Category: Art

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Yamahaha

You can play a complete Mozart concerto with one finger. It’s true. All you need is the Yamaha “Disklavier GrandTouch” electronic piano.

This keyboard instrument is programmed with actual great performances by famous musicians and orchestras. The keyboard “prompts” you for each key that you are supposed to play, and automatically provides the amazing accompaniment.

My question is, why would anyone want such a device? Why why why?

If you were to buy this keyboard primarily for the pleasure of hearing the music already programmed into it—the “great performances” by well-known musicians– why wouldn’t you just buy a CD of the same music and play it on your stereo? Or an MP3 file and play it on your computer? Or, if you wanted the thrill of seeing the music itself scroll by, how about a midi file? This has got to be the world’s largest, clunkiest, clumsiest, stereo system.

If you already know how to play music, why would you want to buy a piano that is programmed to play music performed by other musicians? What kind of satisfaction would there be in having the computer “accompany” you? Is it possible to be moved or inspired by an algorithm? Would you be proud of your performance?

And if you don’t know how to play music, why would you want to deceive yourself into thinking that you can, by sitting behind this keyboard?

Who would you think you were fooling?

As technology advances, the dreamers and schemers at the big and not-so-big high-tech corporations keep coming up with idiotic ways for you to spend your money. At $10K a pop, this keyboard is a particularly bad value. What kind of a society invests so much money into deceiving itself? This instrument represents the cosmetic surgery of creative talent. If your breasts are too small, you have them augmented. If your penis is too small, you buy a gun. If your brain is too small, you buy a Disklavier GrandTouch.

* * *

Consider some other deviant hybrids from ages past:

  • the programmable typewriter (with the tiny LCD screen). It cost as much as a computer, for less than 1/10th the functionality.
  • the moped
  • the umbrella hat

and of course, one of the real winners for instant technological obsolescence:

  • the winmodem

Personally, I think those big camper trucks—Winnebagos– are the same thing, but obviously people have yet to be convinced. You see them everywhere. They’re too big to travel around with in cities, and too small to provide a comfortable home on the go. They cost $45,000+. Think about that. How many days a year do you use it? Ten? Twenty? It would cost about $2,000 to stay in a good motel for twenty days. It would take about twenty years for the Winnebago to pay for itself. And that’s only if you don’t include insurance or gas.

Get a car and a trailer, I say, or, better yet, go to a motel. And if you really want to play the piano, take lessons. And if you can play the piano, buy a piano. And if you want to program music into a keyboard, buy a midi-compatible keyboard and a computer. That will only set you back $3,500. And you get a computer out of the deal as well.

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Norman Rockwell

I never liked Norman Rockwell paintings. They had this kind of smug middle-American arrogance to them. Every one of them seemed to shout at the viewer: “Why would anyone in the world live other than we as Americans live? We’re so great!” They are the most purely American of artifacts. They idealize conservative American values: church, boy scouts, the military. In a portrait of a citizen speaking out at a city hall meeting, Rockwell seems to say, yes, in America, the average citizen has a say in the way things are run around here. Right. The average citizen and the Fortune 500 and the military industrial complex and Rush Limbaugh. But I’ll bet that guy speaking up at that meeting got his parking ticket reversed.

Later in life, however, he began to turn out works that actually alluded to real problems in the real world: “The Problem We all Live With” shows a black girl about to enter a segregated school, surrounded by marshals, whose faces we cannot see. Very moving. Politically correct, of course. But artists are supposed to be visionaries. They’re supposed to be true to a powerful inner voice tell them that this is the way things are no matter what anybody else says. Rockwell was not exactly ahead of the curve here: he did his painting in 1964. Even the U.S. Federal Government was on-board by then.

Norman Rockwell died in 1978 at 84.

There have always been those who argue that Rockwell was a GREAT artist who belongs in the company of Picasso, Millet, Miro, Pollock, or maybe even Andy Warhol (ha ha). Why, they ask, should an artist be held in contempt, just because he is popular? We need to revise our opinion of Rockwell. We need to put his “Fixing a Flat” right up there on display next to Bacon’s “Man in a Box” and Monet’s “Lily pads #4,378”. .

