Income inequality and the artist

The old belief was that college was the ticket to the fabled middle class American Dream. In this belief system, a four-year college diploma was worth more than a diploma from a two-year college.

The belief did deliver for a while. A great number attended state schools in their regions, graduated, and went on to own homes in the suburbs.

Over the recent years, however, this belief system has stopped delivering.

Students are now graduating with debts that are beyond most of our imaginations, and graduates often end up in jobs for which it seems like college degrees are not required and the pay isn't great either. The dream of owning a home and having kids gets postponed. Sometimes the dreams are simply that.

It is not that the "value" of college education itself has changed. The political economy in the world outside the college campus has changed--radically. Average wages have not kept up with the times. There is plenty of money being made by a few, while the vast middle struggles. Increasingly, the money is made by a very few in the rapidly shape-shifting technology world, while the rest are left behind in the silicon dust.

In this structure, it has become a nightmare for those who majored in order to become writers, musicians, dancers, painters, playwrights, and anything else in such a grouping. In The Death of the Artist, William Deresiewicz writes in detail about how conditions have changed in this group that interprets the human condition through their creative talents. And it is one hell of a depressing portrayal of how much things have changed for the worse.

Based on an intuitive understanding derived from reading about the changing trends, I have cautioned many students, like "R" who was passionate about a career in dancing, about the kinds of red flags that Deresiewicz writes about. I have always warned them about the myth of the "starving artist" who does "not sell out." Of course, money is not everything, but the lack of money is one awful existence. Should more students like "R" approach me, I now have a better approach: I will tell them to first read The Death of the Artist.

As Deresiewicz writes, it is not that there is no money in the arts "industry." Consider, for instance, that "Salvator Mundi," a 600-year-old painting by Leonardo da Vinci, sold for almost half-a-billion dollars. There are people who are THAT wealthy in order to afford to buy paintings valued at multiple millions. The fact that there are such ultra-wealthy is the real problem. Deresiewicz writes:

The devastation of the arts economy, like the degradation of the college experience, is rooted in the great besetting sin of contemporary American society: extreme and growing inequality.

Why does this matter?

The growing inequality leaves very little in the bank accounts of the middle class. This then means that the middle class is less able to spend on non-essentials. They then do not spend money on the local community theatre; the local indie band; the local writers' books; etc. Meanwhile, the tech world continues its brainwashing that you, too, can become a music millionaire right from your basement. You fall for it, and the tech giants add a few more billion dollars in market capitalization.

So, what can be done?

You as a consumer have a choice. For example, you could stop patronizing the algorithm-driven services like Pandora and Spotify. Instead, spend that money on art and the artists in your own community.

You as a citizen have a choice. You could vote for candidates and parties that promise to address the growing income and wealth inequality, and who truly want to make the American Dream possible for many more.

You don't have to take my word for it--read William Deresiewicz's The Death of the Artist.

Brown skinned, brown eyed, with long and curly dark hair

Take a look at the art below:

Source

A mother who has the Hindu "dot" on her forehead, with wavy hair and holding a child.

But then there is something that is off, right?  She is not dressed in the traditional sari.  Hindu women in history were not portrayed with pearl necklaces, but with gold and silver and precious stones.

So, you want to guess again on what that image is about?

If I had been asked to guess, which I was not because I read about it instead, I would never have imagined that it is a representation of Mary holding baby Jesus!

Here's the image in full:

The Holy Family, is how it is titled.

The note there is even more head-spinning: "c.1620s Northern India, Mughal court, early 17th century"

An artist in the Mughal court created this "Indian"-looking image of Mary holding Jesus, and making sure that the baby--whose hands are around a beautiful vase--does not knock the vase over.

Is this watercolor art work in India then?

Nope.

It is in Cleveland.

Yes, the Cleveland that every comedian jokes about.

At the Cleveland Museum of Art.

How did it get there?

Gift in honor of Madeline Neves Clapp; Gift of Mrs. Henry White Cannon by exchange; Bequest of Louise T. Cooper; Leonard C. Hanna Jr. Fund; From the Catherine and Ralph Benkaim Collection

How did these people get their hands on a Mughal court art from 400 years ago?  Stolen merchandise that has passed through many hands, and now in a museum half way around the world from where it was created!

As Ricky Ricardo often told Lucy, "you have some 'splaining to do!"

How did I get to viewing that piece of art?

I jumped off a hyperlink in this piece on how in art depictions Jesus started resembling white Europeans, even though Jesus was born in the Middle East.

