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Does acquiring knowledge destroy our sense of wonder?

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Does acquiring knowledge destroy our sense of wonder?

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Can we separate the moral character of the artist from the artwork in the Visual Arts?

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what a TOK journal entry could/should look like-Lucie and TOK team

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what a TOK journal entry could/should look like-Lucie and TOK team

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TOK lesson Pia created-Subjectivity in the Arts

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TOK lesson Pia created-Subjectivity in the Arts

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Is subjectivity overly celebrated in the arts but unfairly condemned in history?

Discuss with reference to the arts and history

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Is subjectivity overly celebrated in the arts but unfairly condemned in history? Discuss with reference to the arts and history.

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Is subjectivity overly celebrated in the arts but unfairly condemned in history? Discuss with reference to the arts and history.

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Subjectivity is the personal perspective or interpretation that individuals bring to their understanding and appreciation of art and history. In the arts, subjectivity is often celebrated because it allows for diverse and unique expressions of creativity. Artistic subjectivity encourages individuality, emotional connection, and the exploration of different ideas and perspectives. It celebrates the idea that there is no one "right" way to interpret or appreciate art.

However, in history, subjectivity is often viewed with caution and can be unfairly condemned. History aims to provide an objective account of past events based on evidence and facts. Subjectivity in historical narratives can lead to biases, distortions, and the omission of certain perspectives, which undermines the pursuit of truth and accuracy.

While subjectivity in the arts is valued for its ability to foster creativity and self-expression, historical accounts should strive for objectivity to ensure a more comprehensive understanding of the past. It is important to acknowledge and critically analyze subjectivity in both the arts and history, celebrating it in the arts for its individualistic nature, while being cautious of its potential limitations when examining historical events.

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10 artworks that caused a scandal-what is shocking.

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10 artworks that caused a scandal-what is shocking.

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Occasionally, the urge to censor a controversial work has been acted upon by offended observers rather than cautious curators. Such was the case in October 2014, when US artist Paul McCarthy's huge inflatable sculpture Tree, erected as a Christmas display on the Place Vendôme in Paris, was fatally toppled by vandals and subsequently deflated. Once the sculpture's close resemblance to the shape of a sex prop was pointed out by commentators - a kinship that was, then, impossible to un-see - there was no protecting the colossal work from assault. Nor did the artist himself escape unscathed. An outraged attendee at the sculpture's installation confronted McCarthy and slapped his face three times before zipping off, like a popped balloon, into the crowd.

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Michelangelo's David and 10 artworks that caused a scandal

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Occasionally, the urge to censor a controversial work has been acted upon by offended observers rather than cautious curators. Such was the case in October 2014, when US artist Paul McCarthy's huge inflatable sculpture Tree, erected as a Christmas display on the Place Vendôme in Paris, was fatally toppled by vandals and subsequently deflated.

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he year 2022 was when AI-generated images went viral. Online, you may have come across very realistic yet suspiciously improbable images of, say, an astronaut riding a horse through space or an avocado doubling as an armchair.

Numerous new generators - including Dall-E, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion - offer anyone with an internet connection the chance to conjure up their own strange apparition, simply by typing in a "prompt" for the AI. (For example, "astronaut astride horse on Mars". Or, for this article, "Mark Rothko Abstract Expressionist oil painting" - yes, the image above isn't a real Rothko.) The possibilities have been endless, the opportunity for meme-making infinite.

It should not be surprising that a great many artists who have spent a lifetime honing their skills are a little put out by this latest disruption. Are companies going to keep hiring designers when they can produce prototypes themselves for free? Will budgets stretch to include animators if their hand can be imitated from a simple text description? Advocates of AI have insisted that creatives should have nothing to worry about and can adapt their process to incorporate or work around technological advances, much like the modernists did with the invention of photography.

But if those historical greats were alive and working today, would they also be watching their backs? And could a computer ever hope to reproduce the emotional depth that gives great art its charm and meaning?

To find out, we set a challenge for three art experts: Bendor Grosvenor, art historian and presenter of the BBC's Britain's Lost Masterpieces; JJ Charlesworth, art critic and editor of ArtReview; and Pilar Ordovas, founder of the Mayfair gallery Ordovas. Each was invited to look at pairs of artworks of a similar style and period over Zoom to see if they could tell which was generated by a machine. All three admitted to finding it tougher than expected ...

Bendor Grosvenor "When authenticating a painting, composition is usually the last thing I would look at, after brushstrokes and condition. The one on the left looks like New Zealand, with the cows a bit plonked in and the grass not particularly well painted - but I quite like the way the light falls on the hills. There's something about the picture on the right that looks a bit too good to be true. It's got the bright, contrasty clouds of a Constable and the winding river reminds me of the French Barbizon school. If you asked a computer to make a Constable, that's probably what it would come up with."

Verdict: correct "I think the AI image is quite impressive, actually. It's like a blend between a Corot and a Constable. I can't even draw a smiley face so take my artistic input with some scepticism, but I would say it needs a figure or a little boat to give it a focal point."

JJ Charlesworth "Landscape can mean a lot of things from a lot of places, and there's also the matter of whether it's good. On the painting on the right, there's something a bit confused at the edges and I'm not sure where the river goes ... but then some painters wouldn't have been too bothered about that. The left one seems to recall the American grand landscape painters. The foliage is weird at the front but the mountains have a humidity haze, there's the cows and a little ship puttering away. My hunch is that the left one is real, by a very conventional painter who understands the codes of the genre."

Verdict: correct "The modernist artists privileged compositional coherence with a degree of lyricism. It's easy for critics to detect when someone is doing it badly, but the machine doesn't notice. That tree in the middle is clumsy and I don't know whether a painter interested in how to put together a picture would have done it."

Pilar Ordovas "In real life, I would always look at the surface and the application of paint and would never judge an artwork from an image on Zoom. The one on the left doesn't feel real to me but, then again, I'm sure there is a landscape that looks like this somewhere in the world. With the one on the right, I can feel the water, the trees and the air, whereas the above painting just feels flat to me and pixelated, so I think it's fake."

Verdict: wrong "I wouldn't normally give judgment on a painting without viewing it in real life. I look at the right-hand picture and think of Corot and a number of other artists, so that's what it's done, right?"

BG "Even if these were two genuine works I wouldn't know where to begin. I can't think of anything interesting to say about either of them. One is probably an extremely famous thing that I should know about but I'm so rubbish on abstract art. I would go for the AI one being the squiggly one on the left because I feel there's something a little bit digitised about some of those scratch marks to the right. The picture on the right feels like the product of ... oh, I don't know! Yes, I'll stick with the one on the left being the AI."

Verdict: wrong " Well, the one on the right is better than the one on the left in my opinion. I don't really have that kind of thing on my wall but if you offered me the choice, I would actually go for the AI one. There's something slightly pleasing about the colours and shapes, a bit like a Ben Nicholson."

JC "Abstraction is obviously very anti-conventional and isn't anchored in figuration, so you have to assess each one on their own merits. There's actually more diversity in the left one, there's a deployment of these scratch marks that is quite complicated ... Put it this way, I find myself more drawn to it. The elements are speaking to each other more so it seems to have a motive. The right hand picture is pleasant enough but there is less structuring principle so, if it were by a human, I would struggle to care much about it."

Verdict: correct "With this genre it's very hard and the idea of cohering logic is important. Most abstract paintings come from a debate about what's necessary in the mind of the artist, rather than what's arbitrary. The one on the left seemed more subtle, but could be simulated from having seen too many Cy Twomblys."

PO "I'm not sure about the shapes and the lines in the image on the left, but it does make me think of very early Pollock, though less colourful. The one on the right could relate to many early works from some of the abstract expressionists or, perhaps, Tancredi and certain Italian artists from the 1950s and 60s. I'm sure the AI is looking at these existing works in order to create something based on them but I would still say the one on the right is real."

Verdict: wrong "When it's not by a particular artist you know very well, it's much harder to determine what feels wrong. With a specific artist you look at how they worked at a particular time, their colours, their compositions and what the feel of it should be. If it could be any artist, it's a bit random."

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BG " The plate of apples on the left looks like an Adriaen Coorte - quite sophisticated and I like the reflection on the plate. The flowers look quite simplistic and the petals don't quite work but I think you're playing a bit of a trick on me here ... because you can get still lifes from the period that look quite clunky and that's part of their appeal. So it's very tricky! The image on the right is full of what you would want to describe as deficiencies: the tablecloth looks like a bit of folded-up cardboard. However, I think it might be genuine because I can see cracks on the surface that I don't think the AI would put there. If it has, it's very, very clever."

