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It’s hard to find anyplace in Europe today, even here in peaceable Sweden, where people aren’t squabbling over cultural property and the spoils of war. For some time, it turns out, a handful of nationalist Danes have been loudly barking about booty that the Swedes nabbed 350 years ago in a war with Denmark. The cache includes an ornate canopy from Kronborg Castle, of Hamlet lore, and recently people in Skane, a region in the south of Sweden that was ceded by Denmark in 1658 after losing the war, said they wanted the canopy handed over.

In other words, one part of Sweden claimed restitution from, well, the rest of Sweden. An Internet poll by a Swedish newspaper revealed that a majority of residents in the region apparently still harbor dreams of Danish citizenship and resent their calm, polite, democracy-loving Swedish masters. On Valentine’s Day, a Danish newspaper went so far as to run a front-page headline accusing Ikea, the furniture giant founded by a Swede, which Danes have long loved to hate, of “bullying Denmark” by giving comfy sofas and shiny tables Swedish and Norwegian place names while assigning Danish names to doormats and rugs.

“I don’t think this can be a coincidence,” a Danish professor is quoted as saying on The Local, an English-language Swedish Web site (thelocal.se). He called it “cultural imperialism.”

Feeling guilty about my living room carpet, I decided to stop the other day into the Royal Armory here for a show called “War Booty” to see if the Swedes had anything to say for themselves. The exhibition ends up being a refresher course in history for an amnesiac nation that, having not fought a battle since losing Finland to the Russians 200 years ago, clearly prefers to think of itself as the home of Dag Hammarskjold rather than as a bygone empire.

But into the 18th century, as the show recounts, Sweden stocked its libraries and museums and churches with stolen arms, books, altarpieces, textiles and art by painters like Titian and Tintoretto, Dürer and Archimboldo. Much of this loot was pinched from Poland and Lithuania. The show argues that this was the custom of the day and that the best thing now is simply to lay everything on the table for all the world to see. But the clock can’t be turned back.

Not until the Congress of Vienna in 1815 (notice how that date falls after Sweden’s empire collapsed, a happy coincidence, no doubt) did countries in Europe generally agree that taking booty was a war crime. So there’s a cut-off date, a legal line in the sand.

Which won’t placate the Danes, you can bet on that. Under the Communists, Poland and Czechoslovakia also made some noises about getting back what Sweden took. The Swedes volunteered to return a treasured scroll to the Poles as a goodwill gesture.

The Czechs longed for the Silver Bible, produced around 520 in Ravenna, Italy. It had wended its way to a monastery in Essen, Germany, before ending up in the hands of Rudolph II in Prague, from whom Sweden’s Queen Christina grabbed it in 1648. Recently the Swedes have loaned the so-called Devil’s Bible to the Czech Republic, but they aren’t going to fork over either permanently. Former Eastern bloc countries are caught today between pressing to recover works like these Bibles and proving themselves to be agreeable partners in the European Union. It’s a tricky diplomatic problem that 17th-century monarchs like Christina clearly didn’t face.

“Do not forget to procure and send me the library and the rarities there in Prague,” she instructed her troops. “These, as you know, are all I really care about.” Her father, King Gustavus Adolphus, at least had looted in what you might call a more enlightened way, to fill Sweden’s then-backward libraries and churches. She treated war like a shopping spree.

Which raises the question: Does it matter whether booty comes from good wars or bad ones, from evil owners or helpless ones, from public places or obscure corners and rich men’s vaults? In principle, the answer should be, “No, it doesn’t matter.” But Germany in World War II stole art from its victims; the Soviets then looted Germany when their troops overran Berlin. In Germany’s case, it’s considered a war crime. Russians insist their actions were just revenge.

And now the descendants of two great czarist-era Russian collectors are pressing the Russian government to compensate them for what the Soviets took from their families, using the occasion of a show currently at the Royal Academy in London of loans from Russia to press their case. And good luck to them with the current Russian regime.

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Read More : nytimes 

The evolution of light and technology has been illuminated by an artist using a simple light bulb and the Australian Synchrotron.

Melbourne-based multimedia artist Chris Henschke has also connected the facility to its outside environment by ensuring it resonates with the sound of a cicada.

Henschke, from RMIT University, says during his time at the Australian Synchrotron he wanted to expand on a desire to show artistically how science has grown.

