This article is based on a talk I gave at the recent John Cage exhibition in the Kettles Yard gallery in Cambridge. Cage is perhaps best known for his avant-garde music, particularly his silent 1952 composition 4′33″ but also for his use of randomness in aleatory music.
But Cage also used randomness in his art. The Kettles Yard exhibition featured wonderful film of assistants reading computer-generated random numbers off a list, which determined which of a row of stones were to be chosen, which brush to use, and the position of the stone on the paper; Cage finally paints around the stone, stands back and announces the results as “beautiful.” He also dictated the use of chance in the form of the exhibition, and Kettles Yard used computer-generated coordinates to determine the heights and positions of the pictures, removing and adding pieces during the exhibition using a random process.
Everyone already knows that romantic love requires sexual attraction, that’s a given. The second component is almost as well known. It’s called attachment, and its part of the show in both romantic and all other kinds of love, including love within families. Attachment is found in other mammal besides us humans: our cats Mischa and Wolfie have become attached to me and my wife, and we are attached to them.
Attachment gives a physical sense of a connection to the beloved. The most obvious cues to attachment are missing the beloved when they are away, and contentment when they return. Loss of that person invokes deep sadness and grief. Another less reliable cue is the sense of having always known a person whom we have just met. This feeling can be intense when it occurs, but it also may be completely absent.
Attachment accounts for an otherwise puzzling aspect of “love”: one can “love” someone that one doesn’t even like. (…)
Finally, there is a third component that is much more complex and subtle than attraction or attachment. It has to do with the lover sharing the thoughts and feelings of the beloved. The lover identifies with the loved person at times, to the point of actually sharing their thoughts their feelings. He or she feels their pain at these times, or joy, or any other feeling, as if it were her or his own. Two people can be attuned, at least at times, to each others’ thoughts and feeling.
It is important to note however, that to qualify as genuine love, the sharing need be balanced between self and other. One shares the others thoughts and feelings as much as one’s own, no more and no less. (…)
The definition of romantic love proposed here involves three components, the three A’s: Attraction, Attachment, and Attunement.
In attempting to be more like photography, the poems actually become less. (…)
Loydell makes the reader do all the work, rarely offering his own interpretation, or even a helpful signpost to meaning.
Which wouldn’t be so bad, if he didn’t keep asserting that there is some sort of deeper meaning to be found here. Every poem of the collection ends with the refrain “the condition of our lives”, tantalisingly hinting at revelations about the human condition, and all that poetry at its best strives to encapsulate. But merely stating it, in amidst such a hap-hazard stream of language does not elucidate anything, does not paint a picture for the reader, or delineate shades of meaning, or even hint at a conclusion which we can draw for ourselves. This isn’t so much Pointillism as join-the-dots. Without the numbers.
Loydell also doesn’t seem to understand the concept of a ballad.
Our brains appear to have an intrinsic response to “art for art’s sake,” researchers at Emory University School of Medicine have found.
Imaging research has revealed that the ventral striatum, a region of the brain involved in experiencing pleasure, decision-making and risk-taking, is activated more when someone views a painting than when someone views a plain photograph.
The images viewed by study participants included paintings from both unknown and well-known artists. (…)
The idea for the study was based on work by marketing experts Henrik Hagtvedt (now at Boston College) and Vanessa Patrick (now at the University of Houston). Hagtvedt and Patrick had investigated the “art infusion” effect, where the presence of a painting on a product’s advertising or packaging makes it more appealing.
One in five teenagers in America can’t hear rustles or whispers, according to a study published in August in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
These teenagers exhibit what’s known as slight hearing loss, which means they often can’t make out consonants like T’s or K’s, or the plinking of raindrops. The word “talk” can sound like “aw.”
The number of teenagers with hearing loss — from slight to severe — has jumped 33 percent since 1994.
Many researchers attribute this widespread hearing loss to exposure to sound played loudly and regularly through headphones. (Earbuds, in particular, don’t cancel as much noise from outside as do headphones that rest on or around the ear, so earbud users typically listen at higher volume to drown out interference.)
The number of financial fraud cases put before the UK’s courts reached record levels in 2010, a report suggests. (…)
KPMG also highlighted the case of a group of men who were accused of using stolen credit card details to buy their own songs on iTunes, generating almost half a million pounds in royalties.
The men targeted the Apple and Amazon sites with 20 songs which they sold through the websites.
It is thought they then stole approximately 1,500 credit cards to buy the songs, and claimed back just under £469,000 in royalties.