Verdict: wrong "Really? Wow, I didn't know it could do that. Well that's very good."

JC "The right one looks familiar. You get the over-stylised flowers in quite a number of still lifes. The bland apples, or pears, whatever they are, on the left ... I think there's a rather clumsy idea of which side you put the red on and I find them rather lifeless and dull. There is too much attention on the reflection on the plate, the colouration seems wrong and I'm not sure why the leaves are so decayed. It could be an artist who nobody bought very much of because he was depressing. On a snap judgment, I'm inclined to say that one is fake."

Verdict: wrong "Well, there are a few alarm bells. There's a slightly confused moment where that red flower on the left is curling off a stem that seems to connect with the blue one. These paintings were aspiring to realism before the existence of photographic realism, so there is often a peculiarity in pre-photographic painting."

PO "The picture on the right looks more like a Dutch still life for me with the flowers. The colours are not quite right but it could be a terrible reproduction. The one on the left looks more Spanish than Dutch to me. The imperfect leaves on the pear are really good, as is the shadow on the plate, so I think that one is real. Still lifes are all about symbolism and the fragility of life, with the wilted leaves sort of eaten up. It relates more to what the artist would have been interested in then."

Verdict: correct "The work on the right just feels empty of all the meaning that you would expect to see in this period. Still life is not just a beautiful vase of flowers or fruits, it's actually laden with feeling. With abstract art it's much more random, so with that it may be harder to make a judgment."

BG The image on the left, from what I can see, is quite spontaneous and creative. I can see sketchiness and the canvas is showing through, whereas the one on the right looks a bit glossy. I'm a little suspicious about the cobbles, they look off as does the tree - or the lamp-post, is it a lamp-post? - on the far right ... I want to say the image on the left is genuine but who is the woman talking to? It looks like a splodge. I'll go with it being human made just because it feels a little bit more rough and ready.

Verdict: correct Well I should know what a Manet looks like, but at least I figured out it was by a human! The picture on the right is almost a little bit too good to be true, like the computer's trying a bit too hard to do a Pissarro or something like that.

JC The one on the right is too orderly, it strikes me that the depth is a little bit obvious and the trees are too repetitive. It feels like an image that understands 3D modelling rather than looking. The one on the left has all the curious incoherence of impressionist preoccupations - blurred distance, indifference ... These are human values that have a certain pathos to them and I just don't get that in the other one. Typically, the street scene was about time, place and boredom, but this seems to me to be prosaic, there's no attention to anything and quite a banal mood.

Verdict: correct Creating a sense of attention is not simply a matter of understanding figures and orchestrating them formally, there's also these quite intangible issues of mood, place and emotion. That doesn't necessarily mean it couldn't have been an image generated by an AI trained on Manet.

PO With impressionism, the surface would tell you everything. However, in the work on the right the colours look off to me and the whites are really, really white. You can hardly see the faces in the foreground. Sometimes with avant garde art you do get odd colours but they make sense and have emotion. This has no depth and the figures look a bit floaty. The composition on the left is very different. It looks like it has a pastelly finish, which may be the AI imitating pastel but there is something that rings more true.

Verdict: correct It's interesting how in the picture on the right, the two figures near the front are almost faceless but in the image on the left you see a face, so it feels human. I am surprised, I thought these comparisons were going to be more obvious but they weren't at all in some cases.

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Is this by Rothko or a robot? We ask the experts to tell the difference between human and AI art

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he year 2022 was when AI-generated images went viral. Online, you may have come across very realistic yet suspiciously improbable images of, say, an astronaut riding a horse through space or an avocado doubling as an armchair.

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TOK powerpoint slides for bell ringers daily.... Valerie R.

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From the guide-the links that we could make

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From the guide-the links that we could make

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Questions related to TOK that a visual arts student might consider include the following.

To what extent is artistic knowledge something which cannot be expressed in any other way?

Are ways of knowing employed in radically different ways in the arts than in other areas of knowledge?

To what extent does imagination play a special role in the visual arts?

What moral responsibilities do artists have?

How can the subjective viewpoint of an individual contribute to knowledge in the arts?

What are the standards by which we judge artworks?

Why might we be more concerned with process rather than product in the search for knowledge?

Do the arts have a social function?

To what extent is truth different in the arts, mathematics and ethics?

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FRAMEWORKS for analysis Appropriation and Contemporary Frameworks

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FRAMEWORKS for analysis Appropriation and Contemporary Frameworks

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Really great lines of questioning

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Scope:

• Do the disciplines in the arts diverge from one another more fundamentally than disciplines within other areas of knowledge?

• Does new knowledge in the arts always build on what is already known?

• How have new technologies changed the nature and scope of the arts as an area of knowledge?

• Are the arts best seen as a system of knowledge, a type of knowledge or a means of expressing knowledge?

• Is artistic knowledge something that cannot be expressed in any other way?

• Is the relationship between “knowing how” and “knowing that” different in the arts compared to other areas of knowledge? Does art enlarge what it is possible for us to think and know?

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Methods and Tools:

• Does convention play a different role in the arts compared to other areas of knowledge?

• Does sense perception perform a radically different role in the arts compared to other areas of knowledge?

• If the language of an art form is non-verbal, does this free it from being limited to propositional knowledge?

• Can some knowledge in the arts only be gained through experience? How does the medium used change the way that knowledge is produced, shared or understood?

• To what extent are the methods of justification different in the arts compared to other areas of knowledge?

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Perspectives:

• What are the justifications for, and implications of, claiming that there are absolute standards for “good art”?

• Who determines what art is valued, and on what criteria?

• Should your judgments about art be given the same weight as those of an expert?

• What role does the history of an artform play in evaluating present work?

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In what ways are moral judgments similar to, or different from, aesthetic judgments?

• Do the arts play a role in the development of our personal value systems?

• How important is the study of literature in our individual ethical development?

• Is the production and enjoyment of art subject to ethical constraints?

• On what criteria could it be decided if the state has the right to censor art that is deemed immoral or blasphemous?

• Do the arts have the power to challenge established moral values?

• Are moral and aesthetic judgments more a matter of taste than a matter of truth?

• Can we separate the moral character of the artist from the value of the artwork?

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Prompts for knowledge questions.

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Choose from a wide variety of shapes to create diagrams and charts. Free from Google.

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A list of video's that link art and theory together

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A list of video's that link art and theory together

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Videos to help understand some key concepts in the IB Theory of Knowledge (TOK) course.

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Making Judgements About Art from the Museum of Bad Art

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Create a new document and edit with others at the same time -- from your computer, phone or tablet. Get stuff done with or without an internet connection. Use Docs to edit Word files. Free from Google.

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Some interesting articles on this website about theories and ideas in the modern world.

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Some interesting articles on this website about theories and ideas in the modern world.

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Making the Inevitable Obvious

It's my birthday. I'm 68. I feel like pulling up a rocking chair and dispensing advice to the young 'uns. Here are 68 pithy bits of unsolicited advice which I offer as my birthday present to all of you.

* Learn how to learn from those you disagree with, or even offend you. See if you can find the truth in what they believe.

* Being enthusiastic is worth 25 IQ points.

* Always demand a deadline. A deadline weeds out the extraneous and the ordinary. It prevents you from trying to make it perfect, so you have to make it different. Different is better.

* Don't be afraid to ask a question that may sound stupid because 99% of the time everyone else is thinking of the same question and is too embarrassed to ask it.

* Being able to listen well is a superpower. While listening to someone you love keep asking them "Is there more?", until there is no more.

* A worthy goal for a year is to learn enough about a subject so that you can't believe how ignorant you were a year earlier.

* Gratitude will unlock all other virtues and is something you can get better at.

* Treating a person to a meal never fails, and is so easy to do. It's powerful with old friends and a great way to make new friends.

* Don't trust all-purpose glue.

* Reading to your children regularly will bond you together and kickstart their imaginations.

* Never use a credit card for credit. The only kind of credit, or debt, that is acceptable is debt to acquire something whose exchange value is extremely likely to increase, like in a home. The exchange value of most things diminishes or vanishes the moment you purchase them. Don't be in debt to losers.

* Pros are just amateurs who know how to gracefully recover from their mistakes.

* Extraordinary claims should require extraordinary evidence to be believed.

* Don't be the smartest person in the room. Hangout with, and learn from, people smarter than yourself. Even better, find smart people who will disagree with you.