"I wanted to use the synchrotron to illuminate an old light bulb and look at it as many different ways as I can," he says.

Henschke describes the tungsten filament light bulb as the great-grandfather of the synchrotron.

"Ironically it is about to become obsolete [under government plans to phase out domestic use], but one day the synchrotron will also become obsolete," he says.

"I am trying to put the new technology into its historical and technological context."

Henschke is still working on pieces for exhibit, but has a series of images produced by exposing the light bulb to different sources of light such as the optical, infra-red and protein crystallography beamlines.

Two-way creativity

He says the residency allowed for a two-way creative process.

One work is the product of a scientist’s suggestion that he expose the light bulb to the protein crystallography beamline.

The resulting image Henschke says is symbolic of his work at the synchrotron.

"I’m at this point where I can almost see into this whole other world, but not quite," he says.

In tune with the synchrotron

One of his creations is permanently embedded in the synchrotron.

Henschke says when he discovered the existence of the so-called synchrotron tune he wanted to hear it.

The synchrotron tune is the balance of frequencies around 13 megahertz needed to make the synchrotron beam work.

With the help of Dr Andreas Wilde, at Germany’s Fraunhofer Institute for Integrated Circuits, in Dresden, Henshcke made the synchrotron tune audible to the human ear.

"I then thought I could put my own tune into their tune," Henschke says.

He initially planned to insert an audio file of all the synchrotron-based scientists shouting the word "synchrotron" and then toyed with the idea of inserting a guitar riff from one of his own songs into the instrument.

Sounds of the cicada

But the night before the experiment was due to happen Henschke heard a cicada in the facility’s car park and knew he had found his sound.

"The cicada’s deafening high-pitched tune was not only geoacoustically appropriate, it also gave me a perfect synaesthetic picture of the energy beam whirling around the synchrotron ring," Henschke says.

After having the tune encoded in Germany he gave it to the accelerator physicists to inject into the machine.

Henschke says the first attempt shut the synchrotron down.

But on the second attempt the sound file was lifted from a base frequency of 5 kilohertz to 1 megahertz to make the "vibration" fast enough to modulate the amplitude of the beam.

"Even though nothing was directly perceivable, just to know that the heart of the huge facility around me was pulsating with the sound of the cicada that lived next to it somehow connected the synchrotron back to the world around it," Henshke says in his blog on the experience.

"The experiment revealed a relationship between sound and light and energy and matter, the cicada singing in the sunlight and the light in the synchrotron singing with the cicada’s tune."

The works were completed as part of a three-month residency sponsored by Arts Victoria and the Australian Network for Art and Technology.

Henshke will outline his experiences at the Adelaide Festival later this week. His work can be viewed at www.topologies.com.au.

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Source : abc.net 

If you are looking for the best technical graphic design training money can buy then look no further then this blog post. Lynda.com is the world’s largest Adobe video training provider and their quality Adobe CS3 tutorials will provide you with the skills you need to succeed as a graphic designer. These Adobe CS3 tutorials are much better then any book you can buy and you just can’t beat the $25 a month price.

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If you do one tutorial a week you will sharpen your design skills in no time. Just remember, becoming a better designer is a never ending process and Lynda.com will help you hone your skills so you can always be on the top of your game!

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Source : youthedesigner 

A COLOUR-BLIND artist who could only recognise black and white shades has learnt how to paint with a full palette by “hearing” the hues he cannot see.

Neil Harbisson, 25, has been fitted with a device called an Eyeborg, which converts 360 colours into different sounds.

Now he is to mount his first London exhibition, showing city scenes such as red phone boxes in London and brightly coloured recycling banks in Barcelona.

Harbisson, whose exhibition will arrive in London in April, after opening in Barcelona, said: “When I paint it is as if I am composing music on a canvas.”

As an art student at Dartington College of Arts in Devon, he painted only in black and white because that is all he saw. But three years ago he met Adam Montandon, a cybernetics expert who came to give a lecture at the college.

After the talk, Montandon was told of Harbisson’s condition and he took up the challenge of solving the problem, enabling Harbisson to paint in colour. The artist suffers from achromatopsia – or complete congenital colour blindness.

Montandon decided to harness the way in which different colours reflect light at different frequencies, with light vibrating fastest from violet and slowest from red.