Well, people can revise their opinions of anything they want. Sometimes, when the obvious has been with us for so long, and for good reason, it becomes fashionable to assert that the obvious was never true. William F. Buckley Jr. decides that “Tail-Gunner” Joseph McCarthy was a hero after all. William Goldman decides that John Lennon was a jerk. Everyone is supposed to go: oh! How brilliant! He saw what everyone else missed! Rockwell really is a brilliant artist!

The thing is, sometimes things are obviously true because they are, well, obviously true. Anyone who has seen the video tape of McCarthy holding a hand over a microphone and smirking while whispering to his aide, Roy Cohn, surely suspects that the man was an idiot. And anyone who has tape of John Lennon talking to reporters from his “bed-in for peace” knows that he was a lovable idealist who wished harm to no one and was far less foolish than he appeared.

But Rockwell a great artist?

No, he isn’t. He is a great illustrator. But you can’t be a great artist if you are constantly pandering to your audience. Rockwell clearly selected subjects and meanings that he knew his audience would accept, adore, and admire, and he presented these subjects and meanings in an idiom that was utterly conventional. Here you are: you imagine that Americans, in the late 20th century, still go down to the fishing hole, or stop at the side of the road to skinny dip on a hot day, or glance with awed respect at little old ladies who pray before they eat their meals in a restaurant. Dream on. These are popular images because they appeal to people’s illusions about themselves. That’s not art. That is propaganda.

rockwell1.jpg (23485 bytes)

It somehow doesn’t surprise that Rockwell did also did advertisements for Crest and Jell-O and other companies. I don’t think Rockwell was embarrassed. Why should he be? He was an illustrator.

Rockwell himself certainly believed he was an important artist. He did a painting of a man standing in an art gallery staring at a Jackson Pollock splatter

rockwell2.jpg (23179 bytes) painting.

 

You can’t see the face but you can picture the quizzical expression from the body language. The man is fair: he’s giving the painting a chance. He’s staring at it, trying to understand it. But you know and I know that the painting makes no sense to him. And that, to Rockwell, is all that there is to modern art.

Rockwell seemed proud of the fact that he was able to credibly, he thought, recreate the Pollock painting himself, using the celebrated splatter technique. Nothing to it. I could paint like that if I wanted to.

Well, I kind of agree with him. Abstract art, or non-figurative art, or whatever you want to call it, has followed it’s own course into oblivion and self-parody. It has become an industry of critics, painters, galleries, art teachers, and students, all trying to define the absurd, all attempting to establish themselves as authorities or experts on something that ridicules expertise and authority.

But I’m not ready to say that the public is right either. Rockwell isn’t the only figurative painter in the world. Van Gogh, Rembrandt, Delacroix, Michelangelo, Da Vinci, Boticelli, Van Eyk, and even Picasso, were all figurative painters at one point or another, but it’s not hard to see that there is a substantial difference between their work and Rockwell’s.

And the public never accepted Van Gogh in his own time. He sold one painting in his entire life. One. So if Rockwell had had any guts– and insight– he would have paired that painting with one of a rumpled Frenchman scratching his head while standing in front of “Starry Night”.  That would have been a far richer, more subtle comment on modern art and the average American consumer.

But that would have made the opposite point that Rockwell intended. It would have shown that the public can be absolutely, totally, completely wrong about what is “good” art. It would have shown that the vast majority of people can be utterly foolish. It would have proven that it was quite possible for a mere illustrator to be the most popular artist in America.

This all begs the question. Is modern, abstract art, and its various derivatives, any good? The public has thrown up their hands. They don’t know and they don’t care.

 

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Fakes

I have before me a Comstock photographic catalogue. This is a lovely little colour magazine that lists hundreds of pictures which you can buy to use in your advertising or internal communications.

The pictures are technically gorgeous. Outstanding colour and composition. Every defect, human or not, has been air-brushed into oblivion. This is about image. If you want a picture of a rugby team to help convince your sales staff to work together, here it is: woman, man, woman, man, perfect teeth, blue eyes, fake sweat on their brows.