* Rule of 3 in conversation. To get to the real reason, ask a person to go deeper than what they just said. Then again, and once more. The third time's answer is close to the truth.

* Don't be the best. Be the only.

* Everyone is shy. Other people are waiting for you to introduce yourself to them, they are waiting for you to send them an email, they are waiting for you to ask them on a date. Go ahead.

* Don't take it personally when someone turns you down. Assume they are like you: busy, occupied, distracted. Try again later. It's amazing how often a second try works.

* The purpose of a habit is to remove that action from self-negotiation. You no longer expend energy deciding whether to do it. You just do it. Good habits can range from telling the truth, to flossing.

* Promptness is a sign of respect.

* When you are young spend at least 6 months to one year living as poor as you can, owning as little as you possibly can, eating beans and rice in a tiny room or tent, to experience what your "worst" lifestyle might be. That way any time you have to risk something in the future you won't be afraid of the worst case scenario.

* Trust me: There is no "them".

* The more you are interested in others, the more interesting they find you. To be interesting, be interested.

* Optimize your generosity. No one on their deathbed has ever regretted giving too much away.

* To make something good, just do it. To make something great, just re-do it, re-do it, re-do it. The secret to making fine things is in remaking them.

* The Golden Rule will never fail you. It is the foundation of all other virtues.

* If you are looking for something in your house, and you finally find it, when you're done with it, don't put it back where you found it. Put it back where you first looked for it.

* Saving money and investing money are both good habits. Small amounts of money invested regularly for many decades without deliberation is one path to wealth.

* To make mistakes is human. To own your mistakes is divine. Nothing elevates a person higher than quickly admitting and taking personal responsibility for the mistakes you make and then fixing them fairly. If you mess up, fess up. It's astounding how powerful this ownership is.

* Never get involved in a land war in Asia.

* You can obsess about serving your customers/audience/clients, or you can obsess about beating the competition. Both work, but of the two, obsessing about your customers will take you further.

* Show up. Keep showing up. Somebody successful said: 99% of success is just showing up.

* Separate the processes of creation from improving. You can't write and edit, or sculpt and polish, or make and analyze at the same time. If you do, the editor stops the creator. While you invent, don't select. While you sketch, don't inspect. While you write the first draft, don't reflect. At the start, the creator mind must be unleashed from judgement.

* If you are not falling down occasionally, you are just coasting.

* Perhaps the most counter-intuitive truth of the universe is that the more you give to others, the more you'll get. Understanding this is the beginning of wisdom.

* Friends are better than money. Almost anything money can do, friends can do better. In so many ways a friend with a boat is better than owning a boat.

* This is true: It's hard to cheat an honest man.

* When an object is lost, 95% of the time it is hiding within arm's reach of where it was last seen. Search in all possible locations in that radius and you'll find it.

* You are what you do. Not what you say, not what you believe, not how you vote, but what you spend your time on.

* If you lose or forget to bring a cable, adapter or charger, check with your hotel. Most hotels now have a drawer full of cables, adapters and chargers others have left behind, and probably have the one you are missing. You can often claim it after borrowing it.

* Hatred is a curse that does not affect the hated. It only poisons the hater. Release a grudge as if it was a poison.

* There is no limit on better. Talent is distributed unfairly, but there is no limit on how much we can improve what we start with.

* Be prepared: When you are 90% done any large project (a house, a film, an event, an app) the rest of the myriad details will take a second 90% to complete.

* When you die you take absolutely nothing with you except your reputation.

* Before you are old, attend as many funerals as you can bear, and listen. Nobody talks about the departed's achievements. The only thing people will remember is what kind of person you were while you were achieving.

* For every dollar you spend purchasing something substantial, expect to pay a dollar in repairs, maintenance, or disposal by the end of its life.

*Anything real begins with the fiction of what could be. Imagination is therefore the most potent force in the universe, and a skill you can get better at. It's the one skill in life that benefits from ignoring what everyone else knows.

* When crisis and disaster strike, don't waste them. No problems, no progress.

* On vacation go to the most remote place on your itinerary first, bypassing the cities. You'll maximize the shock of otherness in the remote, and then later you'll welcome the familiar comforts of a city on the way back.

* When you get an invitation to do something in the future, ask yourself: would you accept this if it was scheduled for tomorrow? Not too many promises will pass that immediacy filter.

* Don't say anything about someone in email you would not be comfortable saying to them directly, because eventually they will read it.

* If you desperately need a job, you are just another problem for a boss; if you can solve many of the problems the boss has right now, you are hired. To be hired, think like your boss.

* Art is in what you leave out.

* Acquiring things will rarely bring you deep satisfaction. But acquiring experiences will.

* Rule of 7 in research. You can find out anything if you are willing to go seven levels. If the first source you ask doesn't know, ask them who you should ask next, and so on down the line. If you are willing to go to the 7th source, you'll almost always get your answer.

* How to apologize: Quickly, specifically, sincerely.

* Don't ever respond to a solicitation or a proposal on the phone. The urgency is a disguise.

* When someone is nasty, rude, hateful, or mean with you, pretend they have a disease. That makes it easier to have empathy toward them which can soften the conflict.

* Eliminating clutter makes room for your true treasures.

* You really don't want to be famous. Read the biography of any famous person.

* Experience is overrated. When hiring, hire for aptitude, train for skills. Most really amazing or great things are done by people doing them for the first time.

* A vacation + a disaster = an adventure.

* Buying tools: Start by buying the absolute cheapest tools you can find. Upgrade the ones you use a lot. If you wind up using some tool for a job, buy the very best you can afford.

* Learn how to take a 20-minute power nap without embarrassment.

* Following your bliss is a recipe for paralysis if you don't know what you are passionate about. A better motto for most youth is "master something, anything". Through mastery of one thing, you can drift towards extensions of that mastery that bring you more joy, and eventually discover where your bliss is.

* I'm positive that in 100 years much of what I take to be true today will be proved to be wrong, maybe even embarrassingly wrong, and I try really hard to identify what it is that I am wrong about today.

* Over the long term, the future is decided by optimists. To be an optimist you don't have to ignore all the many problems we create; you just have to imagine improving our capacity to solve problems.

* The universe is conspiring behind your back to make you a success. This will be much easier to do if you embrace this pronoia.

There are two orders of risk: First Order and Second Order.

We see car accidents and we read about plane accidents yet we use both cars and planes. We wear a seat belt, and we fly on planes, because we know the risk profile of automobiles and planes - high risk for cars, low risk for planes. The risks of flu, Ebola, lightning, vaccinations, skydiving, of most things are known statistically. Since we know the risk profile we can calculate our response, and how much risk we want to accept. This known risk profile is First Order Risk. We can research the risk and then evaluate our response.

The issue with the novel covid-19 is that its risk profile is completely unknown. It is what we can call a Second Order Risk. We don't know how contagious it is; we don't know how lethal it is; we don't know the age, condition, type of person it favors. And we probably won't know with any certainty for several years. So we can't calculate our response. It's a known unknown. (The unknown unknown is a Third Order Risk.)

Therefore this great uncertainty about the covid-19 virus creates a Second Order Risk profile, and that profile with its huge range of limits suggests extraordinary caution is warranted - even if it laters proves to be a low First Order Risk.

[Written 28/02/2020. Updated 05/03/2020. Updated 15/05/2020.]

My guess is that we'll be wrong about our assumptions and first impressions about the Covid-19 virus. I just don't know how we'll be wrong. In an attempt to not be wrong myself, I am trying to open myself it unexpected scenarios, since whatever does eventually happen will probably be unexpected.

There are a lot of expected scenarios for the virus. One expected scenario that it will be a massive truly global pandemic that kills hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. It started in China, then hops around the world, constantly escaping the noose of containment, until every country is eventually affected. That scenario is entirely possible; no one would be surprised if it happened, including me. After all, the flu virus kills hundreds of thousands of people even year, so this virus needs to be "only" as mortal as flu.

Another expected scenario is that this is a deadly disease that needs drastic efforts like massive quarantines, and that through great effort like these measures, the disease is stamped out early without huge loses. And with enough global cooperation, Covid-19 could be eradicated like SARS was. Also possible.

Another scenario being articulated in recent days is that this coronovirus will sort of be controlled in the coming months, that it may diminish as summer comes, but not be eradicated, and will show up next winter as fierce or even fiercer. It might even become like flu, a perennial plague. Very possible.