The historical Jesus likely had the brown eyes and skin of other first-century Jews from Galilee, a region in biblical Israel. But no one knows exactly what Jesus looked like. There are no known images of Jesus from his lifetime

Academics have talked about Jesus' "whiteness" a lot, and how it is highly likely that he was nothing like the northern European depictions.  Will the Black Lives Matter movement of today, and the challenge to the white narratives, dethrone the image of the white savior with blue eyes and blond hair?

I like this description:

Jesus was a man of color who was murdered by law enforcement and state-sanctioned violence for insurrection against the Roman Empire.

That is one powerful image!

So, ... brown skinned, brown eyed, with long and curly dark hair.  Jesus probably looked like me when I had lots of hair on my head!

Me at 27

Jesus looked like this? Source

How old is the temple? Does it matter?

"Please share the Srivaikuntam photos with Girija also--she said she has never been there," I wrote to my sister.  Girija was at a loss when trying to understand how she had never been there, when the distance from Pattamadai to Srivaikuntam is not even 30 miles.

I told her I would send some of my favorite photos from Srivaikuntam.

The temple at Srivaikuntam is at least 1,100 years old.  But then, it could be older, too.

To the locals and the faithful, the age of the temple is immaterial--to them, it has always been there.  But, to an insanely curious person like me, this is a simple question for which detailed answers ought to be there on display boards, in printed materials, ... Could this temple be 1,500 years old? 2,000?  You see what I mean?

Of course, as a confirmed atheist, my interest in this is simply for a better understanding of the world around me and not for any religious salvation. Therefore, it is all the more an irony that here I am as an atheist trying to get the simplest of questions answered, while the true believers don't seem to be interested at all.  Faith doesn't require answers to questions about age.

I was blown away by the complexity of the engineering and art at the temple.  I am one hell of a moron when it comes to anything related to the arts, and even more so when we talk art history.  Yet, yes, mind-blowing!

Lengthy corridors supported by stone columns, each from a single piece. Delicate carving of the stone to produce finely detailed sculptures.

All these done so many years ago.

The temple sculptures have a lot of secular art too--not mere religious ones.

I loved the piece below, which appears to depict a hunter who has returned with a heck of a prize, and perhaps an annoying thorn in the sole of his foot, which the woman is removing.   Simply beautiful.



It seemed that there has been extensive damage to quite a bit of the art in the areas exposed to the harshness that the sun, wind, and rain over the thousand-plus years.  The displays noted that an industrialist/philanthropic family had spent quite some money on renovating the temple.

And then there were art pieces that would make middle school students giggle, and people like me wish that somebody would explain the significance of such wonderful art from so many centuries ago.

In the carving below, there is no doubt about the intention of the bearded male (no, not me!) who seems to be a hermit (no, not me!)



If Pinocchio's nose grew because of lying, well, this hermit's penis appears to reflect his thoughts of sex.

The fingers of the woman's left hand are also strategically placed.

I so wish I had taken art history!

There was a lot more to see, and there is a limit to how much I can take photos too.  If only I had been informed and alert about such fantastic art at temples even when I was way younger!  Youth is certainly wasted on the young :(

One interpretation is that depiction of sex in the art in the outer areas of the temple was to remind the believers to leave their dirty thoughts outside, and enter the holy areas with a mind that was focused only on god.  Maybe.

Another interpretation is that temples were also the local art exhibits where the sculptors displayed their talents. Maybe.

Fascinating fodder for curious minds in a 1,100- or 1,500-year old temple!

The (f)art of science

As even the occasional reader of this blog finds out, there is no pretentious highfalutin crap here.  I am genuinely interested in many aspects of life and the human condition, and I try to understand it in the simplest possible ways.  I even suggest to students all the time that the key is on understanding and articulating that understanding.  The rest is fluff.

An interest in the human condition includes everything from life to death.  Emotions, of course.  Work, heck yes.  Sex and shit, too.  Even sweat; after all, it is human to sweat, right?

Yep, sweat.

I even quoted an uncle who had a quick retort, as he always did, when my brother complained about sweating and the stink. "Tell me when the sweat smells like a perfume and I will collect a bottle of it," he said.  We laughed.

Of course, we know that sweat itself does not have any smell.  The bacteria in places like our armpits are the ones that create that odor, which apparently is like pheromones to some.

An artist who focuses on science has taken this to a whole new level.  Get this: He "worked on an elaborate scent-based art installation called “Labor” to recreate the odor many people associate with sweat and give audiences a new way to “see” and understand smell."