The art world told us that anything could be art, so long as an artist said it was. Almost anyone who goes through a gallery door is likely to have heard about Duchamp and his urinal. The art world is less good at explaining how certain people get to be artists and decide what art is for the rest of us. This process of selection might not make aesthetic or philosophical sense, but it works anyway. It’s about power: whoever holds it gets to officiate and decide. The “art world” is a way of conserving, controlling and assigning this precious resource.
It is not surprising that theologians and artists clashed over the Last Supper. Common meals were the center of social life in Renaissance Europe, everywhere from ascetic, remote monasteries to bankers’ and cardinals’ lush gardens in the middle of Trastevere. And they were always a battleground of opposing ideals of austerity and consumption. (…)
But what should a Last Supper look like? What did Christ and the Apostles eat? And how much? When Jesus distributed pieces of bread, was it leavened or unleavened? What other foodstuffs had been on the table? Did the followers of Jesus eat lamb, as Jews normally did at Passover? Over the centuries—as an article in the International Journal of Obesity recently showed—artists made many different choices. Sometimes they put lamb on the table. But they also served fish, beef, and even pork in portions that grew over the centuries.
{ The US authorities have discovered 20 tonnes of marijuana, worth tens of millions of dollars, in one of the most advanced illegal tunnels ever found. The passage is half a mile long and runs from inside a house in Mexico straight under the border with the United States and into a warehouse in San Diego. | BBC | video }
The documents of Mozart’s life — letters, memoirs of friends, portraits, bureaucratic files — have long been scrutinized at a microscopic level. So when his name was discovered two decades ago in a Viennese archive from 1791, it caused a stir.
The archive showed that an aristocratic friend and fellow Freemason, Prince Karl Lichnowsky, had sued Mozart over a debt and won a judgment of 1,435 florins and 32 kreutzer in Austrian currency of the time (nearly twice Mozart’s yearly income) weeks before the composer died.
The entry was a mystery. No other information about the judgment has come to light, although scholars have generally assumed that it concerned a loan connected with a trip the two men made to Berlin.
Now a Mozart scholar, Peter Hoyt, has come up with a theory about the details: that the judgment stemmed from a loan of 1,000 thalers in Prussian currency made on May 2, 1789, the day the prince and his coach departed Berlin without Mozart, leaving him in need of money for his own transportation.
If true, the conclusion could add depth and texture to our understanding of Mozart’s anxieties over financial problems at the end of his life and of his reception during one of his last journeys.
Have you ever heard a song on the radio that you recognize but you can’t pinpoint the name of the song? (…) It is common for people to recognize a song but how much or how little of the song do you need to hear to recognize it? Do you think you could recognize a song if you just heard a fragment of the song, the rhythm or if you just heard the notes played for you without any rhythmic information?
Kostic and Clearly conducted four different experiments to understand what parts of a song are essential for you to remember hearing it. (…)
The findings from this study reveal that there really is not just one aspect of a song that makes you recognize it as familiar. You can hear a distorted fragment of a song and recognize it. You can hear just the notes of the song played in order and recall that you heard the song before. You can hear the rhythm of the song and still remember it. Finally, you could hear the notes of a song played at a different speed and still recognize it. This speaks to the variety of things we attend to when we are listening to a song.
The secret behind the beautiful songs that birds sing has been decoded and reproduced for the first time.
One of the great challenges in neuroscience is to explain how collections of neural circuits produce the complex sequences of signals that result in behaviours such as animal communication, birdsong and human speech.
Among the best studied models in this area are birds such as zebra finches. These enthusiastic singers produce songs that consist of long but relatively simple sequences of syllables. These sequences have been well studied and their statistical properties calculated.
It turns out that these statistical properties can be accurately reproduced using a type of simulation called a Markov model in which each syllable is thought of as a state of the system and whose appearance in a song depends only on the statistical properties of the previous syllable. (…)
But other birds produce more complex songs and these are harder to explain. One of these is the Bengalese finch whose songs vary in seemingly unpredictable ways and cannot be explained a simple Markov model. Just how the Bengalese finch generates its song is a mystery.
Until now. (…) Instead of the simple one-to-one mapping between syllable and circuit that explains zebra finch song, they say that in Bengalese finches there is a many-to-one mapping, meaning that a given syllable can be produced by several neural circuits. That’s why the statistics are so much more complex, they say.
This type of model is called a hidden Markov model because the things that drives the observable part of the system–the song–remains hidden.
{ Our Imaging Services department is steadily building a comprehensive image archive of all works in the collection, while simultaneously managing more urgent photography requests, including those from outside the Museum. (…) Take a look at this sleek, smooth sculpture by Constantin Brancusi—a shimmering ovoid form seemingly floating in space. Would it ever strike you as one of the most difficult objects in our collection to photograph? Well, it is. | MoMA | full story }
