So in my perusing of the internet I've come across a skeptic/podcaster/musician by the name of George Hrab. His podcast, Geologic is bizarre and entertaining and has little or nothing to do with geology.
George has recently released an album called Trebuchet which is available on Itunes, at CDbaby and very conveniently as one of his podcast episodes. I encourage you to give it a listen.
The album definitely has a skeptical bent and a comedic feel to it but I have run into a terrible block as I try to critique it and discuss it here: I don't like it. I don't have a good reason for my distaste for it. I can't even put into words why I would have Johnathan Coulton's babies and Hrab doesn't even raise my blood pressure. I don't know enough about music to comment meaningfully on the skill of the artist in that regard. The lyrics seem fine enough but they don't catch me so I'm unwilling to invest the time to really analyze them so I find myself with a problem. I can't give meaningful critique to something I don't personally like. So instead, I'll criticise criticism.
In my opinion, good criticism requires good skepticism. A critique should be able to isolate variables and take the piece being examined on using clearly defined criteria and to eliminate bias as much as possible. In my experience, this is not at all how art is critiqued.
Most movie review, musical opinions and artistic critiques that I've encountered are based on post hoc rationalizations. That is, the critic feels something about what they are seeing or hearing and then comes up with reasons for their feelings after the fact.
I point you to two very disparate movie reviewers for evidence: The famed Roger Ebert has a ton of short reviews on the Chicago Sun-Times; Next there is Movie Bob who has some more comedic ones on The Escapist. I'd like you to pay attention to their respective A-team reviews. It's a pretty successful summer action flick and from the reviews, it's like there are two different movies. Ebert clearly hated it and Bob clearly loved it. What comes after that is their justification of their feelings. Both have compelling arguments for why they think the movie is good/bad but they can't both be right can they?
Obviously human opinion varies and people are going to have their own ideas about what makes something good or bad. My argument is that if you're going to critique something (especially professionally) you should be honest about it. State clearly what is based on your personal feelings and what is objective analysis. Realize that your feelings are influencing your reasoning and account for that.
I want to see Ebert to a review that goes something like this:
The cinematography was well done, though fairly typical for a film of this genre. The score was well composed and fit the piece extremely well. There were some extremely creative uses of prostheses and make up which could inform the practices of the rest of the industry. The story was well composed and was carried well by the script. The performances by all of the actors was exemplary, conveying believable emotion and giving character to each role. I hated every minute of it and would have rather have spent that ninety minutes doing differential calculus while salt was being poured on my open wounds.
Why do I think this is better that what we get? Because it clearly admits the feelings of the critic and reviews the movie based on its merits anyway. Can this be done fairly and regularly by humans? Probably not. Would the reviews be more entertaining and marketable if they did? Almost deffinitely not.
Oh well.
Good luck with your album George. Hopefully I'm in the minority.
Monday, July 26, 2010
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
The Art of Hoaxes
Sorry for the long delay between posts. It's gotten harder to find new stuff. Suggestions and discoveries from my VAST audience is always welcome.
Today I want to point you to HOAXART. It's a small collection of hoax videos. I think ///nightview is the most compelling hoax since they use the lack of video quality to hide the digital manipulation making it much more believable.
So is this art? I certainly think so. It's a definitely a creative endeavor for the creator. They have designed and crafted their conception of what an alien craft could be and furthermore presented it in a compelling way.
Is it skeptical? Totally. Hoaxing is something of a mainstay of skeptical thinkers. It's a wonderful way to show people how fallable they are and how easily they can be beguiled. The most famous photo of nessie, and the origin of crop circles are both famous hoaxes that their creators revealed years later.
More recently Penn and Teller did a Bigfoot hoax for their show Bullshit.
They purposely made it extremely poorly and still it garnered attention from the cryptozoological community. (Yes, that is a real word.)
So my conclusion: Well constructed hoaxes are a way to express a person's ideas of what could be while demonstrating to others how their own sense of reason can be manipulated.
I kind of want to make one now.