We try to understand the human condition in many different ways.

So, how did he approach this project?

There is an unusual laboratory in Helsinki, Finland, founded to host creative interdisciplinary practices called “bio-art.” As part of an artist’s residency, I worked at Biofilia at Aalto University to recreate the scent people associate with sweat. For inspiration and perspiration, I used myself as a laboratory subject, spending plenty of time in the legendary Finnish saunas.

How fascinating!

My research began by defining human skin bacteria associated with odors and learning how to grow them. The scientific literature is sparse, as much of this research is carried out by deodorant and antiperspirant industries, which often don’t publish their results.

I tell ya, it is hard work trying to understand the human condition.  One can, of course, live a life without ever examining it.  But, that does not appeal to me.

Next, I isolated my sweat by capturing bacteria from my armpits in sterile gauze, filtering it and incubating it in dozens of heat and atmospheric conditions. Then I designed a bioreactor, similar to fermenters that brew beer, except they are built to enable more varied types of biochemical reactions with microbes. Finally, I experimented with liquid cultures that encouraged bacteria to thrive and produce fragrant waste products.
The concept of my artwork “Labor” is that microorganisms create the “vulgar odors” of sweat

So, at this point you begin to wonder where the "art" is because he is describing a scientific process, right?  Here it comes:

The exhibit contains several large glass bioreactors, each populated with one of three strains of bacteria. The soup in each container produced the smell of sweat, odors that collected in a central glass enclosure where a white T-shirt hung. From there, the smell drifted into the room.

What a piece of installation art!

He ends with this:

It has been said that deep human attraction is often premised on our scents. If bacteria are responsible for our scent, then are we attracted to a person or their bacteria? Perhaps bacteria help steer human sexual selection and evolution.

I wonder what bacteria are there in Love Potion Number 9 ;)

Uncertain and inconclusive

Recently, the town's cultural center featured an evening of "Bollywood" dance.  I refused to go anywhere near that.  Because, "Bollywood" is, as the current President might note, fake news.  As the late Shashi Kapoor put it, Bollywood is "pure escapism."  The escapism often playing on the base emotions like, yes, sex.

Of course I have watched a few "Bollywood" movies in my life.  As one who grew up in India, how could I have not?  But, anybody who is even remotely familiar with India knows that Bollywood is not India.  Instead, it is some kind of a fantasy world. A crazy invention.

As a young adult, I started turning away from those formulaic movies. And, thanks to the one-channel television that was introduced, I finally could watch movies that I had only read about in newspapers and magazines.  The movies that rarely ever played in cinema houses but won awards both at home and abroad.

Mrinal Sen was one of those movie makers, whose movies appealed to me.  As art, and as stories about the real world and its people, his was among the few movies that I remember and cherish even after all these years.

Sen became a seminal figure of India’s “parallel cinema,” which was less the counterpart that its name suggests than an utter refusal of the predominant model of filmmaking in the subcontinent, now colloquially known as Bollywood.

Source

The older I got, the more the Bollywood movies were unwatchable, like in the instances that I have blogged about.  (Here and here.)  Every visit to India has been even more disappointing than the previous ones on how far removed society seems to be from art and culture.

Sen's Ek Din Pratidin I vaguely remember--after all, it has been more than three decades and my memory isn't what it used to be.  Until I read that essay, I had no idea that Sen is still alive.  He is.

Now ninety-four, Sen grew up during the era of Gandhi’s protest against colonial rule, in rural Faridpur, “an unknown little town belonging to the ancient landmass of undivided India,” as the director describes it in a rambling but ultimately moving memoir

No doubt that a life experienced over all those changes would be reflected in the art that Sen created. In those art films, which did not cater to any set formula, the endings often left the viewer exploring the story and the characters because there was no real ending.  No bow tie to wrap up the box.  Sen was no different:

“Life itself is uncertain and inconclusive,” he has said. “Then why should I make a creation conclusive? Thus, all my films are open-ended.”

Uncertain and inconclusive, indeed.  Which is exactly how the latest art film that we watched also wrapped up--uncertain and inconclusive.  If only they made more such movies in the old country instead of the messed up Bollywood ones!

The business of art

One of the Tamil movies that I watched during my late teenage years was Yarukkaaga Azhudhaan (For whom did he cry?)  Of course, it was not during its original theatrical release but much later when the government television channel telecast the movie.

