Brian Neimeier discusses how actual art lasts - and that craft, such as carpentry and plumbing, is, indeed, art. The ancient Romans had a saying, Ars longa, vita brevis. Moderns take it to mean that life is short, but works of art last. We post-Renaissance types get the, "Life is short," part right. But ancients and Medievals didn't restrict the meaning of ars to "fine art". For them, it could apply to any craft. The equivalent Greek word is techne. That's a big clue that everybody before the Modern era would have put Michelangelo and Steve…
All posts in art
Missed the usual G/F posts - so I'll put up a bit of Frazetta.…
A bit of art for the beginning of the week. Moritz von Schwind. The Prisoner's Dream is what captured my attention.…
While it's about a week late, subject matter wise, this particular image came up courtesy of Infogalactic's featured picture on the main page a few days back. The Way to Calvary, by Andrea di Bartolo. Yes, it is stylized instead of realistic, in the sense that posture, perspective, and such are not adhered to with any degree of faithfulness. It is nevertheless beautiful.…
So discussing the ugliness, the propaganda and "sophisticated" writing faults, and the ugliness disguised as beauty as I have been, I thought one more item needed to be looked at. I'm not sure where I most recently heard it, but was reminded of the expression "cult of the child" in regards to several tendencies, mostly parents catering to children, and mothers treating children as shields. What it brought to mind was something else I most painfully noticed a long time ago - especially in Spielberg movies in the 80's - the worship of childlike innocence as a cure to ills.…
The propaganda isn't. Not by a long shot. It is no secret that a number of writers in Hollywood were outright communists back in the days of the much villainized McCarthy, and that drips and drabs of propaganda were inserted back then, even if they rarely had the chance to make the entire movie anti-american. I've discussed before how even older plays and movies like Fiddler on the Roof were steeped in culture-destroying pro-communist propaganda. It had gotten so bad by the late 90's/early 00's that an outright self-proclaimed Trotskyite like Eric Flint could write 1632 and have it…
One of the people I followed on Google+ was Ian Stead, who has done a lot of space and Sci-Fi related art, including a number of excellent renderings of Traveller ships. These have been used for a number of Traveller-compatible shipbook and related products in the last decade or so. While he hasn't updated his website much, it's worth a visit.…
The theme today is Rome, with several in here by Giovanni Paolo Panini.…