Here’s a little Huck Finn guy with a sling shot and chocolate or dirt smeared on his cheeks. I have three children and I’ve never seen a smear like that. It looks like it was stroked on with a paint brush.

Here’s a picture of wrecked computers stacked in a pile. They look like real computers, but the stack doesn’t look real. It looks like it’s been arranged for a photograph.

Here’s a picture of a woman making a presentation. She is perfect, but not too perfect. Yes, there is a tiny bow at the hips to credibility: she is chewing on a pen, and her hair is carefully arranged to look slightly unarranged. The lighting gives it away though. No real office has that kind of dispersed, ambient sunshine. No people in real life look like they’re having so much fun working.

Here are two young, healthy, beautiful couples frolicking on a beach. I have never in my life seen two couples who look like that. Oh sure, I’ve seen lots of beautiful people. And I’ve occasionally seen two beautiful people standing together, in the same frame. But here are four of them: they are absolutely physically perfect. They are little Club Mediterranean Androids. They have perfect smiles, perfect hair, perfect tans, perfect brawny or buxom chests.

Here’s a couple with their two children at a camp-out, in front of a quaint little wood fire. The mom is wearing make-up. The dad has a perfect tan. The little girl is blonde. Even the fire is perfect. The “father” has his arm around the boy, who is toasting a marshmallow on a perfectly twisted little stick. The lighting is magical: their faces are bright, but so is the grass behind them. I picture them all sleeping in a tidy little row of perfectly new perfectly clean sleeping bags: mom, girl, dad, boy, collie. A bear comes along and looks fierce, and everyone cowers behind dad, but he only wants a cookie. A skunk comes by. He isn’t about to spray anything but everyone holds their noses. That’s what you do if you see a skunk: hold your nose. They don’t look like they actually smell anything bad. They look like it’s fun to hold your nose when you look at a skunk and make funny faces.

Here’s an old couple in a canoe. They are looking at each other. Yes, in a canoe. He is leaning to his left, and she is half-turned, looking behind. The canoe is perfectly balanced. His hair looks blow-dried and waxed. She is wearing a floppy hat that looks like someone wrinkled it to make it look rustic They both have perfectly casual yet attractive jackets. They are smiling and happy. Fun, fun, fun.

Here is a picture of the sphinx, a large pyramid, and a full moon, all in one frame, at night, perfectly exposed. Amazing.

CIBC has an ad in which an architect talks about how banking has really improved his architecture. Someone found out he wasn’t really an architect. He was an actor. CIBC says, “What’s the big deal? This is advertising, after all.” But the ad said that “real people” were switching to CIBC. That’s okay. Maybe an actor somewhere opened a new account.

I don’t like Walmart, but in some of their catalogues they use real store employees to model their clothing. I thought that was really cool. This is what you might actually look like if you buy this shirt. And there is a picture of Julie Schiestal in sales, Oklahoma City, wearing the shirt. I only hope that the next time they downsize, they include a few of the laid-off employees in their catalogues. Here’s a new pair of running shoes. Here’s Ed, downsized in Buffalo.  He only makes minimum wage so he’ll need good running shoes  to get away from all his creditors now!

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Mona and Copyright

The Mona Lisa is not copyrighted. It is in the public domain. You can copy it all you want.

Except that… well, a picture of the Mona Lisa is copyrighted. So you can’t take a picture out of an art book and put it up on your web page. How would they know? They would analyze your copy and look for faults. If your faults are the same as the photographer’s faults, he can sue you. But first he’d have to admit, I think, that he was a lousy photographer.

If you took a picture of someone painting a copy of the Mona Lisa, you could be in trouble: his painting of the Mona Lisa is copyrighted, even if it’s an exact copy. You’d have to black out his picture. But then, you still have a picture of him. Can he sue your for violating his personal copyright of his own face? I don’t think so.

What if you took a picture of someone’s picture of a painting of someone else’s pictures? Sure, maybe he’s got a copyright on his picture of the painting, but what right does he have to take that picture of the painting of other paintings? Does he have permission from the artists who did the paintings in the painting? I’ll bet he doesn’t. So if he sues you, maybe you can find the descendents of the artists and sue him.