Unlike the typical movies, this one had no song-dance sequences.  No songs, period.  It was an up close drama.  I loved it.  The fact that it was written and directed by Jayakanthan was a bonus.

But, such movies never became commercial successes.  The movies that hit the box office jackpot were the formulaic ones with a clearly defined hero, a much younger and attractive heroine, a designated bad guy, and a bunch of songs.  The poetic art of the theatre died out in the face of crass commercial cinema.

I have no idea about the contemporary state of "art" movies in the old country.  I hope there are still a couple of people who create meaningful art.

In the adopted home country, art (indie) movies continue to flourish, even as Hollywood itself makes interesting offbeat movies once in a while that sometimes are also commercial successes.  There is one big reason that Hollywood continues to pump up its formulaic movies with action, sex, special effects, CGI, and whatever else.  These can be sold all over the world, whereas the indie movies cannot for one simple reason: There is a lot of talking involved in the art movies.  The language and the slang are distractions for the foreign market.

All these are reflected in the list of English movies playing in Chennai.  There is only one art/commercial crossover that is playing in town--Coco.  But, some of my other favorites from this year may not ever come to town.  Like Lady Bird.

Lady Bird was on my list ever since I read the buzz about it and its writer/director Greta Gerwig, whose performance as an actor I have appreciated in a few movies.  And, when the moment came, the companion and I went to the movie hall.

Like many reviewers, I too was awed by one scene in particular.  The protagonist, Lady Bird, goes to shop for a prom dress with her mother Marion (played by Laurie Metcalf).  The entire conversation, the facial expressions, and the body language, offered wonderful insights into the human that we all are.  Here's a lengthy excerpt from a review about the movie and about this particular scene:

“It’s too tight, fuck!” Lady Bird cries as she tries on one dress. “Well, I suggested you not have that second helping of pasta,” Marion replies through the door. “Honey, you seem upset about it, and I’m trying to help,” she adds as her daughter cries out in protest, “You’re giving me an eating disorder!” Throughout the scene, Gerwig never cuts to inside the dressing room; the camera stays on Marion (with Lady Bird occasionally emerging in a new dress), with Metcalf registering the tiniest facial twinges every time she realizes she’s said something that goes too far. Finally, Lady Bird emerges in a pink, slightly sparkly number. “I love it,” she sighs. “Is it too pink?” Marion replies.
In Marion’s eyes, there’s a fine line between being critical and being helpful, and she’s straddling it, but to her daughter, every criticism is another stab in the heart, an attack on her individuality from which she can’t recover. They’re both wrong, and that’s what’s so wonderful about Gerwig’s script; it lets its characters be wrong without the viewer losing affection for them. “Why can’t you say I look nice?” Lady Bird asks. “I thought you didn’t even care what I think,” Marion counters. “I’m sorry, I was telling you the truth. Do you want me to lie?”
“I just wish … I wish that you liked me,” Lady Bird says sorrowfully. “Of course I love you.” “But do you like me?” Marion can only reply with that most stiflingly parental of philosophies: “I want you to be the very best version of yourself that you can be.” “What if this is the best version?” Lady Bird asks. Marion looks at her askance, saying more in a glance than any piece of dialogue could. Believe me, it’s not, she’s thinking. But also, It had better not be. It’s simultaneously heartbreaking and heartfelt, an entire relationship captured in a look, for better or worse.

Everything in that scene will be lost in translation, unlike a visual spectacle of the ticking clock and the macho hero jumping into action in order to rescue the damsel in distress.  Though, Hollywood has started creating female action characters as well--as long as they have well proportioned breasts and legs that will attract the male audience too.

Yarukkaaga Azhudhaan?

Flowers bloom on Chowringhee Lane

When my cousin asked me about movies that I had watched recently, I laughed and reminded her that our movie tastes do not always coincide.  I told her about two movies that we had watched, and strongly recommended them.

Right from a young age, I have gravitated towards the non-commercial, non-formulaic, movies. One of my greatest complaints when growing up was that the "art" movies were not shown in theatres near me.

Fortunately, television solved that problem.

One of those non-commercial movies that I watched and enjoyed, and one which made me think a lot, was 36 Chowringhee Lane.  I was impressed with every aspect of the movie.  About how the story was told. About the story itself.  And about the director being a woman!

The main character there was an Anglo-Indian woman.  Only because of that movie did I know that she was the wife of one of the big-time commercial Hindi actors--Shashi Kapoor.  I felt a personal loss when she, Jennifer Kendal, died soon after I came to know about her.

