandt’s work, now praised for its ephemeral virtues, was most admired by his contemporaries for its virtuosity. At the turn of the 20th century, the adroit performances of John Singer Sargent were alternately admired and viewed with skepticism for their manual fluency, yet at nearly the same time the artist who would become the era’s most recognized and peripatetic iconoclast, Pablo Picasso, was completing a traditional academic training at which he excelled.
A common contemporary criticism of some modern art occurs along the lines of objecting to the apparent lack of skill or ability required in the production of the artistic object. In conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp’s "Fountain" is among the first examples of pieces wherein the artist used found objects ("ready-made") and exercised no traditionally recognised set of skills. Tracey Emin’s My Bed, or Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living follow this example and also manipulate the mass media. Emin slept (and engaged in other activities) in her bed before placing the result in a gallery as work of art. Hirst came up with the conceptual design for the artwork but has left most of the eventual creation of many works to employed artisans. Hirst’s celebrity is founded entirely on his ability to produce shocking concepts. The actual production in many conceptual and contemporary works of art is a matter of assembly of found objects. However there are many modernist and contemporary artists who continue to excel in the skills of drawing and painting and in creating hands-on works of art.
Value judgment
Somewhat in relation to the above, the word art is also used to apply judgments of value, as in such expressions as "that meal was a work of art" (the cook is an artist), or "the art of deception", (the highly attained level of skill of the deceiver is praised). It is this use of the word as a measure of high quality and high value that gives the term its flavor of subjectivity.
Making judgments of value requires a basis for criticism. At the simplest level, a way to determine whether the impact of the object on the senses meets the criteria to be considered art is whether it is perceived to be attractive or repulsive. Though perception is always colored by experience, and is necessarily subjective, it is commonly understood that what is not somehow aesthetically satisfying cannot be art. However, "good" art is not always or even regularly aesthetically appealing to a majority of viewers. In other words, an artist’s prime motivation need not be the pursuit of the aesthetic. Also, art often depicts terrible images made for social, moral, or thought-provoking reasons. For example, Francisco Goya’s painting depicting the Spanish shootings of 3rd of May 1808 is a graphic depiction of a firing squad executing several pleading civilians. Yet at the same time, the horrific imagery demonstrates Goya’s keen artistic ability in composition and execution and produces fitting social and political outrage. Thus, the debate continues as to what mode of aesthetic satisfaction, if any, is required to define ‘art’.
The assumption of new values or the rebellion against accepted notions of what is aesthetically superior need not occur concurrently with a complete abandonment of the pursuit of what is aesthetically appealing. Indeed, the reverse is often true, that the revision of what is popularly conceived of as being aesthetically appealing allows for a re-invigoration of aesthetic sensibility, and a new appreciation for the standards of art itself. Countless schools have proposed their own ways to define quality, yet they all seem to agree in at least one point: once their aesthetic choices are accepted, the value of the work of art is determined by its capacity to transcend the limits of its chosen medium to strike some universal chord by the rarity of the skill of the artist or in its accurate reflection in what is termed the zeitgeist.
Communication
Art is often intended to appeal to and connect with human emotion. It can arouse aesthetic or moral feelings, and can be understood as a way of communicating these feelings. Artists express something so that their audience is aroused to some extent, but they do not have to do so consciously. Art explores what is commonly termed as the human condition; that is, essentially what it is to be human. Effective art often brings about some new insight concerning the human condition either singly or en masse, which is not necessarily always positive, or necessarily widens the boundaries of collective human ability. The degree of skill possessed by an artist will affect his or her ability to trigger an emotional response and thereby provide new insights, the ability to manipulate them at will shows exemplary skill and determination.
Purpose of art
Art has had a great number of different functions throughout its history, making its purpose difficult to abstract or quantify to any single concept. This does not imply that the purpose of Art is "vague", but that it has had many unique, different reasons for being created. Some of these functions of Art are provided in the following outline. The different purposes of art may be grouped according to those that are non-motivated, and those that are motivated (Levi-Strauss).
Non-motivated functions of art
The non-motivated purposes of art are those that are integral to being human, transcend the individual, or do not fulfill a specific external purpose. Aristotle said, "Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature." [14] In this sense, Art, as creativity, is something humans must do by their very nature (i.e., no other species creates art), and is therefore beyond utility.
1.Basic human instinct for harmony, balance, rhythm. Art at this level is not an action or an object, but an internal appreciation of balance and harmony (beauty), and therefore an aspect of being human beyond utility.
"Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature. Next, there is the instinct for ‘harmony’ and rhythm, meters being manifestly sections of rhythm. Persons, therefore, starting with this natural gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their rude improvisations gave birth to Poetry." -Aristotle
2.Experience of the mysterious. Art provides a way to experience one’s self in relation to the universe. This experience may often come unmotivated, as one appreciates art, music or poetry.
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." -Albert Einstein
3.Expression of the imagination. Art provide a means to express the imagination in non-grammatic ways that are not tied to the formality of spoken or written language. Unlike words, which come in sequences and each of which have a definite meaning, art provides a range of forms, symbols and ideas with meanings that are maleable.
"Jupiter’s eagle [as an example of art] is not, like logical (aesthetic) attributes of an object, the concept of the sublimity and majesty of creation, but rather something else – something that gives the imagination an incentive to spread its flight over a whole host of kindred representations that provoke more thought than admits of expression in a concept determined by words. They furnish an aesthetic idea, which serves the above rational idea as a substitute for logical presentation, but with the proper function, however, of animating the mind by opening out for it a prospect into a field of kindred representations stretching beyond its ken." -Immanuel Kant
4.Universal communication. Art allows the individual to express things toward the world as a whole.[according to whom?] Earth artists often create art in remote locations that will never be experienced by another person. The practice of placing a cairn, or pile of stones at the top of a mountain, is an example. (Note: This need not suggest a particular view of God, or religion.) Art created in this way is a form of communication between the individual and the world as a whole.[citation needed]
5.Ritualistic and symbolic functions. In many cultures, art is used in rituals, performances and dances as a decoration or symbol. While these often have no specific utilitarian (motivated) purpose, anthropologists know that they often serve a purpose at the level of meaning within a particular culture. This meaning is not furnished by any one individual, but is often the result of many generations of change, and of a cosmological relationship within the culture.
"Most scholars who deal with rock paintings or objects recovered from prehistoric contexts that cannot be explained in utilitarian terms and are thus categorized as decorative, ritual or symbolic, are aware of the trap posed by the term ‘art’." -Silva Tomaskova
Motivated functions of art
Motivated purposes of art refer to intentional, conscious actions on the part of the artists or creator. These may be to bring about political change, to comment on an aspect of society, to convey a specific emotion or mood, to address personal psychology, to illustrate another discipline, to (with commercial arts) to sell a product, or simply as a form of communication.
1.Communication. Art, at its simplest, is a form of communication. As most forms of communication have an intent or goal directed toward another individual, this is a motivated purpose. Illustrative arts, such as scientific illustration, are a form of art as communication. Maps are another example. However, the content need not be scientific. Emotions, moods and feelings are also communicated through art.
"[Art is a set of] artefacts or images with symbolic meanings as a means of communication." -Steve Mithen
2.Art as entertainment. Art may seek to bring about a particular emotion or mood, for the purpose of relaxing or entertaining the viewer. This is often the function of the art industries of Motion Pictures and Video Games.
3.The Avante-Garde. Art for political change. One of the defining functions of early twentieth century art has been to use visual images to bring about political change. Art movements that had this goal—Dadaism, Surrealism, Russian Constructivism, and Abstract Expressionism, among others—are collectively referred to as the avante-garde arts.
"By contrast, the realistic attitude, inspired by positivism, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Anatole France, clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement. I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit. It is this attitude which today gives birth to these ridiculous books, these insulting plays. It constantly feeds on and derives strength from the newspapers and stultifies both science and art by assiduously flattering the lowest of tastes; clarity bordering on stupidity, a dog’s life." -André Breton (Surrealism)
4.Art for psychological and healing purposes. Art is also used by art therapists, psychotherapists and clinical psychologists as art therapy. The Diagnostic Drawing Series, for example, is used to determine the personality and emotional functioning of a patient. The end product is not the principal goal in this case, but rather a process of healing, through creative acts, is sought. The resultant piece of artwork may also offer insight into the troubles experienced by the subject and may suggest suitable approaches to be used in more conventional forms of psychiatric therapy.
5.Art for social inquiry, subversion and/or anarchy. While similar to art for political change, subversive or deconstructivist art may seek to question aspects of society without any specific political goal. In this case, the function of art may be simply to criticize some aspect of society.
Spray-paint graffiti on a wall in Rome.Graffiti art and other types of street art are graphics and images that are spray-painted or stencilled on publicly viewable walls, buildings, buses, trains, and bridges, usually without permission. Certain art forms, such as graffiti, may also be illegal when they break laws (in this case vandalism).
6.Art for propaganda, or commercialism. Art is often utilized as a form of propaganda, and thus can be used to subtly influence popular conceptions or mood. In a similar way, art that tries to sell a product also influences mood and emotion. In both cases, the purpose of art here is to subtly manipulate the viewer into a particular emotional or psychological response toward a particular idea or object.
The functions of art described above are not mutually exclusive, as many of them may overlap. For example, art for the purpose of entertainment may also seek to sell a product, i.e. the movie or video game.
Controversial art
Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (c. 1820), was a social commentary on a current event, unprecedented at the time. Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (1863), was considered scandalous not because of the nude woman, but because she is seated next to men fully dressed in the clothing of the time, rather than in robes of the antique world. John Singer Sargent’s Madame Pierre Gautreau (Madam X) (1884), caused a huge uproar over the reddish pink used to color the woman’s ear lobe, considered far too suggestive and supposedly ruining the high-society model’s reputation.
In the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) used arresting cubist techniques and stark monochromatic oils, to depict the harrowing consequences of a contemporary bombing of a small, ancient Basque town. Leon Golub’s Interrogation III (1981), depicts a female nude, hooded detainee strapped to a chair, her legs open to reveal her sexual organs, surrounded by two tormentors dressed in everyday clothing. Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1989) is a photograph of a crucifix, sacred to the Christian religion and representing Christ’s sacrifice and final suffering, submerged in a glass of the artist’s own urine. The resulting uproar led to comments in the United States Senate about public funding of the arts.
Art theories
In the nineteenth century, artists were primarily concerned with ideas of truth and beauty. The aesthetic theorist John Ruskin, who championed what he saw as the naturalism of J. M. W. Turner, saw art’s role as the communication by artifice of an essential truth that could only be found in nature.
The definition and evaluation of art has become especially problematic since the 20th century. Richard Wollheim distinguishes three approaches: the Realist, whereby aesthetic quality is an absolute value independent of any human view; the Objectivist, whereby it is also an absolute value, but is dependent on general human experience; and the Relativist position, whereby it is not an absolute value, but depends on, and varies with, the human experience of different humans.
The arrival of Modernism in the late nineteenth century lead to a radical break in the conception of the function of art, and then again in the late twentieth century with the advent of postmodernism. Clement Greenberg’s 1960 article "Modernist Painting" defines modern art as "the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself".Greenberg originally applied this idea to the Abstract Expressionist movement and used it as a way to understand and justify flat (non-illusionistic) abstract painting:
Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; modernism used art to call attention to art. The limitations that constitute the medium of
painting – the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment — were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Under Modernism these same limitations came to be regarded as positive factors, and were acknowledged openly.
After Greenberg, several important art theorists emerged, such as Michael Fried, T. J. Clark, Rosalind Krauss, Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock among others. Though only originally intended as a way of understanding a specific set of artists, Greenberg’s definition of modern art is important to many of the ideas of art within the various art movements of the 20th century and early 21st century.
Pop artists like Andy Warhol became both noteworthy and influential through work including and possibly critiquing popular culture, as well as the art world. Artists of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s expanded this technique of self-criticism beyond high art to all cultural image-making, including fashion images, comics, billboards and pornography.
Classification disputes
Disputes as to whether or not to classify something as a work of art are referred to as classificatory disputes about art.
Classificatory disputes in the 20th century have included cubist and impressionist paintings, Duchamp’s Fountain, the movies, superlative imitations of banknotes, conceptual art, and video games.
Philosopher David Novitz has argued that disagreement about the definition of art are rarely the heart of the problem. Rather, "the passionate concerns and interests that humans vest in their social life" are "so much a part of all classificatory disputes about art" (Novitz, 1996). According to Novitz, classificatory disputes are more often disputes about societal values and where society is trying to go than they are about theory proper. For example, when the Daily Mail criticized Hirst’s and Emin’s work by arguing "For 1,000 years art has been one of our great civilising forces. Today, pickled sheep and soiled beds threaten to make barbarians of us all" they are not advancing a definition or theory about art, but questioning the value of Hirst’s and Emin’s work. In 1998, Arthur Danto, suggested a thought experiment showing that "the status of an artifact as work of art results from the ideas a culture applies to it, rather than its inherent physical or perceptible qualities. Cultural interpretation (an art theory of some kind) is therefore constitutive of an object’s arthood."
Anti-art is a label for art that intentionally challenges the established parameters and values of art; it is term associated with Dadaism and attributed to Marcel Duchamp just before World War I, when he was making art from found objects. One of these, Fountain (1917), an ordinary urinal, has achieved considerable prominence and influence on art. Anti-art is a feature of work by Situationist International,[31] the lo-fi Mail art movement, and the Young British Artists, though it is a form still rejected by the Stuckists, who describe themselves as anti-anti-art.
Art, class, and value
Art has been perceived by some as belonging to some social classes and often excluding others. In this context, art is seen as an upper-class activity associated with wealth, the ability to purchase art, and the leisure required to pursue or enjoy it. For example, the palaces of Versailles or the Hermitage in St. Petersburg with their vast collections of art, amassed by the fabulously wealthy royalty of Europe exemplify this view. Collecting such art is the preserve of the rich, or of governments and institutions.
Fine and expensive goods have been popular markers of status in many cultures, and they continue to be so today. There has been a cultural push in the other direction since at least 1793, when the Louvre, which had been a private palace of the Kings of France, was opened to the public as an art museum during the French Revolution. Most modern public museums and art education programs for children in schools can be traced back to this impulse to have art available to everyone. Museums in the United States tend to be gifts from the very rich to the masses (The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, for example, was created by John Taylor Johnston, a railroad executive whose personal art collection seeded the museum.) But despite all this, at least one of the important functions of art in the 21st century remains as a marker of wealth and social status.
Performance by Joseph Beuys, 1978 : Everyone an artist — On the way to the libertarian form of the social organism.There have been attempts by artists to create art that can not be bought by the wealthy as a status object. One of the prime original motivators of much of the art of the late 1960s and 1970s was to create art that could not be bought and sold. It is "necessary to present something more than mere objects" said the major post war German artist Joseph Beuys. This time period saw the rise of such things as performance art, video art, and conceptual art. The idea was that if the artwork was a performance that would leave nothing behind, or was simply an idea, it could not be bought and sold. "Democratic precepts revolving around the idea that a work of art is a commodity impelled the aesthetic innovation which germinated in the mid-1960s and was reaped throughout the 1970s. Artists broadly identified under the heading of Conceptual art… substituting performance and publishing activities for engagement with both the material and materialistic concerns of painted or sculptural form… [have] endeavored to undermine the art object qua object."
In the decades since, these ideas have been somewhat lost as the art market has learned to sell limited edition DVDs of video works, invitations to exclusive performance art pieces, and the objects left over from conceptual pieces. Many of these performances create works that are only understood by the elite who have been educated as to why an idea or video or piece of apparent garbage may be considered art. The marker of status becomes understanding the work instead of necessarily owning it, and the artwork remains an upper-class activity. "With the widespread use of DVD recording technology in the early 2000s, artists, and the gallery system that derives its profits from the sale of artworks, gained an important means of controlling the sale of video and computer artworks in limited editions to collectors."
A few nice goals & motivation images I found:
010/365: I’m not sending my representative
Image by malik ml williams
PRIDE (Latin, superbia)
"Pride (or ‘hubris’) is excessive belief in one’s own abilities. It has been called the sin from which all others arise. Pride is also known as Vanity."
I don’t generally worry too much about my appearance. I dress pretty casually, don’t shave often and let my hair pretty much do what it wants. Is this anti-vanity? Or do i not fundamentally believe it’s worth it to put in the effort?
First of all, i don’t believe Pride is a sin. I think a certain amount of pride can be healty to one’s self-esteem and can ensure progress and motivation to achieve goals. I was struggling with what i could do to even address this "sin" when i spoke with my girl Laretta. She asked me, "What about Vanity?" That’s when the lightbulb went on.
So here i am. Teeth unbrushed, hair uncombed, unwashed looking all grimy and unkempt. And yes, i really am picking my teeth. Today is about showing up as who i am, not sending my "representative."
Take me for what i am.
//^\//^\//^\
From "These Are Not My Sins," a series initiated in response to the 365 Days mini-challenge, "Seven Deadly Sins".
Some cool website design images:
michelle goodrich giving tree
Image by _sarchi
my last commute with dear meg – and a very appropriate
tune listen julie london’s cry me a river…but the bob sinclair number should get played
‘hold-on’
michelle beatles
it’s all over now baby blue richie havens
more info about web sites as graphs ..a RIP and a picture mosaic
Etched Starfish Wedding Website Template
Image by William Arthur Fine Stationery
Vera Wang Wedding Templates on Wedding Wire
www.weddingwire.com/wedding-websites/designs/vera-wang.html
Taylor Marriott
Image by spencewsi
Internet Administrator – WSI Northampton, Northants, UK
Check out these website traffic images:
Sydney traffic, c.1960
Image by State Records NSW
George Street, Sydney
Dated: c. 1960
Digital ID: 17420_a014_a0140001214
Rights: www.records.nsw.gov.au/about-us/rights-and-permissions
We’d love to hear from you if you use our photos.
Many other photos in our collection are available to view and browse on our website using Photo Investigator.
A few nice website design images I found:
My website re-design with images cropped to Xpan dimensions with news item on front page
Image by Vanessa Pike-Russell
Trying to streamline my home page so that people with small screens don’t need to scroll down to see all of the slideshow.
Also working on the stylesheet to allow formatting of a news item on the front page. Currently it shows the Camp Quality Convoy Fun Day at Windang.
homepage_2009_1103a
http://www.inform-global.com
Image by spencewsi
Joomla Ecommerce Website
A few nice goals & motivation images I found:
Image by Joost J. Bakker IJmuiden
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items (often with symbolic significance) in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature, film, photography, sculpture, and paintings. The meaning of art is explored in a branch of philosophy known as aesthetics, and even disciplines such as history and psychology analyze its relationship with humans and generations.
Traditionally, the term art was used to refer to any skill or mastery. This conception changed during the Romantic period, when art came to be seen as "a special faculty of the human mind to be classified with religion and science". Generally, art is made with the intention of stimulating thoughts and emotions.
Evaluation
Philosopher Richard Wollheim distinguishes three approaches to assessing the aesthetic value of art: the realist, whereby aesthetic quality is an absolute value independent of any human view; the objectivist, whereby it is also an absolute value, but is dependent on general human experience; and the relativist position, whereby it is not an absolute value, but depends on, and varies with, the human experience of different humans. An object may be characterized by the intentions, or lack thereof, of its creator, regardless of its apparent purpose. A cup, which ostensibly can be used as a container, may be considered art if intended solely as an ornament, while a painting may be deemed craft if mass-produced.
The nature of art has been described by Wollheim as "one of the most elusive of the traditional problems of human culture". It has been defined as a vehicle for the expression or communication of emotions and ideas, a means for exploring and appreciating formal elements for their own sake, and as mimesis or representation. Leo Tolstoy identified art as a use of indirect means to communicate from one person to another. Benedetto Croce and R.G. Collingwood advanced the idealist view that art expresses emotions, and that the work of art therefore essentially exists in the mind of the creator. The theory of art as form has its roots in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and was developed in the early twentieth century by Roger Fry and Clive Bell. Art as mimesis or representation has deep roots in the philosophy of Aristotle. More recently, thinkers influenced by Martin Heidegger have interpreted art as the means by which a community develops for itself a medium for self-expression and interpretation.
Definition
Britannica Online defines art as "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others." By this definition of the word, artistic works have existed for almost as long as humankind: from early pre-historic art to contemporary art; however, some theories restrict the concept to modern Western societies. Adorno said in 1970, "It is now taken for granted that nothing which concerns art can be taken for granted any more: neither art itself, nor art in relationship to the whole, nor even the right of art to exist." The first and broadest sense of art is the one that has remained closest to the older Latin meaning, which roughly translates to "skill" or "craft." A few examples where this meaning proves very broad include artifact, artificial, artifice, medical arts, and military arts. However, there are many other colloquial uses of the word, all with some relation to its etymology.
20th-century Rwandan bottle. Artistic works may serve practical functions, in addition to their decorative value.The second and more recent sense of the word art is as an abbreviation for creative art or fine art. Fine art means that a skill is being used to express the artist’s creativity, or to engage the audience’s aesthetic sensibilities, or to draw the audience towards consideration of the finer things. Often, if the skill is being used in a common or practical way, people will consider it a craft instead of art. Likewise, if the skill is being used in a commercial or industrial way, it will be considered commercial art instead of fine art. On the other hand, crafts and design are sometimes considered applied art. Some art followers have argued that the difference between fine art and applied art has more to do with value judgments made about the art than any clear definitional difference. However, even fine art often has goals beyond pure creativity and self-expression. The purpose of works of art may be to communicate ideas, such as in politically, spiritually, or philosophically motivated art; to create a sense of beauty (see aesthetics); to explore the nature of perception; for pleasure; or to generate strong emotions. The purpose may also be seemingly nonexistent.
Art can describe several things: a study of creative skill, a process of using the creative skill, a product of the creative skill, or the audience’s experience with the creative skill. The creative arts (art as discipline) are a collection of disciplines (arts) that produce artworks (art as objects) that are compelled by a personal drive (art as activity) and echo or reflect a message, mood, or symbolism for the viewer to interpret (art as experience). Artworks can be defined by purposeful, creative interpretations of limitless concepts or ideas in order to communicate something to another person. Artworks can be explicitly made for this purpose or interpreted on the basis of images or objects. Art is something that stimulates an individual’s thoughts, emotions, beliefs, or ideas through the senses. It is also an expression of an idea and it can take many different forms and serve many different purposes. Although the application of scientific knowledge to derive a new scientific theory involves skill and results in the "creation" of something new, this represents science only and is not categorized as art.
History
Sculptures, cave paintings, rock paintings, and petroglyphs from the Upper Paleolithic dating to roughly 40,000 years ago have been found, but the precise meaning of such art is often disputed because so little is known about the cultures that produced them. The oldest art objects in the world—a series of tiny, drilled snail shells about 75,000 years old—were discovered in a South African cave.
Cave painting of a horse from the Lascaux caves, c. 16,000 BP.Many great traditions in art have a foundation in the art of one of the great ancient civilizations: Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, India, China, Ancient Greece, Rome, as well as Inca, Maya, and Olmec. Each of these centers of early civilization developed a unique and characteristic style in its art. Because of the size and duration of these civilizations, more of their art works have survived and more of their influence has been transmitted to other cultures and later times. Some also have provided the first records of how artists worked. For example, this period of Greek art saw a veneration of the human physical form and the development of equivalent skills to show musculature, poise, beauty, and anatomically correct proportions.
