seeing & being seen

In a not-encouraging-sign, Brandeis is to sell their art collection and close their museum:

Rocked by a budget crisis, Brandeis University will close its Rose Art Museum and sell off a 6,000-object collection that includes work by such contemporary masters as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Nam June Paik. …

“Clearly, what’s happening with Brandeis now is that they decided the easiest way is to look around the campus and find things that can be capitalized,” said David Robertson, a Northwestern University professor who is president of the Association of College and Univertsity Museums and Galleries. “It’s always art that goes first.”

But there is no precedent for selling an art collection of the Rose’s stature. Internationally recognized, the collection is strong in American art of the 1960s and 1970s and includes works by Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Morris Louis, and Helen Frankenthaler.

The Itch: a fascinating read on the brain and perception, if you can stop scratching long enough to read it through.

Yesterday’s post reminded me that I’ve been meaning to link to this NYTimes article/visual quiz from a while back: Blind to Change, Even as it Stares us in the Face…

Study for Colors for a Large Wall Ellsworth Kelly 1951

Wow. Check out this disconcerting test of visual perception. Worked on me.

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Meggan Gould, Crow #719 2006

Unrelated to photography, except in the tenuous link of my occasional interest in obsessively photographing crows: Joshua Klein (”Mobile, Future, and Personal Technology Specialist”) has built a vending machine for crows:

His machine uses Skinnerian training. He put coins and peanuts around the machine. The crows eat the peanut on the feeder tray. Then Joshua took away the nuts and left coins in the feeder tray. It pisses off the crows. They sweep the coins around with their beaks, looking for food. When a coin accidentally drops into the slot, it dispenses a peanut. Next, Joshua took away the coins. The crows learned to find coins elsewhere and deposit them.

A blog dedicated to snarky comments serious research into the various Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century… inadvertently also quite a showcase of 19th century photographic portraiture.

Philip Toledano, from Portraits of Gamers series

I have a reasonably long-standing interest in virtual landscapes and screen cultures, and there was an interesting article in the NYTimes this week about a Frontline documentary concerning growing up in increasingly virtual environments, screen identity, etc… I haven’t seen the documentary yet, but reliable sources tell me the show was an example of fantastic documentary work, and, even better, if somewhat ironically, it can be watched in its entirety online for us TV-less-but-internet-addicted folk.

I was reminded of Philip Toledano’s portraits of video gamers - work that looks at the side of the computer display that I tend to ignore in my own work - the faces engaged with the screen.

Disclaimer: the following is not strictly photo-related.

Mind the crack … a visitor looks at Doris Salcedo’s Turbine Hall installation. Photograph: Anton Hammerl/PA

In the I-am-loving category: the Tate Modern’s new installation by Doris Salcedo - a monumental fissure across the floor of the gallery. Google images here. All fine and dandy, apparently, until a few oblivious art viewers are swallowed whole trip. Better yet, however, are the the snide/self-consciously clever titles proliferating across the art pages of various newspapers:

Art lovers fall victim to Doris’s crack

Tate ‘crack’ has Londoners falling over themselves

Is the Tate Modern’s Art All It’s Cracked Up to Be?

Tate Modern’s crack claims first victims

Art lovers fall into Tate’s crack