Now, more than three decades later, Shashi Kapoor is also dead.

Balbir Raj Kapoor was born on March 18, 1938, in what was then Calcutta (now Kolkata). He had no trouble breaking into the movie business: His father was Prithviraj Kapoor, a famous actor. His mother was the former Ramsarni Mehra.
Shashi, as he became known, was still a child when he appeared in his first films, in the 1940s and ’50s.

There is so much of a dynastic effect in some professions, especially in movies.

Shashi Kapoor, too, was more than a mere lip-syncing Bollywood actor:

In 1963 he played a teacher in the domestic comedy “The Householder,” directed by James Ivory and produced by Ismail Merchant, the first of a series of films Mr. Kapoor made for that production team.

Yep, that Ivory-Merchant team that gave us all those awesome movies in which nobody danced around trees!

But, as much as I loved the non-commercial movies, I loved the junk-food that the commercial ones were. Not because of any weighty stories that helped understand the human condition.  Nope, those Bollywood movies couldn't care about them. Shashi Kapoor himself talked about it:

“Of course, a lot of these films look silly,” he told The Times for an article about how movies had become a sort of balm for India’s poor. “But this is exactly what people want, pure escapism. You have people who are uneducated, poor, hungry — they want to escape from all that, they want and need some unreality.”

I couldn't understand the language too.  But, there was one thing that was awesome in those movies--the melodies of many of those film songs.

My favorite of the Shashi Kapoor film songs is this one, particularly because of the classical raaga that is the basis of the tune.

Yes, Shashi Kapoor did what was expected in the commercial Bollywood. Like life itself, it is all a part of the package.

Art is not in my DNA :(

I have no clue about art.  It is yet another instance when I am shocked that I can be so clueless about so many things, and have only the smallest idea of a minor aspect of knowledge, and yet I am hired to teach.  Thankfully, people don't really know how much most of us "teachers" don't have a clue about any damn thing!

But, despite the art-challenged ignorance that envelops and defines my existence, I appreciate art in my own way.  Perhaps this is nothing but yet another version of Justice Potter Stewart's comment "I know it when I see it."  Well, that itself is nothing but an iteration of the old adage that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Anyway, I know it when I see the beauty in art!  And I did see and experience one unique piece of art--Christo's umbrellas.

I lived in Bakersfield back then, and remember going up to Gorman to look at the umbrellas up, close, and personal.  And to stand under it because of the bright and hot sun :) ... I should note that the photo here is not mine, but one I found on Flickr--this too is from Gorman, and exactly how I remember it.

The neatest thing about Christo's umbrellas was that the art was an experience.  Because, unlike a painting that might hang in a museum for centuries, Christo's umbrellas were temporary.  I liked that Buddhist sand mandala approach of his to remind ourselves of the temporary lease we have on this planet.  Like how what we experience now cannot be experienced again ever.  It is more than mere "art."  A few days later, the umbrellas were dismantled.  Gone.

Why this post on Christo?  I was getting bored five miles up in the sky--I was flying to Southern California--when I decided to leaf through the in-flight magazine.  An interview with Christo caught my attention.  It was about his latest project.

Source

Only Christo could have imagined such a project:

“The Floating Piers,” a walkway stretching three kilometers, or nearly two miles, that connects two small islands in Lake Iseo, in Italy’s Lombardy region, to each other and to the mainland.

In the interview, Christo talks about how this idea of his had been rejected over the years--nearly forty years--by the governments in Argentina and Japan.  Finally, Italy approved this art installation.  Christo comments :

Art is in the DNA of the Italian people.Italy has a paragraph devoted to art and culture in their constitution. In the US, we have a paragraph about guns.

I don't know if that that comment on the Italian constitution is true.  It does not matter to me; I rarely ever understand art and the artistic mind.  But, damn, I would love to go and experience the "Floating Piers."

You think you are stressed?

This post is a continuation from yesterday, which was triggered by the interview with Hope Jahren.  Jahren says there about her current research interest:

Right now, I’m interested in stress. We’ve done a lot of experiments around stressing plants to see how they recover and how they manage stress and things like that, which is funny because they’re actually pretty sadistic experiments. I mean, you can torture a plant until it’s this close to dead and then bring it back. You can do all kinds of things you could never get permission to do to animals, and it would be horrible to even think about doing such things to people—but plants are very much fair game in terms of any experiment you want to propose. Especially little small plants and stuff; which gives a kind of scientific freedom in terms of studying life. 