In Byzantine and Medieval art of the Western Middle Ages, much art focused on the expression of Biblical and nonmaterial truths, and used styles that showed the higher unseen glory of a heavenly world, such as the use of gold in the background of paintings, or glass in mosaics or windows, which also presented figures in idealized, patterned (flat) forms. Nevertheless a classical realist tradition persisted in small Byzantine works, and realism steadily grew in the art of Catholic Europe.
Renaissance art had a greatly increased emphasis on the realistic depiction of the material world, and the place of humans in it, reflected in the corporeality of the human body, and development of a systematic method of graphical perspective to depict recession in a three-dimensional picture space.
The stylized signature of Sultan Mahmud II of the Ottoman Empire was written in Arabic calligraphy. It reads Mahmud Khan son of Abdulhamid is forever victorious.In the east, Islamic art’s rejection of iconography led to emphasis on geometric patterns, calligraphy, and architecture. Further east, religion dominated artistic styles and forms too. India and Tibet saw emphasis on painted sculptures and dance, while religious painting borrowed many conventions from sculpture and tended to bright contrasting colors with emphasis on outlines. China saw the flourishing of many art forms: jade carving, bronzework, pottery (including the stunning terracotta army of Emperor Qin), poetry, calligraphy, music, painting, drama, fiction, etc. Chinese styles vary greatly from era to era and each one is traditionally named after the ruling dynasty. So, for example, Tang Dynasty paintings are monochromatic and sparse, emphasizing idealized landscapes, but Ming Dynasty paintings are busy and colorful, and focus on telling stories via setting and composition. Japan names its styles after imperial dynasties too, and also saw much interplay between the styles of calligraphy and painting. Woodblock printing became important in Japan after the 17th century.
Painting by Song Dynasty artist Ma Lin, c. 1250. 24,8 × 25,2 cm.The western Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century saw artistic depictions of physical and rational certainties of the clockwork universe, as well as politically revolutionary visions of a post-monarchist world, such as Blake’s portrayal of Newton as a divine geometer, or David’s propagandistic paintings. This led to Romantic rejections of this in favor of pictures of the emotional side and individuality of humans, exemplified in the novels of Goethe. The late 19th century then saw a host of artistic movements, such as academic art, Symbolism, impressionism and fauvism among others.
The history of twentieth century art is a narrative of endless possibilities and the search for new standards, each being torn down in succession by the next. Thus the parameters of Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, etc. cannot be maintained very much beyond the time of their invention. Increasing global interaction during this time saw an equivalent influence of other cultures into Western art, such as Pablo Picasso being influenced by African sculpture. Japanese woodblock prints (which had themselves been influenced by Western Renaissance draftsmanship) had an immense influence on Impressionism and subsequent development. Later, African sculptures were taken up by Picasso and to some extent by Matisse. Similarly, the west has had huge impacts on Eastern art in the 19th and 20th centuries, with originally western ideas like Communism and Post-Modernism exerting a powerful influence on artistic styles.
Modernism, the idealistic search for truth, gave way in the latter half of the 20th century to a realization of its unattainability. Relativism was accepted as an unavoidable truth, which led to the period of contemporary art and postmodern criticism, where cultures of the world and of history are seen as changing forms, which can be appreciated and drawn from only with irony. Furthermore the separation of cultures is increasingly blurred and some argue it is now more appropriate to think in terms of a global culture, rather than regional cultures.
Characteristics
Art tends to facilitate intuitive rather than rational understanding, and is usually consciously created with this intention.[citation needed] Fine art intentionally serves no other purpose.[dubious – discuss] As a result of this impetus, works of art are elusive, refractive to attempts at classification, because they can be appreciated in more than one way, and are often susceptible to many different interpretations. In the case of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, special knowledge concerning the shipwreck that the painting depicts is not a prerequisite to appreciating it, but allows the appreciation of Géricault’s political intentions in the piece. Even art that superficially depicts a mundane event or object, may invite reflection upon elevated themes.
Traditionally, the highest achievements of art demonstrate a high level of ability or fluency within a medium. This characteristic might be considered a point of contention, since many modern artists (most notably, conceptual artists) do not themselves create the works they conceive, or do not even create the work in a conventional, demonstrative sense. Art has a transformative capacity: it confers particularly appealing or aesthetically satisfying structures or forms upon an original set of unrelated, passive constituents.
Forms, genres, media, and styles
The creative arts are often divided into more specific categories, each related to its technique, or medium, such as decorative arts, plastic arts, performing arts, or literature. Unlike scientific fields, art is one of the few subjects that are academically organized according to technique [1]. An artistic medium is the substance or material the artistic work is made from, and may also refer to the technique used. For example, paint is a medium used in painting, and paper is a medium used in drawing.
An art form is the specific shape, or quality an artistic expression takes. The media used often influence the form. For example, the form of a sculpture must exist in space in three dimensions, and respond to gravity. The constraints and limitations of a particular medium are thus called its formal qualities. To give another example, the formal qualities of painting are the canvas texture, color, and brush texture. The formal qualities of video games are non-linearity, interactivity and virtual presence. The form of a particular work of art is determined by both the formal qualities of the media, and the intentions of the artist.
A genre is a set of conventions and styles within a particular medium. For instance, well recognized genres in film are western, horror and romantic comedy. Genres in music include death metal and trip hop. Genres in painting include still life and pastoral landscape. A particular work of art may bend or combine genres but each genre has a recognizable group of conventions, clichés and tropes. (One note: the word genre has a second older meaning within painting; genre painting was a phrase used in the 17th to 19th centuries to refer specifically to paintings of scenes of everyday life and can still be used in this way.)
The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai (Japanese, 1760–1849), colored woodcut print.The style of an artwork, artist, or movement is the distinctive method and form followed by the respective art. Any loose brushy, dripped or poured abstract painting is called expressionistic. Often a style is linked with a particular historical period, set of ideas, and particular artistic movement. So Jackson Pollock is called an Abstract Expressionist.
Because a particular style may have specific cultural meanings, it is important to be sensitive to differences in technique. Roy Lichtenstein’s (1923–1997) paintings are not pointillist, despite his uses of dots, because they are not aligned with the original proponents of Pointillism. Lichtenstein used Ben-Day dots: they are evenly spaced and create flat areas of color. Dots of this type, used in halftone printing, were originally used in comic strips and newspapers to reproduce color. Lichtenstein thus uses the dots as a style to question the "high" art of painting with the "low" art of comics – to comment on class distinctions in culture. Lichtenstein is thus associated with the American Pop art movement (1960s). Pointillism is a technique in late Impressionism (1880s), developed especially by the artist Georges Seurat, that employs dots that are spaced in a way to create variation in color and depth in an attempt to paint images that were closer to the way people really see color. Both artists use dots, but the particular style and technique relate to the artistic movement adopted by each artist.
These are all ways of beginning to define a work of art, to narrow it down. "Imagine you are an art critic whose mission is to compare the meanings you find in a wide range of individual artworks. How would you proceed with your task? One way to begin is to examine the materials each artist selected in making an object, image video, or event. The decision to cast a sculpture in bronze, for instance, inevitably effects its meaning; the work becomes something different from how it might be if it had been cast in gold or plastic or chocolate, even if everything else about the artwork remains the same. Next, you might examine how the materials in each artwork have become an arrangement of shapes, colors, textures, and lines. These, in turn, are organized into various patterns and compositional structures. In your interpretation, you would comment on how salient features of the form contribute to the overall meaning of the finished artwork. [But in the end] the meaning of most artworks… is not exhausted by a discussion of materials, techniques, and form. Most interpretations also include a discussion of the ideas and feelings the artwork engenders."
Skill and craft
Art can connote a sense of trained ability or mastery of a medium. Art can also simply refer to the developed and efficient use of a language to convey meaning with immediacy and or depth. Art is an act of expressing feelings, thoughts, and observations. There is an understanding that is reached with the material as a result of handling it, which facilitates one’s thought processes. A common view is that the epithet "art", particular in its elevated sense, requires a certain level of creative expertise by the artist, whether this be a demonstration of technical ability or an originality in stylistic approach such as in the plays of Shakespeare, or a combination of these two. Traditionally skill of execution was viewed as a quality inseparable from art and thus necessary for its success; for Leonardo da Vinci, art, neither more nor less than his other endeavors, was a manifestation of skill. Rembrandt’s work, now praised for its ephemeral virtues, was most admired by his contemporaries for its virtuosity. At the turn of the 20th century, the adroit performances of John Singer Sargent were alternately admired and viewed with skepticism for their manual fluency, yet at nearly the same time the artist who would become the era’s most recognized and peripatetic iconoclast, Pablo Picasso, was completing a traditional academic training at which he excelled.
A common contemporary criticism of some modern art occurs along the lines of objecting to the apparent lack of skill or ability required in the production of the artistic object. In conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp’s "Fountain" is among the first examples of pieces wherein the artist used found objects ("ready-made") and exercised no traditionally recognised set of skills. Tracey Emin’s My Bed, or Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living follow this example and also manipulate the mass media. Emin slept (and engaged in other activities) in her bed before placing the result in a gallery as work of art. Hirst came up with the conceptual design for the artwork but has left most of the eventual creation of many works to employed artisans. Hirst’s celebrity is founded entirely on his ability to produce shocking concepts. The actual production in many conceptual and contemporary works of art is a matter of assembly of found objects. However there are many modernist and contemporary artists who continue to excel in the skills of drawing and painting and in creating hands-on works of art.
Value judgment
Somewhat in relation to the above, the word art is also used to apply judgments of value, as in such expressions as "that meal was a work of art" (the cook is an artist), or "the art of deception", (the highly attained level of skill of the deceiver is praised). It is this use of the word as a measure of high quality and high value that gives the term its flavor of subjectivity.
Making judgments of value requires a basis for criticism. At the simplest level, a way to determine whether the impact of the object on the senses meets the criteria to be considered art is whether it is perceived to be attractive or repulsive. Though perception is always colored by experience, and is necessarily subjective, it is commonly understood that what is not somehow aesthetically satisfying cannot be art. However, "good" art is not always or even regularly aesthetically appealing to a majority of viewers. In other words, an artist’s prime motivation need not be the pursuit of the aesthetic. Also, art often depicts terrible images made for social, moral, or thought-provoking reasons. For example, Francisco Goya’s painting depicting the Spanish shootings of 3rd of May 1808 is a graphic depiction of a firing squad executing several pleading civilians. Yet at the same time, the horrific imagery demonstrates Goya’s keen artistic ability in composition and execution and produces fitting social and political outrage. Thus, the debate continues as to what mode of aesthetic satisfaction, if any, is required to define ‘art’.
The assumption of new values or the rebellion against accepted notions of what is aesthetically superior need not occur concurrently with a complete abandonment of the pursuit of what is aesthetically appealing. Indeed, the reverse is often true, that the revision of what is popularly conceived of as being aesthetically appealing allows for a re-invigoration of aesthetic sensibility, and a new appreciation for the standards of art itself. Countless schools have proposed their own ways to define quality, yet they all seem to agree in at least one point: once their aesthetic choices are accepted, the value of the work of art is determined by its capacity to transcend the limits of its chosen medium to strike some universal chord by the rarity of the skill of the artist or in its accurate reflection in what is termed the zeitgeist.
Communication
Art is often intended to appeal to and connect with human emotion. It can arouse aesthetic or moral feelings, and can be understood as a way of communicating these feelings. Artists express something so that their audience is aroused to some extent, but they do not have to do so consciously. Art explores what is commonly termed as the human condition; that is, essentially what it is to be human. Effective art often brings about some new insight concerning the human condition either singly or en masse, which is not necessarily always positive, or necessarily widens the boundaries of collective human ability. The degree of skill possessed by an artist will affect his or her ability to trigger an emotional response and thereby provide new insights, the ability to manipulate them at will shows exemplary skill and determination.
Purpose of art
Art has had a great number of different functions throughout its history, making its purpose difficult to abstract or quantify to any single concept. This does not imply that the purpose of Art is "vague", but that it has had many unique, different reasons for being created. Some of these functions of Art are provided in the following outline. The different purposes of art may be grouped according to those that are non-motivated, and those that are motivated (Levi-Strauss).
Non-motivated functions of art
The non-motivated purposes of art are those that are integral to being human, transcend the individual, or do not fulfill a specific external purpose. Aristotle said, "Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature." [14] In this sense, Art, as creativity, is something humans must do by their very nature (i.e., no other species creates art), and is therefore beyond utility.
1.Basic human instinct for harmony, balance, rhythm. Art at this level is not an action or an object, but an internal appreciation of balance and harmony (beauty), and therefore an aspect of being human beyond utility.
"Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature. Next, there is the instinct for ‘harmony’ and rhythm, meters being manifestly sections of rhythm. Persons, therefore, starting with this natural gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their rude improvisations gave birth to Poetry." -Aristotle
2.Experience of the mysterious. Art provides a way to experience one’s self in relation to the universe. This experience may often come unmotivated, as one appreciates art, music or poetry.
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." -Albert Einstein
3.Expression of the imagination. Art provide a means to express the imagination in non-grammatic ways that are not tied to the formality of spoken or written language. Unlike words, which come in sequences and each of which have a definite meaning, art provides a range of forms, symbols and ideas with meanings that are maleable.
"Jupiter’s eagle [as an example of art] is not, like logical (aesthetic) attributes of an object, the concept of the sublimity and majesty of creation, but rather something else – something that gives the imagination an incentive to spread its flight over a whole host of kindred representations that provoke more thought than admits of expression in a concept determined by words. They furnish an aesthetic idea, which serves the above rational idea as a substitute for logical presentation, but with the proper function, however, of animating the mind by opening out for it a prospect into a field of kindred representations stretching beyond its ken." -Immanuel Kant
4.Universal communication. Art allows the individual to express things toward the world as a whole.[according to whom?] Earth artists often create art in remote locations that will never be experienced by another person. The practice of placing a cairn, or pile of stones at the top of a mountain, is an example. (Note: This need not suggest a particular view of God, or religion.) Art created in this way is a form of communication between the individual and the world as a whole.[citation needed]
5.Ritualistic and symbolic functions. In many cultures, art is used in rituals, performances and dances as a decoration or symbol. While these often have no specific utilitarian (motivated) purpose, anthropologists know that they often serve a purpose at the level of meaning within a particular culture. This meaning is not furnished by any one individual, but is often the result of many generations of change, and of a cosmological relationship within the culture.
"Most scholars who deal with rock paintings or objects recovered from prehistoric contexts that cannot be explained in utilitarian terms and are thus categorized as decorative, ritual or symbolic, are aware of the trap posed by the term ‘art’." -Silva Tomaskova
Motivated functions of art
Motivated purposes of art refer to intentional, conscious actions on the part of the artists or creator. These may be to bring about political change, to comment on an aspect of society, to convey a specific emotion or mood, to address personal psychology, to illustrate another discipline, to (with commercial arts) to sell a product, or simply as a form of communication.
1.Communication. Art, at its simplest, is a form of communication. As most forms of communication have an intent or goal directed toward another individual, this is a motivated purpose. Illustrative arts, such as scientific illustration, are a form of art as communication. Maps are another example. However, the content need not be scientific. Emotions, moods and feelings are also communicated through art.
"[Art is a set of] artefacts or images with symbolic meanings as a means of communication." -Steve Mithen
2.Art as entertainment. Art may seek to bring about a particular emotion or mood, for the purpose of relaxing or entertaining the viewer. This is often the function of the art industries of Motion Pictures and Video Games.
3.The Avante-Garde. Art for political change. One of the defining functions of early twentieth century art has been to use visual images to bring about political change. Art movements that had this goal—Dadaism, Surrealism, Russian Constructivism, and Abstract Expressionism, among others—are collectively referred to as the avante-garde arts.
"By contrast, the realistic attitude, inspired by positivism, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Anatole France, clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement. I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit. It is this attitude which today gives birth to these ridiculous books, these insulting plays. It constantly feeds on and derives strength from the newspapers and stultifies both science and art by assiduously flattering the lowest of tastes; clarity bordering on stupidity, a dog’s life." -André Breton (Surrealism)
4.Art for psychological and healing purposes. Art is also used by art therapists, psychotherapists and clinical psychologists as art therapy. The Diagnostic Drawing Series, for example, is used to determine the personality and emotional functioning of a patient. The end product is not the principal goal in this case, but rather a process of healing, through creative acts, is sought. The resultant piece of artwork may also offer insight into the troubles experienced by the subject and may suggest suitable approaches to be used in more conventional forms of psychiatric therapy.
5.Art for social inquiry, subversion and/or anarchy. While similar to art for political change, subversive or deconstructivist art may seek to question aspects of society without any specific political goal. In this case, the function of art may be simply to criticize some aspect of society.
Spray-paint graffiti on a wall in Rome.Graffiti art and other types of street art are graphics and images that are spray-painted or stencilled on publicly viewable walls, buildings, buses, trains, and bridges, usually without permission. Certain art forms, such as graffiti, may also be illegal when they break laws (in this case vandalism).
6.Art for propaganda, or commercialism. Art is often utilized as a form of propaganda, and thus can be used to subtly influence popular conceptions or mood. In a similar way, art that tries to sell a product also influences mood and emotion. In both cases, the purpose of art here is to subtly manipulate the viewer into a particular emotional or psychological response toward a particular idea or object.
The functions of art described above are not mutually exclusive, as many of them may overlap. For example, art for the purpose of entertainment may also seek to sell a product, i.e. the movie or video game.
Controversial art
Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (c. 1820), was a social commentary on a current event, unprecedented at the time. Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (1863), was considered scandalous not because of the nude woman, but because she is seated next to men fully dressed in the clothing of the time, rather than in robes of the antique world. John Singer Sargent’s Madame Pierre Gautreau (Madam X) (1884), caused a huge uproar over the reddish pink used to color the woman’s ear lobe, considered far too suggestive and supposedly ruining the high-society model’s reputation.
In the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) used arresting cubist techniques and stark monochromatic oils, to depict the harrowing consequences of a contemporary bombing of a small, ancient Basque town. Leon Golub’s Interrogation III (1981), depicts a female nude, hooded detainee strapped to a chair, her legs open to reveal her sexual organs, surrounded by two tormentors dressed in everyday clothing. Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1989) is a photograph of a crucifix, sacred to the Christian religion and representing Christ’s sacrifice and final suffering, submerged in a glass of the artist’s own urine. The resulting uproar led to comments in the United States Senate about public funding of the arts.
Art theories
In the nineteenth century, artists were primarily concerned with ideas of truth and beauty. The aesthetic theorist John Ruskin, who championed what he saw as the naturalism of J. M. W. Turner, saw art’s role as the communication by artifice of an essential truth that could only be found in nature.
The definition and evaluation of art has become especially problematic since the 20th century. Richard Wollheim distinguishes three approaches: the Realist, whereby aesthetic quality is an absolute value independent of any human view; the Objectivist, whereby it is also an absolute value, but is dependent on general human experience; and the Relativist position, whereby it is not an absolute value, but depends on, and varies with, the human experience of different humans.
The arrival of Modernism in the late nineteenth century lead to a radical break in the conception of the function of art, and then again in the late twentieth century with the advent of postmodernism. Clement Greenberg’s 1960 article "Modernist Painting" defines modern art as "the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself".Greenberg originally applied this idea to the Abstract Expressionist movement and used it as a way to understand and justify flat (non-illusionistic) abstract painting:
Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; modernism used art to call attention to art. The limitations that constitute the medium of
painting – the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment — were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Under Modernism these same limitations came to be regarded as positive factors, and were acknowledged openly.
After Greenberg, several important art theorists emerged, such as Michael Fried, T. J. Clark, Rosalind Krauss, Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock among others. Though only originally intended as a way of understanding a specific set of artists, Greenberg’s definition of modern art is important to many of the ideas of art within the various art movements of the 20th century and early 21st century.
Pop artists like Andy Warhol became both noteworthy and influential through work including and possibly critiquing popular culture, as well as the art world. Artists of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s expanded this technique of self-criticism beyond high art to all cultural image-making, including fashion images, comics, billboards and pornography.
Classification disputes
Disputes as to whether or not to classify something as a work of art are referred to as classificatory disputes about art.
Classificatory disputes in the 20th century have included cubist and impressionist paintings, Duchamp’s Fountain, the movies, superlative imitations of banknotes, conceptual art, and video games.
Philosopher David Novitz has argued that disagreement about the definition of art are rarely the heart of the problem. Rather, "the passionate concerns and interests that humans vest in their social life" are "so much a part of all classificatory disputes about art" (Novitz, 1996). According to Novitz, classificatory disputes are more often disputes about societal values and where society is trying to go than they are about theory proper. For example, when the Daily Mail criticized Hirst’s and Emin’s work by arguing "For 1,000 years art has been one of our great civilising forces. Today, pickled sheep and soiled beds threaten to make barbarians of us all" they are not advancing a definition or theory about art, but questioning the value of Hirst’s and Emin’s work. In 1998, Arthur Danto, suggested a thought experiment showing that "the status of an artifact as work of art results from the ideas a culture applies to it, rather than its inherent physical or perceptible qualities. Cultural interpretation (an art theory of some kind) is therefore constitutive of an object’s arthood."
Anti-art is a label for art that intentionally challenges the established parameters and values of art; it is term associated with Dadaism and attributed to Marcel Duchamp just before World War I, when he was making art from found objects. One of these, Fountain (1917), an ordinary urinal, has achieved considerable prominence and influence on art. Anti-art is a feature of work by Situationist International,[31] the lo-fi Mail art movement, and the Young British Artists, though it is a form still rejected by the Stuckists, who describe themselves as anti-anti-art.
Art, class, and value
Art has been perceived by some as belonging to some social classes and often excluding others. In this context, art is seen as an upper-class activity associated with wealth, the ability to purchase art, and the leisure required to pursue or enjoy it. For example, the palaces of Versailles or the Hermitage in St. Petersburg with their vast collections of art, amassed by the fabulously wealthy royalty of Europe exemplify this view. Collecting such art is the preserve of the rich, or of governments and institutions.
Fine and expensive goods have been popular markers of status in many cultures, and they continue to be so today. There has been a cultural push in the other direction since at least 1793, when the Louvre, which had been a private palace of the Kings of France, was opened to the public as an art museum during the French Revolution. Most modern public museums and art education programs for children in schools can be traced back to this impulse to have art available to everyone. Museums in the United States tend to be gifts from the very rich to the masses (The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, for example, was created by John Taylor Johnston, a railroad executive whose personal art collection seeded the museum.) But despite all this, at least one of the important functions of art in the 21st century remains as a marker of wealth and social status.
Performance by Joseph Beuys, 1978 : Everyone an artist — On the way to the libertarian form of the social organism.There have been attempts by artists to create art that can not be bought by the wealthy as a status object. One of the prime original motivators of much of the art of the late 1960s and 1970s was to create art that could not be bought and sold. It is "necessary to present something more than mere objects" said the major post war German artist Joseph Beuys. This time period saw the rise of such things as performance art, video art, and conceptual art. The idea was that if the artwork was a performance that would leave nothing behind, or was simply an idea, it could not be bought and sold. "Democratic precepts revolving around the idea that a work of art is a commodity impelled the aesthetic innovation which germinated in the mid-1960s and was reaped throughout the 1970s. Artists broadly identified under the heading of Conceptual art… substituting performance and publishing activities for engagement with both the material and materialistic concerns of painted or sculptural form… [have] endeavored to undermine the art object qua object."
In the decades since, these ideas have been somewhat lost as the art market has learned to sell limited edition DVDs of video works, invitations to exclusive performance art pieces, and the objects left over from conceptual pieces. Many of these performances create works that are only understood by the elite who have been educated as to why an idea or video or piece of apparent garbage may be considered art. The marker of status becomes understanding the work instead of necessarily owning it, and the artwork remains an upper-class activity. "With the widespread use of DVD recording technology in the early 2000s, artists, and the gallery system that derives its profits from the sale of artworks, gained an important means of controlling the sale of video and computer artworks in limited editions to collectors."
