vanitas

Willem Claesz - Still Life

Pieter Claesz - Vanitas

science and art

Science is often thought to rob the arts of their importance and vitality. How ironic that evolutionary theory leads to a conception of the arts as such an important part of our "social physiology" that they can even be regarded as vital organs.

Science allows us to appreciate art more because through science, we can begin to understand why it is that we crave art, need art.

music as sexual display

Geoffrey Miller attempts to explain music along with all forms of art as sexual display practiced mostly by men for the purpose of attracting women. After all, the typical music video consists of young male singers ostentatiously flashing their wealth amid a bevy of nubile half-naked women.

origin of dance

Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involves. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participating in collective ritual.

Most of us today think of dancing as a mating ritual perfhrmed by couples or something that we pay to watch professionals perform onstage, but most dancing throughout history has been a group affair. From military drill to ecstatic religious dances, the community dances of villages on festival occasions, and the tribal dances of indigenous people around the world, groups of people assemble to move their bodies in unison, sometimes for so long that they drop from exhaustion or pass into a trancelike state. The effect in all cases is to create a sense of unity among members of the group who have danced together.

- David Sloan Wilson

other uses of art

The gift of a work of art, has enormous tax-shelter potential unaffected by the IRS using a panel of appraisers to try to spot valuation abuses. A Degas may have a fair market value today of $1 million. The donor can get a tax deduction for that amount even though he picked it up for one-hundredth of that amount a mere decade ago.

looks ominous, must be god

art and money

Joseph Albers - Homage to the Square:
Yellow Resonance (1957)

Edward Ruscha - The Act of Letting a Person Into Your Home (1983)

Ed Ruscha - Untitled Panel 1 of 2 (2008)

Georgia O’Keefe, Ladder to the Moon, 1958

Jasper Johns - Flags I (1973)

art: does it cost a lot of money because it is beautiful or is it beautiful because it costs a lot of money?