“The whole problem can be stated quite simply by asking, ‘Is there a meaning to music?’ My answer would be, ‘Yes.’ And ‘Can you state in so many words what the meaning is?’ My answer to that would be, ‘No.'” — Aaron Copland, What to Listen for in Music, 1939
The Ferrari 250 GTO has been called the top sports car of all time. Only 39 were manufactured, so they sell for as much as $35 million among collectors.
Chris Smart of Bishopstoke, Hampshire, couldn’t afford to buy one …
… so he painted one on his garage door.
For the Festival of World Cultures in August 2008, street painter Edgar Mueller transformed the East Pier in Dún Laoghaire, Ireland, into an ice-age crevasse.
“Beside the personal messages, questions and sometimes answers in my paintings I’m questioning the experienced daily perception of people by changing the appearance of public places,” he says.
Dutch engineer Theo Jansen builds complex walking sculptures from PVC pipe and turns them loose on the beaches of the Netherlands, where they have been evolving (with his help) for 20 years.
“Over time,” he says, “these skeletons have become increasingly better at surviving the elements such as storms and water, and eventually I want to put these animals out in herds on the beaches, so they will live their own lives.”
“I’ve seen a lot of mechanical sculpture, and Jansen’s animari are the finest I’ve seen by far in the ‘low-tech clockwork’ mechanism category,” robotic designer Carl Pisaturo told Wired in 2005. “These are amazing creations, and the simplicity of the technology and the fact that they are wind-powered only makes their poetic motions more impressive.”
Near a streetcorner in Winslow, Ariz., trompe l’oeil artist John Pugh has painted six windows. On an upper sill perches an eagle, and in the lower windows is reflected a girl in a flatbed Ford — presumably slowing down.
In 1980 Pugh received a commission from his alma mater, California State University, Chico, to paint a mural on the side of Taylor Hall. Shortly after its completion, a woman who worked across the street called the administration to ask when the wall would be repaired.
With his mural Art Imitating Life Imitating Art Imitating Life at San Jose’s Cafe Espresso, Pugh created a convincing extension of the restaurant’s interior. Everything within the brick proscenium — the alcove, sculpture, painting, stairway, cat, and woman — was painted by hand.
After the mural was completed in February 1997, a male patron tried to introduce himself to the woman and complained to a manager that she was giving him the “silent treatment.”
When did Shakespeare’s plays come into existence? We tend to think they appeared when he conceived them.
But if God is omniscient, then he has perfect knowledge of the future. Before the creation, he knew that Shakespeare would compose the plays, and he knew the full text of each one.
“A consequence of the view that God knows everything about the future is that all compositions existed before creation,” writes philosopher Richard R. La Croix.
In this sense, “the coming into existence of any composition is an event which occurs prior to the events that cause it to occur” — and, in each case, an effect precedes its cause.
Nearly 3 million years ago, an ancestor of modern humans picked this pebble out of a slow-flowing stream in southern Africa and carried it at least 4 kilometers to a cave, where it was discovered by Wilfred Eizman in 1925.
Why would the creature have done this? Possibly because it recognized a face in the natural markings on the pebble’s surface. If so, this is the earliest evidence of an aesthetic sense in human heritage.
John Haberle’s 1889 trompe l’oeil masterpiece U.S.A. was such a faithful representation of a U.S. greenback that one could read the ironic government warning on the bill:
“Counterfeiting, or altering this note, or passing any counterfeit or alteration of it, or having in possession any false or counterfeit plate or impression of it, or any paper made in imitation of the paper on which it is printed, is punishable by $5000 fine or 15 years at hard labor or both.”
More than one viewer took it for an actual bill. When the painting was installed at the Art Institute of Chicago, the art critic of The Chicago Inter-Ocean objected: “There is a fraud hanging on the Institute walls. … It is that alleged still life by Haberle [in which] a $1 bill and the fragments of a $10 note have been pasted on canvas. … That the management of the Art Institute should hang this kind of ‘art’ even though it were genuine, is to be regretted, but to lend itself to such a fraud … is shameful.”
Haberle immediately took a train to Chicago and stood by while experts scrutinized the work through lenses, rubbed off paint, and declared it a genuine work of imitative art. The critic issued a public apology, acknowledging that others, including “Eastman Johnson, the dean of American figure and genre painters”, had also been taken in by Haberle’s works.
What’s unusual about this 1649 engraving by Claude Mellan, Sudarium of Saint Veronica?
The image is produced by one continuous spiraling line starting at the tip of Jesus’ nose.
Winston Churchill faced an awkward moment in 1954, when Parliament unveiled a portrait on the occasion of his 80th birthday. The ceremony took place before a crowded Westminster Hall, and no one present, one observer said, “will forget the idiosyncratic nonsound with which a thousand people stopped breathing when the canvas was revealed.”
The painting, by Graham Sutherland, was a decidedly modern take on the octogenarian statesman. “Its chief defect was that it looked unfinished in as much as his feet were concealed in a carpet that seemed to have sprouted a dun-coloured grass,” wrote Studio editor G.S. Whittet. “The artist had obviously been unhappy about them and they had been painted over since it would have been impossible to ‘cut off’ his legs below the knees without radically altering the proportions and placing of the picture on the canvas.”
One MP called the portrait “a study in lumbago,” and Lord Hailsham said it was “disgusting, ill-mannered, terrible.” Churchill accepted the gift with a measured good humor, but privately he muttered, “It makes me look half-witted, which I ain’t.” After the unveiling, the painting was never seen again — shortly before Churchill’s death, his wife had it cut up and burned.
See Immortalized.