Image by Joost J. Bakker IJmuiden
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items (often with symbolic significance) in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature, film, photography, sculpture, and paintings. The meaning of art is explored in a branch of philosophy known as aesthetics, and even disciplines such as history and psychology analyze its relationship with humans and generations.
Traditionally, the term art was used to refer to any skill or mastery. This conception changed during the Romantic period, when art came to be seen as "a special faculty of the human mind to be classified with religion and science". Generally, art is made with the intention of stimulating thoughts and emotions.
Evaluation
Philosopher Richard Wollheim distinguishes three approaches to assessing the aesthetic value of art: the realist, whereby aesthetic quality is an absolute value independent of any human view; the objectivist, whereby it is also an absolute value, but is dependent on general human experience; and the relativist position, whereby it is not an absolute value, but depends on, and varies with, the human experience of different humans. An object may be characterized by the intentions, or lack thereof, of its creator, regardless of its apparent purpose. A cup, which ostensibly can be used as a container, may be considered art if intended solely as an ornament, while a painting may be deemed craft if mass-produced.
The nature of art has been described by Wollheim as "one of the most elusive of the traditional problems of human culture". It has been defined as a vehicle for the expression or communication of emotions and ideas, a means for exploring and appreciating formal elements for their own sake, and as mimesis or representation. Leo Tolstoy identified art as a use of indirect means to communicate from one person to another. Benedetto Croce and R.G. Collingwood advanced the idealist view that art expresses emotions, and that the work of art therefore essentially exists in the mind of the creator. The theory of art as form has its roots in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and was developed in the early twentieth century by Roger Fry and Clive Bell. Art as mimesis or representation has deep roots in the philosophy of Aristotle. More recently, thinkers influenced by Martin Heidegger have interpreted art as the means by which a community develops for itself a medium for self-expression and interpretation.
Definition
Britannica Online defines art as "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others." By this definition of the word, artistic works have existed for almost as long as humankind: from early pre-historic art to contemporary art; however, some theories restrict the concept to modern Western societies. Adorno said in 1970, "It is now taken for granted that nothing which concerns art can be taken for granted any more: neither art itself, nor art in relationship to the whole, nor even the right of art to exist." The first and broadest sense of art is the one that has remained closest to the older Latin meaning, which roughly translates to "skill" or "craft." A few examples where this meaning proves very broad include artifact, artificial, artifice, medical arts, and military arts. However, there are many other colloquial uses of the word, all with some relation to its etymology.
20th-century Rwandan bottle. Artistic works may serve practical functions, in addition to their decorative value.The second and more recent sense of the word art is as an abbreviation for creative art or fine art. Fine art means that a skill is being used to express the artist’s creativity, or to engage the audience’s aesthetic sensibilities, or to draw the audience towards consideration of the finer things. Often, if the skill is being used in a common or practical way, people will consider it a craft instead of art. Likewise, if the skill is being used in a commercial or industrial way, it will be considered commercial art instead of fine art. On the other hand, crafts and design are sometimes considered applied art. Some art followers have argued that the difference between fine art and applied art has more to do with value judgments made about the art than any clear definitional difference. However, even fine art often has goals beyond pure creativity and self-expression. The purpose of works of art may be to communicate ideas, such as in politically, spiritually, or philosophically motivated art; to create a sense of beauty (see aesthetics); to explore the nature of perception; for pleasure; or to generate strong emotions. The purpose may also be seemingly nonexistent.
Art can describe several things: a study of creative skill, a process of using the creative skill, a product of the creative skill, or the audience’s experience with the creative skill. The creative arts (art as discipline) are a collection of disciplines (arts) that produce artworks (art as objects) that are compelled by a personal drive (art as activity) and echo or reflect a message, mood, or symbolism for the viewer to interpret (art as experience). Artworks can be defined by purposeful, creative interpretations of limitless concepts or ideas in order to communicate something to another person. Artworks can be explicitly made for this purpose or interpreted on the basis of images or objects. Art is something that stimulates an individual’s thoughts, emotions, beliefs, or ideas through the senses. It is also an expression of an idea and it can take many different forms and serve many different purposes. Although the application of scientific knowledge to derive a new scientific theory involves skill and results in the "creation" of something new, this represents science only and is not categorized as art.
History
Sculptures, cave paintings, rock paintings, and petroglyphs from the Upper Paleolithic dating to roughly 40,000 years ago have been found, but the precise meaning of such art is often disputed because so little is known about the cultures that produced them. The oldest art objects in the world—a series of tiny, drilled snail shells about 75,000 years old—were discovered in a South African cave.
Cave painting of a horse from the Lascaux caves, c. 16,000 BP.Many great traditions in art have a foundation in the art of one of the great ancient civilizations: Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, India, China, Ancient Greece, Rome, as well as Inca, Maya, and Olmec. Each of these centers of early civilization developed a unique and characteristic style in its art. Because of the size and duration of these civilizations, more of their art works have survived and more of their influence has been transmitted to other cultures and later times. Some also have provided the first records of how artists worked. For example, this period of Greek art saw a veneration of the human physical form and the development of equivalent skills to show musculature, poise, beauty, and anatomically correct proportions.
In Byzantine and Medieval art of the Western Middle Ages, much art focused on the expression of Biblical and nonmaterial truths, and used styles that showed the higher unseen glory of a heavenly world, such as the use of gold in the background of paintings, or glass in mosaics or windows, which also presented figures in idealized, patterned (flat) forms. Nevertheless a classical realist tradition persisted in small Byzantine works, and realism steadily grew in the art of Catholic Europe.
Renaissance art had a greatly increased emphasis on the realistic depiction of the material world, and the place of humans in it, reflected in the corporeality of the human body, and development of a systematic method of graphical perspective to depict recession in a three-dimensional picture space.
The stylized signature of Sultan Mahmud II of the Ottoman Empire was written in Arabic calligraphy. It reads Mahmud Khan son of Abdulhamid is forever victorious.In the east, Islamic art’s rejection of iconography led to emphasis on geometric patterns, calligraphy, and architecture. Further east, religion dominated artistic styles and forms too. India and Tibet saw emphasis on painted sculptures and dance, while religious painting borrowed many conventions from sculpture and tended to bright contrasting colors with emphasis on outlines. China saw the flourishing of many art forms: jade carving, bronzework, pottery (including the stunning terracotta army of Emperor Qin), poetry, calligraphy, music, painting, drama, fiction, etc. Chinese styles vary greatly from era to era and each one is traditionally named after the ruling dynasty. So, for example, Tang Dynasty paintings are monochromatic and sparse, emphasizing idealized landscapes, but Ming Dynasty paintings are busy and colorful, and focus on telling stories via setting and composition. Japan names its styles after imperial dynasties too, and also saw much interplay between the styles of calligraphy and painting. Woodblock printing became important in Japan after the 17th century.
Painting by Song Dynasty artist Ma Lin, c. 1250. 24,8 × 25,2 cm.The western Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century saw artistic depictions of physical and rational certainties of the clockwork universe, as well as politically revolutionary visions of a post-monarchist world, such as Blake’s portrayal of Newton as a divine geometer, or David’s propagandistic paintings. This led to Romantic rejections of this in favor of pictures of the emotional side and individuality of humans, exemplified in the novels of Goethe. The late 19th century then saw a host of artistic movements, such as academic art, Symbolism, impressionism and fauvism among others.
The history of twentieth century art is a narrative of endless possibilities and the search for new standards, each being torn down in succession by the next. Thus the parameters of Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, etc. cannot be maintained very much beyond the time of their invention. Increasing global interaction during this time saw an equivalent influence of other cultures into Western art, such as Pablo Picasso being influenced by African sculpture. Japanese woodblock prints (which had themselves been influenced by Western Renaissance draftsmanship) had an immense influence on Impressionism and subsequent development. Later, African sculptures were taken up by Picasso and to some extent by Matisse. Similarly, the west has had huge impacts on Eastern art in the 19th and 20th centuries, with originally western ideas like Communism and Post-Modernism exerting a powerful influence on artistic styles.
Modernism, the idealistic search for truth, gave way in the latter half of the 20th century to a realization of its unattainability. Relativism was accepted as an unavoidable truth, which led to the period of contemporary art and postmodern criticism, where cultures of the world and of history are seen as changing forms, which can be appreciated and drawn from only with irony. Furthermore the separation of cultures is increasingly blurred and some argue it is now more appropriate to think in terms of a global culture, rather than regional cultures.
Characteristics
Art tends to facilitate intuitive rather than rational understanding, and is usually consciously created with this intention.[citation needed] Fine art intentionally serves no other purpose.[dubious – discuss] As a result of this impetus, works of art are elusive, refractive to attempts at classification, because they can be appreciated in more than one way, and are often susceptible to many different interpretations. In the case of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, special knowledge concerning the shipwreck that the painting depicts is not a prerequisite to appreciating it, but allows the appreciation of Géricault’s political intentions in the piece. Even art that superficially depicts a mundane event or object, may invite reflection upon elevated themes.
Traditionally, the highest achievements of art demonstrate a high level of ability or fluency within a medium. This characteristic might be considered a point of contention, since many modern artists (most notably, conceptual artists) do not themselves create the works they conceive, or do not even create the work in a conventional, demonstrative sense. Art has a transformative capacity: it confers particularly appealing or aesthetically satisfying structures or forms upon an original set of unrelated, passive constituents.
Forms, genres, media, and styles
The creative arts are often divided into more specific categories, each related to its technique, or medium, such as decorative arts, plastic arts, performing arts, or literature. Unlike scientific fields, art is one of the few subjects that are academically organized according to technique [1]. An artistic medium is the substance or material the artistic work is made from, and may also refer to the technique used. For example, paint is a medium used in painting, and paper is a medium used in drawing.
An art form is the specific shape, or quality an artistic expression takes. The media used often influence the form. For example, the form of a sculpture must exist in space in three dimensions, and respond to gravity. The constraints and limitations of a particular medium are thus called its formal qualities. To give another example, the formal qualities of painting are the canvas texture, color, and brush texture. The formal qualities of video games are non-linearity, interactivity and virtual presence. The form of a particular work of art is determined by both the formal qualities of the media, and the intentions of the artist.
A genre is a set of conventions and styles within a particular medium. For instance, well recognized genres in film are western, horror and romantic comedy. Genres in music include death metal and trip hop. Genres in painting include still life and pastoral landscape. A particular work of art may bend or combine genres but each genre has a recognizable group of conventions, clichés and tropes. (One note: the word genre has a second older meaning within painting; genre painting was a phrase used in the 17th to 19th centuries to refer specifically to paintings of scenes of everyday life and can still be used in this way.)
The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai (Japanese, 1760–1849), colored woodcut print.The style of an artwork, artist, or movement is the distinctive method and form followed by the respective art. Any loose brushy, dripped or poured abstract painting is called expressionistic. Often a style is linked with a particular historical period, set of ideas, and particular artistic movement. So Jackson Pollock is called an Abstract Expressionist.
Because a particular style may have specific cultural meanings, it is important to be sensitive to differences in technique. Roy Lichtenstein’s (1923–1997) paintings are not pointillist, despite his uses of dots, because they are not aligned with the original proponents of Pointillism. Lichtenstein used Ben-Day dots: they are evenly spaced and create flat areas of color. Dots of this type, used in halftone printing, were originally used in comic strips and newspapers to reproduce color. Lichtenstein thus uses the dots as a style to question the "high" art of painting with the "low" art of comics – to comment on class distinctions in culture. Lichtenstein is thus associated with the American Pop art movement (1960s). Pointillism is a technique in late Impressionism (1880s), developed especially by the artist Georges Seurat, that employs dots that are spaced in a way to create variation in color and depth in an attempt to paint images that were closer to the way people really see color. Both artists use dots, but the particular style and technique relate to the artistic movement adopted by each artist.
These are all ways of beginning to define a work of art, to narrow it down. "Imagine you are an art critic whose mission is to compare the meanings you find in a wide range of individual artworks. How would you proceed with your task? One way to begin is to examine the materials each artist selected in making an object, image video, or event. The decision to cast a sculpture in bronze, for instance, inevitably effects its meaning; the work becomes something different from how it might be if it had been cast in gold or plastic or chocolate, even if everything else about the artwork remains the same. Next, you might examine how the materials in each artwork have become an arrangement of shapes, colors, textures, and lines. These, in turn, are organized into various patterns and compositional structures. In your interpretation, you would comment on how salient features of the form contribute to the overall meaning of the finished artwork. [But in the end] the meaning of most artworks… is not exhausted by a discussion of materials, techniques, and form. Most interpretations also include a discussion of the ideas and feelings the artwork engenders."
Skill and craft
Art can connote a sense of trained ability or mastery of a medium. Art can also simply refer to the developed and efficient use of a language to convey meaning with immediacy and or depth. Art is an act of expressing feelings, thoughts, and observations. There is an understanding that is reached with the material as a result of handling it, which facilitates one’s thought processes. A common view is that the epithet "art", particular in its elevated sense, requires a certain level of creative expertise by the artist, whether this be a demonstration of technical ability or an originality in stylistic approach such as in the plays of Shakespeare, or a combination of these two. Traditionally skill of execution was viewed as a quality inseparable from art and thus necessary for its success; for Leonardo da Vinci, art, neither more nor less than his other endeavors, was a manifestation of skill. Rembrandt’s work, now praised for its ephemeral virtues, was most admired by his contemporaries for its virtuosity. At the turn of the 20th century, the adroit performances of John Singer Sargent were alternately admired and viewed with skepticism for their manual fluency, yet at nearly the same time the artist who would become the era’s most recognized and peripatetic iconoclast, Pablo Picasso, was completing a traditional academic training at which he excelled.
A common contemporary criticism of some modern art occurs along the lines of objecting to the apparent lack of skill or ability required in the production of the artistic object. In conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp’s "Fountain" is among the first examples of pieces wherein the artist used found objects ("ready-made") and exercised no traditionally recognised set of skills. Tracey Emin’s My Bed, or Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living follow this example and also manipulate the mass media. Emin slept (and engaged in other activities) in her bed before placing the result in a gallery as work of art. Hirst came up with the conceptual design for the artwork but has left most of the eventual creation of many works to employed artisans. Hirst’s celebrity is founded entirely on his ability to produce shocking concepts. The actual production in many conceptual and contemporary works of art is a matter of assembly of found objects. However there are many modernist and contemporary artists who continue to excel in the skills of drawing and painting and in creating hands-on works of art.
Value judgment
Somewhat in relation to the above, the word art is also used to apply judgments of value, as in such expressions as "that meal was a work of art" (the cook is an artist), or "the art of deception", (the highly attained level of skill of the deceiver is praised). It is this use of the word as a measure of high quality and high value that gives the term its flavor of subjectivity.
Making judgments of value requires a basis for criticism. At the simplest level, a way to determine whether the impact of the object on the senses meets the criteria to be considered art is whether it is perceived to be attractive or repulsive. Though perception is always colored by experience, and is necessarily subjective, it is commonly understood that what is not somehow aesthetically satisfying cannot be art. However, "good" art is not always or even regularly aesthetically appealing to a majority of viewers. In other words, an artist’s prime motivation need not be the pursuit of the aesthetic. Also, art often depicts terrible images made for social, moral, or thought-provoking reasons. For example, Francisco Goya’s painting depicting the Spanish shootings of 3rd of May 1808 is a graphic depiction of a firing squad executing several pleading civilians. Yet at the same time, the horrific imagery demonstrates Goya’s keen artistic ability in composition and execution and produces fitting social and political outrage. Thus, the debate continues as to what mode of aesthetic satisfaction, if any, is required to define ‘art’.
The assumption of new values or the rebellion against accepted notions of what is aesthetically superior need not occur concurrently with a complete abandonment of the pursuit of what is aesthetically appealing. Indeed, the reverse is often true, that the revision of what is popularly conceived of as being aesthetically appealing allows for a re-invigoration of aesthetic sensibility, and a new appreciation for the standards of art itself. Countless schools have proposed their own ways to define quality, yet they all seem to agree in at least one point: once their aesthetic choices are accepted, the value of the work of art is determined by its capacity to transcend the limits of its chosen medium to strike some universal chord by the rarity of the skill of the artist or in its accurate reflection in what is termed the zeitgeist.
Communication
Art is often intended to appeal to and connect with human emotion. It can arouse aesthetic or moral feelings, and can be understood as a way of communicating these feelings. Artists express something so that their audience is aroused to some extent, but they do not have to do so consciously. Art explores what is commonly termed as the human condition; that is, essentially what it is to be human. Effective art often brings about some new insight concerning the human condition either singly or en masse, which is not necessarily always positive, or necessarily widens the boundaries of collective human ability. The degree of skill possessed by an artist will affect his or her ability to trigger an emotional response and thereby provide new insights, the ability to manipulate them at will shows exemplary skill and determination.
Purpose of art
Art has had a great number of different functions throughout its history, making its purpose difficult to abstract or quantify to any single concept. This does not imply that the purpose of Art is "vague", but that it has had many unique, different reasons for being created. Some of these functions of Art are provided in the following outline. The different purposes of art may be grouped according to those that are non-motivated, and those that are motivated (Levi-Strauss).
Non-motivated functions of art
The non-motivated purposes of art are those that are integral to being human, transcend the individual, or do not fulfill a specific external purpose. Aristotle said, "Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature." [14] In this sense, Art, as creativity, is something humans must do by their very nature (i.e., no other species creates art), and is therefore beyond utility.
1.Basic human instinct for harmony, balance, rhythm. Art at this level is not an action or an object, but an internal appreciation of balance and harmony (beauty), and therefore an aspect of being human beyond utility.
"Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature. Next, there is the instinct for ‘harmony’ and rhythm, meters being manifestly sections of rhythm. Persons, therefore, starting with this natural gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their rude improvisations gave birth to Poetry." -Aristotle
2.Experience of the mysterious. Art provides a way to experience one’s self in relation to the universe. This experience may often come unmotivated, as one appreciates art, music or poetry.
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." -Albert Einstein
3.Expression of the imagination. Art provide a means to express the imagination in non-grammatic ways that are not tied to the formality of spoken or written language. Unlike words, which come in sequences and each of which have a definite meaning, art provides a range of forms, symbols and ideas with meanings that are maleable.
"Jupiter’s eagle [as an example of art] is not, like logical (aesthetic) attributes of an object, the concept of the sublimity and majesty of creation, but rather something else – something that gives the imagination an incentive to spread its flight over a whole host of kindred representations that provoke more thought than admits of expression in a concept determined by words. They furnish an aesthetic idea, which serves the above rational idea as a substitute for logical presentation, but with the proper function, however, of animating the mind by opening out for it a prospect into a field of kindred representations stretching beyond its ken." -Immanuel Kant
4.Universal communication. Art allows the individual to express things toward the world as a whole.[according to whom?] Earth artists often create art in remote locations that will never be experienced by another person. The practice of placing a cairn, or pile of stones at the top of a mountain, is an example. (Note: This need not suggest a particular view of God, or religion.) Art created in this way is a form of communication between the individual and the world as a whole.[citation needed]
5.Ritualistic and symbolic functions. In many cultures, art is used in rituals, performances and dances as a decoration or symbol. While these often have no specific utilitarian (motivated) purpose, anthropologists know that they often serve a purpose at the level of meaning within a particular culture. This meaning is not furnished by any one individual, but is often the result of many generations of change, and of a cosmological relationship within the culture.
"Most scholars who deal with rock paintings or objects recovered from prehistoric contexts that cannot be explained in utilitarian terms and are thus categorized as decorative, ritual or symbolic, are aware of the trap posed by the term ‘art’." -Silva Tomaskova
Motivated functions of art
Motivated purposes of art refer to intentional, conscious actions on the part of the artists or creator. These may be to bring about political change, to comment on an aspect of society, to convey a specific emotion or mood, to address personal psychology, to illustrate another discipline, to (with commercial arts) to sell a product, or simply as a form of communication.
1.Communication. Art, at its simplest, is a form of communication. As most forms of communication have an intent or goal directed toward another individual, this is a motivated purpose. Illustrative arts, such as scientific illustration, are a form of art as communication. Maps are another example. However, the content need not be scientific. Emotions, moods and feelings are also communicated through art.
"[Art is a set of] artefacts or images with symbolic meanings as a means of communication." -Steve Mithen
2.Art as entertainment. Art may seek to bring about a particular emotion or mood, for the purpose of relaxing or entertaining the viewer. This is often the function of the art industries of Motion Pictures and Video Games.
3.The Avante-Garde. Art for political change. One of the defining functions of early twentieth century art has been to use visual images to bring about political change. Art movements that had this goal—Dadaism, Surrealism, Russian Constructivism, and Abstract Expressionism, among others—are collectively referred to as the avante-garde arts.
"By contrast, the realistic attitude, inspired by positivism, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Anatole France, clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement. I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit. It is this attitude which today gives birth to these ridiculous books, these insulting plays. It constantly feeds on and derives strength from the newspapers and stultifies both science and art by assiduously flattering the lowest of tastes; clarity bordering on stupidity, a dog’s life." -André Breton (Surrealism)
4.Art for psychological and healing purposes. Art is also used by art therapists, psychotherapists and clinical psychologists as art therapy. The Diagnostic Drawing Series, for example, is used to determine the personality and emotional functioning of a patient. The end product is not the principal goal in this case, but rather a process of healing, through creative acts, is sought. The resultant piece of artwork may also offer insight into the troubles experienced by the subject and may suggest suitable approaches to be used in more conventional forms of psychiatric therapy.
5.Art for social inquiry, subversion and/or anarchy. While similar to art for political change, subversive or deconstructivist art may seek to question aspects of society without any specific political goal. In this case, the function of art may be simply to criticize some aspect of society.
Spray-paint graffiti on a wall in Rome.Graffiti art and other types of street art are graphics and images that are spray-painted or stencilled on publicly viewable walls, buildings, buses, trains, and bridges, usually without permission. Certain art forms, such as graffiti, may also be illegal when they break laws (in this case vandalism).
6.Art for propaganda, or commercialism. Art is often utilized as a form of propaganda, and thus can be used to subtly influence popular conceptions or mood. In a similar way, art that tries to sell a product also influences mood and emotion. In both cases, the purpose of art here is to subtly manipulate the viewer into a particular emotional or psychological response toward a particular idea or object.
The functions of art described above are not mutually exclusive, as many of them may overlap. For example, art for the purpose of entertainment may also seek to sell a product, i.e. the movie or video game.
Controversial art
Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (c. 1820), was a social commentary on a current event, unprecedented at the time. Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (1863), was considered scandalous not because of the nude woman, but because she is seated next to men fully dressed in the clothing of the time, rather than in robes of the antique world. John Singer Sargent’s Madame Pierre Gautreau (Madam X) (1884), caused a huge uproar over the reddish pink used to color the woman’s ear lobe, considered far too suggestive and supposedly ruining the high-society model’s reputation.
In the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) used arresting cubist techniques and stark monochromatic oils, to depict the harrowing consequences of a contemporary bombing of a small, ancient Basque town. Leon Golub’s Interrogation III (1981), depicts a female nude, hooded detainee strapped to a chair, her legs open to reveal her sexual organs, surrounded by two tormentors dressed in everyday clothing. Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1989) is a photograph of a crucifix, sacred to the Christian religion and representing Christ’s sacrifice and final suffering, submerged in a glass of the artist’s own urine. The resulting uproar led to comments in the United States Senate about public funding of the arts.