But I don't think these are unexpected enough. So I am working on more unusual ones. One unlikely but possible scenario is that this "novel" virus is not really novel. Because its symptoms are generally mild and very similar to other symptoms from flu and other viruses, it may have been circulating around the globe for a while, without a name. It can be transmitted by people who have no symptoms at the time or even while they have the virus. If the majority of people infected don't ever get sick, but easily pass it on, then it can spread widely unseen. Evidence for this is new virus DNA sequencing which suggests the first cases of Covid-19 in Washington state may have been there 6 weeks earlier, but was completely undetected. So for six weeks the virus is spreading with little damage. But once people begin to look, and devise a test, the next person to get sick is tested, and it seems as if the virus just appeared, when it has been there a while.

But a few are susceptible to it and die. Because the symptoms are not unique to it, this illness is assumed to be flu or something else. Then something happened in China to produce notice - maybe someone created a test for it - and then as people died, the new test found many people positive. So the test was spread around and with that we suddenly find many positive results. Then when a few people later get sick in distant countries like Iran, the test shows positive results because the virus was already there, maybe even years earlier.

In this scenario, cases will start to pile up very quickly, not because the virus is spreading, but because testing is spreading. One way to check the real rate of infection is to begin to test random asymptomatic people to see what percent are infected. It could very well be at least 2% of the random population right now.

If this scenario is true then at some point in the future there'll be evidence found for the virus in samples way before the "first" known case in Wuhan in fall of 2019. Perhaps the virus underwent a mutation in Wuhan, a mutation that current tests don't distinguish from earlier forms.

Yet another alternative scenario: Perhaps today there are already more than one variant of Covid-19, and these mutations are not equally detected by current tests. A recent study says there may be two variants with different levels of potency, which could explain why some clusters are more deadly than others. There could be multiple variants in the wild with different rates of contagion. It's possible the current test may be unreliable in detecting all the variants, either way, over-reporting and under-reporting different strands.

Another scenario is that there is more than one variant of the virus and each of these variants have different lethality and infection rates. So the virus that is raging through Italy and causing a lot of damage may not be the same virus that is creeping through the US. There is some suggestions that the virus in the US is related to the one from Wuhan, but the actual details of difference may matter greatly. As far as I can tell the tests the US is using to identify the virus is not the same test that is being used in Italy or Iran. So it is possible that different tests are masking the different viruses, which may be creating different symptoms. An extension of this same scenario is that there may be more than two variants of the disease with different behaviors circulating in the same population, and that the current tests are not detecting this difference.

In the same vein, another scenario is that the virus is being over-reported because it is being over-diagnosed. Perhaps the tests that are being used in places like Iran, Italy or Korea are not all testing the same thing. How did all these stations get the same test so fast? How was Korea able to test 10,000 people per day, as they claim. What exactly are they testing. Who made these tests? What equipment are they using? Because I was curious I found two firms making Covid-19 test kits. PrimerDesign is UK-based and claims to be shipping kits to the US. No price is given on their website. The other is Chinese firm Sansure, which seems to have a device or system, rather than a kit. There seems to be a suggestion that either/both of these are selling their systems to public health departments round the world and this is what is being used to test for the virus, but it is not clear to me they are. If not them, what is the test they are using in the hundreds to test for this virus?

From recent New York Times news reports from Italy (Feb 28, 2020) it seems that if you use one kind of test and test people who have no symptoms, many will test positive for Covid-19. What's odd is that the positive tested have no contact with anyone with symptoms either. Likewise, as reported, in Germany, officials spent great effort to determine the chain of infection for a German man who tested positive for Covid-19 but were unable to link him to anyone infected. The virus might be especially transmittable with zero symptoms, or the tests are inaccurate.

It's possible this virus will join the flu virus as a perennial plague, one that we never get rid of, that continues to mutate and returns every year. It could be another flu that we try to deal with vaccines but will still prey on the old and infirmed. It might be that there will not be some moment, so week when the epidemic is declared over. Instead, there's just a background level of outbreaks as it migrates around the world.

Some conspiracists offer the scenario that the virus is man-made and escaped from China's first level 4 biohazard research lab which was built recently in Wuhan. A deliberate release of a pathogen seems very unlikely given how much it hurt China. It is possible some research experiment could have escaped but since the Level 4 facility is designed against this, I'd call this unlikely, but possible.

Another radical scenario that is also in the conspiratorial camp is that there have been massive numbers of cases and deaths in China, maybe hundreds of times more than they are reporting, which suggests that the virus is extremely potent and contagious, far more than current data suggests. The top-level secrecy and censoring in China make this scenario believable but it's also unlikely given the virus's behavior in other countries outside of China. And the scale of the cover-up needed seems very unlikely given my own experience in China: they would be the first to report it to each other.

If my scenario about Covid-19 being older and already global, here are some predictions that would be testable: 1) We would find retro samples of symptom-free blood more than a year old will test positive. 2) Consensus that in 2019 and in early 2020 multiple mutants and variants of Covid-19 were on the loose. 3) Because of its asymptomatic transmission it will still be found in the wild a year from now.

There are probably more scenarios that I have not considered, but should. Please leave a comment if you have one.

The emergence of YouTube sites that provide virtual friendship, companionship, and cater to loneliness. Link.

The Economist interviewed an AI to ask it about the future of AI. It gave coherent answers. But they weren't what the AI thought. The answers it gave were what the AI thought the internet thought. Still, impressive. Link.

Science has not destroyed religion. Link.

Important uncertainty: the untested legality of streaming video games, particularly for profit (see Twitch). Link.

Innovation and discoveries are becoming more expensive because the easy ones have already been found. Future innovations will cost more. Link.

Pure Gibsonian future : Red state American farmers hacking their tractors with Ukrainian pirateware. Link.

Universal translation by AI will increase global prosperity. When eBay improved its translation functions it increased their commerce by 11 percent. Imagine what prosperity will come from earbuds that give instant, free, real time language translation to all workers. Link.

Bill Gibson had some interesting things to say in this interview about his new book Agency.

"I have a nagging suspicion that evolution (a wholly random process, though too few of us understand that) has left most of us unable to grasp the idea of an actual apocalypse being possibly of several centuries' duration. The jackpot began one or two hundred years ago, it seems to me. I myself can dimly recall a world before utterly ubiquitous injection-molded plastics. Toys were of metal, wood, rubber. Styrene was as exotic as Gore-tex, briefly. I'm yet to discover any record of a culture whose imagined apocalypse was a matter of centuries. I doubt anyone has ever stood out on a street corner wearing a sandwich board reading, "THE WORLD IS COMING TO AN END IN A FEW HUNDRED YEARS." Even before we became as aware as some of us now are of climate change, and of the fact that our species has inadvertently caused it, we seemed to be losing our sense of a capital-F Future. Few phrases were as common throughout the 20th century as "the 21st century," yet how often do we see "the 22nd century"? Effectively, never."

One of the best future scenarios of the next decade - 2020s - by @fredwilson . It is hard to be not obvious and not implausible at the same time, but Fred is neither. It helps he is optimistic. What Will Happen In The 2020s.""

This is true: "To a degree still difficult for outsiders to absorb, China is preparing to shape the twenty-first century, much as the U.S. shaped the twentieth." From the must read article:

The question "why do the Chinese people like their current government?" is answered here with great intelligence, insight and empathy. I think this article is 100% correct from my personal experience of my extensive time in China. Link.

Deep fakes are getting better each day. Here is a holiday melody of one actor doing a series of impressions speaking, while the AI does an impression visually. Link.

It is a thing: Mukbang (mook bong) are live streaming videos of the host eating, often over-eating huge meals. It started in Korea and is now a sizable global phenom. Link.

Quibi is a $1 billion experiment in video streaming. Some if its ideas will work, many won't. We won't know which until it launches. Link.

New trend: naming boys with action-words, like Charger, Trooper, Stryker. Great article about new styles in naming children. Link.

The case for a 100-year bond. Link.

Using state-of-the-art technology to add a glowing trace of a hockey puck on TV was a brilliant innovation that did not stick. Perhaps it was too early to be accepted, but it did change sports viewing. And perhaps the time is right to bring it, or something like it, back. The history of the glowing puck:

In response to highly overworked urban lives, some young Chinese are dropping out, almost becoming Chinese hippies. Here is a short video on early hippy pioneers.

Major change brewing: "Before long, most of our food will come neither from animals nor plants, but from unicellular life." Good summary anticipation. Link.

