Octopodial Chrome

Photographer Carl Warner fashions lovely landscapes from food. Really cool to look at.

yesterday I went with my mother to see an exhibit of items from the Louvre at the Denver Art Museum which was very cool. What struck me was how very little actual art is in the museum. There are a few floors of contemporary paint-blobs on canvas; there are a few examples of handicrafts from aborigines; there are a few of pop-art of the crudest kind; but there are only two floors with art proper: one of European and one of Far Asian. The European is most interesting to me, particularly the Holbein portrait of Edward VI. That’s real art: in this case, it depicts someone of importance (Edward VI, duh), it has historical significance (I was inches from a canvas that Henry VII almost certainly touched!) and it’s attractive and executed with skill.

I’m not against non-representational art; I’m not against abstract art; I’m not against random art. Some of the greatest art of history is non-representational (just look at the Anglo-Saxons, the Celts and the Greeks!). But most of what passes for art these days is far from the ding an sich—it’s pure dreck.

That said, it was absolutely glorious to see the relics of the ancien régime and to breathe on a few great works of true art. When my readers and I are dust, those works will remain—and the dreck the Museum collects will be dust to. The eternal things will last so long as there are those who appreciate beauty, skill and true art.

There are two types of computerised image: bit-mapped images are composed of thousands or millions of small pixels while vector images are composed of lines, circles, curves, whatever. The two types have differing pros and cons: each of a bitmap’s pixels can be a different colour, meaning that a bitmap typically approximates a photograph better—but that same pixelation means that if you zoom in too much a bitmap is useless; a vector image can be zoomed in forever (at least theoretically) and its resolution never suffers—but it’s very difficult to use a vector image to represent a real view.

Enter VectorMagic. Given a JPEG of a photo or logo, it will produce a vector image. This is actually very cool stuff—it appears to do an excellent job with the test images I’ve submitted.

The same bloke wot did women in art has also done a sequence of women in photographs. It’s good, although not quite as good as the centuries’ worth of paintings.

A fellow has made a lovely montage of women in paintings over the centuries. Strangely enough, the partial morphs between two different paintings are often the most attractive faces.

Oh, and modern art isn’t.

Kurt Wenner creates beautiful 3D-like sidewalk chalk drawings. Very cool stuff: I hope that he comes to Denver someday.