The first device fitted to Harbisson’s head was fairly primitive, letting him “hear” only six colours. His current model is far more sophisticated, giving him access to 360 colours.

Montandon created the Eyeborg system, manufactured by HMC Interactive, the design company in Plymouth that he co-founded. It is a head-mounted digital camera that reads the colours directly in front of it. The camera is connected to a laptop computer, carried in a backpack, which slows down the frequency of light waves to the frequency of sound waves. The computer then sends the “sound” of each colour to an earpiece worn by Harbisson. Montandon expects the system eventually to be as small as an MP3 player.

The device has made a huge difference to Harbisson’s art, which is now his profession. Since wearing the Eyeborg he has expanded from just two or three, usually primary, colours to many more.

“I used to paint rather literally,” he said. “I would stand in front of something and just paint what I saw immediately before me. Now I’m doing more abstracts and being much more free and liberal with my art.”

His paint tubes have labels stating their colours and also have a sample of the colour itself on the outside so he knows through his ears which colour to pick.

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More : timesonline 

SQUEAMISH readers might want to look away now as we unveil the world’s first ever EYEBALL TATTOO.

The freaky procedure was carried out to turn a body-art fan’s eye blue.

And it took FORTY insertions of the needle to get the job done.

Volunteer Pauly Unstoppable, from Canada, has perfect vision but jumped at the chance to be the first punter.

Brave Pauly said he had full confidence in the team working on him - but urged people not to try it at home.

He added: "The procedure was extensively researched and done by people who were aware of the risks and possible complications and that it should not be casually attempted.

"Now that this experiment has been started, please wait for us to either heal or go blind before trying it."

What the hell was he inking?

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Source : thesun 

Researchers believe early illustrations of how to play the game of chess, found in a long-lost Italian manuscript, may have been drawn by Leonardo da Vinci.

Da Vinci was a close friend of Italian mathematician and Franciscan friar Luca Pacioli, who wrote the manuscript.

Pacioli wrote the book - a collection of puzzles called "De ludo scacchorum" found in a private library last year - around the year 1500, experts say.

The puzzles are very similar to those found in daily newspapers today.

So far, three pages of the manuscript have been published, showing carefully drawn diagrams, each representing a possible chess scenario, to which Pacioli offered his solutions - checkmate in a set number of moves.

It was not the first of its kind, but one of the most striking things about it, aside from the practical demonstrations of the game, is the novelty and beauty of its illustrations.

The king, queen, bishop and knight are all represented by elegant and distinctive symbols, coloured in black and red ink; so finely drawn that it soon became clear these must be the hand of another artist.

Independent assessment

The researchers say they are confident these are the drawings of Leonardo and they have asked experts in the United States to make a second, independent assessment.

The manuscript was discovered last year among thousands of volumes in a private library in Gorizzia, north-east Italy.

Pacioli and Leonardo were working and collaborating on each other’s works around the year 1500.

Leonardo is thought to have understood chess and maybe he even played it.

He made a reference to a technical term from the game in one of his many manuscripts.

This is thought to be the only surviving copy of the De ludo scacchorum.

And if it does indeed contain drawings by the hand of Leonardo, then of course, it will be priceless.

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Source : BBC 

JERUSALEM — In a remarkable feat of cooperation between France and Israel, requiring intensive negotiations and the passage of a law by the Israeli Parliament, the Israel Museum here has opened an exhibition of important art looted by the Nazis from France and then returned after the war. Some of it was never reclaimed, presumably because the owners were killed in the Holocaust.
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Running parallel to the show of French-held art is a companion exhibition: looted art, with no known owners, held in custody by the Israel Museum itself.

The two exhibitions are haunting, and they also contain some notable art, including works by Cézanne, Manet, Degas, Chagall, Delacroix, Egon Schiele, Monet, Alfred Sisley, Max Liebermann, Pieter de Hooch and others.

Some of the French-held art was ordered taken by Hitler himself, for the Third Reich. Some pieces were looted; others were forced sales. After the war some works were immediately returned; de Hooch’s 1658 painting “The Drinker,” for example, was returned to the family of Édouard de Rothschild, whose daughter donated it to the Louvre in 1974. Some owners sold their works to museums, but some owners were never found.