Today I want to point you to HOAXART. It's a small collection of hoax videos. I think ///nightview is the most compelling hoax since they use the lack of video quality to hide the digital manipulation making it much more believable.
So is this art? I certainly think so. It's a definitely a creative endeavor for the creator. They have designed and crafted their conception of what an alien craft could be and furthermore presented it in a compelling way.
Is it skeptical? Totally. Hoaxing is something of a mainstay of skeptical thinkers. It's a wonderful way to show people how fallable they are and how easily they can be beguiled. The most famous photo of nessie, and the origin of crop circles are both famous hoaxes that their creators revealed years later.
More recently Penn and Teller did a Bigfoot hoax for their show Bullshit.
They purposely made it extremely poorly and still it garnered attention from the cryptozoological community. (Yes, that is a real word.)
So my conclusion: Well constructed hoaxes are a way to express a person's ideas of what could be while demonstrating to others how their own sense of reason can be manipulated.
I kind of want to make one now.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
The Hoaxes of Art
Is there anything more beautiful that a masterfully executed hoax? Is there a more cunning way to force a people to admit that they can be fooled? I think not.
There have been some wonderful hoaxes throughout history, though it would seem that the 20th century saw the creation of a new kind of hoax: one that is meant to be found out. There have been snake oil salesmen, artifact and art forgers and liars of all sorts as long as there has been a market. The normal theme, though, is to profit and get out before anyone suspects anything. Or better yet, to keep the hoax going and gain a following of believers.
An apparently modern twist is to purposely expose the hoax as a fraud after it has been successfully executed. The purposes of this are varied but normally involve some level of making the hoaxed look foolish and making the hoaxers feel brilliant.
What does this have to do with art? Well there is of course an art to creating a good hoax, but that's for another post. Today I want to look at some hoaxes perpetrated with fine art.
The Museum of Hoaxes has a rather nice repository of good art hoaxes and I want to talk about a couple. The first is the incident of Pierre Brussau. Pierre was a modern artist working in the early 1960s in a non-representational or abstract, modern style. He was also a chimpanzee. His work was shown in an art show in sweden to rave reviews. The whole endeavour was to expose the fact that the abstract style couldn't be analyzed meaningfully by art critics. It showed that it was basically arbitrary whether or not the critics liked the work or not.
Another similar hoax was perpetrated by Naromji in 1946. Naromji was another modernist artist and was actually a man by the name of Jim Moran pranking the critics. He created the most meaningless colage he could think of and submitted it to an art show where it hung amongst other famous artists of the time. The interesting twist on this is that the value of the painting bounced around as different people claimed authorship. When Antheil delivered it, the association took it as a powerful work. When Moran exposed the Hoax, the painting was garbage. When an artist by the name of Kester later claimed it was his, the value was restored. As far as I'm concerned that made this hoax even more powerful. It exposed a painful truth in the art community that the name on a work is more highly valued than the work itself and the criticism that a work receives is heavily biased by the critic's view of the artist.
There have been some wonderful hoaxes throughout history, though it would seem that the 20th century saw the creation of a new kind of hoax: one that is meant to be found out. There have been snake oil salesmen, artifact and art forgers and liars of all sorts as long as there has been a market. The normal theme, though, is to profit and get out before anyone suspects anything. Or better yet, to keep the hoax going and gain a following of believers.
An apparently modern twist is to purposely expose the hoax as a fraud after it has been successfully executed. The purposes of this are varied but normally involve some level of making the hoaxed look foolish and making the hoaxers feel brilliant.
What does this have to do with art? Well there is of course an art to creating a good hoax, but that's for another post. Today I want to look at some hoaxes perpetrated with fine art.
The Museum of Hoaxes has a rather nice repository of good art hoaxes and I want to talk about a couple. The first is the incident of Pierre Brussau. Pierre was a modern artist working in the early 1960s in a non-representational or abstract, modern style. He was also a chimpanzee. His work was shown in an art show in sweden to rave reviews. The whole endeavour was to expose the fact that the abstract style couldn't be analyzed meaningfully by art critics. It showed that it was basically arbitrary whether or not the critics liked the work or not.