Art theories
In the nineteenth century, artists were primarily concerned with ideas of truth and beauty. The aesthetic theorist John Ruskin, who championed what he saw as the naturalism of J. M. W. Turner, saw art’s role as the communication by artifice of an essential truth that could only be found in nature.
The definition and evaluation of art has become especially problematic since the 20th century. Richard Wollheim distinguishes three approaches: the Realist, whereby aesthetic quality is an absolute value independent of any human view; the Objectivist, whereby it is also an absolute value, but is dependent on general human experience; and the Relativist position, whereby it is not an absolute value, but depends on, and varies with, the human experience of different humans.
The arrival of Modernism in the late nineteenth century lead to a radical break in the conception of the function of art, and then again in the late twentieth century with the advent of postmodernism. Clement Greenberg’s 1960 article "Modernist Painting" defines modern art as "the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself".Greenberg originally applied this idea to the Abstract Expressionist movement and used it as a way to understand and justify flat (non-illusionistic) abstract painting:
Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; modernism used art to call attention to art. The limitations that constitute the medium of
painting – the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment — were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Under Modernism these same limitations came to be regarded as positive factors, and were acknowledged openly.
After Greenberg, several important art theorists emerged, such as Michael Fried, T. J. Clark, Rosalind Krauss, Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock among others. Though only originally intended as a way of understanding a specific set of artists, Greenberg’s definition of modern art is important to many of the ideas of art within the various art movements of the 20th century and early 21st century.
Pop artists like Andy Warhol became both noteworthy and influential through work including and possibly critiquing popular culture, as well as the art world. Artists of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s expanded this technique of self-criticism beyond high art to all cultural image-making, including fashion images, comics, billboards and pornography.
Classification disputes
Disputes as to whether or not to classify something as a work of art are referred to as classificatory disputes about art.
Classificatory disputes in the 20th century have included cubist and impressionist paintings, Duchamp’s Fountain, the movies, superlative imitations of banknotes, conceptual art, and video games.
Philosopher David Novitz has argued that disagreement about the definition of art are rarely the heart of the problem. Rather, "the passionate concerns and interests that humans vest in their social life" are "so much a part of all classificatory disputes about art" (Novitz, 1996). According to Novitz, classificatory disputes are more often disputes about societal values and where society is trying to go than they are about theory proper. For example, when the Daily Mail criticized Hirst’s and Emin’s work by arguing "For 1,000 years art has been one of our great civilising forces. Today, pickled sheep and soiled beds threaten to make barbarians of us all" they are not advancing a definition or theory about art, but questioning the value of Hirst’s and Emin’s work. In 1998, Arthur Danto, suggested a thought experiment showing that "the status of an artifact as work of art results from the ideas a culture applies to it, rather than its inherent physical or perceptible qualities. Cultural interpretation (an art theory of some kind) is therefore constitutive of an object’s arthood."
Anti-art is a label for art that intentionally challenges the established parameters and values of art; it is term associated with Dadaism and attributed to Marcel Duchamp just before World War I, when he was making art from found objects. One of these, Fountain (1917), an ordinary urinal, has achieved considerable prominence and influence on art. Anti-art is a feature of work by Situationist International,[31] the lo-fi Mail art movement, and the Young British Artists, though it is a form still rejected by the Stuckists, who describe themselves as anti-anti-art.
Art, class, and value
Art has been perceived by some as belonging to some social classes and often excluding others. In this context, art is seen as an upper-class activity associated with wealth, the ability to purchase art, and the leisure required to pursue or enjoy it. For example, the palaces of Versailles or the Hermitage in St. Petersburg with their vast collections of art, amassed by the fabulously wealthy royalty of Europe exemplify this view. Collecting such art is the preserve of the rich, or of governments and institutions.
Fine and expensive goods have been popular markers of status in many cultures, and they continue to be so today. There has been a cultural push in the other direction since at least 1793, when the Louvre, which had been a private palace of the Kings of France, was opened to the public as an art museum during the French Revolution. Most modern public museums and art education programs for children in schools can be traced back to this impulse to have art available to everyone. Museums in the United States tend to be gifts from the very rich to the masses (The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, for example, was created by John Taylor Johnston, a railroad executive whose personal art collection seeded the museum.) But despite all this, at least one of the important functions of art in the 21st century remains as a marker of wealth and social status.
Performance by Joseph Beuys, 1978 : Everyone an artist — On the way to the libertarian form of the social organism.There have been attempts by artists to create art that can not be bought by the wealthy as a status object. One of the prime original motivators of much of the art of the late 1960s and 1970s was to create art that could not be bought and sold. It is "necessary to present something more than mere objects" said the major post war German artist Joseph Beuys. This time period saw the rise of such things as performance art, video art, and conceptual art. The idea was that if the artwork was a performance that would leave nothing behind, or was simply an idea, it could not be bought and sold. "Democratic precepts revolving around the idea that a work of art is a commodity impelled the aesthetic innovation which germinated in the mid-1960s and was reaped throughout the 1970s. Artists broadly identified under the heading of Conceptual art… substituting performance and publishing activities for engagement with both the material and materialistic concerns of painted or sculptural form… [have] endeavored to undermine the art object qua object."
In the decades since, these ideas have been somewhat lost as the art market has learned to sell limited edition DVDs of video works, invitations to exclusive performance art pieces, and the objects left over from conceptual pieces. Many of these performances create works that are only understood by the elite who have been educated as to why an idea or video or piece of apparent garbage may be considered art. The marker of status becomes understanding the work instead of necessarily owning it, and the artwork remains an upper-class activity. "With the widespread use of DVD recording technology in the early 2000s, artists, and the gallery system that derives its profits from the sale of artworks, gained an important means of controlling the sale of video and computer artworks in limited editions to collectors."
Image by Joost J. Bakker IJmuiden
Art is the product or process of deliberately arranging items (often with symbolic significance) in a way that influences and affects one or more of the senses, emotions, and intellect. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression, including music, literature, film, photography, sculpture, and paintings. The meaning of art is explored in a branch of philosophy known as aesthetics, and even disciplines such as history and psychology analyze its relationship with humans and generations.
Traditionally, the term art was used to refer to any skill or mastery. This conception changed during the Romantic period, when art came to be seen as "a special faculty of the human mind to be classified with religion and science". Generally, art is made with the intention of stimulating thoughts and emotions.
Evaluation
Philosopher Richard Wollheim distinguishes three approaches to assessing the aesthetic value of art: the realist, whereby aesthetic quality is an absolute value independent of any human view; the objectivist, whereby it is also an absolute value, but is dependent on general human experience; and the relativist position, whereby it is not an absolute value, but depends on, and varies with, the human experience of different humans. An object may be characterized by the intentions, or lack thereof, of its creator, regardless of its apparent purpose. A cup, which ostensibly can be used as a container, may be considered art if intended solely as an ornament, while a painting may be deemed craft if mass-produced.
The nature of art has been described by Wollheim as "one of the most elusive of the traditional problems of human culture". It has been defined as a vehicle for the expression or communication of emotions and ideas, a means for exploring and appreciating formal elements for their own sake, and as mimesis or representation. Leo Tolstoy identified art as a use of indirect means to communicate from one person to another. Benedetto Croce and R.G. Collingwood advanced the idealist view that art expresses emotions, and that the work of art therefore essentially exists in the mind of the creator. The theory of art as form has its roots in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and was developed in the early twentieth century by Roger Fry and Clive Bell. Art as mimesis or representation has deep roots in the philosophy of Aristotle. More recently, thinkers influenced by Martin Heidegger have interpreted art as the means by which a community develops for itself a medium for self-expression and interpretation.
Definition
Britannica Online defines art as "the use of skill and imagination in the creation of aesthetic objects, environments, or experiences that can be shared with others." By this definition of the word, artistic works have existed for almost as long as humankind: from early pre-historic art to contemporary art; however, some theories restrict the concept to modern Western societies. Adorno said in 1970, "It is now taken for granted that nothing which concerns art can be taken for granted any more: neither art itself, nor art in relationship to the whole, nor even the right of art to exist." The first and broadest sense of art is the one that has remained closest to the older Latin meaning, which roughly translates to "skill" or "craft." A few examples where this meaning proves very broad include artifact, artificial, artifice, medical arts, and military arts. However, there are many other colloquial uses of the word, all with some relation to its etymology.
20th-century Rwandan bottle. Artistic works may serve practical functions, in addition to their decorative value.The second and more recent sense of the word art is as an abbreviation for creative art or fine art. Fine art means that a skill is being used to express the artist’s creativity, or to engage the audience’s aesthetic sensibilities, or to draw the audience towards consideration of the finer things. Often, if the skill is being used in a common or practical way, people will consider it a craft instead of art. Likewise, if the skill is being used in a commercial or industrial way, it will be considered commercial art instead of fine art. On the other hand, crafts and design are sometimes considered applied art. Some art followers have argued that the difference between fine art and applied art has more to do with value judgments made about the art than any clear definitional difference. However, even fine art often has goals beyond pure creativity and self-expression. The purpose of works of art may be to communicate ideas, such as in politically, spiritually, or philosophically motivated art; to create a sense of beauty (see aesthetics); to explore the nature of perception; for pleasure; or to generate strong emotions. The purpose may also be seemingly nonexistent.
Art can describe several things: a study of creative skill, a process of using the creative skill, a product of the creative skill, or the audience’s experience with the creative skill. The creative arts (art as discipline) are a collection of disciplines (arts) that produce artworks (art as objects) that are compelled by a personal drive (art as activity) and echo or reflect a message, mood, or symbolism for the viewer to interpret (art as experience). Artworks can be defined by purposeful, creative interpretations of limitless concepts or ideas in order to communicate something to another person. Artworks can be explicitly made for this purpose or interpreted on the basis of images or objects. Art is something that stimulates an individual’s thoughts, emotions, beliefs, or ideas through the senses. It is also an expression of an idea and it can take many different forms and serve many different purposes. Although the application of scientific knowledge to derive a new scientific theory involves skill and results in the "creation" of something new, this represents science only and is not categorized as art.
History
Sculptures, cave paintings, rock paintings, and petroglyphs from the Upper Paleolithic dating to roughly 40,000 years ago have been found, but the precise meaning of such art is often disputed because so little is known about the cultures that produced them. The oldest art objects in the world—a series of tiny, drilled snail shells about 75,000 years old—were discovered in a South African cave.
Cave painting of a horse from the Lascaux caves, c. 16,000 BP.Many great traditions in art have a foundation in the art of one of the great ancient civilizations: Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, India, China, Ancient Greece, Rome, as well as Inca, Maya, and Olmec. Each of these centers of early civilization developed a unique and characteristic style in its art. Because of the size and duration of these civilizations, more of their art works have survived and more of their influence has been transmitted to other cultures and later times. Some also have provided the first records of how artists worked. For example, this period of Greek art saw a veneration of the human physical form and the development of equivalent skills to show musculature, poise, beauty, and anatomically correct proportions.
In Byzantine and Medieval art of the Western Middle Ages, much art focused on the expression of Biblical and nonmaterial truths, and used styles that showed the higher unseen glory of a heavenly world, such as the use of gold in the background of paintings, or glass in mosaics or windows, which also presented figures in idealized, patterned (flat) forms. Nevertheless a classical realist tradition persisted in small Byzantine works, and realism steadily grew in the art of Catholic Europe.
Renaissance art had a greatly increased emphasis on the realistic depiction of the material world, and the place of humans in it, reflected in the corporeality of the human body, and development of a systematic method of graphical perspective to depict recession in a three-dimensional picture space.
The stylized signature of Sultan Mahmud II of the Ottoman Empire was written in Arabic calligraphy. It reads Mahmud Khan son of Abdulhamid is forever victorious.In the east, Islamic art’s rejection of iconography led to emphasis on geometric patterns, calligraphy, and architecture. Further east, religion dominated artistic styles and forms too. India and Tibet saw emphasis on painted sculptures and dance, while religious painting borrowed many conventions from sculpture and tended to bright contrasting colors with emphasis on outlines. China saw the flourishing of many art forms: jade carving, bronzework, pottery (including the stunning terracotta army of Emperor Qin), poetry, calligraphy, music, painting, drama, fiction, etc. Chinese styles vary greatly from era to era and each one is traditionally named after the ruling dynasty. So, for example, Tang Dynasty paintings are monochromatic and sparse, emphasizing idealized landscapes, but Ming Dynasty paintings are busy and colorful, and focus on telling stories via setting and composition. Japan names its styles after imperial dynasties too, and also saw much interplay between the styles of calligraphy and painting. Woodblock printing became important in Japan after the 17th century.
Painting by Song Dynasty artist Ma Lin, c. 1250. 24,8 × 25,2 cm.The western Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century saw artistic depictions of physical and rational certainties of the clockwork universe, as well as politically revolutionary visions of a post-monarchist world, such as Blake’s portrayal of Newton as a divine geometer, or David’s propagandistic paintings. This led to Romantic rejections of this in favor of pictures of the emotional side and individuality of humans, exemplified in the novels of Goethe. The late 19th century then saw a host of artistic movements, such as academic art, Symbolism, impressionism and fauvism among others.
The history of twentieth century art is a narrative of endless possibilities and the search for new standards, each being torn down in succession by the next. Thus the parameters of Impressionism, Expressionism, Fauvism, Cubism, Dadaism, Surrealism, etc. cannot be maintained very much beyond the time of their invention. Increasing global interaction during this time saw an equivalent influence of other cultures into Western art, such as Pablo Picasso being influenced by African sculpture. Japanese woodblock prints (which had themselves been influenced by Western Renaissance draftsmanship) had an immense influence on Impressionism and subsequent development. Later, African sculptures were taken up by Picasso and to some extent by Matisse. Similarly, the west has had huge impacts on Eastern art in the 19th and 20th centuries, with originally western ideas like Communism and Post-Modernism exerting a powerful influence on artistic styles.
Modernism, the idealistic search for truth, gave way in the latter half of the 20th century to a realization of its unattainability. Relativism was accepted as an unavoidable truth, which led to the period of contemporary art and postmodern criticism, where cultures of the world and of history are seen as changing forms, which can be appreciated and drawn from only with irony. Furthermore the separation of cultures is increasingly blurred and some argue it is now more appropriate to think in terms of a global culture, rather than regional cultures.
Characteristics
Art tends to facilitate intuitive rather than rational understanding, and is usually consciously created with this intention.[citation needed] Fine art intentionally serves no other purpose.[dubious – discuss] As a result of this impetus, works of art are elusive, refractive to attempts at classification, because they can be appreciated in more than one way, and are often susceptible to many different interpretations. In the case of Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, special knowledge concerning the shipwreck that the painting depicts is not a prerequisite to appreciating it, but allows the appreciation of Géricault’s political intentions in the piece. Even art that superficially depicts a mundane event or object, may invite reflection upon elevated themes.
Traditionally, the highest achievements of art demonstrate a high level of ability or fluency within a medium. This characteristic might be considered a point of contention, since many modern artists (most notably, conceptual artists) do not themselves create the works they conceive, or do not even create the work in a conventional, demonstrative sense. Art has a transformative capacity: it confers particularly appealing or aesthetically satisfying structures or forms upon an original set of unrelated, passive constituents.
Forms, genres, media, and styles
The creative arts are often divided into more specific categories, each related to its technique, or medium, such as decorative arts, plastic arts, performing arts, or literature. Unlike scientific fields, art is one of the few subjects that are academically organized according to technique [1]. An artistic medium is the substance or material the artistic work is made from, and may also refer to the technique used. For example, paint is a medium used in painting, and paper is a medium used in drawing.
An art form is the specific shape, or quality an artistic expression takes. The media used often influence the form. For example, the form of a sculpture must exist in space in three dimensions, and respond to gravity. The constraints and limitations of a particular medium are thus called its formal qualities. To give another example, the formal qualities of painting are the canvas texture, color, and brush texture. The formal qualities of video games are non-linearity, interactivity and virtual presence. The form of a particular work of art is determined by both the formal qualities of the media, and the intentions of the artist.
A genre is a set of conventions and styles within a particular medium. For instance, well recognized genres in film are western, horror and romantic comedy. Genres in music include death metal and trip hop. Genres in painting include still life and pastoral landscape. A particular work of art may bend or combine genres but each genre has a recognizable group of conventions, clichés and tropes. (One note: the word genre has a second older meaning within painting; genre painting was a phrase used in the 17th to 19th centuries to refer specifically to paintings of scenes of everyday life and can still be used in this way.)
The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai (Japanese, 1760–1849), colored woodcut print.The style of an artwork, artist, or movement is the distinctive method and form followed by the respective art. Any loose brushy, dripped or poured abstract painting is called expressionistic. Often a style is linked with a particular historical period, set of ideas, and particular artistic movement. So Jackson Pollock is called an Abstract Expressionist.
Because a particular style may have specific cultural meanings, it is important to be sensitive to differences in technique. Roy Lichtenstein’s (1923–1997) paintings are not pointillist, despite his uses of dots, because they are not aligned with the original proponents of Pointillism. Lichtenstein used Ben-Day dots: they are evenly spaced and create flat areas of color. Dots of this type, used in halftone printing, were originally used in comic strips and newspapers to reproduce color. Lichtenstein thus uses the dots as a style to question the "high" art of painting with the "low" art of comics – to comment on class distinctions in culture. Lichtenstein is thus associated with the American Pop art movement (1960s). Pointillism is a technique in late Impressionism (1880s), developed especially by the artist Georges Seurat, that employs dots that are spaced in a way to create variation in color and depth in an attempt to paint images that were closer to the way people really see color. Both artists use dots, but the particular style and technique relate to the artistic movement adopted by each artist.
These are all ways of beginning to define a work of art, to narrow it down. "Imagine you are an art critic whose mission is to compare the meanings you find in a wide range of individual artworks. How would you proceed with your task? One way to begin is to examine the materials each artist selected in making an object, image video, or event. The decision to cast a sculpture in bronze, for instance, inevitably effects its meaning; the work becomes something different from how it might be if it had been cast in gold or plastic or chocolate, even if everything else about the artwork remains the same. Next, you might examine how the materials in each artwork have become an arrangement of shapes, colors, textures, and lines. These, in turn, are organized into various patterns and compositional structures. In your interpretation, you would comment on how salient features of the form contribute to the overall meaning of the finished artwork. [But in the end] the meaning of most artworks… is not exhausted by a discussion of materials, techniques, and form. Most interpretations also include a discussion of the ideas and feelings the artwork engenders."
Skill and craft
Art can connote a sense of trained ability or mastery of a medium. Art can also simply refer to the developed and efficient use of a language to convey meaning with immediacy and or depth. Art is an act of expressing feelings, thoughts, and observations. There is an understanding that is reached with the material as a result of handling it, which facilitates one’s thought processes. A common view is that the epithet "art", particular in its elevated sense, requires a certain level of creative expertise by the artist, whether this be a demonstration of technical ability or an originality in stylistic approach such as in the plays of Shakespeare, or a combination of these two. Traditionally skill of execution was viewed as a quality inseparable from art and thus necessary for its success; for Leonardo da Vinci, art, neither more nor less than his other endeavors, was a manifestation of skill. Rembrandt’s work, now praised for its ephemeral virtues, was most admired by his contemporaries for its virtuosity. At the turn of the 20th century, the adroit performances of John Singer Sargent were alternately admired and viewed with skepticism for their manual fluency, yet at nearly the same time the artist who would become the era’s most recognized and peripatetic iconoclast, Pablo Picasso, was completing a traditional academic training at which he excelled.
A common contemporary criticism of some modern art occurs along the lines of objecting to the apparent lack of skill or ability required in the production of the artistic object. In conceptual art, Marcel Duchamp’s "Fountain" is among the first examples of pieces wherein the artist used found objects ("ready-made") and exercised no traditionally recognised set of skills. Tracey Emin’s My Bed, or Damien Hirst’s The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living follow this example and also manipulate the mass media. Emin slept (and engaged in other activities) in her bed before placing the result in a gallery as work of art. Hirst came up with the conceptual design for the artwork but has left most of the eventual creation of many works to employed artisans. Hirst’s celebrity is founded entirely on his ability to produce shocking concepts. The actual production in many conceptual and contemporary works of art is a matter of assembly of found objects. However there are many modernist and contemporary artists who continue to excel in the skills of drawing and painting and in creating hands-on works of art.
Value judgment
Somewhat in relation to the above, the word art is also used to apply judgments of value, as in such expressions as "that meal was a work of art" (the cook is an artist), or "the art of deception", (the highly attained level of skill of the deceiver is praised). It is this use of the word as a measure of high quality and high value that gives the term its flavor of subjectivity.
Making judgments of value requires a basis for criticism. At the simplest level, a way to determine whether the impact of the object on the senses meets the criteria to be considered art is whether it is perceived to be attractive or repulsive. Though perception is always colored by experience, and is necessarily subjective, it is commonly understood that what is not somehow aesthetically satisfying cannot be art. However, "good" art is not always or even regularly aesthetically appealing to a majority of viewers. In other words, an artist’s prime motivation need not be the pursuit of the aesthetic. Also, art often depicts terrible images made for social, moral, or thought-provoking reasons. For example, Francisco Goya’s painting depicting the Spanish shootings of 3rd of May 1808 is a graphic depiction of a firing squad executing several pleading civilians. Yet at the same time, the horrific imagery demonstrates Goya’s keen artistic ability in composition and execution and produces fitting social and political outrage. Thus, the debate continues as to what mode of aesthetic satisfaction, if any, is required to define ‘art’.
The assumption of new values or the rebellion against accepted notions of what is aesthetically superior need not occur concurrently with a complete abandonment of the pursuit of what is aesthetically appealing. Indeed, the reverse is often true, that the revision of what is popularly conceived of as being aesthetically appealing allows for a re-invigoration of aesthetic sensibility, and a new appreciation for the standards of art itself. Countless schools have proposed their own ways to define quality, yet they all seem to agree in at least one point: once their aesthetic choices are accepted, the value of the work of art is determined by its capacity to transcend the limits of its chosen medium to strike some universal chord by the rarity of the skill of the artist or in its accurate reflection in what is termed the zeitgeist.
Communication
Art is often intended to appeal to and connect with human emotion. It can arouse aesthetic or moral feelings, and can be understood as a way of communicating these feelings. Artists express something so that their audience is aroused to some extent, but they do not have to do so consciously. Art explores what is commonly termed as the human condition; that is, essentially what it is to be human. Effective art often brings about some new insight concerning the human condition either singly or en masse, which is not necessarily always positive, or necessarily widens the boundaries of collective human ability. The degree of skill possessed by an artist will affect his or her ability to trigger an emotional response and thereby provide new insights, the ability to manipulate them at will shows exemplary skill and determination.
Purpose of art
Art has had a great number of different functions throughout its history, making its purpose difficult to abstract or quantify to any single concept. This does not imply that the purpose of Art is "vague", but that it has had many unique, different reasons for being created. Some of these functions of Art are provided in the following outline. The different purposes of art may be grouped according to those that are non-motivated, and those that are motivated (Levi-Strauss).
Non-motivated functions of art
The non-motivated purposes of art are those that are integral to being human, transcend the individual, or do not fulfill a specific external purpose. Aristotle said, "Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature." [14] In this sense, Art, as creativity, is something humans must do by their very nature (i.e., no other species creates art), and is therefore beyond utility.
1.Basic human instinct for harmony, balance, rhythm. Art at this level is not an action or an object, but an internal appreciation of balance and harmony (beauty), and therefore an aspect of being human beyond utility.
