A Bit More Detail

• Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber considers democracy as an information system.


• The Crux shares what we have learned from our studies of the tusks of the mammoths.


• D-Brief notes another landmark of the InSight mission: It brought two CubeSats with it to Mars.


• JSTOR Daily takes a look at the odaliques of Matisse, paintings of North African women in intimate positions, in the contexts of colonialism and #metoo. What untold stories are there with these images?


• Anakana Schofield writes at the LRB Blog about her problems finding CBD oil post-marijuana legalization in greater Vancouver.


• The Map Room Blog notes the support of Popular Mechanics for paper maps, even in the digital age.


• Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution praises Toby Green's new history of West Africa, A Fistful of Shells, a book that emphasizes the influence of West Africa in the Americas and the wider Atlantic world.


• The NYR Daily carries a Tim Parks essay questioning whether it is worthwhile for an author to consciously seek out literary glory.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel reports on the possibility that rocky planets might get large moons only if they suffer large impacts.


• Window on Eurasia reports on the insulting remarks of Russian liberal Oleg Kashin towards Ukrainians, and Tatars too, suggesting even liberal Russians might well be inclined to be anti-Ukrainian.


• Arnold Zwicky notes a remarkable word error in noting the 40th anniversary of the deaths of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, changing "assassination" into "assignation".

Located in a restored Victorian industrial building in the Distillery District, Cube Works is part studio and part gallery. Vibrant, multi-coloured, in-your-face pictures of familiar icons—Elvis Presley, Marilyn Monroe, Bob Marley—are plastered all over the exposed-brick walls. Get a bit closer to the images and you quickly realize they’re not paintings or posters, but rather artwork made entirely out of Rubik’s Cubes.

In much the same way that pixels on a computer screen are coloured and organized to form images, Cube Works uses Rubik’s Cubes as the core material for their art. The inspiration for the company’s “retro yet avant-garde” work, explains Josh Chalom, the creative director of Cube Works, comes from playing old-school videogames. Translating that eight-bit gaming aesthetic into art was natural. “Kids make simple images, like putting a few cubes together to create a flower,” he says. “We’ve just taken it to a much larger level.” The studio also features art created with dice, thread, crayons, and other unusual materials.

Creating these intricate compositions is no easy feat. If the artwork is commissioned, the client will bring the idea to the Cube Works design team. They create or find an image and then pixelate it using computer programs, but it takes many hours to “map out” the blueprints for each project. “It’s a little bit trickier than it looks,” explains Nick Hall, Cube Works’ design architect. “The computer thinks in an infinite palette, but we only work with six colours.”

[Researchers Angelina Hawley-Dolan and Ellen Winner] wanted to test the assertion that abstract expressionist art is devoid of talent – that it could be done by a mere child, or even an animal. With keyboards and enough time, monkeys could surely duplicate Shakespeare, but with a paintbrush and a few hours, could a monkey produce a Rothko?

To find out, Hawley-Dolan and Winner asked 32 art students and 40 psychology students to compare pairs of paintings. One piece of each pair was the work of a recognised artist, such as Kline, Rothko, Cy Twombly, Gillian Ayre, and more. The other came from the oeuvre of lesser-known painters, including preschool children, elephants, chimps, gorillas and monkeys. The paintings were matched according to colour, line quality, brushstroke and medium; the students had to say which they preferred and which was better.

Both groups of students preferred the professional pieces to the amateur ones, and judged them to be superior. Even the psychology students, who had no background in art education, felt the same way, although as you might expect, their preference for the professional works was slightly weaker.

Throughout the experiments, the students typically picked the professional pieces between 60% and 70% of the time. These aren’t overwhelming majorities, but they were statistically significant. On average, a child could not “paint that”, even if first glances might suggest otherwise. Nor are the qualities of the abstract art only visible to people steeped in the art world – even untrained people responded to the paintings in some way.

Hawley-Dolan and Winner also found that it didn’t matter if the students were duped into thinking that the paintings came from the wrong “artist”. The duo labelled the pairs of paintings on some of the tests (“artist”, “child”, “monkey” or “elephant”) and mislabelled them on others. Even with these tags, the students still preferred the actual professional painting. The labels only swayed the decisions of the psychology students – they were more likely to judge the professional paintings more positively if they were correctly labelled (but not more harshly if the labels were swapped).

