Marcel Duchamp

May 31rst

Marcel Duchamp pioneered a movement called Ready-Made Art. He declared that ideas were more interesting to him than visual products that were merely "beautiful."  The MoMa website on Duchamp challenges us with the following questions. Today I am answering.


What should art provide the maker and the viewer?

Meaning

Who is it for?

Anyone it speaks to.

Where does one encounter art?

In the place where from and the formless meet. Which means, at ever turn, where ever our senses take us.

What is the role of the artist?

To facilitate the discovery of meaning, even if after careful inspection the meaning gets lost.

Art that stirs up controversy has no meaning for me.

Art should help us leave the realm of time and place 

where even our thoughts take a back seat.

Good Art takes us into a timeless spaceless dimension.

 Signed Izzy the Curator of the Bjorn Museum

Crystal Gardens gets some stained glass today.

 Crystal would like to have an outdoor garden of stained glass. 

So she hired Zoey to help her out. 

First she went to the library and find a book on stained glass. 

and here it is before she took it outside into the magic of the garden

Working on my two point perspective today.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Quote of the day

"Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire."

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

A Contribution to Statistics

Here's a great link that Becker brought to my attention

https://poetrywithmathematics.blogspot.com/2012/02/szymborska-1921-2012-on-statistics.html

Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska (1923-2012)  won the 1996 Nobel Prize for literature; I am saddened by her death-- yesterday, February 1, at her home in Krakow. But one cannot help but rejoice for her poems.  Szymborska did not shy from use of mathematical ideas.  As in this sample:

  

A Contribution to Statistics   by Wislawa Szymborska

    Out of every hundred people

    those who always know better:

   -- fifty-two,    

   doubting every step

   -- nearly all the rest,

   glad to lend a hand

   if it doesn't take too long:

  -- as high as forty-nine,

   always good,

   because they can't be otherwise:

   -- four, well maybe five,

   able to admire without envy

   -- eighteen,

   living in constant fear

   of someone or something

   -- seventy-seven.

   capable of happiness:

   -- twenty-something tops,

   harmless singly,

   savage in crowds

   -- half at least,

   cruel

   when forced by circumstances:

   -- better not to know,

   even b allpark figures,

   wise after the fact

   -- just a couple more

   than wise before it,

   taking only things from life

   -- forty

   (I wish I were wrong),

   hunched in pain,

   no flashlight in the dark

   -- eighty-three

   sooner or later,

   worthy of compassion

   -- ninety-nine.

   mortal

   -- a hundred out of one hundred.

   Thus far this figure still remains unchanged.

Domenico Ghirlandaio