"Imitation, then, is one instinct of our nature. Next, there is the instinct for ‘harmony’ and rhythm, meters being manifestly sections of rhythm. Persons, therefore, starting with this natural gift developed by degrees their special aptitudes, till their rude improvisations gave birth to Poetry." -Aristotle
2.Experience of the mysterious. Art provides a way to experience one’s self in relation to the universe. This experience may often come unmotivated, as one appreciates art, music or poetry.
"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." -Albert Einstein
3.Expression of the imagination. Art provide a means to express the imagination in non-grammatic ways that are not tied to the formality of spoken or written language. Unlike words, which come in sequences and each of which have a definite meaning, art provides a range of forms, symbols and ideas with meanings that are maleable.
"Jupiter’s eagle [as an example of art] is not, like logical (aesthetic) attributes of an object, the concept of the sublimity and majesty of creation, but rather something else – something that gives the imagination an incentive to spread its flight over a whole host of kindred representations that provoke more thought than admits of expression in a concept determined by words. They furnish an aesthetic idea, which serves the above rational idea as a substitute for logical presentation, but with the proper function, however, of animating the mind by opening out for it a prospect into a field of kindred representations stretching beyond its ken." -Immanuel Kant
4.Universal communication. Art allows the individual to express things toward the world as a whole.[according to whom?] Earth artists often create art in remote locations that will never be experienced by another person. The practice of placing a cairn, or pile of stones at the top of a mountain, is an example. (Note: This need not suggest a particular view of God, or religion.) Art created in this way is a form of communication between the individual and the world as a whole.[citation needed]
5.Ritualistic and symbolic functions. In many cultures, art is used in rituals, performances and dances as a decoration or symbol. While these often have no specific utilitarian (motivated) purpose, anthropologists know that they often serve a purpose at the level of meaning within a particular culture. This meaning is not furnished by any one individual, but is often the result of many generations of change, and of a cosmological relationship within the culture.
"Most scholars who deal with rock paintings or objects recovered from prehistoric contexts that cannot be explained in utilitarian terms and are thus categorized as decorative, ritual or symbolic, are aware of the trap posed by the term ‘art’." -Silva Tomaskova
Motivated functions of art
Motivated purposes of art refer to intentional, conscious actions on the part of the artists or creator. These may be to bring about political change, to comment on an aspect of society, to convey a specific emotion or mood, to address personal psychology, to illustrate another discipline, to (with commercial arts) to sell a product, or simply as a form of communication.
1.Communication. Art, at its simplest, is a form of communication. As most forms of communication have an intent or goal directed toward another individual, this is a motivated purpose. Illustrative arts, such as scientific illustration, are a form of art as communication. Maps are another example. However, the content need not be scientific. Emotions, moods and feelings are also communicated through art.
"[Art is a set of] artefacts or images with symbolic meanings as a means of communication." -Steve Mithen
2.Art as entertainment. Art may seek to bring about a particular emotion or mood, for the purpose of relaxing or entertaining the viewer. This is often the function of the art industries of Motion Pictures and Video Games.
3.The Avante-Garde. Art for political change. One of the defining functions of early twentieth century art has been to use visual images to bring about political change. Art movements that had this goal—Dadaism, Surrealism, Russian Constructivism, and Abstract Expressionism, among others—are collectively referred to as the avante-garde arts.
"By contrast, the realistic attitude, inspired by positivism, from Saint Thomas Aquinas to Anatole France, clearly seems to me to be hostile to any intellectual or moral advancement. I loathe it, for it is made up of mediocrity, hate, and dull conceit. It is this attitude which today gives birth to these ridiculous books, these insulting plays. It constantly feeds on and derives strength from the newspapers and stultifies both science and art by assiduously flattering the lowest of tastes; clarity bordering on stupidity, a dog’s life." -André Breton (Surrealism)
4.Art for psychological and healing purposes. Art is also used by art therapists, psychotherapists and clinical psychologists as art therapy. The Diagnostic Drawing Series, for example, is used to determine the personality and emotional functioning of a patient. The end product is not the principal goal in this case, but rather a process of healing, through creative acts, is sought. The resultant piece of artwork may also offer insight into the troubles experienced by the subject and may suggest suitable approaches to be used in more conventional forms of psychiatric therapy.
5.Art for social inquiry, subversion and/or anarchy. While similar to art for political change, subversive or deconstructivist art may seek to question aspects of society without any specific political goal. In this case, the function of art may be simply to criticize some aspect of society.
Spray-paint graffiti on a wall in Rome.Graffiti art and other types of street art are graphics and images that are spray-painted or stencilled on publicly viewable walls, buildings, buses, trains, and bridges, usually without permission. Certain art forms, such as graffiti, may also be illegal when they break laws (in this case vandalism).
6.Art for propaganda, or commercialism. Art is often utilized as a form of propaganda, and thus can be used to subtly influence popular conceptions or mood. In a similar way, art that tries to sell a product also influences mood and emotion. In both cases, the purpose of art here is to subtly manipulate the viewer into a particular emotional or psychological response toward a particular idea or object.
The functions of art described above are not mutually exclusive, as many of them may overlap. For example, art for the purpose of entertainment may also seek to sell a product, i.e. the movie or video game.
Controversial art
Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (c. 1820), was a social commentary on a current event, unprecedented at the time. Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (1863), was considered scandalous not because of the nude woman, but because she is seated next to men fully dressed in the clothing of the time, rather than in robes of the antique world. John Singer Sargent’s Madame Pierre Gautreau (Madam X) (1884), caused a huge uproar over the reddish pink used to color the woman’s ear lobe, considered far too suggestive and supposedly ruining the high-society model’s reputation.
In the twentieth century, Pablo Picasso’s Guernica (1937) used arresting cubist techniques and stark monochromatic oils, to depict the harrowing consequences of a contemporary bombing of a small, ancient Basque town. Leon Golub’s Interrogation III (1981), depicts a female nude, hooded detainee strapped to a chair, her legs open to reveal her sexual organs, surrounded by two tormentors dressed in everyday clothing. Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1989) is a photograph of a crucifix, sacred to the Christian religion and representing Christ’s sacrifice and final suffering, submerged in a glass of the artist’s own urine. The resulting uproar led to comments in the United States Senate about public funding of the arts.
Art theories
In the nineteenth century, artists were primarily concerned with ideas of truth and beauty. The aesthetic theorist John Ruskin, who championed what he saw as the naturalism of J. M. W. Turner, saw art’s role as the communication by artifice of an essential truth that could only be found in nature.
The definition and evaluation of art has become especially problematic since the 20th century. Richard Wollheim distinguishes three approaches: the Realist, whereby aesthetic quality is an absolute value independent of any human view; the Objectivist, whereby it is also an absolute value, but is dependent on general human experience; and the Relativist position, whereby it is not an absolute value, but depends on, and varies with, the human experience of different humans.
The arrival of Modernism in the late nineteenth century lead to a radical break in the conception of the function of art, and then again in the late twentieth century with the advent of postmodernism. Clement Greenberg’s 1960 article "Modernist Painting" defines modern art as "the use of characteristic methods of a discipline to criticize the discipline itself".Greenberg originally applied this idea to the Abstract Expressionist movement and used it as a way to understand and justify flat (non-illusionistic) abstract painting:
Realistic, naturalistic art had dissembled the medium, using art to conceal art; modernism used art to call attention to art. The limitations that constitute the medium of
painting – the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment — were treated by the Old Masters as negative factors that could be acknowledged only implicitly or indirectly. Under Modernism these same limitations came to be regarded as positive factors, and were acknowledged openly.
After Greenberg, several important art theorists emerged, such as Michael Fried, T. J. Clark, Rosalind Krauss, Linda Nochlin and Griselda Pollock among others. Though only originally intended as a way of understanding a specific set of artists, Greenberg’s definition of modern art is important to many of the ideas of art within the various art movements of the 20th century and early 21st century.
Pop artists like Andy Warhol became both noteworthy and influential through work including and possibly critiquing popular culture, as well as the art world. Artists of the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s expanded this technique of self-criticism beyond high art to all cultural image-making, including fashion images, comics, billboards and pornography.
Classification disputes
Disputes as to whether or not to classify something as a work of art are referred to as classificatory disputes about art.
Classificatory disputes in the 20th century have included cubist and impressionist paintings, Duchamp’s Fountain, the movies, superlative imitations of banknotes, conceptual art, and video games.
Philosopher David Novitz has argued that disagreement about the definition of art are rarely the heart of the problem. Rather, "the passionate concerns and interests that humans vest in their social life" are "so much a part of all classificatory disputes about art" (Novitz, 1996). According to Novitz, classificatory disputes are more often disputes about societal values and where society is trying to go than they are about theory proper. For example, when the Daily Mail criticized Hirst’s and Emin’s work by arguing "For 1,000 years art has been one of our great civilising forces. Today, pickled sheep and soiled beds threaten to make barbarians of us all" they are not advancing a definition or theory about art, but questioning the value of Hirst’s and Emin’s work. In 1998, Arthur Danto, suggested a thought experiment showing that "the status of an artifact as work of art results from the ideas a culture applies to it, rather than its inherent physical or perceptible qualities. Cultural interpretation (an art theory of some kind) is therefore constitutive of an object’s arthood."
Anti-art is a label for art that intentionally challenges the established parameters and values of art; it is term associated with Dadaism and attributed to Marcel Duchamp just before World War I, when he was making art from found objects. One of these, Fountain (1917), an ordinary urinal, has achieved considerable prominence and influence on art. Anti-art is a feature of work by Situationist International,[31] the lo-fi Mail art movement, and the Young British Artists, though it is a form still rejected by the Stuckists, who describe themselves as anti-anti-art.
Art, class, and value
Art has been perceived by some as belonging to some social classes and often excluding others. In this context, art is seen as an upper-class activity associated with wealth, the ability to purchase art, and the leisure required to pursue or enjoy it. For example, the palaces of Versailles or the Hermitage in St. Petersburg with their vast collections of art, amassed by the fabulously wealthy royalty of Europe exemplify this view. Collecting such art is the preserve of the rich, or of governments and institutions.
Fine and expensive goods have been popular markers of status in many cultures, and they continue to be so today. There has been a cultural push in the other direction since at least 1793, when the Louvre, which had been a private palace of the Kings of France, was opened to the public as an art museum during the French Revolution. Most modern public museums and art education programs for children in schools can be traced back to this impulse to have art available to everyone. Museums in the United States tend to be gifts from the very rich to the masses (The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, for example, was created by John Taylor Johnston, a railroad executive whose personal art collection seeded the museum.) But despite all this, at least one of the important functions of art in the 21st century remains as a marker of wealth and social status.
Performance by Joseph Beuys, 1978 : Everyone an artist — On the way to the libertarian form of the social organism.There have been attempts by artists to create art that can not be bought by the wealthy as a status object. One of the prime original motivators of much of the art of the late 1960s and 1970s was to create art that could not be bought and sold. It is "necessary to present something more than mere objects" said the major post war German artist Joseph Beuys. This time period saw the rise of such things as performance art, video art, and conceptual art. The idea was that if the artwork was a performance that would leave nothing behind, or was simply an idea, it could not be bought and sold. "Democratic precepts revolving around the idea that a work of art is a commodity impelled the aesthetic innovation which germinated in the mid-1960s and was reaped throughout the 1970s. Artists broadly identified under the heading of Conceptual art… substituting performance and publishing activities for engagement with both the material and materialistic concerns of painted or sculptural form… [have] endeavored to undermine the art object qua object."
In the decades since, these ideas have been somewhat lost as the art market has learned to sell limited edition DVDs of video works, invitations to exclusive performance art pieces, and the objects left over from conceptual pieces. Many of these performances create works that are only understood by the elite who have been educated as to why an idea or video or piece of apparent garbage may be considered art. The marker of status becomes understanding the work instead of necessarily owning it, and the artwork remains an upper-class activity. "With the widespread use of DVD recording technology in the early 2000s, artists, and the gallery system that derives its profits from the sale of artworks, gained an important means of controlling the sale of video and computer artworks in limited editions to collectors."
Check out these goals & motivation images:
Bike Wordle 75 Words
Image by tulenheimo
What bicycling is about?
Bike Wordle
Image by tulenheimo
What bicycling is about?
A few nice small business ideas images I found:
They’re Like Pokemon
Image by TerryJohnston
My moo MiniCards came today… drop em like their hot! You know the rules: I have 16 different versions, note the one you like and email me your shipping address. Yep, that easy. In fact easier than me…
Thames-Coromandel, New Zealand
Image by 350.org
Hi there 350
I couldn’t get a group photo so I took 70 individual photos of people by this 350 banner. I was planning to compile them all into the shape of 350 but Im struggling with that so I’ll just send a few to you now.
The 350 Day of Action that I organised in my small town included a showing of the ‘Age of Stupid’ movie at our local cinema, a ‘Not So Stupid Ideas-fest’ out the front with Community groups showcasing their climate friendly businesses & ideas.
We also set up a huge Gong in the centre of town and invited the public to strike it 350 times during the day.
We got over 250 signatures for a Greenpeace Sign On campaign thats running here in NZ and I put over 60 "Come on John, Sign On" castes on peoples arms (a gimmick aimed at our prime minister to get him to set strong emission reduction targets at Copenhagen)
It was a really sucessful day and alot of fun. Thank you to your team for making it happen. The photos on the 350 website are amazing.
Cheers
Sheena Beaton
Some cool small business ideas images:
Oogwave_200x55
Image by Oogwave Inc
Oogwave in white small
sixty4media featured on BC Business Online (cropped)
Image by John Bollwitt
Cropped photos by Nordica Photography.
www.bcbusinessonline.ca/bcb/tech-innovation/2010/04/01/va…
From the article:
Rebecca & John Bollwitt
Twitter: @miss604 & @johnbollwitt – 12,777 Total Followers Web: Miss604.com & johnbollwitt.com Google any Vancouver related topic and you’re going to find Miss604.com. Blog turned-small-Vancouver-empire, if there’s something you need / should know about Vancouver, you’ll find it on their site. The Bollwitts also run sixty4media, and have just about as much Google-juice between them as one couple could ever want.
Q: What’s next in online innovation in B.C.?
A: It’s hard to predict the "next big thing." The current trend is quick, mobile, and geo-location. However, no one could predict this. It was just a few years ago that meeting people "from the internet" was taboo and now telling strangers where you are and what you’re doing all day via social networks is the norm. Some of the most-used social media tools started off as ideas that most people thought were crazy. Online innovations grow organically. The most successful didn’t start out with millions of dollars (and still don’t have millions) but they just had grassroots users who boosted the platforms from the ground up. Many of these concepts came from, and continue to stem from, the minds of B.C.-based innovators.
Read more: www.bcbusinessonline.ca/bcb/tech-innovation/2010/04/01/va…
Some cool website design images:
Vera website design #5
Image by eworm
Some cool blogging for money images:
Debt Clock Runs Out of Digits…
Image by MyEyeSees
A Pretty Ugly Day…. we’re in for a deep and long recession, something we’ve not seen in three decades. Before market opens, Paulson signals US may invest in lenders as part of 0 billion rescue; Bernake, Paulson seek global help as credit crisis defeats US efforts. Global markets lurch in crisis. Can a unified approach to fighting the world financial crisis be reached?U.S. action so far is unprecedented in scale since the Great Depression. In the past five weeks alone, the government has taken over mortgage-finance firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, rescued insurer American International Group Inc., backed the deposits of money-market funds and authorized a 0 billion bank rescue program.
Bailout now called: 0 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.
The problem has now morphed from a U.S. housing recession into a global financial meltdown. UK calls it a Bailout Plan.
Credit markets had stalled Tuesday and Wednesday. Stock prices in the United States went on a roller-coaster ride, at the end of which the Dow Jones industrial average was down 189 points, or 2 percent.
It becomes official: US is in a recession
trillion in global stock-market losses on October 6 and 7
The National Debt clock in New York reached its limits last month as the national debt exceeded trillion for the first time, the clock ran out of digits to record the number.
This is Part II of the Media Study on the US Financial Crisis, a study that started with Part I at the end of September.
Part I of the Media Study is at www.flickr.com/photos/myeye/sets/72157607584362826/
Blogging on the subject starts with
Bigge$ st Cri$ i$ and Media–
motherpie.typepad.com/motherpie/2008/09/bigget-crii-and.html
10/9: NYT
Image by MyEyeSees
A Pretty Ugly Day…. we’re in for a deep and long recession, something we’ve not seen in three decades. Before market opens, Paulson signals US may invest in lenders as part of 0 billion rescue; Bernake, Paulson seek global help as credit crisis defeats US efforts. Global markets lurch in crisis. Can a unified approach to fighting the world financial crisis be reached?U.S. action so far is unprecedented in scale since the Great Depression. In the past five weeks alone, the government has taken over mortgage-finance firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, rescued insurer American International Group Inc., backed the deposits of money-market funds and authorized a 0 billion bank rescue program.
Bailout now called: 0 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.
The problem has now morphed from a U.S. housing recession into a global financial meltdown. UK calls it a Bailout Plan.
Credit markets had stalled Tuesday and Wednesday. Stock prices in the United States went on a roller-coaster ride, at the end of which the Dow Jones industrial average was down 189 points, or 2 percent.
It becomes official: US is in a recession
trillion in global stock-market losses on October 6 and 7
The National Debt clock in New York reached its limits last month as the national debt exceeded trillion for the first time, the clock ran out of digits to record the number.
This is Part II of the Media Study on the US Financial Crisis, a study that started with Part I at the end of September.
Part I of the Media Study is at www.flickr.com/photos/myeye/sets/72157607584362826/
Blogging on the subject starts with
Bigge$ st Cri$ i$ and Media–
motherpie.typepad.com/motherpie/2008/09/bigget-crii-and.html
Check out these website design images:
Universe of Dreams Tweetup
Image by LunaWeb
The performers shared conversation and autographs after the show.
LunaWeb is the leading web design and marketing company in Memphis. Look for us on Facebook:
www.facebook.com/pages/Memphis-TN/LunaWeb-Inc/19455817912…
Our website
And Twitter
Universe of Dreams Tweetup
Image by LunaWeb
The performers shared conversation and autographs after the show.
LunaWeb is the leading web design and marketing company in Memphis. Look for us on Facebook:
www.facebook.com/pages/Memphis-TN/LunaWeb-Inc/19455817912…
Our website
And Twitter
Universe of Dreams Tweetup
Image by LunaWeb
The performers shared conversation and autographs after the show.
LunaWeb is the leading web design and marketing company in Memphis. Look for us on Facebook:
www.facebook.com/pages/Memphis-TN/LunaWeb-Inc/19455817912…
Our website
And Twitter
Check out these pictures work from home:
Green Line Professionals November Meetup in Domku
The highlight Wayan Vota of
So why are not you here? We swap tips on everything from Twitter to the home office renovations Post.Begleiten us at the next Green Line Professionals Glad Afternoon
Home Bound
The highlight FLEECIRCUS
After moving home from work, I was home almost 7 days a week. I love looking out the large window in the evening, fly back to people on their way home from work and home for the birds sehen.Bessere View On Black
work laptop (Lenovo ThinkPad T60) Wall
The highlight acflynn
I build a crazy metal wall mount for my work provided laptop (I work from home most of the time). I can let the laptop and docking station on the wall. This is from my desk, which is clearly a Vorteil.Die proprietor is basically a J-shaped piece of steel plate, with a cable operator for the sharp edge (and then duct tape below). It is not pretty, but it is not visible from the entry area, and it is available when nötig.Der Dell XPS tower is the white box to the left.
A few nice blogging for money images I found:
10/9 Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Image by MyEyeSees
A Pretty Ugly Day…. we’re in for a deep and long recession, something we’ve not seen in three decades. Before market opens, Paulson signals US may invest in lenders as part of 0 billion rescue; Bernake, Paulson seek global help as credit crisis defeats US efforts. Global markets lurch in crisis. Can a unified approach to fighting the world financial crisis be reached?U.S. action so far is unprecedented in scale since the Great Depression. In the past five weeks alone, the government has taken over mortgage-finance firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, rescued insurer American International Group Inc., backed the deposits of money-market funds and authorized a 0 billion bank rescue program.
Bailout now called: 0 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.
The problem has now morphed from a U.S. housing recession into a global financial meltdown. UK calls it a Bailout Plan.
Credit markets had stalled Tuesday and Wednesday. Stock prices in the United States went on a roller-coaster ride, at the end of which the Dow Jones industrial average was down 189 points, or 2 percent.
It becomes official: US is in a recession
trillion in global stock-market losses on October 6 and 7
The National Debt clock in New York reached its limits last month as the national debt exceeded trillion for the first time, the clock ran out of digits to record the number.
This is Part II of the Media Study on the US Financial Crisis, a study that started with Part I at the end of September.
Part I of the Media Study is at www.flickr.com/photos/myeye/sets/72157607584362826/
Blogging on the subject starts with
Bigge$ st Cri$ i$ and Media–
motherpie.typepad.com/motherpie/2008/09/bigget-crii-and.html
10/9: HuffPo is Political Headlines
Image by MyEyeSees
A Pretty Ugly Day…. we’re in for a deep and long recession, something we’ve not seen in three decades. Before market opens, Paulson signals US may invest in lenders as part of 0 billion rescue; Bernake, Paulson seek global help as credit crisis defeats US efforts. Global markets lurch in crisis. Can a unified approach to fighting the world financial crisis be reached?U.S. action so far is unprecedented in scale since the Great Depression. In the past five weeks alone, the government has taken over mortgage-finance firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, rescued insurer American International Group Inc., backed the deposits of money-market funds and authorized a 0 billion bank rescue program.
Bailout now called: 0 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.
The problem has now morphed from a U.S. housing recession into a global financial meltdown. UK calls it a Bailout Plan.
Credit markets had stalled Tuesday and Wednesday. Stock prices in the United States went on a roller-coaster ride, at the end of which the Dow Jones industrial average was down 189 points, or 2 percent.
It becomes official: US is in a recession
trillion in global stock-market losses on October 6 and 7
The National Debt clock in New York reached its limits last month as the national debt exceeded trillion for the first time, the clock ran out of digits to record the number.
This is Part II of the Media Study on the US Financial Crisis, a study that started with Part I at the end of September.
Part I of the Media Study is at www.flickr.com/photos/myeye/sets/72157607584362826/
Blogging on the subject starts with
Bigge$ st Cri$ i$ and Media–
motherpie.typepad.com/motherpie/2008/09/bigget-crii-and.html
Check out these goals & motivation images:
Breaker Boy 1900
Image by Space Art
Inspirational and motivational poster for all who want to achieve their goal. Buy prints or merchandise from timeship.deviantart.com to support our cause for FREE publishing.
Wake Up and Make Your Dreams Come True
Image by FindYourSearch
"The best way to make your dreams come true is to wake up." – Paul Valery
We all have hopes and dreams, but are we spending too much time dreaming, and not enough doing? It’s important to take action in order to succeed. Rather than spending all our time wishing for a change, we must do what is necessary to reach our goals.
Unless, of course, you’re a cat. 
(Original photo licensed under Creative Commons Attribution by SMN)
A Brand New Day
Image by sirwiseowl
A new sunrise and a new sunset,
The worries of old I will soon forget.
A brand new day and new memories to make,
For the world is mine for me to take.
New dreams to build, and new things to plan,
And a whole new place to say, "I can"…
This is the beginning of the rest of my life,
A new future to build, new goals in sight.
Yesterday has come and gone,
And now is the time for me to move on.
