Rush (p 1-17) reading response

I appreciate how Rush explains 20th century artists' repeated questioning of the inaccessibility of painting as art form. This extends to both the creation and appreciation of painted works, and works that include everyday objects "extend the content of the canvas beyond paint" (7) promote creation and appreciation of all art for everyone. While at first I was skeptical that this rebellion of sorts was even necessary, I can still detect in myself and others some resistance to the accessibility of painting. I grew up before the internet, but I used computers during and after high school to create art (digital drawings & zines). I've done very little actual painting and the barrier to entry seems steep to me. Will I even like it? Is this a moot point today for people with access to a computer? Probably not, because it's important to understand the evolution of art, and art from before this movement is still around. I wonder about artists who survived only at the pleasure of their wealthy patrons. I suppose new media does put the artist at the center (to paraphrase Rush), by giving them so many ways to create. I certainly feel more free to create today with the plethora of tools around me.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Rush: Chapter 1 (58-68)

One of the things I think about when I read passages about these artists is, what did they think about themselves? Like, there seems to be some pretentiousness about calling yourself an artist, as we discussed in this class, around Martin Creed, I think ("What the fuck am I doing?"). I don't know, maybe I'm projecting my self-doubt on others, because it's hard for me to reckon someone without self-doubt. Like does Mühl take himself completely seriously? Is Scheiss-Kerl supposed to be serious and profound? I know that rocking people's assumptions is part of art, but really? I know, art doesn't have to be serious; I guess simply prompting disgust in the viewer could be a legitimate goal. Others, however, looking at the "'bathetic sadomasochism', of the Aktion artists, whether directed towards men and more specifically towards women, fatally undermines their claims to liberation, catharsis and expiation" (A.L. Rees).
Read more

How art can help us understand AI

Image
This Axios article  talks about human rights vis-à-vis technology and artificial intelligence. "Uncanny Valley: Being Human in the Age of AI," which confronts exhibition goers with powerful images of data monetization, algorithmic bias and the loss of humanity, opens this week at the de Young Museum in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park. Trevor Paglen's "They Took the Faces from the Accused and the Dead" consists of hundreds of faces used to train an artificial intelligence engine, all without any of the subjects' consent. "What we are looking at here is dirty data," curator Claudia Schmuckli said.
Read more

randomart in ssh (nerd alert!)

Today I learned about randomart in ssh. It generates random ASCII art from ssh keys. Think old-skool BBS art generated with letters, numbers, and punctuation. SSH is a command-line utility for connecting to remote servers. It uses cryptographic keys to secure the connection so it can't be eavesdropped on by folks in the middle (using a network sniffer, for example). Anyway, ssh keys are long strings of characters, and they are easy to verify with a computer, but difficult for humans to verify visually. Changing even one character in a key makes it into a different key, and that would be hard for humans to detect easily and routinely. So, the authors of ssh, an Open Source tool, implemented a feature that generates a unique picture (but the same one every time for a specific key). If you regularly ssh to a server, it's anticipated that you'd notice any changes to that picture. The key fingerprint is: SHA256:o5lJ57gY1oUS+VIMP/KU7T5varCH+6Xsc+M0/BXyHUw HaX0r@shell The ke...
Read more