Category: art
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Context and Aesthetic Judgements
It’s no surprise that perceived context is important in influencing people’s decisions. A recent experiment has shown that people rate pictures as more aesthetically pleasing (and actually experience more pleasure while viewing them) if they believe they come from art galleries. Aesthetic judgments, like most judgments, depend on context. Whether an object or image is…
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Interpreting Hybrid Images
Remember how the Mona Lisa’s famous smile was painted in low spatial frequencies, hence why we interpret the face differently depending on where we look? Now, Mo of Neurophilosophy takes an in-depth look at how our brains interpret hybrid images and complex visual scenes, shedding more light on this effective imaging technique. He also links…
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Forever’s Not So Long
Forever’s Not So Long is a touching short film (13 mins.) chronicling how two people decide to see out the end of their lives. via Link Banana
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Beauty as Human Reason
Human reason and abstract thought are prerequisites for the appreciation of beauty, argues Roger Scruton in his latest book, Beauty. However in his review of Beauty, Sebastian Smee—art critic of the Boston Globe—finds himself disagreeing with the sentiment. [Scruton] is swayed by Plato’s idea that beauty is not just an invitation to desire, but a call to…
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Evolution of Art and Design
Flickr user 802.11 has created a lovely flowchart depicting the evolution of art and design between 1845 and 1980. The chart depicts art movements and design groups and how each are connected. You should take a look at some of her other visualisations, too. I particularly like the depiction of character interactions throughout Shakespeare’s Romeo…
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Most Borrowed Author in Britain
For the second year in a row James Patterson has been announced as the UK’s most borrowed author. Interestingly, all is not as it seems: in calling Patterson “less a novelist than a literary factory”, The Guardian notes that he actually employs a large number of writers to do the majority of his writing. Patterson and the…
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The Evolution of Art Appreciation
The appreciation of art is not culturally learned, but is in fact an evolved trait, or at least that’s the view of Denis Dutton as elaborated in his latest book, The Art Instinct. In a generally positive review of the book, Newsweek points out the many limitations of Dutton’s conjecture as well as summarizing it’s main…
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Survey Art: The ‘Most Wanted’ Paintings
After surveying thousands of people around the world and online, artists Komar and Melamid produced a series of paintings portraying the respondents’ results. The project was dubbed People’s Choice and consisted of the 30 most and least ‘wanted’ paintings for 14 countries and the web as a whole. Interestingly, the Dutch (and the Italians, to some extent)…
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The Age of High Culture
The cover story for this quarter’s Intelligent Life is an article arguing that, contrary to most recent opinions, the population isn’t, in fact, becoming dumber and we are at the dawn of an ‘age of mass intelligence’. This quote from Ira Glass, the creator of This American Life, gets to the core of the argument…
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Genetic Programming and the Evolution of Mona Lisa
Roger Alsing used a genetic algorithm to create a brilliant approximation of da Vinci’s Mona Lisa using only 50 semi-transparent polygons, evolving over approximately a million generations. You can see the end result, after 904,314 generations here, but even after roughly 100,000 generations the image is impressive. I loved scrolling through the pictures, slowly seeing…