In the normal course of a day, we don't think much about torturing plants, while we have all kinds of issues with torturing animals.  (Well, unless you are a Dick Cheney or a Donald Trump, in which case you don't think twice about torture!)  Plants are life forms, too.  We kill them. We routinely eliminate weeds.  As Jahren puts it, "plants are very much fair game."  

But, there is more to the plant stress than that aspect.  

The interesting thing that we’re coming to is, what is stress? How do you define stress? One thing we’ve noticed is there’s a disconnect between what I think will stress the plant and how it actually reacts. So how do you measure stress? The same life event happens to two people—two people of the same species—they’re not going to react the same. So I can say well, I won’t give these little guys water for a few days, and then I’ll measure how much they didn’t grow, and then I’ll compare the stress between them. But I’ve already projected my own assumption about what stress should be into that experiment—lack of growth. I’m having a lot of fun thinking really deeply about how subjective the experience of stress is. Subjective in terms of human subject is one thing, but subjective in terms of individual experimental plants—that’s a whole other mind box that has to open in order to go there. So that’s what I can say about what I’m really excited about now.

A friend's father, who is a big time backyard gardener, routinely stresses his tomato plants--by not watering them until the time--and the plants always produce more tomatoes than one can imagine.  The stress makes the plant more fertile?  After all, producing the fruits means producing seeds for the next generation, right?

The anthropogenic climate change could add various kinds of stress to plants.  Maybe some will be stressed more than others.    I like the way she phrases it, especially because of the reference to work, earnings, and time:

if I quadruple your salary but I don’t give you any more vacation time, you can’t take that around-the-world tour even if it seems cheap to you, because you can’t get the time off. So now it’s not money that’s limiting; it’s time. Plants have a similar thing in that nitrogen can become limiting, water can become limiting when temperatures go up. There may be less water available in very critical places. So the economy of plants can also tip based on these secondary limitations. That’s also very interesting to us. But I think we need to start wrapping our heads scientifically around some of these scenarios that nobody wants.

Interesting, right, to think about what the limiting factors are? 

Even more fascinating a thinker Jahren is--she is not merely a science person:

When I was deciding what to do with my life, I felt a need to write. I was very drawn to books in a powerful way. I wanted to study them, with a capital “S.” When I got to college I learned very quickly that if I became a writer society would let me die on the street. And if I became a scientist I would always have a roof over my head and a job, and my labor would be something that people needed. That difference has always struck me as so arbitrary, because I was willing to put my soul into all those activities but it became very clear to me that society viewed one of them as important and one of them as optional. So, let’s think about that for a minute. If you’re a scientist, if you have scientific skills, society believes on some fundamental level based on what I just said that you deserve to eat, you deserve to sleep in a dry place, you are entitled to all these things. Now, if we conceptualize science like we do art—something creative that anyone has the potential to do, maybe not everybody is great at it, but it’s this approachable thing that people write books, etc.—why should they be rewarded for that in the same way? What if we really did view science like that as this thing that anybody can do? How would we conceptualize the value of it? Would we lose that protection? Would we lose this protection that scientists have from the street? From hunger? From unemployment? From irrelevance? So it always strikes me as hypocritical that especially when we start talking about how “oh we need all these people to become scientists and we’ve got to get them interested,” as if people’s personal yearnings are at fault. As if people aren’t already yearning for meaning and discovery and things like that.

 A wonderful thought experiment all by itself to "conceptualize science like we do art."  Jahren says that the purpose of science is "to feed the soul in the same way that art is."  I tell ya, there are some wonderful thinkers out there.  The world is better off thanks to them.

Art is everywhere

A few years ago, a neighbor-couple invited me over to have lunch with them and another couple who had spent some time in India.

The conversation was mostly about our travels to different parts of the world.  My neighbor said something like, "I want to see art in Florence. And art in Rome. And art in Paris."

When she paused, I asked her, "does your husband know about this Art you want to see in those places?"

It took a couple of seconds.  And then it was haha all around.

Perhaps it is the art-challenged nature in me that makes me think that going to a place to look at art can be exhausting. It is like eating one too many chocolate bars in a matter of minutes.  But then one cannot fly over the ocean and look at only the Mona Lisa and return, eh!

It is not that there is no possibility of art in everyday life. If we do not find it, then it simply means that we are oblivious to it. Or that we do not care.