To pick up and say, "This world is mine"…
And to show how bright my life can shine.
I hold my destiny in my own hands,
Now I will make all my own plans.
With the lessons of yesterday deep in my heart,
I have a Brand New day, for a brand new start.
Author: Leigh Ann Wood
Check these website traffic images:
pagequest.co.uk SEO Article Marketing
The highlight big ass
That is Page Quest article directory. Article marketing is a great way to generate traffic to your website and a proven SEO methodology. Write a suitable quality articles on the topic of your webpage. Quest Log page to login and send your Artikel.Wenn your article being read or reprinted, it creates a back link to your website will give you more Verkehr.Je more articles you submit, the more traffic you create. Do it today! Click image above to Web Quest.
visit
Traffic Los Angeles, California
The highlight Tyler Oxendine
Website: www.TylerWho.com Twitter: www.twitter.com / tyleroxendine
Becker font
The highlight gingerbeardman
I have placed a series of mp3 files with the provisions of ISO-8859-1 character as a song name, so I was able to photograph the entire Scripture. So I re-created it, pixel by pixel, with the fantastic FontStruct website.
Check out these Web site hosting pictures:
How do I create a virtual library / Sub Domain – Part 4
The highlight IvanWalsh.com
I decided last week means a new website to erstellen.Dies usually register a new domain and get web Hosting.Allerdings you do not need this tun.Stattdessen I decided to create a virtual library on the main page for the facility and create the new site as a sub-Ordner.Das saved me the usual fees and allowed me to these sub-site under the roof of the main site is at halten.Hier as a virtual library erstellen.Siehe: www.ivanwalsh .com/2009/10/save-money-by-creating-virtual- …
How do I create a virtual library / Sub Domain – Part 8
The highlight IvanWalsh.com
I decided last week means a new website to erstellen.Dies usually register a new domain and get web Hosting.Allerdings you do not need this tun.Stattdessen I decided to create a virtual library on the main page for the facility and create the new site as a sub-Ordner.Das saved me the usual fees and allowed me to these sub-site under the roof of the main site is at halten.Hier as a virtual library erstellen.Siehe: www.ivanwalsh .com/2009/10/save-money-by-creating-virtual- …
How do I create a virtual library / Sub Domain – Part 3
The highlight IvanWalsh.com
I decided last week means a new website to erstellen.Dies usually register a new domain and get web Hosting.Allerdings you do not need this tun.Stattdessen I decided to create a virtual library on the main page for the facility and create the new site as a sub-Ordner.Das saved me the usual fees and allowed me to these sub-site under the roof of the main site is at halten.Hier as a virtual library erstellen.Siehe: www.ivanwalsh .com/2009/10/save-money-by-creating-virtual- …
Check out these website hosting images:
All Video Sites – The List
Image by HH-Michael
www.all-video-sites.com
All-video-sites.com is the list of video sharing websites from around the world. Do you miss one link? Suggest it now, simply comment on this picture.
Melanie Smith-Thuret – Web Design
Image by a-doughty
After two rounds, this is the design that Melanie chose. The goal was to design a elegant, simple, peaceful, and calming website. That is a tall order for any one site, but we both love this resulting design.
Project Summary: I created a logo and website for Melanie Smith-Thuret, a practicing psychotherapist and consultant in MA. The goal was to create a professional but calming web presence.
Services Used:
* Website Design
* Website Development
* Website Hosting
* Strategic Website Review
Project Status: Project is currently in the development phase.
PROMOTE GA VSU06001 Team – First Place Winners
Image by Old Shoe Woman
The Educational Technology Training Center at Valdosta State University hosted a conference for students in surrounding counties to present their PROMOTE GA websites.
www.promotega.org/
Check out these small business ideas images:
speech
Image by bitmask
this was #9 (persuade). It was on microfinance, and how it’s possible to make a huge difference to someone’s life with as little as through a microcredit organization such as kiva.
Here are my notes for the speech so you can read them:
World bank:
extreme poverty /day
moderate poverty /day
3.8 billion people live on less than a day
these people are poor for a myriad of reasons which are not their fault
deficiencies in public administration
failures of their environment
overpopulation
disease
whatever the reason, they are unable to thrive
what have you done to help?
give money to charities..
and when you do, do you pay attention to what percentage of your donation goes to helping people
when you give to charities do you know who’s life you’ve changed?
aid can do good
but specifically in africa, despite the billions of dollars poured in to the continent, of people in extreme poverty is increasing
increasing aid increases dependency on aid as free goods flood the market and put local merchants out of business
if you’re given everything, how much incentive do you have to become self reliant?
just after the new year, i got an email saying that manuella had finished paying back her loan
manuella enterprising woman who raised money for her current store by giving massages and manicures
now she sells school supplies and she had just paid back a loan to buy a photocopier which will expand her business
I was impressed by how she bootstrapped
and so when I found her profile on kiva, I lent her part of what she was asking for
32 other people also contributed to her loan
which was then distributed by one of kiva’s field partners in ecuador
kiva is a person to person microlending organization
0,000 loaned
to 2026 entrepreurs
i went back to kiva and started looking at other available loans
i lent to
safina in tanzania who works 10 hour days to make /mo expand her business selling cloth
sun chrip, mother of 4 in cambodia build a roof and a sturdy wall so that her house wouldn’t leak.
loans are few hundred to 1000, many people contribute to one loan
small sums would never be lent by a normal bank
and because the borrowers have no credit
because the administrative costs outweigh the interest on the loan
first microfinance bank
Grameen bank started by Muhammad Yunus as a research project to test this method for providing credit and banking services to the rural poor
grameen means ‘of the village’, so this is is a bank of, for and by the people
aim to lend to the poorest of the poor
it was wildly successful
In 2006, Yunus and the Grameen bank were jointly awarded the nobel peace prize
for their efforts to create economic and social development from below.
Lasting peace can not be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty.
…
That vision can not be realised by means of micro-credit alone. But Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank have shown that, in the continuing efforts to achieve it, micro-credit must play a major part."
why does microlending work so well
targeting women
more likely to spend money on improving their family and children
than to spend it on themselves
raises socio economic status gives them power
2nd innovation
group lending
group not responsible for the loan
but will not receive another loan if any of the members defaults
encourages others to fill in, and to help each other make payments
borrowers have better information about each other than the bank, credit
support group, community, business ideas
traditional aid doesn’t have the power to affect people at this level
loans are small
and have tremendous potential to affect the lives of the recipients
who has become rich from receiving handouts?
prosperity is the result of opportunity and effort
microlending gives the opportunity and allows people to
to provide services and gain esteem in their community
to gain skills
build their own future, to become self reliant
the next time you want to give money, take a minute to consider WHO you are giving it to.
sources
wikipedia
kiva
microplace
www.csa.com/discoveryguides/microfinance/review2.php?SID=…
www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/0,1518,363663,00.html
My “brand new” cooking pot
Image by AmUnivers
I went to the flea market this morning ! I got 4 photo albums (strong black paper, should be nice to put colorful photos on top and comment in white), a form to make 6 muffins, but my best buy is really this pot !
I saw it, and thought it looked great ! I asked the guy how much it was. "What would you say ?" — he answered. I thought, and had no idea, so I said just that. Then he thought for a while. And said 50 cents. I didn’t hesitate a second !! Hehe I’m so happy now 
(He said something like he had done some good business today, so he was happy to sell it to me for a good price
Check out these forex trading images:
gbp170311
Image by Tradingrichmom
NO TRADE 16.03.11
GBP$ 15min. – 7:30 buy
Entry 1.6041
Stop Loss 1.6011
Limit 1:1 = 1.6081
Exit 9:13 1.6041 (hit break even) = 0 pips profit
For more trade examples go see www.flickr.com/photos/tradingrichmom/
Dagmar
Trading results that make you say WOW
Follow me on twitter.com/tradingrichmom
Jets-Dolphin game, Nov 2009 – 054
Image by Ed Yourdon
Note: this photo was published in an Apr 16, 2010 blog titled "Dolphins Trade Ted Ginn Jr. to the 49ers." It was also published in an undated (July 2010) Forex Currency Trading Exchange blog, with the same title as the caption that I used on this Flickr page. And it was published in a Jul 15, 2010 blog titled "FAP Turbo – Learning the Forex Trading Robot." It was also published in a Sep 30, 2010 blog titled "Where to Get Reliable Forex Trading Help So Earn and Not Burn." And it was published in a Nov 19, 2010 blog titled "What is the best forex trading strategies books for a beginner to start learning the market?", as well as an undated (late-Nov 2010) blog titled "Best Forex Trading Strategy – Understanding the “Fundamentals”." It was also published in a Dec 5, 2010 blog titled "Top 5 Forex Books," and a Dec 6, 2010 blog titled " How To Use Forex Books To Your Advantage When Trading Currency," and another Dec 6, 2010 blog titled "Forex Trading Basics." It was also published in a Dec 8, 2010 blog titled "Nice Ted Ginn 49ers photos," as well as a Dec 9, 2010 blog titled "What is the Best Forex Trading Course?"
Moving into 2011, the photo was published in a Jan 3, 2011 blog titled "Forex Trading Strategy, Automatic Forex Trading." It was also published in an undated (mid-Jan 2011) blog titled "The Truth About Automated Forex Trading Robot." And it was published in a Feb 6, 2011 blog titled "Is anyone using Freedom Rocks system to trade Forex?"
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On November 1st, I attended my third professional football game, with a photographer’s press pass that let me get down on the field to photograph players, referees, cheerleaders, other photographers, fans in the stand, and anyone else who looked interesting. (My first such game was a pre-season contest between the New York Jets and Philadelphia Eagles, which you can see by clicking here, and the second game was between the New York Jets and the Buffalo Bills, which you can see by clicking here.)
I learned some lessons from photographing the first two games, and I showed up this time with even more equipment. I brought my Nikon D300 and D700 cameras, with an assortment of telephoto lenses; and I rented a hulking big 150-500mm zoom lens, which I mounted on my half-frame D300 camera to get the equivalent of a 300-750mm telephoto on a "standard" 35mm camera. Most of the time, I used the (full-frame) D700 with a 300mm zoom to get shots of fans in the stadium, and I used the long-lens 150-500mm zoom lens to get shots of the football players, as well as some closeups of the cheerleaders, as they waved their long hair in the air during the various "performances" with which they entertained the crowd.
Technical details aside, this game was very much like the last two: I was down on the field, surrounded by 77,000 roaring fans who made conversation virtually impossible. All I could do was try my best to follow the action, and shoot anything that looked interesting. It usually (though not always) started with a snap to the quarterback — but it was sometimes on the other side of the field, or down at the other end of the field. Like the other photographers, I scurried back and forth from one end of the field to the other to be as close to the action as possible … but in many cases, all I ended up with was a picture of a tangle of bodies, and no clear idea of what had just happened.
After watching the Flickr statistics associated with my previous Jets games, I was amused to see that the most popular photos — by a huge margin were those of the cheerleaders … so I included about two dozen closeup photos of the cheerleaders in this set. I also found the fans interesting and occasionally picturesque, so you’ll find several fan-related pictures in this set.
Since I was on the field, once again, through the generosity and permission of the New York Jets, I naturally rooted for them to win. And though they played to a 3-3 tie at halftime, their special teams fell apart in the second half. Their rookie quarterback (Mark Sanchez, whose #6 jersey appears prominently in some of the photos) scored and passed well, but the Jets were down by 5 points with a minute left in the game, and while they were only about 20 yards from the goal line at that point, it was a fourth-down … for which the traditional strategy is to attempt a field-goal. But what’s the point of getting 3 points for a field goal, when you’re down 5 points, and the clock has almost run out?
Well, perhaps this is all blindingly obvious to most football fans — but football really isn’t my sport at all, so I thought I was actually rather clever to anticipate what the Jets decided to do on that final play: pass for a 6-point touchdown, rather than waste their time with a field-goal kick. As it turned out, I was near the goal line myself, and when the play started, and it became obvious that Jets QB Sanchez was going to pass, I switched my attention to the end zone, and did my best to focus on wide receiver Jerricho Cotchery as he attempted to catch the "hail Mary" pass. As it turned out, the pass was a little too high, so they didn’t score and the game was effectively over. But I did get a shot of that attempted pass reception; it’s not perfect, but it’s not too bad … and you’ll find it at the very end of this Flickr set (which will take several days to upload).
All in all, I took a little over 1,500 images and whittled it down to 150 "keepers" that I think you’ll enjoy looking at — i.e., 10% of the total, rather than the usual 5% that I uploaded from the last two games. Another 150 had to be deleted immediately because they were out of focus, or because a referee decided to run in front of my camera just as I was pushing the shutter button … but I’ve still got roughly 1,200 images of jumbled piles of football players that will probably continue to sit on my computer until I run out of space on my hard disk. C’est la vie…
P.S. One little nuance about professional football, which seems obvious but was still a surprise to me on this third game: unlike high-school football, cheerleaders don’t cheer. They don’t sing, they don’t chant, they don’t utter a word while they’re prancing around in front of the roaring crowd in the stadium. Of course: how could they? Who would hear a thing they said? Still, it’s a little weird to spend an afternoon on the field with these skimpily-dress beauties, with smiles frozen on their faces as they dance for the fans … and who, for all practical purposes, never make a sound.
Check out these website design images:
Metro Health Hospital website design
Image by Fellowship of the Rich
This site went live over a week ago. My responsiblities were graphic design/art direction.
www.metrohealth.net
Studio7
Image by dklimke
www.studio7designs.com/
Cleanly organized navigation and nice vector style accent graphics
The organization of their logo designs is brilliantly done as well www.studio7designs.com/portfolio-logo/
Check out these website design images:
Website Interactive Design
Image by VFS Digital Design
For her graduate project in the Digital Design program, Cherie Korol created an ocean conservation news portal. Most sites in the field of ocean conservation are poorly organized , showcasing marginalized areas of information. Cherie utilized this initiative to develop a strong content strategy approach and viable IA that successfully carries through to mobile devices, such as the iPad.
Learn more about VFS’s one-year Digital Design program at www.vfs.com/digitaldesign.
Website Interactive Design
Image by VFS Digital Design
For her graduate project in the Digital Design program, Cherie Korol created an ocean conservation news portal. Most sites in the field of ocean conservation are poorly organized , showcasing marginalized areas of information. Cherie utilized this initiative to develop a strong content strategy approach and viable IA that successfully carries through to mobile devices, such as the iPad.
Learn more about VFS’s one-year Digital Design program at www.vfs.com/digitaldesign.
Check out these website hosting images:
Barbecue: Bridge of Weir, Paisley Elim’s Men’s Cellnet.
Image by † Jimmy MacDonald †
Thanks to our host Peter for having the Bar B-Q @ his place. It was a great evening!
Paisley Elim: Elim Christian Fellowship, Paisley
My other Flickr Sites: Jimmy MacDonald [2] Jimmy MacDonald [3]
My Website: Jimmy MacDonald’s Website
My YouTube Chanel: Jimmy MacDonald’s YouTube
My Blog: Profiles Blog
My Flickr Group Photos: Christians in Prayer & Worship
Guestbook: View/Sign Guestbook
Photo Guestbook: View/Sign Photo Guestbook
100727-N-7770B-040
Image by JTF Guantanamo
GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba – Air Force Tech. Sgt. (Ret.) Adam Popp, a Soldiers Undertaking Disabled Scuba (SUDS) participant, practices spear fishing Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Aug. 27, 2010. Volunteers from the base and Joint Task Force Guantanamo hosted SUDS participants Aug. 26-31. JTF Guantanamo provides safe, humane, legal and transparent care and custody of detainees, including those convicted by military commission and those ordered released by a court. The JTF conducts intelligence collection, analysis and dissemination for the protection of detainees and personnel working in JTF Guantanamo facilities and in support of the War on Terror. JTF Guantanamo provides support to the Office of Military Commissions, to law enforcement and to war crimes investigations. The JTF conducts planning for and, on order, responds to Caribbean mass migration operations. (JTF Guantanamo photo by Navy mass Communication Specialist 1st Class Maria Blanchard) UNCLASSIFIED – Cleared for public release. For additional information contact JTF Guantanamo PAO 011-5399-3589; DSN 660-3589 www.jtfgtmo.southcom.mil
100827-F-3431H-197
Image by JTF Guantanamo
GUANTANAMO BAY, Cuba –Army Maj. David Underwood, a Soldiers Undertaking Disabled Scuba (SUDS) participant, enters the water at Naval Station Guantanamo Bay, Aug. 27, 2010. Volunteers from Naval Station Guantanamo Bay and Joint Task Force Guantanamo hosted SUDS participants Aug. 26-31. JTF Guantanamo provides safe, humane, legal and transparent care and custody of detainees, including those convicted by military commission and those ordered released by a court. The JTF conducts intelligence collection, analysis and dissemination for the protection of detainees and personnel working in JTF Guantanamo facilities and in support of the War on Terror. JTF Guantanamo provides support to the Office of Military Commissions, to law enforcement and to war crimes investigations. The JTF conducts planning for and, on order, responds to Caribbean mass migration operations. (JTF Guantanamo photo by U.S. Air Force Tech. Sgt. Michael R. Holzworth) UNCLASSIFIED – Cleared for public release. For additional information contact JTF Guantanamo PAO 011-5399-3589; DSN 660-3589 www.jtfgtmo.southcom.mil
Some cool online business images:
Grace Building – James Schouw & Associates_RonSombilonGallery
Image by Ron Sombilon Gallery
James Schouw photoshoot by Ron Sombilon Gallery
Ron Sombilon is proud to photograph Vancouver developer James Schouw.
For more info on James and his current projects, please visit
About James Schouw
Award winning Yaletown developer James Schouw is a designer, green-minded builder, philanthropist, and community visionary. A building by James Schouw looks unlike any other, anywhere else in the world. James is influenced by early Vancouver architecture with neo-classical elements but his designs are truly original and eclectic.
James oversees all aspects of his developments, from conception, to design, to construction. His timeless design with attention to detail and cutting edge construction, has created a devoted following. His buildings are on the ‘must-see’ list of Vancouver architecture and it’s a common site to see people taking pictures of his buildings. The beauty of his buildings have turned them into Habitable Art, art that people live in.
Best known for the dramatic style of his buildings, James is changing the way buildings are built and raising the bar for environmental sensitivity with his innovative designs. His landmark Grace building, at 1280 Richards, is the first high rise in the city to have been conceived with energy efficient geothermal heating, a technology that saves on heating costs, produces minimal greenhouse gases and has set the standard for other high end projects. The carbon emission reduction for Grace is the equivalent of taking 100 cars off the road annually. In addition to the Geothermal heating system, his projects incorporate a rainwater recovery system. He has also installed a fingerprint recognition security system that ensures only inhabitants gain entrance.
Creating buildings with a reduced environmental footprint is a reflection of James’ overall development philosophy. He has sense of responsibility to enhance the community and give back to society. A minimum of 50% of each year’s net corporate and personal income will be donated to humanitarian efforts over a ten-year period. Charity work is ingrained into his company’s values and culture.
Born in Winnipeg and raised in Vancouver, James studied physics at university but became fascinated with construction after spending time helping his architect father at a construction site. A natural entrepreneur he left school to start a successful ice cream distribution business and to pursue his interest in design and construction. His own dissatisfaction with what he saw on the market prompted him to build his first multifamily development, Iliad. James is a long time resident of Yaletown and always resides in the projects he creates so that they have the liveability that he would expect in a home.
James’ Grace building was awarded the 2008 Georgie Award for High Rise of the Year, was a nominee for best multi-family housing for the national SAM awards, and was a finalist for the international SPARK design awards. James is a past winner of Business in Vancouver’s 40 under 40 Award and he has been featured on CBC Television’s “Living Vancouver”, HGTV’s Lofty Ideas, and CKNW’s “Adler Online”. He is an occasional contributor to Business in Vancouver Magazine, writing articles giving his thoughtful perspective on Vancouver’s housing industry.
James Schouw & Associates_RonSombilonGallery_HR
Image by Ron Sombilon Gallery
James Schouw photoshoot by Ron Sombilon Gallery
Ron Sombilon is proud to photograph Vancouver developer James Schouw.
For more info on James and his current projects, please visit
About James Schouw
Award winning Yaletown developer James Schouw is a designer, green-minded builder, philanthropist, and community visionary. A building by James Schouw looks unlike any other, anywhere else in the world. James is influenced by early Vancouver architecture with neo-classical elements but his designs are truly original and eclectic.
James oversees all aspects of his developments, from conception, to design, to construction. His timeless design with attention to detail and cutting edge construction, has created a devoted following. His buildings are on the ‘must-see’ list of Vancouver architecture and it’s a common site to see people taking pictures of his buildings. The beauty of his buildings have turned them into Habitable Art, art that people live in.
Best known for the dramatic style of his buildings, James is changing the way buildings are built and raising the bar for environmental sensitivity with his innovative designs. His landmark Grace building, at 1280 Richards, is the first high rise in the city to have been conceived with energy efficient geothermal heating, a technology that saves on heating costs, produces minimal greenhouse gases and has set the standard for other high end projects. The carbon emission reduction for Grace is the equivalent of taking 100 cars off the road annually. In addition to the Geothermal heating system, his projects incorporate a rainwater recovery system. He has also installed a fingerprint recognition security system that ensures only inhabitants gain entrance.
Creating buildings with a reduced environmental footprint is a reflection of James’ overall development philosophy. He has sense of responsibility to enhance the community and give back to society. A minimum of 50% of each year’s net corporate and personal income will be donated to humanitarian efforts over a ten-year period. Charity work is ingrained into his company’s values and culture.
Born in Winnipeg and raised in Vancouver, James studied physics at university but became fascinated with construction after spending time helping his architect father at a construction site. A natural entrepreneur he left school to start a successful ice cream distribution business and to pursue his interest in design and construction. His own dissatisfaction with what he saw on the market prompted him to build his first multifamily development, Iliad. James is a long time resident of Yaletown and always resides in the projects he creates so that they have the liveability that he would expect in a home.
James’ Grace building was awarded the 2008 Georgie Award for High Rise of the Year, was a nominee for best multi-family housing for the national SAM awards, and was a finalist for the international SPARK design awards. James is a past winner of Business in Vancouver’s 40 under 40 Award and he has been featured on CBC Television’s “Living Vancouver”, HGTV’s Lofty Ideas, and CKNW’s “Adler Online”. He is an occasional contributor to Business in Vancouver Magazine, writing articles giving his thoughtful perspective on Vancouver’s housing industry.
James Schouw & Associates_RonSombilonGallery_HR (13)
Image by Ron Sombilon Gallery
James Schouw photoshoot by Ron Sombilon Gallery
Ron Sombilon is proud to photograph Vancouver developer James Schouw.
For more info on James and his current projects, please visit
About James Schouw
Award winning Yaletown developer James Schouw is a designer, green-minded builder, philanthropist, and community visionary. A building by James Schouw looks unlike any other, anywhere else in the world. James is influenced by early Vancouver architecture with neo-classical elements but his designs are truly original and eclectic.
James oversees all aspects of his developments, from conception, to design, to construction. His timeless design with attention to detail and cutting edge construction, has created a devoted following. His buildings are on the ‘must-see’ list of Vancouver architecture and it’s a common site to see people taking pictures of his buildings. The beauty of his buildings have turned them into Habitable Art, art that people live in.