An emerging alternative theory for chronic diseases such as Alzheimer's and diabetes (among others) is that the underlying cause is bacterial. If true, this is huge. Link.

Great TED talk on the 7 principles of building a livable city by Peter Calthorpe. Based on his experience doing urban planning in California and China. Link.

The superiority of knobs. The US navy is reverting back to physical throttles after sailors reject touch screen controls because they were too complex. Link.
Further steps toward a virtual movie studio. One step is a combined real and virtual model. Short video clip.

By trying to model oceans in detail, astronomers hope to simulate possible Earth-like planets capable of detectable life, and are concluding that oceans play a huge role in creating diverse life on Earth. It may be that other planets, with other oceans, may yield even life more diverse than on this planet. Link.

How to get really good - world class - at something. Don't just practice the flow. Try to fail in practice. More tips here.

In biology the Red Queen hypothesis is well known. I had not heard of the Black Queen hypothesis: organisms shed genes for functions adjacent organisms provide. Link.

Ghost-kitchens are virtual restaurants that are visible only as an app on a phone. The kitchen is not opened to the public, often hard to find, but serves food delivered via online sales. Uber Eats, Grubhub and other apps cater niche food prepared by hidden kitchens.

Walking is a superpower. When you walk you increase many cognitive functions. I know that is true for me. A scientist offers some evidence in a new book In Praise of Walking (I have not read). Article about the book here.

A job for humans: teaching the AIs to see. It's now a big business. See this article on the startup, Scale.

Using virtual reality to swap bodies and give your self advice. Weird, but early experiments suggest it works. Link.

Forgetting may not be a malfunction of memory, but a key component of memory. In other words you may not be able to remember or deal with the future unless you forget. Recent science. Link.

"Why Humans Will Never Colonize Mars" is a very strong argument, one that I agree with. Link.

A well-argued proposal for a new science of progress and setting up a new discipline of Progress Studies. I think this would be a highly productive investment for society. Link.

Are you up to speed? DYK "China has more than 425 million live-streamers." Many earn money live-streaming. Some use face filters to make them look more beautiful. Except when they break. Story link:

Insightful article about the business models of online/video games. Says "it turns out the most effective way to generate billions of dollars is to not require a player spend a single one." Link.

This album of tiny video experiments is sweet, lovely, brilliant, useless and cool - in other words, art. Link.

So-called Influencers don't influence. According a 2007 paper by Duncan Watts, "large scale changes in public opinion are not driven by highly influential people who influence everyone else, but rather by easily influenced people, influencing other easily influenced people." Link.

This is super great! A chat bot wastes the time of a scam telemarketer. I want one of these. Link.

In-depth exploration of the real dilemma in video game architecture between "free to act" and "guided story." A super fan of Red Dead Redemption goes deep with entertaining analysis in long YouTube episode. Link.

Extensible games is a neat new concept. When you gain levels, powers, tokens, characters in one game, you can transfer them, securely and honestly, to other games via a blockchain technology. Link.

By 2025 the next car you buy will probably be an electric car manufactured in China. Link. /

I recommend this deep dive into the precarious state of grocery chains in the US, and why their future is moving away from transactions (owned by Amazon) and into the realm of experiences. This move is not just about grocery stores. It applies to all product and industrial businesses. Link.

New Coke didn't fail because it tasted bad. It failed because it was new and its brand was nostalgic and the cranks took over. Great writing about the true story. Link.

The science of video gaming, and an appreciation. Excerpt: "I might go further and say traveling in imaginary spaces rivals the experiences of traveling in real ones, like Venice and Rome, Lima and Machu Picchu, as I have in my life. Both the imaginary and real are emotionally moving and immersive." Link.

Global Greening: Increased CO2 in the atmosphere is plant food. Wild plants of all kinds are growing faster around the world, sequestering CO2 into biomass. This is not the whole climate story, but it should not be ignored. Good summary by Matt Ridley here.

Once a modern heresy, non-Darwinian inheritance, aka Lamarkism, increasing can be shown to sometimes happen in nature. Case in point this recent paper. Question is: how common or important is it ordinarily.

One necessary aspect of the Mirrorworld is scanning the real world in full volumetric 3D. This demo of Matterport's scanning ability is pretty impressive. They scan Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West.

TikTok, Chinese-owned video music platform, is creating a whole new genre of music video - the music meme, or memetic music, in 15 second clips that spread virally. This ear-opening article is a good introduction. Link.

There's a yearly contest run by JPL for the best strategy to settle 100,000 star systems with human habitation 10,000 years from now. If you have a plan, you submit a simulation based on technology yet to be invented. Link.

The US is headed down a risky path toward 5G that is different from the rest of the world, while China is leading the rest along the other more doable path. Good explanation in @WIRED. This was a solid, essential, correct piece. I have not seen the argument made elsewhere. It was the article I hoped Wired would run. Link.

What color is the future? If you google "futuristic" you get images in blue and black. Why is that? Good thread on Twitter here.

There is not too much about technology that I worry about. But one technological area I do worry a lot about is cyber war, cyber security, cyber conflict. My worry stems from the lack of accountability and the lack of consensus in this arena. It is devilishly difficult to discern what is being done cyberwise, and who is doing it. At the same time, there is no consensus about which actions need to be disclosed, or monitored, or verified. Nor is there real consensus on what actions are allowed, permitted, prohibited, discouraged, or encouraged. Finally, there are no limits, remedies, restrictions that can be enforced.

What this means is that right now there are huge cyber operations happening around the world every day. Some of these are defensive, but many are offensive attacks. Systems are breached, probed, potential damage is rehearsed, future secret entrances installed, small things are broken. The US, China, Russia, Isreal, Iran, North Korea - to name some of the most active countries - plus many more non-state, quasi-state, organized crime agents, like hacker groups, are involved in huge maneuvers that are invisible to the rest of the world. Increasingly these data vs data conflicts are touching the physical infrastructure. The world's electrical grids, transportation networks, hospitals, water systems all depend on an intangible data structure, where these skirmishes are taking place. So far only a few incursions have crippled physical civic services; a hospital is cut from electricity, or traffic lights are disrupted. My worry is that because there is neither transparency nor agreed norms, these mutual attacks will escalate until something horrible happens. There is no push-back on this arms race. The public doesn't see it, and the experts who do see it, don't agree on where to go.

We beings on this planet have evolved an elaborate set of rules about how to conduct war. Weirdly we have agreed on how to kill each other. Some ways are okay and some are not. You can't kill someone you take asprisoner. You can't intentionally kill children. You can't torture. Etc. As new weapons were invented we added them to our agreement. We have agreed to avoid using nuclear bombs (although some countries, including the US, still make them).

Cyber weapons are new, and have not been included in our agreements. In war is it okay to take down a nation's banking system? Is it permissible to disable everyone's phones? Should the world accept hacking interference in another nation's election?

Problematic weapons like nuclear, chemical, and biological ones, have extensive, complicated programs of verification to make sure our collective agreement is adhered to. Part of that process is self-reporting, self-disclosure by those who posses these weapons. None of this disclosure is happening in cyberspace.

None of the countries active in using these new weapons will acknowledge they have the weapons; they deny they are using them, and don't even communicate when others use the weapons against them. There is a conspiracy of silence in cyberwar. That is the danger.

This silence and denial also creates cover for non-state attacks by criminals, rouge state hackers, naive teenage hackers, to do damage. They are hidden behind the same cloak that nations are hiding behind. Together state and non-state hacking can add up to a potentially mutual destruction. Today every developed country is potentially very vulnerable to a cyber attack. And soon every developed country will be capable of delivering a crippling attack.

We have nuclear arms treaty because we realized we had the capability of mutual destruction . Our next step is to realize we have the capability of mutual CYBER destruction. The remedy issimilar: a global agreement on acceptable use of cyber weapons, and a public accounting of those weapons.

A significant hurdle for the accountability of cyber weapons is their close alignment with intelligence gathering. Cyberwar is fought with information, and information is the heart of intelligence. It is very difficult to unravel cyber weapons from cyber tools. There is the thinnest line between hacking a system to learn about it (intelligence gathering) and hacking it to learn how to damage it (reconnaissance) or hacking it to damage it (war). The same tools (weapons?) may be used in each case.

Understandably, the intelligence departments of nations are reluctant to reveal their methods, or share their tools, or in any way handicap themselves. Cyber-weapons derive from cyber spy tools, and it is a challenge to untangle the two. Knowledge and intelligence can be wielded as a weapon. It's hard to see a way to account for information weapons that does not expose information spying.

