Image © Amy Arbus.
Page 291 celebrates its first birthday today. Thanks to everyone for reading! I’ve been a little bit M.I.A. recently, falling back on links instead of reviews, commentary, etc. That should change next week, although summer is obviously a lighter season and I’ll be moving slightly outside the city in […]
Image © Jonathan Haeber.
Optical illusions, or perceptual illusions? According to the NYT, many of these tricks are due to our brain’s need to predict the future in order to process the present. Deep. (Story here and here.)
Courtroom sketches from the 9/11 co-conspirator trials in Guantánamo.
Snowdon is an example of the type of […]
Image © Rafal Milach.
Great photo selections from FotoGrafia and World Press Photo 2008 over at We Make Money Not Art.
How to make three-dimensional animals from print advertising. Or virtual three-dimensional animals, anyway.
Paul Fusco describes the happy accident that became RFK Funeral Train.
Tattoos and the NBA: “At one time, people got tattoos to be different, […]
The answer is, of course, “nothing”–it’s all digital now. The Times business section has a nice piece on recent transformations at Kodak in the wake of its improved earnings report on Thursday. The article gives you a good feel for how the digital evolution has played out from the perspective of the big […]
There’s a good article about the Flickr aesthetic(s) by Virginia Heffernan in last weekend’s Times. In it, Heffernan talks about the sort of community rules that determine a “good” Flickr photograph, which turn out to be a hodgepodge of technical quibbles (e.g., sharp focus), subject matter (animals, erotic photos, landscapes), and over-the-top post-processing. […]
Since the confusing boundaries between science, technology, and art are a favorite topic here at 291–and yesterday’s post was such a grisly example–it’s only appropriate to make note of the Times‘ morbid little article about the 1962 Stereoscopic Atlas of the Human Body. Apparently Stanford University plans to put the 25-volume masterpiece online to […]
Am I the only one who’s disappointed that this Yale abortion thing seems to be a hoax? Well, it’s not a hoax, but rather a stunt, where the art is the information and documentation about the thing, rather than the thing itself–which it seems never happened.
According to the Yale Daily News, this […]
There are currently three different features on Gregory Crewdson in the media right now–not counting reviews of his new show at Luhring Augustine. There’s an art/human interest piece in New York magazine, an essay in Aperture redacted from a talk given by Crewdson about his influences, and an interview with Crewdson online at the […]
There’s a great article in U.S. News & World Report on the photograph that won that Pulitzer prize in 1976, The Soiling of Old Glory. The article is an interview with Louis Masur, a professor of American culture at Trinity who’s written a book on the photograph. Incredibly, I’d never seen this image […]
Waldemar Januszczak has a problem with Vanity Fair. “Vanity Fair,” he points out, is a title lifted from W. M. Thackeray’s novel; Thackeray himself lifted the phrase from John Bunyan. It is a phrase coined by Bunyan to describe a carnivalesque world of pleasures inhabited by people obsessed with themselves. Thackeray revived […]