Sometimes, even the display of fruits and vegetables in the grocery stores is colorful and arty. Or, perhaps even in the basket one carries in the store.  That's what a woman told me as I was walking up an aisle. "Your basket is so colorful and arty, with the flowers, the oranges, ..."

I thanked her.  And then hurriedly turned a corner into another aisle, placed the basket on the floor and looked at it. It looked like plain old grocery stuff.

Perhaps art, too, is in the eye of the beholder.  Even though I didn't find my grocery stuff to be exciting, I was delighted that it made somebody happy.

I do get excited when I manage to create something that looks beautiful enough even for the art-challenged me.  Like this salad that I created from the tomatoes and cilantro that were in that grocery basket:

Even more exciting it was when the son-in-law loved both the look and taste of the salad. I suppose I, too, had traveled far for art.

"The Pleasure of Finding Things Out"

In the high school biology class, during one of the lab sessions, we transferred our blood drops to a glass slide, and viewed that with a microscope.  Even though the textbook and the biology teacher (was Gladstone his name?) had prepped me for it, I was blown away that the liquid blood was not some simple solution but there was all kinds of things happening there.  There is more than meets the eye, indeed!

I was reminded of that experience when I read this essay on how discovering the microscopic world led humans into yet another frontier to which humans had never gone before.  Explorations of the micro-biology kind.

When it came to studying the human reproductive system, after reading the textbook with a sense of being a science explorer combined with all the teenage angst and desires, there were certainly plenty of moments when I wondered if the sperm really looked anything at all like the tadpoles in the pond.  I suppose it would have been one crazy biology lab if any classmate had attempted to check that out; thankfully, nobody did, and we believed the textbook instead.

It is that kind of curiosity to constantly peek behind the curtains which has led us to where we are now.

In previous ages, natural philosophers had attributed the causes of processes to invisible, occult forces and emanations — vague and insensible agencies. The new mechanistic philosophers of the 17th century argued that nature worked like a machine, filled with levers, hooks, mills, pins and other familiar devices too small to be seen. As Hooke put it: ‘Those effects of Bodies, which have been commonly attributed to Qualities, and those confess’d to be occult, are perform’d by the small Machines of Nature.’
He never quite found them — what the microscope revealed was more often unintelligible in these terms. But there was no shortage of other marvels.

Yes, marvels. A never ending stream of marvels.

A typical complaint is that the more we systematically analyze the world around us, the less everything is charming.  That we reduce the wonders of nature to their material components, and then we decipher the components of those components.

It simply isn't so.

The fact that such inquiries enabled humans to walk around on the moon has not made the sight of a full moon any less poetic--it has only increased our desire to go check out the moon for ourselves, as much as we pricked our fingers and examined that blood under the microscope.  Critically analyzing a play or a musical performance makes us appreciate the nuances and adds to our enjoyment.

But then, I am not saying anything new.  The phenomenal polymath physicist, Richard Feynman, articulated it for all of us while talking about the beauty of a flower:

I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time, I see much more about the flower than he sees. I could imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside, which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension, at one centimeter; there’s also beauty at smaller dimensions, the inner structure, also the processes. The fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting; it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which the science knowledge only adds to the excitement, the mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds. I don’t understand how it subtracts.

Yes, the marvels we discover adds considerably to appreciating and enjoying this world.  If only people would invest a lot more time and energy to understanding science than we currently do.

As Feynman noted in this context of a lack of interest in scientific knowledge:

we should teach them wonders and that the purpose of knowledge is to appreciate wonders even more. And that the knowledge is just to put into correct framework the wonder that nature is.

Ah, "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out" ...

From the BBC Interview for Horizon 'The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/tvradio/programmes/horizon/broadband/archive/feynman/)
Animated by Fraser Davidson (www.sweetcrude.tv).

Scream: laugh and then .... scream?

The Scream goes on sale, and the New Yorker's cartoon editor serves up quite some laughs, like this one:

and this one:

Muahaha :)

Quote of the day: On Václav Havel

“Ten years ago,” Černý told me, Havel “would probably immediately give them a pardon. But that asshole in the Castle won’t.” 

That was the final sentence in this short piece on protest art in the Czech Republic.  The "conservative Czech President Václav Klaus" is the one referred to by that anatomical metaphor, in contrast to the liberal intellectual Havel, who died a few months ago.  Yes, Klaus the pen stealer :)

Until I read the essay, I had no idea about this:

In April 2007, Czech artist David Hons replaced the human silhouettes in 48 Prague crosswalk signals with figures engaged in decidedly less pedestrian activities. One signal depicted a man urinating; another had a bottle raised to his mouth. A man squatted to defecate; another appeared to be falling down drunk. “I wanted to show people, they don’t have to walk or stand when the system says so,” Hons wrote on his website.