But not impossible. We can regulate specific actions via treaties and agreements. Rather than outlaw tools (or weapons), we can outlaw outcomes. We might agree that taking a banking system down is not acceptable, whether you use a computer virus, a social media hack, or a EMP bomb blast. Interfering in an election should be prohibited via any method, even the most indirect.

The remaining challenge is mutual verification of the source of cyber actions. Tracking the source of actions is made difficult by the dark web. Much can be hidden by anonymizers and cleverness. But a lot online is hidden because the global internet is a patchwork of national networks, and because the actual humans creating attacks are shielded from inspection by national laws. Hackers in country X casting spells on country Y, even if proven bad, may be out of reach of country Y.

Part of the needed reform for a consensus on cyber war extends to making it harder to hide behind the walls erected by nations. I predict the nations will begin to cooperate more in disclosing the source of actions, including their own departments, for this simple reason: nations will come to understand that there is no national cyber security without global cyber security.

Rather than kumbaya global peace, pure self-interest will drive nations to be more cooperative in the cyber dimensions. When you have a global network, your security is only reliable as the weakest link in that system.Attackers bleed to the least secure edges where they can continue to cause damage.Ultimately security within your nation will fail unless the security of all the other nations is also maintained.

In addition to improving the overt security in peacetime, this requirement for global mutual security can drive the transparency needed to regulate cyber weapons.My only worry is that it may take a huge cyber disaster with many people dying before nations come together in agreement on how we should treat these new weapons.

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Making the Inevitable Obvious It's my birthday. I'm 68. I feel like pulling up a rocking chair and dispensing advice to the young 'uns. Here are 68 pithy bits of unsolicited advice which I offer as my birthday present to all of you. * Learn how to learn from those you disagree with, or even offend you.

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If machines want to make art, will humans understand it? Empathy...??

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Assuming that the emergence of consciousness in artificial minds is possible, those minds will feel the urge to create art.

But will we be able to understand it? To answer this question, we need to consider two subquestions: when does the machine become an author of an artwork? And how can we form an understanding of the art that it makes?

Empathy, we argue, is the force behind our capacity to understand works of art. Think of what happens when you are confronted with an artwork. We maintain that, to understand the piece, you use your own conscious experience to ask what could possibly motivate you to make such an artwork yourself - and then you use that first-person perspective to try to come to a plausible explanation that allows you to relate to the artwork. Your interpretation of the work will be personal and could differ significantly from the artist's own reasons, but if we share sufficient experiences and cultural references, it might be a plausible one, even for the artist. This is why we can relate so differently to a work of art after learning that it is a forgery or imitation: the artist's intent to deceive or imitate is very different from the attempt to express something original. Gathering contextual information before jumping to conclusions about other people's actions - in art, as in life - can enable us to relate better to their intentions.

But the artist and you share something far more important than cultural references: you share a similar kind of body and, with it, a similar kind of embodied perspective. Our subjective human experience stems, among many other things, from being born and slowly educated within a society of fellow humans, from fighting the inevitability of our own death, from cherishing memories, from the lonely curiosity of our own mind, from the omnipresence of the needs and quirks of our biological body, and from the way it dictates the space- and time-scales we can grasp. All conscious machines will have embodied experiences of their own, but in bodies that will be entirely alien to us.

We are able to empathise with nonhuman characters or intelligent machines in human-made fiction because they have been conceived by other human beings from the only subjective perspective accessible to us: 'What would it be like for a human to behave as x?' In order to understand machinic art as such - and assuming that we stand a chance of even recognising it in the first place - we would need a way to conceive a first-person experience of what it is like to be that machine. That is something we cannot do even for beings that are much closer to us. It might very well happen that we understand some actions or artifacts created by machines of their own volition as art, but in doing so we will inevitably anthropomorphise the machine's intentions. Art made by a machine can be meaningfully interpreted in a way that is plausible only from the perspective of that machine, and any coherent anthropomorphised interpretation will be implausibly alien from the machine perspective. As such, it will be a misinterpretation of the artwork.

But what if we grant the machine privileged access to our ways of reasoning, to the peculiarities of our perception apparatus, to endless examples of human culture? Wouldn't that enable the machine to make art that a human could understand? Our answer is yes, but this would also make the artworks human - not authentically machinic. All examples so far of 'art made by machines' are actually just straightforward examples of human art made with computers, with the artists being the computer programmers. It might seem like a strange claim: how can the programmers be the authors of the artwork if, most of the time, they can't control - or even anticipate - the actual materialisations of the artwork? It turns out that this is a long-standing artistic practice.

Suppose that your local orchestra is playing Beethoven's Symphony No 7 (1812). Even though Beethoven will not be directly responsible for any of the sounds produced there, you would still say that you are listening to Beethoven. Your experience might depend considerably on the interpretation of the performers, the acoustics of the room, the behaviour of fellow audience members or your state of mind. Those and other aspects are the result of choices made by specific individuals or of accidents happening to them. But the author of the music? Ludwig van Beethoven. Let's say that, as a somewhat odd choice for the programme, John Cage's Imaginary Landscape No 4 (March No 2) (1951) is also played, with 24 performers controlling 12 radios according to a musical score. In this case, the responsibility for the sounds being heard should be attributed to unsuspecting radio hosts, or even to electromagnetic fields. Yet, the shaping of sounds over time - the composition - should be credited to Cage. Each performance of this piece will vary immensely in its sonic materialisation, but it will always be a performance of Imaginary Landscape No 4.

Why should we change these principles when artists use computers if, in these respects at least, computer art does not bring anything new to the table? The (human) artists might not be in direct control of the final materialisations, or even be able to predict them but, despite that, they are the authors of the work. Various materialisations of the same idea - in this case formalised as an algorithm - are instantiations of the same work manifesting different contextual conditions. In fact, a common use of computation in the arts is the production of variations of a process, and artists make extensive use of systems that are sensitive to initial conditions, external inputs or pseudo-randomness to deliberately avoid repetition of outputs. Having a computer executing a procedure to build an artwork, even if using pseudo-random processes or machine-learning algorithms, is no different than throwing dice to arrange a piece of music, or to pursuing innumerable variations of the same formula. After all, the idea of machines that make art has an artistic tradition that long predates the current trend of artworks made by artificial intelligence.

Machinic art is a term that we believe should be reserved for art made by an artificial mind's own volition, not for that based on (or directed towards) an anthropocentric view of art. From a human point of view, machinic artworks will still be procedural, algorithmic and computational. They will be generative, because they will be autonomous from a human artist. And they might be interactive, with humans or other systems. But they will not be the result of a human deferring decisions to a machine, because the first of those - the decision to make art - needs to be the result of a machine's volition, intentions and decisions. Only then will we no longer have human art made with computers, but proper machinic art.

The problem is not whether machines will or will not develop a sense of self that leads to an eagerness to create art. The problem is that if - or when - they do, they will have such a different Umwelt that we will be completely unable to relate to it from our own subjective, embodied perspective. Machinic art will always lie beyond our ability to understand it because the boundaries of our comprehension - in art, as in life - are those of the human experience.

Rui Penha & Miguel Carvalhais

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Related Articles Around the Web

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Will humans understand AI-generated art?

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AI-generated art is gaining ground and making money in the art world, but all of the examples thus far have had human direction. What happens if machines develop a sense of self that motivates them to make art on their own? Will humans be able to recognize it as art?

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In April 1917, everything changed. At least, that is, in the world of art. It was then that the legendary avant-garde French artist and cultural prankster, Marcel Duchamp, conceived a work so controversial in its making and meaning that it would alter forever the way the game of art is played. The work in question was a porcelain urinal that Duchamp quizzically flipped onto its back, signed with a mysterious nom de plume, and called Fountain. Like a genius move by a stealthy chess master, the introduction of Fountain into the history of image-making had the effect of check-mating the art world's sensibilities, marking the end of one kind of game and the start of another.

The analogy to chess is more than merely fanciful. Insisting that it "has all the beauty of art and much more", Duchamp was obsessed with the game. (So obsessed in fact he forfeited significant pieces of his personal and creative life to its pursuit. In November 1927, after having, years earlier, shifted his energies entirely from making art to playing chess, his new wife Lydie had had enough of his incessant strategizing of moves and countermoves. One night, while he was sleeping, she glued the pieces of his set to the board. They divorced a month later.) Duchamp's mischievous creation of Fountain 100 years ago this month is deeply in accord with the artist's lifelong inclination towards cerebral playfulness and demonstrates the same skilful sleights of hand that a grandmaster displays when wiping the board clean with his opponents.