Best known for the dramatic style of his buildings, James is changing the way buildings are built and raising the bar for environmental sensitivity with his innovative designs. His landmark Grace building, at 1280 Richards, is the first high rise in the city to have been conceived with energy efficient geothermal heating, a technology that saves on heating costs, produces minimal greenhouse gases and has set the standard for other high end projects. The carbon emission reduction for Grace is the equivalent of taking 100 cars off the road annually. In addition to the Geothermal heating system, his projects incorporate a rainwater recovery system. He has also installed a fingerprint recognition security system that ensures only inhabitants gain entrance.
Creating buildings with a reduced environmental footprint is a reflection of James’ overall development philosophy. He has sense of responsibility to enhance the community and give back to society. A minimum of 50% of each year’s net corporate and personal income will be donated to humanitarian efforts over a ten-year period. Charity work is ingrained into his company’s values and culture.
Born in Winnipeg and raised in Vancouver, James studied physics at university but became fascinated with construction after spending time helping his architect father at a construction site. A natural entrepreneur he left school to start a successful ice cream distribution business and to pursue his interest in design and construction. His own dissatisfaction with what he saw on the market prompted him to build his first multifamily development, Iliad. James is a long time resident of Yaletown and always resides in the projects he creates so that they have the liveability that he would expect in a home.
James’ Grace building was awarded the 2008 Georgie Award for High Rise of the Year, was a nominee for best multi-family housing for the national SAM awards, and was a finalist for the international SPARK design awards. James is a past winner of Business in Vancouver’s 40 under 40 Award and he has been featured on CBC Television’s “Living Vancouver”, HGTV’s Lofty Ideas, and CKNW’s “Adler Online”. He is an occasional contributor to Business in Vancouver Magazine, writing articles giving his thoughtful perspective on Vancouver’s housing industry.
A few nice small business ideas images I found:
Camera Case – Unloaded
Image by fensterbme
I get a decent number of questions asking me what I shoot with, do I use X or Y or whatever… so to make it easier I recently just took a photo of what’s in my camera case, and then dumped it out so folks could get an idea of what tools I use (admittedly some more than other’s).
If you dump out my camera case… this is what falls out. Too see what it looks like packed inside see this photo.
Camera Bodies:
Canon 5DMkII
Canon 5D
Canon 50D
Canon 20D
Canon Elan 7
Lenses:
Canon 15mm f/2.8 fisheye
Canon 35mm f/1.4L
Canon 50mm f/1.4
Canon 85mm f/1.2L MkII
Canon 100mm f/2.8 macro
Canon 135mm f/2L
Canon 16-35mm f/2.8 MkII
Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L
Canon 70-200mm f/2.8L IS
Lensbaby Composer (w/ lens diaphram set)
Flash / Lighting Stuff:
Canon 580EXII x3 (w/ foot stands)
Pocket Wizard Plus II x4
Sekonic L-358 (w/ Pocket Wizard Trigger Module)
Canon Remote Shutter Release Cable (to trigger camera via Pocket Wizards)
Pocket Wizard Mini to PC Sync Cables x4
Canon CP-E4 Camera Battery Pack (filled with Maha Powerex 2700mAh batteries)
Canon ST-E2 Wireless Trasmitter
Film / Memory Cards:
SanDisk Ultra II 2GB x 9
SanDisk Ultra II 4GB x 1
SanDisk Extreme III 8GB x 2
Fuji Pro400H and NeoPan Film
Gepe Cardsafe Extreme Cases x3
Accessories:
Lastolite White/Grey Card
x-rite Colorchecker Passport w/ no case (recieved it as a beta tester for the product)
Canon RS-80N3 Remote Switch
Business cards, Canon CPS Calendar, Pen
Large and Regular Sized PhotoClear Cleaning Cloth
LensPen, Giottos Cleaning Brush
Hot Shoe Level
Extra Battery for Canon 5DMkII and for the ST-E2 Transmitter
Battery Chargers for Canon Camera’s
Hoya CP Filter
Case:
Pelican 1614 Hardshell case w/ rollers and adjustable dividers
Pelican 1609 Lid Oranizer for 1600 Case
Pelican Silica Gel Pack (for removing moisture, able to be used over and over)
Tech Details: If your curious how one takes a photograph of all of one’s photo gear the answer is you borrow a friends camera from down the street (a Rebel XT/350D with a Canon 24-70mm f/2.8L lens).
Lighting provided by one White Lighting X1600 to camera right difused through a large softbox, with Westcott 42" Silver reflector to camera right to just bring in some fill light. A short roll of White Savage Seamless just hanging off the knuckle arm of an Avenger C-Stand (easier and quicker than getting out a big background stand). Triggered by a good ole-fashioned sync cable connected to a Nikon AS-15 on the hot shoe since the RebelXT/350D lacks a PC Sync connector.
NOTE: This photo made it into Flickr’s ‘Explore" as one of the top five hundred most interesting photos on a particular day. You can see all of my photo’s that have made it into the Flickr Explore pages here.
Alaska’s Sarah Palin, by RR
Image by NineInchNachosIV
Alaska’s Culture of my Corruption
Frost Park Chalk Challenge No. 21
What follows is an open letter written by a resident of Wasilla, Alaska named Anne Kilkenny.
I am a resident of Wasilla, Alaska. I have known Sarah since 1992. Everyone here knows Sarah, so it is nothing special to say we are on a first-name basis. Our children have attended the same schools. Her father was my child’s favorite substitute teacher. I also am on a first name basis with her parents and mother-in-law. I attended more City Council meetings during her administration than about 99% of the residents of the city.
She is enormously popular; in every way she’s like the most popular girl in middle school. Even men who think she is a poor choice and won’t vote for her can’t quit smiling when talking about her because she is a “babe”.
It is astonishing and almost scary how well she can keep a secret. She kept her most recent pregnancy a secret from her children and parents for seven months. She is “pro-life”. She recently gave birth to a Down’s syndrome baby. There is no cover-up involved, here; Trig is her baby. She is energetic and hardworking. She regularly worked out at the gym.
She is savvy. She doesn’t take positions; she just “puts things out there” and if they prove to be popular, then she takes credit. Her husband works a union job on the North Slope for BP and is a champion snowmobile racer. Todd Palin’s kind of job is highly sought-after because of the schedule and high pay. He arranges his work schedule so he can fish for salmon in Bristol Bay for a month or so in summer, but by no stretch of the imagination is fishing their major source of income. Nor has her life-style ever been anything like that of native Alaskans. Sarah and her whole family are avid hunters. She’s smart.
Her experience is as mayor of a city with a population of about 5,000 (at the time), and less than 2 years as governor of a state with about 670,000 residents. During her mayoral administration most of the actual work of running this small city was turned over to an administrator. She had been pushed to hire this administrator by party power-brokers after she had gotten herself into some trouble over precipitous firings which had given rise to a recall campaign.
Sarah campaigned in Wasilla as a “fiscal conservative”. During her 6 years as Mayor, she increased general government expenditures by over 33%. During those same 6 years the amount of taxes collected by the City increased by 38%. This was during a period of low inflation (1996-2002). She reduced progressive property taxes and increased a regressive sales tax which taxed even food. The tax cuts that she promoted benefited large corporate property owners way more than they benefited residents.
The huge increases in tax revenues during her mayoral administration weren’t enough to fund everything on her wish list though, borrowed money was needed, too. She inherited a city with zero debt, but left it with indebtedness of over million. What did Mayor Palin encourage the voters to borrow money for? Was it the infrastructure that she said she supported? The sewage treatment plant that the city lacked? or a new library? No. m for a park. m-plus for construction of a multi-use sports complex which she rushed through to build on a piece of property that the City didn’t even have clear title to, that was still in litigation 7 yrs later–to the delight of the lawyers involved! The sports complex itself is a nice addition to the community but a huge money pit, not the profit-generator she claimed it would be. She also supported bonds for .5m for road projects that could have been done in 5-7 yrs without any borrowing.
While Mayor, City Hall was extensively remodeled and her office redecorated more than once. These are small numbers, but Wasilla is a very small city. As an oil producer, the high price of oil has created a budget surplus in Alaska. Rather than invest this surplus in technology that will make us energy independent and increase efficiency, as Governor she proposed distribution of this surplus to every individual in the state.
In this time of record state revenues and budget surpluses, she recommended that the state borrow/bond for road projects, even while she proposed distribution of surplus state revenues: spend today’s surplus, borrow for needs.
She’s not very tolerant of divergent opinions or open to outside ideasor compromise. As Mayor, she fought ideas that weren’t generated by her or her staff. Ideas weren’t evaluated on their merits, but on the basis of who proposed them.
While Sarah was Mayor of Wasilla she tried to fire our highly respected City Librarian because the Librarian refused to consider removing from the library some books that Sarah wanted removed. City residents rallied to the defense of the City Librarian and against Palin’s attempt at out-and-out censorship, so Palin backed down and withdrew her termination letter. People who fought her attempt to oust the Librarian are on her enemies list to this day.
Sarah complained about the “old boy’s club” when she first ran for Mayor, so what did she bring Wasilla? A new set of “old boys”. Palin fired most of the experienced staff she inherited. At the City and as Governor she hired or elevated new, inexperienced, obscure people, creating a staff totally dependent on her for their jobs and eternally grateful and fiercely loyal–loyal to the point of abusing their power to further her personal agenda, as she has acknowledged happened in the case of pressuring the State’s top cop (see below).
As Mayor, Sarah fired Wasilla’s Police Chief because he “intimidated” her, she told the press. As Governor, her recent firing of Alaska’s top cop has the ring of familiarity about it. He served at her pleasure and she had every legal right to fire him, but it’s pretty clear that an important factor in her decision to fire him was because he wouldn’t fire her sister’s ex-husband, a State Trooper. Under investigation for abuse of power, she has had to admit that more than 2 dozen contacts were made between her staff and family to the person that she later fired, pressuring him to fire her ex-brother-in-law. She tried to replace the man she fired with a man who she knew had been reprimanded for sexual harassment; when this caused a public furor, she withdrew her support.
She has bitten the hand of every person who extended theirs to her in help. The City Council person who personally escorted her around town introducing her to voters when she first ran for Wasilla City Council became one of her first targets when she was later elected Mayor. She abruptly fired her loyal City Administrator; even people who didn’t like the guy were stunned by this ruthlessness.
Fear of retribution has kept all of these people from saying anything publicly about her.
When then-Governor Murkowski was handing out political plums, Sarah got the best, Chair of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission: one of the few jobs not in Juneau and one of the best paid. She had no background in oil & gas issues. Within months of scoring this great job which paid 2,400/yr, she was complaining in the press about the high salary. I was told that she hated that job: the commute, the structured hours, the work. Sarah became aware that a member of this Commission (who was also the State Chair of the Republican Party) engaged in unethical behavior on the job.
In a gutsy move which some undoubtedly cautioned her could be political suicide, Sarah solved all her problems in one fell swoop: got out of the job she hated and garnered gobs of media attention as the patron saint of ethics and as a gutsy fighter against the “old boys’ club” when she dramatically quit, exposing this man’s ethics violations (for which he was fined).
As Mayor, she had her hand stuck out as far as anyone for pork from Senator Ted Stevens. Lately, she has castigated his pork-barrel politics and publicly humiliated him. She only opposed the “bridge to nowhere” after it became clear that it would be unwise not to.
As Governor, she gave the Legislature no direction and budget guidelines, then made a big grandstand display of line-item vetoing projects, calling them pork. Public outcry and further legislative action restored most of these projects–which had been vetoed simply because she was not aware of their importance–but with the unobservant she had gained a reputation as “anti-pork”.
She is solidly Republican: no political maverick. The State party leaders hate her because she has bit them in the back and humiliated them. Other members of the party object to her self-description as a fiscal conservative.
Around Wasilla there are people who went to high school with Sarah.
They call her “Sarah Barracuda” because of her unbridled ambition and predatory ruthlessness. Before she became so powerful, very ugly stories circulated around town about shenanigans she pulled to be made point guard on the high school basketball team. When Sarah’s mother-in-law, a highly respected member of the community and experienced manager, ran for Mayor, Sarah refused to endorse her.
As Governor, she stepped outside of the box and put together of package of legislation known as “AGIA” that forced the oil companies to march to the beat of her drum.
Like most Alaskans, she favors drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. She has questioned if the loss of sea ice is linked toglobal warming. She campaigned “as a private citizen” against a state initiaitive that would have either a) protected salmon streams from pollution from mines, or b) tied up in the courts all mining in the state (depending on who you listen to). She has pushed the State’s lawsuit against the Dept. of the Interior’s decision to list polar bears as threatened species.
McCain is the oldest person to ever run for President; Sarah will be a heartbeat away from being President. There has to be literally millions of Americans who are more knowledgeable and experienced than she. However, there’s a lot of people who have underestimated her and are regretting it.
CLAIM VS FACT
•“Hockey mom”: true for a few years
•“PTA mom”: true years ago when her first-born was in elementary school, not since
•“NRA supporter”: absolutely true
•social conservative: mixed. Opposes gay marriage, BUT vetoed a bill that would have denied benefits to employees in same-sex relationships (said she did this because it was unconsitutional).
•pro-creationism: mixed. Supports it, BUT did nothing as Governor to promote it.
•“Pro-life”: mixed. Knowingly gave birth to a Down’s syndrome baby BUT declined to call a special legislative session on some pro-life legislation
•“Experienced”: Some high schools have more students than Wasilla has residents. Many cities have more residents than the state of Alaska. No legislative experience other than City Council. Little hands-on supervisory or managerial experience; needed help of a city administrator to run town of about 5,000.
•political maverick: not at all
•gutsy: absolutely!
•open & transparent: ??? Good at keeping secrets. Not good at explaining actions.
•has a developed philosophy of public policy: no
•”a Greenie”: no. Turned Wasilla into a wasteland of big box stores and disconnected parking lots. Is pro-drilling off-shore and in ANWR.
•fiscal conservative: not by my definition!
•pro-infrastructure: No. Promoted a sports complex and park in a city without a sewage treatment plant or storm drainage system. Built streets to early 20th century standards.
•pro-tax relief: Lowered taxes for businesses, increased tax burden on residents
•pro-small government: No. Oversaw greatest expansion of city government in Wasilla’s history.
•pro-labor/pro-union. No. Just because her husband works union doesn’t make her pro-labor. I have seen nothing to support any claim that she is pro-labor/pro-union.
WHY AM I WRITING THIS?
First, I have long believed in the importance of being an informed voter. I am a voter registrar. For 10 years I put on student voting programs in the schools. If you google my name (Anne Kilkenny + Alaska), you will find references to my participation in local government, education, and PTA/parent organizations.
Secondly, I’ve always operated in the belief that “Bad things happen when good people stay silent”. Few people know as much as I do because few have gone to as many City Council meetings.
Third, I am just a housewife. I don’t have a job she can bump me out of. I don’t belong to any organization that she can hurt. But, I am no fool; she is immensely popular here, and it is likely that this will cost me somehow in the future: that’s life.
Fourth, she has hated me since back in 1996, when I was one of the 100 or so people who rallied to support the City Librarian against Sarah’s attempt at censorship.
Fifth, I looked around and realized that everybody else was afraid to say anything because they were somehow vulnerable.
CAVEATS
I am not a statistician. I developed the numbers for the increase in spending & taxation 2 years ago (when Palin was running for Governor) from information supplied to me by the Finance Director of the City of Wasilla, and I can’t recall exactly what I adjusted for: did I adjust for inflation? for population increases? Right now, it is impossible for a private person to get any info out of City Hall–they are swamped. So I can’t verify my numbers.
You may have noticed that there are various numbers circulating for the population of Wasilla, ranging from my “about 5,000?, up to 9,000. The day Palin’s selection was announced a city official told me that the current population is about 7,000. The official 2000 census count was 5,460. I have used about 5,000 because Palin was Mayor from 1996 to 2002, and the city was growing rapidly in the mid-90’s.
Office 1
Image by ballookey
I’ve never posted an after shot of my office. It’s a tiny room, and I have a lot of books and craft supplies, so storage solutions are the primary concern.
I apologize for the general crappiness of this photo – I took it with my new pocket digital because it shoots wide angle, but I’m still not happy with this camera.
Check out this site design images:
Environ LLC website design
Year peak of Batmunkh.E
This is a website for Environmental LLC, an environmental consulting company designed – www.environ.mn
Maroon 5 on the website
Year peak of dklimke
www.maroon5.com/hi_fi/ Not a fan of her music, but a big fan of a well designed website
J.Y. Design Home
Year peak of James Young Art
www.jydesign.com Personal website design
cool small business ideas pictures
Republicans Water Loo
Year peak of elycefeliz
www.frumforum.com / Waterloo March 21, 2010 at 04:59 by David frum suffer conservative and Republicans today most of its crushing legal defeat since 1960 Jahren.Es is hard to exaggerate the scale of the disaster. The conservatives can rejoice that they will compensate for the expected vote today with a great victory in November elections in 2010. But: (a) It is a good bet that conservative overoptimistic November is – so economy will have improved, and the immediate delights in the health care bill will reach key voting blocks (2) So what.? Legislative majority come and go. Healthcare is eternal. A victory in November is a very poor substitute for this failure to kaufen.So far, I think a lot of conservatives would agree with me. Now comes the hard lesson: Much of the blame for the current disaster attaches conservatives and Republicans uns.Am beginning of this process, we have a strategic choice: unlike, say that the Democrats in 2001, when President Bush’s the first tax cut proposed, we would not deal with administration. No negotiation, no compromise, nothing. We were all balls. That would be Obama’s Waterloo – like the Clinton health care was 1994.Nur hawks overlooked a few important facts: Obama was not with 53% of the vote, Clinton 42% elected. The liberal bloc of the Democratic Congressional Caucus is bigger and stronger than it was in 1993-94. And of course, think the Democrats also because its history and also the consequences of the 1994 Scheitern.Dieses time we went after all the bullets we had reached an agreement with keiner.Konnte? Who knows? But we know that the difference between this plan and traditional Republican ideas are very large. Obama plan has a broad similarity with Mitt Romney’s Massachusetts plan. It builds on ideas at the Heritage Foundation in the early 1990s, formed the basis for Republican counterproposal of Clinton Care in 1993-1994 entwickelt.Barack Obama necessarily Republican votes for his plan. Could we leveraged his desire to make the plan more closely with conservative views? To finance without redistribution taxes on productive enterprises – without weighing so heavily on small businesses – without Medicaid expansion? Too late. They are all illusions Gesetz.Keine note: This bill will not be lifted. Although Republicans have in 1994-style landslide in november, how many votes we can muster reopen the “donut hole” and invite more seniors for prescription drugs? How many votes again to cancel the insurance if they see any pre-existing condition? How many votes to ban 25-year-olds from their parents’ insurance? And even when the votes were – President Obama will sign a waiver, we of the most radical voices in the party and followed the movement, and they led us to abject defeat and irreparable. There were leaders who knew better, who would have liked a lot. But they were caught. Conservative rapporteur on Fox and talk radio had the Republican base vote in such a frenzy that was impossible to make-whipped. How do you handle someone who wants to kill your grandmother negotiate? Or – more accurately – to believe that with someone you have been convinced voters, the murder of her grandmother I’m on a soap box for several months about the damage that our super-heated debate, we were there. Yes, it mobilized supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information is overheated discussion made it impossible for representatives to represent and lead the elected politicians. The real leaders are on television and radio, and they have very different needs of people in government. Talk Radio thrives on confrontation and recriminations. If Rush Limbaugh said he did not want President Obama that he was intelligent explains his own interests. What he failed to say – but what is equally true – is that he wants Republicans to fail. If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and to negotiate attractive trade-offs out of office – Rush’s listeners are less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less and less heard ads for Sleep Number Betten.Also day defeat to the free market economy and Republican values ??are a great asset to the conservative entertainment industry. Your listeners and viewers are now even more angry, more frustrated, more disappointed with all except the responsibility for free talkers on television and radio. For them it is mission accomplished. For because they purport to represent, it’s okay Waterloo: our
.
Check out these pictures of affiliate marketing:
Shawn Collins of Affiliate Summit
Year peak of InternetGeekGirl
Shawn Collins Affiliate marketing guru and conference leader. blog.affiliatesummit.com /
Legal 2.0: Hot Topics in Affiliate Marketing session at Affiliate Summit 2008 East
Year peak of affiliate summit
Legal experts and regulators card that confers legal mine field of affiliate marketing critical updates for advertising and online marketing and the FTC Act and state Rechtsdurchsetzung.Leonard L. Gordon, Regional Director, Federal Trade CommissionJeffrey Greenbaum, Partner, Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz , PCWill Haselden, Founder, Chief – Cyber Fraud Section, Office of the Attorney General, State of Florida Bennet Kelley, Founder, Internet Law Center
A few nice blogging for money images I found:
10/9 McClatchy: Raises Question
Image by MyEyeSees
A Pretty Ugly Day…. we’re in for a deep and long recession, something we’ve not seen in three decades. Before market opens, Paulson signals US may invest in lenders as part of 0 billion rescue; Bernake, Paulson seek global help as credit crisis defeats US efforts. Global markets lurch in crisis. Can a unified approach to fighting the world financial crisis be reached?U.S. action so far is unprecedented in scale since the Great Depression. In the past five weeks alone, the government has taken over mortgage-finance firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, rescued insurer American International Group Inc., backed the deposits of money-market funds and authorized a 0 billion bank rescue program.
Bailout now called: 0 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.
The problem has now morphed from a U.S. housing recession into a global financial meltdown. UK calls it a Bailout Plan.
Credit markets had stalled Tuesday and Wednesday. Stock prices in the United States went on a roller-coaster ride, at the end of which the Dow Jones industrial average was down 189 points, or 2 percent.
It becomes official: US is in a recession
trillion in global stock-market losses on October 6 and 7
The National Debt clock in New York reached its limits last month as the national debt exceeded trillion for the first time, the clock ran out of digits to record the number.
This is Part II of the Media Study on the US Financial Crisis, a study that started with Part I at the end of September.
Part I of the Media Study is at www.flickr.com/photos/myeye/sets/72157607584362826/
Blogging on the subject starts with
Bigge$ st Cri$ i$ and Media–
motherpie.typepad.com/motherpie/2008/09/bigget-crii-and.html
10/9 LA Times
Image by MyEyeSees
A Pretty Ugly Day…. we’re in for a deep and long recession, something we’ve not seen in three decades. Before market opens, Paulson signals US may invest in lenders as part of 0 billion rescue; Bernake, Paulson seek global help as credit crisis defeats US efforts. Global markets lurch in crisis. Can a unified approach to fighting the world financial crisis be reached?U.S. action so far is unprecedented in scale since the Great Depression. In the past five weeks alone, the government has taken over mortgage-finance firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, rescued insurer American International Group Inc., backed the deposits of money-market funds and authorized a 0 billion bank rescue program.
Bailout now called: 0 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.
The problem has now morphed from a U.S. housing recession into a global financial meltdown. UK calls it a Bailout Plan.
Credit markets had stalled Tuesday and Wednesday. Stock prices in the United States went on a roller-coaster ride, at the end of which the Dow Jones industrial average was down 189 points, or 2 percent.
It becomes official: US is in a recession
trillion in global stock-market losses on October 6 and 7
The National Debt clock in New York reached its limits last month as the national debt exceeded trillion for the first time, the clock ran out of digits to record the number.
This is Part II of the Media Study on the US Financial Crisis, a study that started with Part I at the end of September.