The 53 French-held paintings are among some 2,000 works still not restored to their owners or descendants and maintained by French museums. The Israeli collection is smaller and less distinguished but includes an important Schiele cityscape of his mother’s birthplace, “Krumau — Crescent of Houses (The Small City V),” whose splayed arrangement of the houses carries an implicit sexual power.

The French exhibition is titled “Looking for Owners: Custody, Research and Restitution of Art Stolen in France During World War II.” France’s minister of culture and communications, Christine Albanel, came to Jerusalem to help open the exhibit Monday evening, despite a fierce winter storm.

France has both a duty and “a very strong desire” to keep alive the memory of the Holocaust, she said. In part, the exhibition fulfills a requirement of a French commission formed in 1997 to study Jewish property restitution, which recommended a project with the Israel Museum.

But Ms. Albanel is credited by the Israelis for working with the French Foreign Ministry to persuade the French bureaucracy to approve showing such important paintings, instead of more ordinary work; not all looted art was either good or valuable.

Still, Israel first had to pass a law that prevents the seizure of art temporarily exhibited in Israel by those who claim to own it. The 2007 legislation states that claims can be made only in the exhibition’s country of origin, in this case France. France would not have allowed the pictures to be shown here without such a law, a legacy of the 1998 controversy over the seizure in New York of Schiele paintings on loan from the Leopold Foundation in Vienna.

James S. Snyder, the director of the Israel Museum, praised Ms. Albanel, saying that “there is a resonance between the art and the state of Israel” because both were rescued, in a sense, “from the ashes of the tragedy of the war.”

The exhibition, he said, “is a kind of memorial to our loss in Europe.”

The parallel Israeli exhibition — some 50 paintings, drawings, artifacts and Judaica — is called “Orphaned Art: Looted Art From the Holocaust in the Israel Museum.” The display is drawn from some 1,200 works collated by the Jewish Restitution Service Organization, charged by the United States to gather looted art from Germany after the more obvious postwar restitutions had been made. The organization distributed the art to Jewish institutions in Israel and worldwide.

Much of the collection is indifferent or anonymous, and the museum has no record of its provenance. But Israel wanted to show, Mr. Snyder said, that “the issue of art lost in the war is a challenge shared by museums and countries around the world, including Israel.”

The Israel Museum (www.imjnet.org.il) has put the unclaimed art on its Web site. The two exhibitions will be on view here through June 3, and then appear at the Museum of Jewish Art and History in Paris from June 24 to Sept. 28.

Source : nytimes 

This summer, New York City couple Christine Santora and Justin Gignac launched Wants For Sale, a site where they sell paintings of things that they want, at the cost of the real item. So a painting of a slice of pizza is only $3 while a Nintendo Wii goes for $270.92. (Your DSL must have been down if you missed it.)

After starting the project, the couple realized there was something they both really wanted—the ability to help others. With that in mind, Christine and Justin are launching a new site today called Needs For Sale just in time for the holiday season. Needs For Sale follows the same idea as the Wants series, but 100% of the profits go to charity.

The Needs paintings will support various non-profits and depict images to represent what the couple wants to give to someone in need. For example, Habitat for Humanity says a $100 donation buys a kitchen sink, so the couple will paint a sink and sell it for $100.
coatdrive.jpg

Here’s a list of their first set of paintings and benefiting charities:

Winter Coat–NY Cares Coat Drive
Wig–Locks of Love
Spiral Ham–City Harvest
Can of Peas–City Harvest
Kitchen Sink–Habitat for Humanity
Front Door–Habitat for Humanity
Pig–Heifer International
Cow–Heifer International
Ark–Heifer International
Barbie/Care Bear/Princess Crown–Toys for Tots
Nerf football/Transformer/Green Army Man–Toys for Tots

Source : coolhunting 

In the Introduction to his book The Van Gogh Blues: The Creative Person’s Path Through Depression, Eric Maisel, PhD writes:

African Canvas: The Art of West African Women"Creators have trouble maintaining meaning. Creating is one of the ways they endeavor to maintain meaning.

"In the act of creation, they lay a veneer of meaning over meaninglessness and sometimes produce work that helps others maintain meaning.

"This is why creating is such a crucial activity in the life of a creator: It is one of the ways, and often the most important way, that she manages to make life feel meaningful. Not creating is depressing because she is not making meaning when she is not creating."