To understand how Duchamp managed to outmanoeuvre the art world, one needs to return to the moment that the scurrilous sculpture arrived for consideration at the recently formed Society of Independent Artists in New York in spring 1917, in advance of an exhibition due to open on 10 April. As a founding member of the association, Duchamp had helped devise and articulate the organisation's avant-garde ideology, including its commitment never to reject a work submitted by one of its members. To test the sincerity and sturdiness of those principles, Duchamp entered the urinal under an assumed artistic identity - 'R Mutt' - knowing full well that the provocative piece would leave his fellow players in the society scrambling for their next move.

Fountain gushes with conundra about the very nature of creation and what it means to be a maker

Duchamp then watched with disappointment, if not surprise, when the question of whether to exhibit the piece was put to a vote, in hypocritical violation, he believed, of the society's widely-publicised open-mindedness. When Fountain was rejected by fellow members on grounds of aesthetic crudity, Duchamp found his conscience suddenly cornered. Left with no other possible move, he resigned.

Doing so, however, left him with an awkward challenge: how, physically, to retrieve the scandalous sculpture without exposing himself as its impish author? Yet somehow Duchamp succeeded in smuggling the work out of the society undetected, aided no doubt by the reliable prejudice of anyone who might have observed him, never believing that the cumbersome hunk of porcelain plumbing was an object worth protecting. Once back in Duchamp's possession, Fountain was whisked away to pose for Duchamp's friend, the legendary photographer Alfred Stieglitz, whose iconic black-and-white portrait of the piece quickly etched itself into cultural consciousness.

Duchamp's reluctance to sign his own name to the work, his refusal to claim credit for it, and his strenuous efforts to avoid being seen removing the work, demonstrate a remarkable resolve to distance the maker from the made. Such arduous anonymity is instructive in helping us establish principles for appreciating one of the most controversial works of art in the past century.
The age of outrage
When it comes to contemplating Fountain, observers must rethink how an aesthetic object should be approached and put aside conventional biases about the nature of artistic craftsmanship. For the first time, the significance of a work of art has been detached utterly from the artist's role in making it. After all, Duchamp did not forge the sculpture from clay with his own hands. Its significance instead lies in the object's ability surreptitiously to skirt the scrutiny and prejudices of the eye and to engage the mind instead in a match of philosophical wits. Sliding from eye to 'I', Fountain gushes with conundra about the very nature of creation and what it really means to be a maker.

Since 1913, Duchamp had been experimenting with notions of originality, challenging the art world to accept as legitimate what he called 'readymades', or everyday commercial objects that he deemed, by situating them in a new cultural context, to be works of art. In the case of Fountain, Duchamp purchased from the JL Mott Iron Works Company in New York a new urinal which he endeavoured to estrange from its accepted identity, just as earlier he had forced observers of his painting Nude Descending a Staircase No 2 (1912), to recalibrate the way they perceive the muscular syncopations of the female form as it flexes through space.

The assumed name he attached to the object - 'R Mutt' - was intended, he later confessed, to being a fusion of the manufacturer's name for the ceramic apparatus and a 'funny' character from the famous cartoon strip Mutt and Jeff. Writing at the time of Fountain's rejection from The Society of Independent Artists' exhibition, an anonymous contributor to the Dada periodical Blind Man defended the sculpture, which had come under sustained attack, in terms that would help propel the work and the dilemmas it posed permanently into popular imagination:

"Mr Mutt's fountain is not immoral, that is absurd, no more than a bathtub is immoral. It is a fixture that you see every day in plumbers' shop windows.

"Whether Mr Mutt with his own hands made the fountain has no importance. He CHOSE it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view - created a new thought for that object."

With a flick of his wrist, Duchamp had flushed traditional notions of artistic identity down the drain. The implications for how an artist perceived his or her role in making objects would be irreversible and far-reaching.

Duchamp's Fountain became the yardstick against which outrageousness would subsequently be measured

Remove Fountain from the cluttered chessboard of modern art, and one would need to remove too a vast army of subsequent works by artists who followed Duchamp's fearless lead. Pop Art's insistence on smudging the distinction between objects of high culture and the commodities of ordinary retail life directly descends from Duchamp's notion of the readymade. No Fountain, no Warhol Brillo Boxes. No Campbell's Soup Cans. Seminally sensational, Duchamp's Fountain became the yardstick against which outrageousness, as an aesthetic quality, would subsequently be measured. The imagined repository for bodily waste, Fountain's potential as a receptacle for shock is arguably filled and fulfilled 70 years later by the US artist Andres Serrano's salacious photo of a crucifix submerged sacrilegiously in urine - a work that sparked a furore in 1987.

To my eye, the open-mouth gape of Fountain's frozen yawn prefigures, too, the guffaws of Damien Hirst's formaldehyde shark (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, 1991) as well as his chuckling diamond-encrusted skull, For the Love of God (2007) - all three of which chortle with menacing self-confidence in their own mesmeric power. Yes, Fountain changed the game of art forever. Every so-called 'found object' that one encounters in a contemporary art exhibition, every infuriating row of bricks we trip over in a gallery, or dishevelled bed that makes us question the relationship between concept and execution, craft and craftiness, owes its origin to Duchamp's audacity. With the 'I' of the artist now regarded as a piece that can be sacrificed without forfeiting the game, those who contemplate art have been forced to reconsider their aesthetic strategies and to practise entirely new ways of seeing.

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In April 1917, everything changed. At least, that is, in the world of art. It was then that the legendary avant-garde French artist and cultural prankster, Marcel Duchamp, conceived a work so controversial in its making and meaning that it would alter forever the way the game of art is played.

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A small play about big issues is how the producers like to portray Art, a sensation when it opened in the West End 20 years ago and now packing 'em in again in a revival at the Old Vic in London. The play is a three-hander by French writer Yasmina Reza. It opened in Paris in 1994 and, in a translation by Christopher Hampton, swept the Anglo-Saxon world two years later, helped by starry casts - the first, unveiled in London in October 1996, was Albert Finney, Tom Courtenay and Ken Stott. That production won the Olivier award for best comedy in 1997. "But I thought I had written a tragedy," said Reza when she picked up the prize.
Art review - Rufus Sewell shines in finely shaded character study
The setup is simple. Serge, who fancies himself as an art collector, has bought a painting - "a white canvas with fine diagonal white streaks" - by a fashionable artist called Antrios for €100,000. His old friend Marc thinks it's "shit", and the ensuing argument about its merits threatens their relationship. Their mutual friend Yvan, a committed fence-sitter, is caught in the crossfire.

It is a clever, calculating piece of theatre, but does it really have anything to say about modern art? We set up our own three-hander to find out - Guardian art critics Adrian Searle and Skye Sherwin, and me in the middle, playing the part of the hapless Yvan, eager to get answers to big questions: what is art; how do you judge artistic value; should we venerate the artist; and what the hell is this play really about?

"I hadn't seen it before," says Searle. "I'd been very much put off by the rotating casts, and had sort of assumed it was about taking the piss out of art. The posters had put me off, too - pictures of sweaty men throwing buckets of coloured paint at each other, which doesn't happen in the play. So I went in feeling ill disposed towards it, and when Serge brings out his white canvas the waves of laughter from the audience immediately antagonised me, but I think it's much more complex than that, and not entirely in a bad way."

It is not just an idle assassination of modern art, whatever some members of the audience might think. But Searle doubts whether the play wants seriously to engage with the nature of art. "The artwork is a portmanteau, the McGuffin, and they could just as easily be talking about cars," he says. "It's really about male friendship."

Searle also argues that Tony Hancock made many of the same points about the art world - and more forcefully - in his 1961 satirical film The Rebel, in which Hancock chucks in his life as a clerk in London to become an existentially inclined artist in Paris (despite a singular lack of artistic talent). "It's a favourite film of artists," says Searle. "The art world is best debunked by artists. When you get literary types writing about art, they do it badly."

If Searle takes the part of the Marc character - there is less to this than meets the eye - Sherwin tends towards the role of Serge, who feels he has found truth through his expensive purchase. "I enjoyed it immensely," she says. "One of the things I liked was the way Marc deflates the rhetoric used in the art world, as when he turns round to Serge and says, 'Why are you saying the Artist?'. She [Reza] uses the idea of the 'system' around art really cleverly."