Part I of the Media Study is at www.flickr.com/photos/myeye/sets/72157607584362826/
Blogging on the subject starts with
Bigge$ st Cri$ i$ and Media–
motherpie.typepad.com/motherpie/2008/09/bigget-crii-and.html
10/9 ABC News
Image by MyEyeSees
A Pretty Ugly Day…. we’re in for a deep and long recession, something we’ve not seen in three decades. Before market opens, Paulson signals US may invest in lenders as part of 0 billion rescue; Bernake, Paulson seek global help as credit crisis defeats US efforts. Global markets lurch in crisis. Can a unified approach to fighting the world financial crisis be reached?U.S. action so far is unprecedented in scale since the Great Depression. In the past five weeks alone, the government has taken over mortgage-finance firms Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, rescued insurer American International Group Inc., backed the deposits of money-market funds and authorized a 0 billion bank rescue program.
Bailout now called: 0 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program.
The problem has now morphed from a U.S. housing recession into a global financial meltdown. UK calls it a Bailout Plan.
Credit markets had stalled Tuesday and Wednesday. Stock prices in the United States went on a roller-coaster ride, at the end of which the Dow Jones industrial average was down 189 points, or 2 percent.
It becomes official: US is in a recession
trillion in global stock-market losses on October 6 and 7
The National Debt clock in New York reached its limits last month as the national debt exceeded trillion for the first time, the clock ran out of digits to record the number.
This is Part II of the Media Study on the US Financial Crisis, a study that started with Part I at the end of September.
Part I of the Media Study is at www.flickr.com/photos/myeye/sets/72157607584362826/
Blogging on the subject starts with
Bigge$ st Cri$ i$ and Media–
motherpie.typepad.com/motherpie/2008/09/bigget-crii-and.html
A few nice forex trading images I found:
GBP0709
Image by Tradingrichmom
Rich Mom’s system signals entry:
11:45 GBP$ sell @ 1.6244, S/L 1.6267, exit when CCIx -118 up
Exit 12:40 @ 1.6226 = 18p. profit in 55 min.
Dagmar
Trading results that make you say W.O.W.
Follow me on twitter.com/tradingrichmom
www.fortunemachine.info
EUR0509
Image by Tradingrichmom
Rich Mom’s system signals entry:
13:45 EUR$ sell @ 1.3640, S/L 1.3649, exit when CCIx -166 up
Exit 14:13 @ 1.3624 = 16p. profit (hit trailing S/L) in 28 min.
Dagmar
Trading results that make you say W.O.W.
Follow me on twitter.com/tradingrichmom
www.fortunemachine.info
Check out these online business images:
IMG_0100
Image by Mark & Andrea Busse
Various shots from F5 Expo online business strategy conference at the Vancouver Convention Centre on April 7, 2010.
IMG_0084
Image by Mark & Andrea Busse
Various shots from F5 Expo online business strategy conference at the Vancouver Convention Centre on April 7, 2010.
Some cool blogging for money images:
Waterstones Contents
Image by kostika
This is the contents of my Waterstones bag on Friday.
It’s the Absolute Sandaman volume 1. The Absolute books are done in
limited printings and once they’re gone they’re gone. I have several
others form other comic series and I love them and they’re very much
worth the money you pay for them, but they usually cost around £50. They
are high quality gloss prints of the originals in the large format.
They’re simply wonderful.
In the case of my Abolute Planetary book I paid about £80 for it as I
had to import it from the US since it was a few months past its print
run and had to buy it from a private seller through Amazon.com.
This is volume 1 of the Sandman books though and is only the first 20
issues. So I expect there to be a couple more volumes. The Absolute
Authority is in 2 volumes also though. I expect there to be a second
volume of Planetary also eventually.
cool website traffic images:
Statistics Cybersoc.com
Year peak of Robin Hamman
I’m not sure that the page views and unique users, the best way to measure website traffic these days, especially with many users switching to RSS (approximately half of my visitors – read on) Whatever it. The monthly statistics reports for my blog www.cybersoc.com in the last six months of StatCounter The six months is 45,912 36,136 page views and unique User.Ich ‘m not about the apparent decline in a month at a monthly traffic large number of interested readers do via RSS. Feedburner says that between 165 to 200 people download my feeds each day, it’s about half of my total traffic. This traffic is not shown in the statistics erscheinen.Meine current Technorati Rank 20 the 142nd The best finish I’ve ever achieved in the upper 9000s [ statement by Technorati Rank] According to TypePad, with the total number of page impressions I started the blog is 125.085.Nun if I could only figure out which of this information was helpful
Library Website Traffic – Northeast
Year peak of edlabdesigner
Library Website Traffic – Global
Year peak of edlabdesigner
cool Affiliate Marketing Images:
Denise Wakeman on Niche Affiliate Marketing System (NAMS) Workshop 3
Year peak of rogercarr
Photo by Denise Wakeman was on Niche Affiliate Marketing System Workshop in Atlanta, GA held on 29 January 1 February 2010 will erfasst.Um more about it next NAMS Workshop, www.NAMSExperience.com .
Niche Affiliate Marketing System (NAMS) Workshop 3
Year peak of rogercarr
The photo was taken on Niche Affiliate Marketing System Workshop in Atlanta, GA held on 29 January 1 February 2010 will erfasst.Um more about it next NAMS Workshop, www.NAMSExperience.com .
Check out these blogging for money images:
Google Trends:Obama,McCain, Economy, Bailout
Image by MyEyeSees
Things Get Serious.
Pre-opening – Fed cut rates, generates big impact on futures, up 100 points after being down 150 points and other markets followed suit in world coordination- Does this help stabilize? Billion bailout in UK enacted — Bank of England announces 0 pool of money for banks to borrow from – intrabank lending… First emergency rate cut by England, last time did this was on 9/11
Market Opens… Dow down 206.13 points
US consumers paying down debt forthe first time in a decade – MarketWatch
Dow down more than 1400 points over past five sessions
Day Ended: The Dow closed down 189.01 to 9,258.10
Henry Paulson, warned that financial "turmoil" will not end soon and that more banks are likely to bite the dust. Stocks close, stock indexes suffer sixth straight day of losses
Part I: Sept. U.S. Economic Crisis Media Study —
www.flickr.com/photos/myeye/sets/72157607584362826/
Blogging on the subject starts with
Bigge$ st Cri$ i$ and Media–
motherpie.typepad.com/motherpie/2008/09/bigget-crii-and.html
10/8 Google News
Image by MyEyeSees
Things Get Serious.
Pre-opening – Fed cut rates, generates big impact on futures, up 100 points after being down 150 points and other markets followed suit in world coordination- Does this help stabilize? Billion bailout in UK enacted — Bank of England announces 0 pool of money for banks to borrow from – intrabank lending… First emergency rate cut by England, last time did this was on 9/11
Market Opens… Dow down 206.13 points
US consumers paying down debt forthe first time in a decade – MarketWatch
Dow down more than 1400 points over past five sessions
Day Ended: The Dow closed down 189.01 to 9,258.10
Henry Paulson, warned that financial "turmoil" will not end soon and that more banks are likely to bite the dust. Stocks close, stock indexes suffer sixth straight day of losses
Part I: Sept. U.S. Economic Crisis Media Study —
www.flickr.com/photos/myeye/sets/72157607584362826/
Blogging on the subject starts with
Bigge$ st Cri$ i$ and Media–
motherpie.typepad.com/motherpie/2008/09/bigget-crii-and.html
Check out these forex trading images:
EUR0209
Image by Trading Rich Mom
Rich Mom’s system signals entry:
12:15 EUR$ sell 1.2880, S/L 1.2933, exit when CCIx -115 up
Exit 12:45 1.2857 (hit trailing stop) = 23p. profit in 30 min.
Dagmar
Trading results that make you say W.O.W.
Follow me on twitter.com/tradingrichmom
www.fortunemachine.info
GBP0309loss
Image by Trading Rich Mom
Rich Mom’s system signals entry:
13:00 GBP$ sell @ 1.4567, S/L 1.4590, exit when CCIx -144 up
Exit 13:28 @ 1.4574 = 7p. loss
Dagmar
Trading results that make you say W.O.W.
Follow me on twitter.com/tradingrichmom
A few nice small business ideas images I found:
Ines Schaber : Culture is our Business (2004)
Image by Marc Wathieu
View at Artefact Festival, STUK, Leuven, february 2009.
www.artefact-festival.be/2009/
In 1919 Willi Römer photographed a fight in Berlin during the occupation of the press district by revolutionaries. We follow the path of the image from being a document of an historic event to a digitalised commodity of Corbis, one of the largest image archives and stock agencies (for fee-based download). On Corbis’ website the image has the (incorrect) title "Revolution in Berlin – Forces loyal to the Kaiser and Imperial Government prepare to do battle against insurgents near end of World War I".
Corbis was founded by Bill Gates in 1989. The company owns more than 70 million photographs and has moved its analog collection to an underground storage space in a former limestone shaft in Pennsylvania. The company has as well purchased large (private) archives containing historically important photographs. Part of the collection was converted to a digital format‚ inscribed with a watermark‚ and posted on the company’s website. This also happened with Römer’s image. According to international law, the use of the photo had already long been public domain. Even following the sale and the removal of the watermark, the image exists under copyright due to the embedded watermark.
Ines Schaber highlights the interrelation between the image as private property and the writing of our common history. She exposes the potentially threatening, monopolistic-capitalistic appropriating of pictorial memory. On the original image she shows a letter that she wrote to Bill.
Text source :
www.artefact-festival.be/2009/099_expo_en.php?id=015
/////////
About a photograph and its circulation
Ines Schaber in conversation with Diethard Kerbs, Professor of the History of Photography, July 2004, Berlin
Ines Schaber:
Could you tell me what we can see on this photograph?
Diethart Kerbs:
The photo shows Berlin’s Schützenstrasse during the occupation of the press district on the 10th or 11th of January 1919. What we have here is a press photo which was also published as a photo-postcard. The photo was most likely taken by Willy Römer, a press photographer from Berlin who had just become independent in the winter of 1918/19. It is apparent from the shot that the photographer took the picture from the entrance of the Mosse Publishing House aiming his camera towards the outside. Of course, this is not a real fight scene; the photographer probably ran around during the quiet intervals and said: “stay sitting down like you are sitting now, I will take a picture of you”. If shots were being fired, he couldn’t have stood there taking photos like that, because he would have probably been hit by the bullets of the government troops. It is interesting to note the random composition of the group in question: marines, soldiers, people dressed as civilians who jointly keep the Mosse Publishing House under seizure. Through this the government troops and revolutionaries can always be easily distinguished: the former are equipped with perfect combat gear, while the latter are usually haphazard groups of people.
IS:
You say that the picture was shot from the inside to the outside. Does this mean that the revolutionaries trusted the photographer and believed that it was important for them to be photographed?
DK:
That’s hard to say. Above all, they were only fighting. Whether they were media-conscious in the dual sense – in other words, whether they were, on the one hand, consciously aware of the importance of photographically documenting the revolution, which would later be made public worldwide, and, on the other hand, knew or suspected that having been photographed, they would become identifiable and later, if nothing came of the revolution, may be lined up against the wall for it – is difficult to say. In any case, in the spring of 1919, no one was called to account based on photographs, but anyone with a gun in their hand was shot. More than 80 % of those who died in the revolution were not victims of the fighting, but were shot later for having fought or because they had been injured, or sometimes because they had a scar on their shoulder where the gun they walked the streets with had rubbed it raw. The soldiers simply tore the workers’ shirts open and whoever had a mark like that on his shoulder was stood against the wall and shot. Willy Römer probably did not anticipate that the police or the army would come and confiscate his photos. In any case, almost all of his photos of the revolution survived, even the one which documents his own arrest.
IS:
In accordance with the copyright laws that were in effect in 1919, Willy Römer’s photos were protected for 10 years, is that correct?
DK:
Yes, but this changed later. As I am no expert on copyright laws, I can only offer you anecdotes about it. However absurd it may seem, we own one of the forward leaps in lawmaking pertaining to photography copyrights to Adolf Hitler. Heinrich Hoffmann, Hitler’s personal photographer and friend, with whom he was on a first name basis, went to see him and said: “I am doomed, the rights to my photos have expired. I can no longer make money with the photos that I took between 1910 and 1920. Now anyone can steal them.” Then Adolf allegedly said: “Alright, my friend, I will help you”. Thus, in 1940, the term of copyright protection was extended to 25 years. Willy Römer fought for the copyright of his photos after World War II. With the help of the Berlin Journalist Association, he filed complaints each time one of his photos was used in a TV movie or a documentary and he was not paid. The usual response was that the photos had already been in their possession or that they got them from someone – even from the photographer himself – years before, or that they had no idea they were Römer’s photographs. Most times they managed to find an excuse. Sometimes he was even invited to sue. Willy Römer fought these battles for the recognition of the authorship of his photos, as well as the royalties due him. After 1945, his financial situation became dire. He could no longer keep up with his younger colleagues as an up to date press photographer. In 1947, he turned sixty. He lived for another 32 years. He attempted to make a living by putting his photos in circulation, but he received virtually no money for them. Following a few instances of protestation at the Ullstein Photo Agency, he was told “Fine, since it’s you and we know you, we will do as we had done before, 50:50.” Ullstein still has originals by Römer from the time of the revolution.
IS:
What do you mean by “originals”? Original prints or original negatives?
DK:
Both, in fact. Of course, negatives are “the more original originals”. One can still make copies from a glass plate today. But the more valuable originals are the so-called vintage prints, held in such high esteem by auction houses and art dealers. These are the original prints made by the photographer himself at the time the photo was created.
IS:
How did you acquire Römer’s photos?
DK:
Willy Römer became very old. Until his death in 1979, he took care of his archive and made supplementary labels for his photographs. In 1981, I discovered the archive by accident when I saw it advertised for sale in a newspaper. The family needed money. Römer’s wife had a pathetically small pension and his daughter did not live in Berlin. They wanted to sell it to ensure the old-age pension of the mother. They had tried all possible institutions in Berlin –the photo bureau and the archives of the province, the Berlinische Galerie, the Ullstein Photo Agency, the Bertelsmann Encyclopedia Publishing House, the Pan-German Ministry, etc. – but they were not able to find a home for the archive. When I learned of this, I also made an attempt to find a taker for it, but to no avail. I was turned away by everyone. No one had the wish or the ability to handle and take care of such a large mass of photos. I, on the other hand, became very interested, and, with great difficulty, scraped enough money together to purchase the archive myself. Then, together with a few of my friends, we founded the Working Group for Image Source Research and Contemporary History (Arbeitsgemeinschaft für Bildquellenforschung und Zeitgeschichte e.V.). This nonprofit organisation operates the so-called Agency for Images of Contemporary History (Agentur für Bilder zur Zeitgeschichte), which has a very small staff. It, in fact, consists of a single young lady for whom this is a source of supplementary income. Our profit is so meager that it is negligible in terms of taxes. It usually remains under EUR 4000 per year, which we make by loaning out copies. One half of the money is given to this lady and the rest is used to care of the stock and to finance research.
IS:
Is it possible to view these photos and to conduct research in the archive?
DK:
No, it isn’t. The archive is located in a small room of a private residence. We are not equipped to receive visitors. The archive is basically a private institution, anyway it is neither a public archive, nor a commercial company. You have to make a very specific inquiry– as accurately as possible – what motifs you are looking for. Then, we can find the images and show them to you. This is, of course, only possible if the visitor articulates a specific, professionally supported request. The location and the shortage of time do not make it possible for us to receive visitors who wish to “just have a look around”.
IS:
How do you define the terms ” rights of use” and “copyright”?
DK:
Copyright is the same as in the case of a book. Through copyright, the author reserves all rights relating to the text. The author may also confer these rights, if he wishes, to a publisher, for example. Usually, when publishers release a book, they want to acquire the copyright for themselves. This, however, means that they bear the financial risk but also the possible profit. Thus, copyright is the right connected to a text or a photograph.
IS:
Photos are very different from books in terms of accessibility.
DK:
Yes, they are. And there is a historical reason for this. The invention of photography was made public news in 1839 and, very generously, donated to humanity by the French government. They said: “We have bought the rights and we relinquish them… now you may all take photographs”. This was a great, cultural gesture of the French government. It did not, however, go as far as establishing a phototheque, a library of photographs. Public libraries came into existence almost immediately, as bourgeois revolutions opened up the royal libraries. However, the bourgeois states never declared of their own volition: “now we will begin to collect all those photographs that are of significance to us in order to render them at the disposal of the public”. The fact that photographs are also part of the cultural wealth, and that they should generally be made available to the whole of society, was forgotten. We are still at this level today. Bourgeois society has neglected to establish the availability of photographic resources as a general right to education the way it managed to do this for literary resources.
IS:
How does this relate to the copyright of photographs?
DK:
In the case of photographs, copyrights can be owned for 50 years after the creation of the photo, or for 70 years after the death of the author. A distinction is made between functional and art photography. All photographers who wish to secure the rights for 70 years after their death refer to themselves as photo-designers.
Willy Römer’s shots are press photos – but this can be disputed. We have the example of Dr. Erich Salomon, who was a learned lawyer. During the unemployment of 1929, he worked as a clerk in the advertisement department of Ullstein Publishing. He began to take pictures in order to photograph the advertising surfaces they offered for rent. Then he began to enjoy photography and started taking press photos for Ullstein Publishing. Within two years, he became one of the most famous German press photographers. As a Jew, he immigrated to the Netherlands during the Nazi years and was later murdered. His son was successful in getting two suitcases full of his photos to England and, after the war, discovered the remainder of his inheritance in an attic in the Netherlands. This inheritance was sold for 1 million Deutsche Marks to the city of Berlin in 1975. This is, of course, a special case. Salomon was a member of the Jewry of Berlin and a victim of Fascism, as well as an excellent photographer. Furthermore, the photos show important figures of history. These four factors add up to the high value of the photos. No one today would dispute the rightfulness of the purchase and the value of the pictures. If, however, we were to interpret the story more strictly, we would have to say that these are press photos.
IS:
The debate of whether or not to declare something as art often only takes place during the battle over the rights.
DK:
The definition is, as a matter of fact, quite simple and the question, for me, is easily answered. Art is everything that is found in museums, presented in galleries, offered and bought by art dealers, critiqued by art critics, and accepted as that by the international art market regardless of where it came from and who made it. There is nothing to dispute here, society has already decided.
IS:
Does this mean you would answer the question whether a photograph is art or not, through the
market?
DK:
Yes, to a great extent. Being that we live in capitalism. It is a function of social use. As Luhmann would say, it is a system within the social systems. This is a pragmatic definition, it saves one from the theoretical debates. At the beginning of the seventies, even in bourgeoismagazines, like the ZEIT, there was a heated debate on whether art was a “commodity”. Then this rapidly abated, as an economic-social revolution failed to ensue. A society will not immediately change its economic structure only because a few intellectuals decide on pondering it.
IS:
In your running of the Agency for Images of Contemporary History, do you not get caught in the bind between private property and the demand for public access?
DK:
Of course, I do. Society (or, if you prefer, the state), on the one hand, would have to make sure that photographs, or visual information that bear historical and cultural significance, are generally made accessible so that all those interested and wanting to learn can see them. On the other hand, those who took these photos and those who preserve them should be protected against theft and exploitation. Their work should be safeguarded and rewarded by society. So far the state has done this very poorly. This goes for all photographers, be they artists or press photographers. The public is not even aware of this problem yet.
IS:
Accessibility to photographs also opens the possibilities for titeling and thus naming them. Bill Gates’ image stock Agency Corbis titles the photo we have talked about on their home page as “Revolution in Berlin”. Forces loyal to the Kaiser and Imperial Government prepare to do battle against insurgents near end of World War I.”
DK:
This is interesting – and completely false. This way the fronts are, in effect, swapped. This was probably written by someone who didn’t have the slightest idea about the story of the Berlin revolution. The problem of erroneous photo titles is as old as the profession itself. The texts say whatever happens to suit the newspaper or the book author.
IS:
Can Corbis actually sell the photos?
DK:
It is handled like this.You must keep in mind that at the time about 100 prints entered circulation, plus photo-postcards, maybe about 300 copies. Of these, probably 30 or 40 have survived in various archives. Sometimes these too land at large companies, not much can be done about that. The photo we were talking about can be found at Ullstein or the photo archive of the Preussischer Kulturbesitz. Corbis has the technical advantage. If you want the same photo from us, you would have to call us, we have to look it up, and, in some cases, if we don’t want to part with the original, we would have to make a reproduction. All this takes about 14 days and only then can the reproduction or the print be sent out. Then we have to chase you down so that you return the photo to us. This is an ancient method. What we do is 20th century, what Corbis does is 21st century. They send the photo to your screen in a matter of seconds.
IS:
And what are you doing?
DK:
The way we handle this at the Agency for Images of Contemporary History – is our cultural, social, and political decisions and orientation. We also, of course, decide what we do and don’t want to circulate. We also have a couple of photos by horrible Nazis. We don’t necessarily have to publish these. This is the difference, and this is our decision. We have the freedom to say no and to forgo profit – the money that comes in from advertisement, for example. But as I have said, the business side of this is rather underexposed in our case, while for Gates, Getty and others, it is the main direction. For me it is mostly about the preservation of valuable, historical photo stocks and its integration into public-cultural use. To this end, we mostly organise exhibitions and publish books, and it is for this purpose that I write about this topic in newspapers and journals.
Text source :
www.artefact-festival.be/2009/099_expo_en.php?id=016
The Risk of Becoming an Expert
Image by Intersection Consulting
The danger of becoming an expert doesn’t lie in the label or how freely others bestow it upon you. “Expert” becomes a risk to your small business when you buy into the hype that you’ve reached the pinnacle of knowledge and it’s okay to stop thinking, learning and embracing new ideas. Note: Inspired by David Armano.
Some cool small business ideas images:
New Marketing
Image by Intersection Consulting
Before the web, companies had to either buy advertising or convince journalists to write about their products or services (many organizations still use this approach). One component of New Marketing focuses on brand journalism – the idea that creating great content will help your small business publish it’s way to brand awareness.
Il Pescatore
Image by CarleyJane
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SocialSpark CPC
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Check out these online business images:
IMG_0064
Image by Mark & Andrea Busse
Various shots from F5 Expo online business strategy conference at the Vancouver Convention Centre on April 7, 2010.
Some cool local business images:
Free Google Local Business Listings
Image by Hobo!
Free Google Local Business Listings
Governor Patrick visits City Fresh Foods and meets with local business owners
Image by Office of Governor Patrick
Governor Patrick talks with local business owners in a roundtable at City Fresh Foods in Roxbury.
(Photo credit: Eugena Ossi/Governor’s Office)
Some cool blogging for money images:
SocialSpark Sparks
Image by BenSpark
For my SocialSpark Saturday series on How To make Money with SocialSpark www.benspark.com/how-do-i-make-money-with-socialspark.html
SocialSpark Marketplace
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SocialSpark All Opps
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Some cool work from home images:
Working from home today
Image by slworking2
Working from home – required wardrobe
Image by cronewynd
One of the best aspects of working from home is that no special clothing is required…
A few nice site design pictures I found:
picture Ajda Gregor?i? 
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picture Ajda Gregor?i? website design for Beauty and Wellness Shop LotosSpa. Lotus spa.si /
some cool pictures to work from home:
picture Ben McLeod 
picture from gin drink I woke up this morning yearning for a big old pile of Yorkshire puddings. Now unfortunately I had to go into the office this morning, so there is no time for a Yorkshire pudding breakfast. but luckily I had decided to work from home and discovered that afternoon half a dozen eggs, with up necessary to say – so before you “make sauce,” I was at home SA works through me some strong professional Tome [erm ... ok more like light] objects and chewed my way happily through a large plate of Yorkshire. mmmm, mmmm! Note: I also give credit to Seven Hills Beer Monster
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GBP0209zerox
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