I'm looking for a new wallpaper for my windows desktop. I ambled across a Picaso and then went to Guernica. It reminded me that my cousin had a very large print on his wall in Brooklyn, and I suppose that says a bit about my cousin and my family. I doubt that he still has it in Madison where he's raising his family. But it also reminded me that I would be remiss in my review of Western Civilization, that thing our Improper Empire is involved in defending against errant Islamists and other enemies of liberty, if I were not to consider our arts at length.
We already know that popular film and music are degraded, music much more than film but film nonetheless. I can't imagine that there has been a significant and serious play on Broadway since Angels in America, although I didn't even bother to see that. People die of disease. So what? But we are geniuses when it comes to graphic art and architecture. The 'design' area of Western Civ is alive and kicking, and fewer places more innovative than videogames despite their mostly awful cultural content. Movies can be visually arresting, and I tend to watch them for that quality as well as their mix of storytelling through the medium though again, most of the stories are awful. (Remind me to compare and contrast 'Gran Torino' with 'Forgetting Sarah Marshall').
So I'm thinking back to Picaso and his peers, and fortunately, there is a top 200 poll that I have found at the Telegraph. I figure I'll go through it. I do so in parallel to my good virtual friend Gerard over at American Digest as an effort to find Something Wonderful over here.
One of the very first CD-ROMs I ever bought, back when they called them CD-ROMs was a collection of several hundred paintings complete with text and audio narrations on their significance. I wore that sucker down, and I wonder where it is. But there were some extraordinary images from around the world and my favorites remain clear in my mind's eye without any particular attribution.
Today it is not completely ironically, a videogame by the name of Assassin's Creed II that impels me to jump into a little online art collection, appreciation and criticism. As part of one of that game's side quests, collecting art for one's villa is included. So I must travel to Forli, Venezia and Firenze to pick up bargains. I recognized a few of the paintings and so it piqued my curiosity. What must there be on Google artwise? Well, quite a bit.
Back in 1986 when Xerox bet one of its farms on VAX technology, we used to wonder if anybody on the planet would scan documents at higher resolutions than 600dpi. It seemed, at the time, to be out of the question. And so Eeyore and his doubtful cousins ran the day about matters of online art appreciation saying it'll never happen. At this moment in Moore's Law's run (amok it seems) isn't it odd that as GE is in the process of selling NBC to Comcast what those megalomaniacs have in mind is piping more crap like Iron Man in HD? Now I enjoy watching metal monsters spit fire at Muhajadeen as much as the next barbarian, but there's a limit. And of late I am becoming fond of mocking those who capitalize on the tastes of peasants and then later pretend that they are too big to fail. So right about now I think it most appropriate to consider what efforts there are to retain and represent some of mankind's better visual creations onto the Internet, the second greatest creation of the 20th century (behind all that's nuke).
So it begins.
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