This goes against an earlier experiment by Ulrich Kirk, who found that people find paintings to be more aesthetically pleasing when they’re labelled as having come from a gallery, rather than having been generated by computers. Other anecdotes have also painted an unflattering picture of abstract art. The mother of two-year-old toddler Freddie Linsky managed to dupe the art world by selling her son’s work – including a splash of ketchup on a high chair – on Saatchi Online (admittedly, for a paltry £20). A chimp called Congo fared much better, selling off three paintings for £12,000 at Bonhams auction house.

But none of these stories involved paired comparisons. Hawley-Dolan and Winner think that such side-by-side judgments are better ways of telling if people can discriminate between pieces produced by different painters.

The problem here (and which is highlighted well by the non-traditional nature of abstract and expressionist art) is the simple fact that the audience is the artist. The audience makes the meaning, finds the connection, feels the emotion (or not). The artisan (painter sculptor, writer, composer, actor, etc.) can, through skill and experience, make it easier for the audience to find meaning in a work and can influence the type of reaction the audience is more likely to have, but in the end, there is no art without an audience.

A person can train herself to be a better artist (audience) by studying the medium in question, but such study doesn’t lend validity to any particular reaction, it merely ensures a higher fidelity to the artisan’s intended meaning; since one assumes that an artisan is working within the context of a medium’s established history, a shared knowledge of that history makes it easier for the artisan to communicate through a work of art. But still, the true artist, the one who actually makes the meaning of a work of art, remains the audience.

So in a sense, it doesn’t actually matter if the artisan of a work is human, animal, or even a natural force (although non-human artisans are obviously not working within a historical artistic context).

Truly, wherever you go, there is art.

Xiao Qiang in Action
Originally uploaded by rfmcdpei

Keepers at the Qingdao Polar Ocean World say Xiao Qiang started out when he simply grabbed a paint brush left behind buy a visitor and started playing with it.

Now the seven year old star's paintings are changing hands for hundreds of pounds among fans.

"He showed a lot of interest in painting right from the start so now all we have to do is give him the brushes and hold the paper while he paints with his mouth," said trainer Zhang Yong.

"His favourite colour seems to be blue and he's best of all at seascapes. His people always look like seals."

Experts say that dolphin-like Belugas - known as the sea canary because of their high pitched squeaks and twitters - have more soft tissue around their mouths than other whales which allows Xiao Qiang to manipulate a brush.

"He enjoys what he does and this turning of the head to paint is a natural movement that these whales perform in the wild when they are cleaning their food of sand," added Yong.

he art of cultural diaspora is a genre unto itself: a mainstay of curatorial-studies curriculum and art fairs alike. Spawning a motherlode of postcolonial dreck, the genre also includes the odd dazzler, such as the work of transnational superstar Yinka Shonibare (a British-Nigerian artist residing in London), or Zhang Huan (a Chinese émigré in New York) – artists who have made cross-cultural drift a reigning preoccupation of contemporary art.

It is into this context that the 31-year-old Toronto artist Will Kwan inserts himself. Kwan came to Canada from Hong Kong at age 4, but his work is still backward glancing. These days, he teaches sculpture and art theory at the University of Toronto's Scarborough campus, and his work is the subject of a concise exhibition at the Justina M. Barnicke Gallery at Hart House, curated by gallery curator-director Barbara Fischer. The show rounds up his major work to date, revealing an artist who articulates sharp cultural observations in the language of conceptual art. Occasionally, the work feels formulaic – his wall installation of ceremonial crimson hong bao gift envelopes emblazoned with the logos of various world banks, for example. Other works, though, are more inventive.

Clocks that do not tell the time (2008), for example, is a curious puzzle, seeming to be a bank of institutional clocks displaying the time around the world. But instead of the customary New York, Paris and Mumbai, we find place names like Alang, Punto Fijo and Bentonville. It's only upon reading Kwan's research (some of which he has pinned to the back of the display wall) that these locations are revealed to be hubs of international corporate commerce and industry. Why Wilmington? It's home to many U.S. head offices, Delaware serving as an onshore tax haven for corporate America. Sonapur? That's where the labour camp is for the 150,000 Asian workers who toil by day to build the glittering towers of Dubai.