Another similar hoax was perpetrated by Naromji in 1946. Naromji was another modernist artist and was actually a man by the name of Jim Moran pranking the critics. He created the most meaningless colage he could think of and submitted it to an art show where it hung amongst other famous artists of the time. The interesting twist on this is that the value of the painting bounced around as different people claimed authorship. When Antheil delivered it, the association took it as a powerful work. When Moran exposed the Hoax, the painting was garbage. When an artist by the name of Kester later claimed it was his, the value was restored. As far as I'm concerned that made this hoax even more powerful. It exposed a painful truth in the art community that the name on a work is more highly valued than the work itself and the criticism that a work receives is heavily biased by the critic's view of the artist.
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
The language of truth
This is actually what started me on the whole skeptical art idea, the visual language used by museums.
When I was a kid I went to the Royal Ontario Museum and was fascinated by all of their impressive displays about the evolution of dinosaurs and how evolved into lizards. When I went back years later the same dinosaurs were there, but they were evolving into birds.
Now that I'm an adult I can visit a museum and read the signs deeply enough to catch the caveats and disclaimers about this being what "evidence suggests" and "the scientific consensus" scattered here and there in the longer blocks of text that everyone skips over to look at the compelling and scientific looking graphic beside the awe inspiring sculpture.
That brings me to my jump off point to all of this inquiry: What is a scientific looking? Why do we believe what we see in a museum with credulity? I have lots of hypotheses. I'm going to start with this.
We believe what we see in a museum because that's what the word "museum" means. A museum is where we keep history so that the public can see it. Scientists and learned people put those things there so they must be true. When we enter a museum, we leave our skepticism at the door and absorb everything we see as fact. Museums, at least those that I have visited, have a certain structure to their exhibits that tell us that what we're seeing is a museum piece. The cases, the labels the lighting and the poses of the sculptures all contribute. Also, the complimentary graphics that tend to emphasize form and detail over movements and composition tell us that the truth is more important than entertainment.
This visual language seems to have become so well understood that it can be abused. Enter the Museum of Creation. I shit you not. This is a real place. Their agenda is to present an interpretation of history that is coherent with a literal interpretation of the bible. How do they do it? By creating the same environment as a genuine natural history museum. Take their virtual tour. This is the same place as I visited as a kid but with different labels. If I wasn't versed in the sciences I would be entirely unable to discern between the facts being presented at each.
So my conclusion? We have, as a society, created and conformed to a visual language that lends credibility to its subject. That language can now be exploited by anyone with the resources to do so.
My solution? Introduce paradox. Create and present items using the visual language of the museum that can't possibly be true. Force the viewer to think critically about what they're seeing and hope that they can then apply that to future exhibits. My dream is to make a whole museum style exhibit full of visually compelling nonsense. Here's my prototype:
(I did say in my first post that at some point I would stroke my own ego)
In my mind I have an exhibit with interactive displays and fake fossils and some bigger skeletons and a whole evolutionary history based entirely on lies. I'm convinced that it will work because two strangers have already asked me if this guy is real.
When I was a kid I went to the Royal Ontario Museum and was fascinated by all of their impressive displays about the evolution of dinosaurs and how evolved into lizards. When I went back years later the same dinosaurs were there, but they were evolving into birds.
Now that I'm an adult I can visit a museum and read the signs deeply enough to catch the caveats and disclaimers about this being what "evidence suggests" and "the scientific consensus" scattered here and there in the longer blocks of text that everyone skips over to look at the compelling and scientific looking graphic beside the awe inspiring sculpture.
That brings me to my jump off point to all of this inquiry: What is a scientific looking? Why do we believe what we see in a museum with credulity? I have lots of hypotheses. I'm going to start with this.
