Elaine Velie at Hyperallergic: A new documentary delves into the scandals that plagued the 1964 Venice Biennale, where Robert Rauschenberg became the first American to earn the Golden Lion grand prize amid allegations of a rigged jury. Critic and ...
‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ ‌ 

Here is the daily email update for you. Click here to start your FREE subscription


3 Quarks Daily - 5 new articles

Was Robert Rauschenberg’s Venice Biennale Victory Rigged?

Elaine Velie at Hyperallergic:

A new documentary delves into the scandals that plagued the 1964 Venice Biennale, where Robert Rauschenberg became the first American to earn the Golden Lion grand prize amid allegations of a rigged jury. Critic and director Amei Wallach’s film Taking Venice (2023) delves into the sensationalized victory, illuminating the United States government’s obsession with its international image; the mid-century art world that launched the careers of artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol; and the ultimate triumph of Pop art at the eurocentric Venice Biennale. The film will screen for the public at New York’s IFC Center on May 17 and at Laemmle Theaters in Los Angeles on May 24.

As Taking Venice recounts it, Rauschenberg’s win solidified the US as the center of the art market, and Europeans were not happy. Newspaper headlines flash throughout the film, bearing declarations that the Americans were “colonizing Europe,” among other claims.

more here.

     
 


The Celebrity As Muse

Philippa Snow at the Paris Review:

“There isn’t really anybody who occupies the lens to the extent that Lindsay Lohan does,” the artist Richard Phillips observed in 2012. “Something happens when she steps in front of the camera … She is very aware of the way that an icon is constructed, and that’s something that is unique.” Phillips, who has long used famous people as his muses, was promoting a new short film he had made with the then-twenty-five-year-old actress. Standing in a fulgid ocean in a silvery-white bathing suit, her eyeliner and false lashes dark as a depressive mood, she is meant to look healthily Californian, but her beauty is a little rumpled, and even in close-up she cannot quite meet the camera’s gaze. The impression left by Lindsay Lohan (2011), Phillips’s film, is that of an artist’s model who is incapable of behaving like one, having been cursed with the roiling interior life of a consummate actress. Most traditional print models can successfully empty out their eyes for fashion films and photoshoots, easily signifying nothing, but Lohan looks fearful, guarded, as if somewhere just beyond the camera she can see the terrible future. Unlike her heroine Marilyn Monroe, Phillips also observed in a promotional interview, Lohan is “still alive, and she’s more powerful than ever.”

more here.

     
 


The Fly On The Wall Always Gets The Best View: Drone Aesthetics In A Time Before Drones

by Brooks Riley

Something odd happens when I look at the elder Pieter Bruegel’s paintings: I experience a jolt of vertigo, as though I’d stepped out on a ledge somewhere—not too high up, but high enough to initiate a physical reaction more like titillation than terror. I didn’t notice this right away: For a long time, I was too busy taking in all the business going on in those paintings: the crowds, the tussles and bustle of the marketplace, the hawkers, the wagons, the houses, the animals, and in some of his works a topography rather alien to his own very flat province of North Brabant in the Netherlands. A master of ‘everything everywhere all at once,’ Bruegel knew how to crowd a wooden panel.

In The Fight between Carnival and Lent, faced with a multitude of finely-rendered characters alive with attitude, it’s easy to be distracted from the shot itself—its acute angle, its distance from the action, its extended scope and high horizon achieved through elevation. This is a classic content-over-form dialectic that faces every viewer looking at a painting. What am I seeing? What am I supposed to see? Where am I seeing from? 

In this case ‘where am I seeing from’ has everything to do with ‘what am I seeing’’: It’s the high oblique angle that enables the viewer to take in all those individuals spread out over the market square. (An AI command to make each character look up at the painter, might force the viewer to think about where Bruegel is situated as he paints, even if he’s up there only in his imagination. It’s like the fourth wall: you’re unaware of it until a character turns and speaks to you directly.)

A cinematographer would recognize this as a crane shot, or its replacement, the drone shot. This crane or drone doesn’t move. It defines the POV (point of view) of the painter, and shows how far his perspective can reach and how much he can cram into the in-between, that 2D surface which expands vertically with every higher angle of his POV, as in this crane shot from Gone with the Wind.

The issue of POV has been around a long time. Dürer faced it too: How can I depict the Last Supper in such a way that all 12 apostles sitting at the table are visible? Leonardo da Vinci’s theatrical solution had been to put everyone on one side of a table elongated to stretch-limousine length: Jesus and the 12 disciples all in a row, at eye level. All that’s missing are footlights.

In a woodcut from 1510, Dürer...

Read the whole entry »

     
 


Puzzles, Spherical Cows, and Applied Geometry

by Jonathan Kujawa

Researching tide pools at the Oregon coast.

My nieces, Hannah and Sydney, came to visit for the weekend. Since they’re 8 and 9, the delightful Guardian Games in downtown Corvallis was a must-stop. Along with games galore, they have an amazing assortment of puzzles. They have puzzles with micro-sized pieces, puzzles with jumbo-sized pieces, puzzles with only a few pieces, and puzzles with a veritable googolplex of pieces.

The profusion of puzzles reminded me of a recent research paper in applied geometry. The authors are Madeleine Bonsma-Fisher, a mathematician and data scientist at the University of Toronto, and her partner Kent Bonsma-Fisher, a quantum computing and optics researcher.

Like many of us, they assembled an inordinate number of puzzles during the COVID-19 restrictions. And like many puzzlers, they came to wonder:

How big a table do you really need if you want to assemble a puzzle?

Everyone knows you need extra room on the table to spread out the pieces. But how much extra room? Does the amount of space needed depend on the size of the pieces? Or if the puzzle has more or fewer pieces?

This is a frequent topic of discussion for puzzlers on the internet. A commonly cited rule of thumb is that the table should be twice the area of the finished puzzle.

But rules of thumb aren’t math. Fortunately, close readers of 3QD know of some math that could help here. We discussed the problem of sphere packing here and here. Sphere packing is all about finding an arrangement of equal-sized spheres (e.g., cannonballs or oranges) that packs the most spheres into a given volume.

Cannonballs and oranges live in three dimensions, but you can ask about packing spheres in higher dimensions like we did in those essays. But you can also ask the question in two dimensions. There it becomes a problem of packing equal-sized circles on a tabletop. And if you’re a mathematician, a circle is basically the same thing as a puzzle piece!

In 1892 Thule [1] proved that a hexagonal packing of circles is the densest configuration. Even my nieces can quickly figure out that the rectangular packing is pretty good, a hexagonal packing is better, and it is hard to imagine anything could beat it. But proof by lack of imagination isn’t good enough. When Kepler first thought about sphere packing in 1611, he no doubt already knew that hexagonal packing was as good as it gets, but it took 250+ years for us to know for sure.

Image borrowed...

Read the whole entry »

     
 


Monday Poem

     
 


More Recent Articles