That is bloody creative, and what a wonderful way to convey that idea.

What was even more exciting was when I read the following:

In May 2010, as the country was preparing for a nationwide election, Roman Smetana, a 29-year-old bus driver from the city of Olomouc, defaced some 30 campaign posters, scrawling, “Liars,” “Idiots,” “Corruptioneers,” and “Prostitutes” across them in Magic Marker. After the election, the victorious center-right Civic Democrats took legal action. Smetana was found guilty of vandalizing private property, fined $800, and ordered to perform 100 hours of community service. He complied with the fine (to avoid debt collectors) but resisted the second half of the punishment. His graffiti, he told the court, “was the free expression of opinion by a citizen who, unlike political parties, does not have huge funds for publicity at his disposal.” For refusing the community service, he was sentenced to 100 days in jail. Yet this month, Smetana refused to show up at the prison to begin his sentence; he could now spend three years behind bars for defying the court’s orders.

Not only is the protest format itself neat, I even know this place, Olomouc; it was where I visited my old friend almost fourteen years ago :)

Minimalist economics posters: The Invisible Hand

Pretty darn good!
More here
ht

A Neyveli artist in Chennai's Besant Nagar. No, it is not me!

In a corner of the day's supplemental pages of the newspaper that dad buys daily, I saw a note about an arts exhibit.  For three days. Across from the beach.

Always looking out for activities like this, I was excited enough to decide that I would go there the first day itself!

It was a great call.

The address said "1, Elliots Beach Road."  I hailed an auto.  After winding through a few side-streets after a long ride, I suddenly heard the driver ask me for the address.

"Number 1" I replied.  And added, "is this Elliots Beach Road?"

"No, sir, Elliots Beach Road is after I make this right turn."

He turned and I could see the beach on the left.  I looked to the right, and there it was: a huge banner that said "Paalam."

"Right here" I told the auto driver, and paid.

It was much smaller than what I had anticipated.  But, it was a wonderful setting.

Across from the beach.  Under some gorgeous trees.  With an arty and small amphitheater.

Way cool.  It didn't matter that I am severely art-challenged!

I checked at the reception desk whether it would be ok for me to take photos.  No problems.

I scanned the inner set of art work, near the amphitheater:

As I stood there trying to make sense of this surreal experience of art in Chennai, by the beach, on a glorious afternoon, a guy came up to me with a tray of paper cups full of tea. 

"Some tea?" he asked.

"No, thanks."

I walked around, and stood under another tree:

Artists certainly seem to know how to hang out in some awesome places.  The conferences I go to are held in climate-controlled semi-dark rooms where people talk while pointing at crappy PowerPoint slides!

I retraced me path, and was delighted to see a flapping paper that had the artist's name and hometown: he was from Neyveli.  Yay!!!

I couldn't locate the artist. But, I was not too keen on inquiring either. 

I figured it was time to visit the beach.  In one section, I spotted a lone man sitting facing the waters. I imagined that he was the artist from Neyveli and that is why he was not to be found in the art exhibit.

Christo, art, and his umbrellas

I have no clue about art. (editor: ahem, do you have a clue about anything, for that matter?)
But, I tell people that I appreciate art in my own way, which is nothing but yet another version of Justice Potter Stewart's comment "I know it when I see it."  Well, that itself is nothing but an iteration of the old adage that beauty is in the eye of the beholder.

Anyway, I know it when I see the beauty in art!  And I did see one unique piece of art--Christo's umbrellas.  I lived in Bakersfield, and remember going up to Gorman to look at one of the umbrellas up, close, and personal.  And to stand under it because of the bright and hot Sun :) ... I should note that the photo here is not mine, but one I found on Flickr--this too is from Gorman.

The neatest thing about Christo's umbrellas was that the art was an experience.  Because, unlike a painting that might hang in a museum for centuries, Christo's umbrellas were temporary.  I liked that Buddhist sand mandala approach of his to remind ourselves of the temporary lease we have on this planet.  I would like to think that it was more than mere art.
(Why the note on Christo? All because of this!)

Say, all that talk about umbrellas remind me of Rihanna's hit number :)

Marilyn Monroe + modern Islamic art = ?

Click here for a gallery of more artwork ....