• angel80 reports on the political nature of climate change in Australia, how emissions trading is seen as suspect and how controls on water use--saying, using precious water to grow rice for little net benefit--are politicized. Myself, I can say that similar things are this in this anti-antipodean dominion, one notable local variation being the idea that climate change would open up large areas of Canada to exploitation, even settlement. Note, please, that the Canadian Shield is pretty infertile, agricultural settlement is so passé, and the wholesale collapse of the boreal and arctic ecologies isn't a good thing.


• james_nicoll lets us know that some idiot decided to transmit the genetic code for RuBisCo, the molecule responsible for carbon fixation, to three nearby stars. Admittedly two of the stars are exceedingly dim red dwarfs, one so dim that it wasn't discovered at twelve light-years until recently, and the third is a bright star that would have been Sun-like but for its tendency to flood its system and hypothetical planets with stellar plasma, but still. Shouldn't we at least have some idea as to whether anyone's out there before we start transmitting "Hi we're here!" signals? At least, as James says, it isn't an obvious "lamp post error."i


• mawombat, too long absent, comes up with a great two-part analysis (1, 2) of Géricault's famous 1819 painting The Raft of the Medusa.


• Finally, ptownnyc enunciates my anger about those people who talk about the "innocent victims of AIDS," in implicit contrast to the guilty victims (recipients?) of AIDS, like, say, queer men. He's not at all wrong when he talks about how many of the people, evangelical Christians but others, who fight against AIDS were absent from the fight against the beginning of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in the developed world, which affected guess-who. I laughed cynically once when I read a passage wherein an evangelical's wife picked up a magazine in 2001, read an article about AIDS, and realized that people with AIDS suffered. Really?

Almost everybody I spoke to was disgruntled: The crowds had tripled, the art had dwindled. Everybody was stuck in traffic human or vehicular, the whole night. The city was in total immobile gridlock. And where was the art? Every now and then, you'd pass a gallery that was open and it would be so jammed with people you'd be exhausted just contemplating working your way in. There were queues outside some of the big university buildings so long that it would take you half an hour even to find out what you were queuing for.

In the parks and on the streets were mostly just a bunch of goofy things – people dressed in costumes or singing silly songs. There were balloons holding up strings of lights. Whatever. It was a great night for quirk.

[. . .]

Of course, some people remember a time when the state used to fund these things in their entirety, and we didn't have to give up control of our art and our public spaces to corporations. Ridiculous, I know.

Concentrated in a tighter geographical area, and built around key events, Saturday night's Nuit Blanche was a more concentrated focused event than in years past. With an estimated million people on the streets, the lineups were already hours deep by 10 p.m., the city lit by a full moon rising in a cloudless blue velvet sky.

In the mayhem, magical moments unfolded - sometimes literally, as in the Tarot-reading fair staged by the artist collective FASTWURMS in the waterfall court of the Sheraton Centre hotel which they transformed into a candle-lit mystical glade. (I'm in for some heavy weather, apparently, but the Princess card in my future looks promising.)

[. . .]

Meanwhile, the Church of the Holy Trinity beside the Eaton Centre served as the lovely backdrop for Geoffrey Farmer's installation of stroboscopic hallucination-inducing "dream machines," modelled on experimental devices from the sixties. People sat around on little red cushions, their eyes closed in sincere, expectant contemplation. Compared to the big-budget ebullience in the Eaton Centre next door, where crowds assembled beneath Jeff Koons's giant inflatable rabbit, Farmer's project felt hushed and soulful, its low-budget charm refreshing. (The devices rotated atop reclaimed LP players.) His jerry-rigged banner reading "Destroy the Word" slipped seamlessly into the fabric of the little activist church, with its handmade banners in support of political activism, aboriginal rights and gay liberation. For one night only, radical Anglicanism held hands with Eastern meditation.

At new City Hall, Phoenix artist D. A. Therrien's 4 Letter Word Machine was suspended dramatically between the curving armature of the Viljo Revell designed towers, 65 metresabove the ground, the letters illuminated to a dazzling, Kleig-light brilliance. The severity of the typeface suggested Soviet austerity, lending an eerie, stylistically Dr. Strangelove vibe to the event as throngs of people gathered to decipher the oracle. (During our sojourn, the word shifted from FREE to FATE, eliciting a roar from the crowd.) At times, the letters devolved (whether intentionally or not) into meaningless ciphers, but the audience stood spellbound all the same.