In this interview, he addresses some questions about topics in the book.

Eric Maisel: A lack of success and a lack of recognition are profound meaning crises that must be addressed just as any meaning crisis must be addressed, with all of our heart and all of our energy.

We have the following options. We reinvest meaning in our art and reinvest meaning in our marketing efforts and make a new go at doing excellent work and also at becoming an excellent advocate for our work, in the hope that this time recognition and success will follow.

That is, we try again, only harder and smarter.

In addition, we invest meaning elsewhere, in other meaning avenues and other meaning containers, and especially in intimate relationships (Van Gogh was happy for one year, when he was in such an intimate relationship).

There are no other existential answers: we try again (perhaps differently and hopefully with a better payoff) and/or we try something new. 

Eric Maisel: When we fear that we do not matter or that our efforts do not matter, we get depressed.

Similarly, the places where we make large investments of meaning, for instance in our performances, paintings, or books, are places of great anxiety, because there is more than our ego on the line, there is our very sense of the meaningfulness of our life.

If the world is not interested in our paintings, for instance, we will be hard-pressed to maintain meaning there; so, when we come to the blank canvas, we can already be a little (or a lot) frightened that a negative reaction to this as-yet-unborn painting will precipitate a meaning crisis.

There is a remarkable dance that is necessary to perform in order to deal with this precise dynamic: we must invest meaning in our effort while at the same time detaching (or divesting meaning) from the outcome.

That is, we say to ourselves, “I will show up—that is what I demand of myself”—and at the same time we say, “I have no way to control the creative process, so I have no way to guarantee an excellent outcome here; all I can do is try.” 

We make the meaning investment in the effort, not in the outcome; and in that way we reduce our experience of anxiety.

Eric Maisel: Many artists try. I believe that it serves us best to learn how to reduce or eliminate both depression and anxiety from our lives, as I do not hold them as useful in any way.

I think that pain is overrated.

That isn’t to say that the following might not happen: you work honorably and well on a creative project, you finish it, you are depleted and no new project wants to come forward, and after a certain amount of time the blues strike, since you aren’t making sufficient meaning and don’t feel quite up to making new meaning.

This sort of depression can creep up on any working artist. The depression is not useful in and of itself but it is a clear signal that the time has come to see if new meaning can be made.

It is the time to get back on the horse and back into the studio. Maybe there is nothing there yet and maybe you will experience days or weeks of nothing particularly generative happening.

Be that as it may, the depression was not a gift; it was merely the warning sign that a meaning crisis was brewing or had erupted—and that action, even if futile at first, was now required.

Q: You write of the "special relationship to addiction and addictive tendencies" of creative people, because the "pressure to make meaning minute-in and minute-out can send anyone scurrying away in full retreat, away from the struggle and toward alcohol, drugs, sex or some other powerful meaning substitute."

In my article "Gifted, Talented, Addicted" I speculate that a number of people with exceptional creative abilities have used drugs and alcohol as self-medication to ease the pain of their sensitivity, or as a way to enhance thinking and creativity.

(Beethoven reportedly drank wine about as often as he wrote music, and was reportedly an alcoholic or at least a problem-drinker.)

Can there be some positive, meaning-enhancement uses for what you list as meaning substitutes?

Eric Maisel: In my vernacular, no, because a meaning substitute is just that—not meaningful. It is a “poor substitute” for making intentional meaning.

That isn’t to say that it might not have tremendous blandishments and rewards, activating our pleasure center this way or numbing our pain that way.

But, especially over time, the dangers are profoundly great, as witnessed by the number of creative and performing artists ruined by addiction.

A drink is not a problem; turning to drink as a way to deal with meaning challenges is a problem.

Shopping for a tie is not a problem; turning to acquisition as a way to deal with meaning challenges is a problem.

To the extent that a creative person uses anything or does anything as a way to avoid the challenge of making sufficient meaning, that is a problem—maybe not the first time he does it, maybe not the second time, but certainly when it becomes habitual and a place of dependency.

Source : Eric Maisel Interview

Lately I’ve noticed a pattern of people building Single Serving Sites, web sites comprised of a single page with a dedicated domain name and do only one thing. Here are a few examples:

single serving site