Friday, February 27, 2015

New media, new art

Modern Family has just, and justifiably, attracted a lot of attention with an episode taking place on Claire's laptop screen, and the video chats and other stuff that happens there. It was very good.

Somebody beat them to it, though. Noah is just the same, and almost the same length, 17 minutes (the MF episode was 21 minutes without ads).
I think Noah was good and interesting, although the ADD Hyper-speed young people operate at digitally and which was captured well, did tend to confuse.
I guess this ultra-multitasking must be addictive, I doubt you get more done that way.

Tuesday, February 24, 2015

The Unbearable Lightness of Tweeting

The Unbearable Lightness of Tweeting, article.
[Note: the article does *not* end with the graphics.]

I have earlier (to my shame, more than once. I'd like to be more positive, but sometimes it's hard) kvetched about Twitter. It's a small wonder I can't find anything interesting on it, who can be interesting in 140 characters?

But I thought at least it might be a good platform to share links, both for me and for others. A portal medium, leading to substantial stuff, relatively.

But no, it turns out that even at best, only about 1% of twitter readers who interact with a tweet, click through to a link! That is so depressing. It means Twitter actually *is* useless as a medium, except for such superficial use as sharing 140-character jokes or making 140-character arguments.

I, like many others, have found our attention span horribly diminished in the digital age. That many, many others are far, far ahead in this slow mental suicide might be a solace, but sadly it does not feel like it.

photograph reportedly just went for a world record $6.5 million

...photograph reportedly just went for a world record $6.5 million, article.

Australian photographer Peter Lik will rarely pass up an opportunity to show his biceps. There he was, wearing a cowboy hat, trekking up a snowy mountainside, arms bare. There he was, behind the wheel of a green truck, flexing. ...
art consultant David Hulme saying. Commenting on one of Lik’s pieces that went for $1 million, he added: “I don’t fancy the owner’s chances of recouping anywhere near what he paid for this one.”
That assessment hasn’t stopped Lik from selling. Take it from photographer Scott Reither, who also sells pictures and once worked as one of Lik’s salesmen. He wrote a lengthy blog post on his travails in which he spoke of hustling photographs like a used car salesman and pushing fine art on a Las Vegas clientele caught up in “impulsive behavior while visiting Sin City.” Reither said he sold $700,000 worth of Lik’s photography in seven months and quit, unable to “stomach it any further.”
“I felt like I had to feed people a bunch of lies,” he wrote, questioning the “absurd pricing structure for the not-very limited editions of 950″ print...
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Get this print for $6.5M. 

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Pop singers "design" Leica cameras, and the Marborro Man sets world records in "art photo" pricing. It's a brave new world. Or at least a brass one. 

Lenny Kravitz, Leica designer?

This is one of those increasingly frequent stories where you check mentally "is it the first of April already?"
Lenny Kravitz, by virtue of being a medium-popular pop-rock singer, and by virtue of apparently sometimes using a Leica camera, has achieved the status of now being a Leica designer!
His "design" consists of no more changes to the camera than having machines and assistants rubbing off the black paint in corners and some areas on a black Leica camera, so it looks like it has been used a lot! Awesome...
(Having seen some documentaries about how things work in Celebrity World, I would be surprised if Lenny even had anything to do himself with this design "idea".)

Read Mike Johnston's no less sarcastic take on this.