We believe what we see in a museum because that's what the word "museum" means. A museum is where we keep history so that the public can see it. Scientists and learned people put those things there so they must be true. When we enter a museum, we leave our skepticism at the door and absorb everything we see as fact. Museums, at least those that I have visited, have a certain structure to their exhibits that tell us that what we're seeing is a museum piece. The cases, the labels the lighting and the poses of the sculptures all contribute. Also, the complimentary graphics that tend to emphasize form and detail over movements and composition tell us that the truth is more important than entertainment.
This visual language seems to have become so well understood that it can be abused. Enter the Museum of Creation. I shit you not. This is a real place. Their agenda is to present an interpretation of history that is coherent with a literal interpretation of the bible. How do they do it? By creating the same environment as a genuine natural history museum. Take their virtual tour. This is the same place as I visited as a kid but with different labels. If I wasn't versed in the sciences I would be entirely unable to discern between the facts being presented at each.
So my conclusion? We have, as a society, created and conformed to a visual language that lends credibility to its subject. That language can now be exploited by anyone with the resources to do so.
My solution? Introduce paradox. Create and present items using the visual language of the museum that can't possibly be true. Force the viewer to think critically about what they're seeing and hope that they can then apply that to future exhibits. My dream is to make a whole museum style exhibit full of visually compelling nonsense. Here's my prototype:
(I did say in my first post that at some point I would stroke my own ego)
In my mind I have an exhibit with interactive displays and fake fossils and some bigger skeletons and a whole evolutionary history based entirely on lies. I'm convinced that it will work because two strangers have already asked me if this guy is real.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
The borderline case.
As with so much else, skeptical art is on a continuum. On one end there is pure skeptical discussion such as one might find in the skeptical enquirer or, one might argue, scientific publications. On the far other end is art which happens to also encourage critical thinking but doesn't have an agenda. Somewhere between there we transition between art and discourse.
I think I have found a borderline case: the comic Cectic is very much a skeptical comic, but I find that it specifically engages in discourse rather than being ant artful endeavor. However it does use art, it does engage in skeptical activism and one could argue that there is some artistic satire.
Overall I see it as a borderline case, it doesn't clearly fall on either side of the line it sort of sits in the foggy middle.
I think I have found a borderline case: the comic Cectic is very much a skeptical comic, but I find that it specifically engages in discourse rather than being ant artful endeavor. However it does use art, it does engage in skeptical activism and one could argue that there is some artistic satire.
Overall I see it as a borderline case, it doesn't clearly fall on either side of the line it sort of sits in the foggy middle.
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
What I want to be when I grow up
I stumbled across this little gem yesterday. It's a creation of Clifton Burt based on a haiku by John Maeda. I found that it spoke to me on several levels.
Personally, this is what I am and what I enjoy being. I throw myself at projects and think about their implications and applications afterward.
What I love about this sign is how concisely it engages the viewer in a debate about order of operations and simultaneously extols active thought and reflection as a noble virtue. In science, the question is often raised about the value judgments and whether or not scientists adequately contemplate the implications of their work ahead of time. By specifically reversing the order and making it an ideal for which to strive, it makes us question its validity.
What I don't love about this is that it's not really a haiku. This has nothing to do with skepticism or art or anything like that. It's just a rant about the misinterpretation of an intricate art form upon appropriation. A haiku is a Japanese form of poetry with its roots in Zen Buddhism which focuses primarily on the contemplation and reverence of nature. Upon appropriation, western culture retained only the syllabic structure which is not only less important than the conceptual structure but also loses meaning when you change languages. I guess this does have some relations to skepticism. Every time I (and now you) see something someone calls a haiku, I think about how much can be lost in translation between language and culture and I think more critically about our imported culture.
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Best optical illusions of 2010
Yes, there are awards for this. I, for one, am happy that there are. I was introduced to the awards last year and they're all fascinating, but not all art.
This year's winner managed to do both. They created a simple sculpture and made a wonderful little video to mess with your head.
I highly recommend taking a trip to the awards site to see the other finalists.
This year's winner managed to do both. They created a simple sculpture and made a wonderful little video to mess with your head.
I highly recommend taking a trip to the awards site to see the other finalists.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)