Tag: art

New York Apartment

a fictitious New York City apartment for sale that covers more than 20M m2 and spans the 5 boroughs. Compiled from actual online real estate listings, the artwork collapses the high and low ends of the market, architectural periods and styles, and neighborhoods and affordability into a single space that cumulatively creates a portrait of New York’s living spaces and the real estate market.

Salvator Mundi decoded

The world’s costliest painting depicts a glass sphere with curious optical properties. Computer scientists figured out what the artist was getting at.

After comparing their renderings with the original, they have concluded that the orb is not solid at all. Instead, they show that the painting is a realistic physical representation of a hollow sphere with a radius of 6.8 centimeters but a thickness of just 1.3 millimeters.

44 ka Figurative Art

We describe an elaborate rock art panel from the limestone cave of Leang Bulu’ Sipong that portrays several figures that appear to represent therianthropes hunting wild pigs and dwarf bovids; this painting has been dated to at least 44 ka on the basis of uranium-series analysis of overlying speleothems. This hunting scene is currently the oldest pictorial record of storytelling and the earliest figurative artwork in the world.

2021-11-13: The New Yorker has a nice background article, and it turns out newer research pushed the age 1 ka back:

The painting of the warty pig was at least 45 ka old. This makes it the oldest known example of figurative cave art in the world. The implications of these dates are profound. The famous animal paintings in the Chauvet cave, of France, are dated at 35 ka BP; the Sulawesi warty pig outdoes them by 10 ka. Many archeologists and anthropologists talk about a “great leap forward” in human culture, suggesting that it occurred 30-60 ka BP. During this “leap,” Homo sapiens initiated behaviors characteristic of modern humans. Such discoveries indicate that the leap may have occurred toward the more ancient end of that range. The warty pig also upends any lingering belief that figurative cave art was a European thing. “The early cave art in Europe is so spectacular that it was hard for archeologists to tear their eyes away from it”. This sometimes resulted in a “not fully conscious Eurocentrism.”

2023-01-06: Insights into the why of cave paintings

the number of marks on the cave paintings was a record, by lunar month, of the animals’ mating seasons. Ice Age hunter-gatherers were the first to use a systemic calendar and marks to record information about major ecological events within that calendar

Lindsay Pickett Cityscapes

Oil painter Lindsay Pickett crafts distorted cityscapes that are at times taken from the artist’s dreams. His influences range from Dali and Bosch to scifi illustrators like Wayne Barlowe and Jim Burns. The key to crafting these pieces is not just subverting physics, but walking the tightrope of making them somehow convincing.

Mauled Tourist

wolf packs have survived and even thrived in New York’s labyrinthine tunnels, emerging in local parks only on occasion to hunt in the moonlight for live prey. In fact, the NYPD chalks up the majority of missing tourist reports each year to the city’s subterranean canine inhabitants. Today, The Ed Koch Wolf Foundation in partnership with the NYC Fellowship is erecting monuments in city parks to serve as cautionary reminders to out-of-town visitors. When in NYC, visit our many beautiful green districts. Just let these stunning statues remind you as to why we close our parks at night.

Imagenet Roulette

The ImageNet researchers attribute the inclusion of offensive and insensitive categories to the overall size of the task, which ultimately involved 50K workers who evaluated 160M candidate images. They also point out that only a fraction of the “person” images were actually used in practice. That’s because references to ImageNet typically mean a smaller version of the data set used in the ImageNet Challenge

Burning Man traces

Burning Man bills itself as the biggest “Leave No Trace” event in the world. This means that after revelers have dismantled the geodesic domes, giant duckies, and steampunk ships that form their temporary city in Nevada, they get down on their hands and knees to scour the white alkaline sand for every last cigarette butt and sequin. But in the end, 80k people still leave a mark. “Sure, by October, there’s no trash left on the surface of the Black Rock Desert. But boy, are there a lot of traces.”