Tag: art

Synthetic culture

wherein we learn whether you can wish culture into existence. my prediction: no.

Qatar Purchases Cézanne’s The Card Players for More Than $250M, Highest Price Ever for a Work of Art. With this landmark score, the tiny, oil-rich nation joins a massively exclusive club: only 5 Card Players exist, and the other 4 are in world-class collections such as the Musée d’Orsay and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The purchase is just the latest bid in Qatar’s effort to become an international intellectual hub.

Digitized art

this is an extremely impressive effort. over 100k paintings in the UK have been digitized, out of 200k total. you’d have to visit 1000s of museums to get similar breadth, and most of these paintings are not on display anyway.

The most ambitious digitization project I’ve ever heard of is halfway to its goal of putting every single publicly owned oil painting (plus tempera and acrylic) in the United Kingdom online. A joint effort of the Public Catalogue Foundation and the BBC, Your Paintings now has 104K artworks by the likes of Degas and Rubens uploaded to the website out of an estimated 200K. It’s the first national online art museum ever attempted. Just to give you a sense of the scale, there are only 3000 paintings in the immense National Gallery.