It is Yvan, trying to defend Serge's purchase to Marc, who first uses this key word: "It's a work of art, there's a system behind it ... It's the completion of a journey ... It wasn't painted by accident, it's a work of art which stakes its claim as part of a trajectory." Marc mocks Ivan for "parroting Serge's nonsense".

When do we take an artist seriously and why? Is it because they have a "system"? Is that what makes them an "artist"? "If we're living in a world where anything can be an artwork," says Sherwin, "it's not necessarily to do with the materiality or the craft. It can be an idea. So the figure of the artist becomes much more important in terms of bestowing value. The artist has to have some unique vision for the whatever-it-is to be special."

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Jeff Koons's sculpture Balloon Flower attracts attention in St James's Park, London, 2008. Photograph: Ben Stansall/AFP/Getty Images

"I agree with Duchamp that the artist's greatest invention is the artist," adds Searle. "A kind of critical mass builds up behind a successful artist. They get written about by critics and academics; people start writing theses about them; the view becomes fixed. But that can start to break down after a bit. Often when artists die, there is a dip for a while - or that can be permanent. There are figures who are very fashionable in their lifetime who then fall out of favour."

Some artists are also lucky, or adept at catching a wave. "They are remembered not because the work was great, but because of its sociological context," says Searle. "The diamond skull of Damien Hirst is precisely that, and I think Jeff Koons is a lot of that. What has he [Koons] added to Andy Warhol? Not very much."

How, then, does one judge the value of art? I like the question Marc puts to Yvan about the Antrios: "You're getting married tomorrow, and you get this painting as a wedding present. Does it make you happy?" Yvan admits it would not make him happy. But Searle rejects happiness as a criterion for judging art. "I hate it when people say 'What art do you love most?' I don't love art."

He tells me not to worry so much, and dismisses any simple terminology I try to apply to art. "'Importance' is a posteriori; 'beauty' is not a word I use very often; I can only say the word 'masterpiece' in a Darth Vader-type voice; and I'm not looking for 'happiness'." So what are you looking for? "I don't know," he says. "I don't know what I'm looking for, but I find things."

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For the Love of God, Damien Hirst's 2007 life-size cast of a human skull in platinum and diamonds. Photograph: Reuters/HO

"Going to an exhibition with a set of criteria to tick off a list would be a huge mistake," says Sherwin. "The point of art is freedom, and if you're a critic going in with a preconceived list you're doing a huge disservice to your subject." The market is always seeking to put a value on art; critics couldn't give a damn. "I try to avoid even reading about the market," says Searle.

Can you ever, like Marc, say that something is "shit", or is such language hopelessly subjective? "There is shit," says Searle, "but questions of whether this is good or bad are the least interesting part of what we do." "'Is it good, is it bad?' shuts down conversations," adds Sherwin. "As a critic you want to open up conversations by thinking through the work. There are no essential questions, just as there are no essential forms."

Sherwin reckons writers are too keen to look for meaning in art. She cites Margaret Atwood's and Siri Hustvedt's What I Loved as novels in which the art is intensely literary - all about narrative, symbols, content. "The idea that it could be just process, material or about the circulation of images, the massive completely open box that art actually is, doesn't come in to it," she says. "Writers always think of art in literary terms, as something that can be unpacked."

If writers want art to mean something, collectors want art to celebrate their own success, good taste, modernity. Serge is seeking to validate himself through art. "It's all to do with consumerism," says Searle, "not just judging art but judging each other through the decisions they make. The play was written in a period of boom for the French bourgeoisie. It is art as luxury commodity."

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All white ... A 2015 Robert Ryman exhibition. Photograph: Bill Jacobson. Courtesy of the Greenwich Collection, Ltd/Dia Art Foundation, New York

He is dismissive of the painting at the centre of the play. "It is exactly the kind of painting that would be used as a prop in a furniture catalogue and made by the yard. And there's nothing very outre about a white painting. Robert Ryman has made his entire career out of making white paintings." Indeed, there is an honourable tradition of all-white paintings: Kazimir Malevich unveiled his painting White on White as long ago as 1918. Far from being a modernist statement, the Antrios is old hat.

Near the end of the play the painting is defaced by Marc, with Serge's complicity. Sherwin says she sensed from the start this would be the inevitable denouement. "It's a blank canvas with three men arguing over it," she says. "What other possible way could it go?" "Somebody's got to get their cock out and piss on it," adds Searle. Now that would be artistically innovative.

How did Searle feel when the painting was defaced? "I thought, 'Oh, this reminds me of a Michael Krebber painting'," he says. Krebber is a German conceptualist whose paintings tend to be characterised by enigmatic splodges on white backgrounds. It emerges that Searle once, urged on by the artists, defaced an artwork by Jake and Dinos Chapman on a TV programme. Acts of destruction, it seems, can be acts of creation. It may be that Marc's desecration of Serge's beloved Antrios - carried out in the name of classicism, essentialism and representative art - is a more modern gesture than the painting itself.

is at the Old Vic, London SE1, until 18 February. oldvictheatre.com.
Topics

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Canvassing opinion: what art critics make of the hit play Art

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A small play about big issues is how the producers like to portray Art, a sensation when it opened in the West End 20 years ago and now packing 'em in again in a revival at the Old Vic in London. The play is a three-hander by French writer Yasmina Reza.

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What is ToK?
Theory of Knowledge is a pivotal point of the IBDP model that encourages students to think critically and curiously.
In TOK class students examine how we know things, if we are sure we know them, and to try to make sense of what they encounter. Throughout the course they will consider viewpoints and knowledge perspectives from across a wide spectrum of subject areas. Hopefully they may begin to recognize some of their own assumptions and gain a richer more nuanced understanding of themselves and their own previously unquestioned belief systems.

El arte es una mentira que nos acerca a la verdad.
[Art is a lie that brings us nearer to the truth.]
Pablo Picasso

What is the relationship of TOK to Visual Art?

Art itself offers many deeply provocative questions that an inquiring mind will find stimulating and mind expanding. I have met students who say that it is their TOK class that got them interested in the concepts that underpin art making, and art students make avid TOK learners. Vice versa, art provides TOK classes, teachers and students with a wealth of topics for debate, discussion and disagreement. The pages in this section offer some tasty morsels for the questioning mind and gentle enticement for the less curious.

Is there a required TOK project in Art? The answer is no, but TOK permeates all of art making as part of the process of inquiry and discovery.

How do I incorporate TOK in my teaching? There are many opportunities for TOK style discussions and written reflections but here are a few practical examples of ways you can encourage TOK inquiry:

Showing films and documentaries on contemporary controversial or thought provoking artists and generating in class discussions is another way of encouraging critical thinking and reflection.

Exhibition visits can be extremely effective in raising awareness, curiosity, discussion and reflection. Try the new resource 4 Ways of Looking at Art

You might consider teaching or joining with a session or two of the TOK course when they are addressing The Arts perspective and trying out some of the approaches outlined here.

Questions that encourage in depth critical thinking around art
Critical Thinking

Any one of these questions can be developed as a topic for discussion or used as a starting point for a journal reflection. You can focus on any question for a single lesson, or use it as an umbrella topic over a longer period of time. Often an exhibition that you visit as a class will raise the question very clearly and you can seize that opportunity to make the link with TOK. Individual students can also pursue their own line of inquiry regarding a specific topic.

Art and TOK Questions
These challenging questions make excellent starting points for a thought provoking reflection and discussion. Handout Art and Tok Questions
Art and Ethics

* What moral responsibilities does the artist have or not have? Are they different from any other knower?

* To what extent does the artist have a moral obligation to avoid or confront issues that might shock or be contrary to most people?

* Do you think controversy is important for an artwork to have a strong impact? Why do artists often rely on the shock factor?

* What do we expect from art? Truth? Seduction? Provocation? Beauty

Does art have to have meaning?

Conversely, if something is meaningless, can it be art?

Who decides what is art? Are there limits to what we can call art?

Is there a distinction between high art and low art? Between Art and Craft? What might this be?

Is there a common ground for what constitutes art?

When does performance become art?

Is there a line between the different art forms?

Is life art?

Art and Meaning

Can ideas be owned?

Does a signature make a work of art?

Is the idea or the thing the original?

Does a work of art become less valuable when it is infinitely reproducable?

Is it important for artworks to be original? Why?

Art and Originality

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Theory of Knowledge is a pivotal point of the IBDP model that encourages students to think critically and curiously.In TOK class students examine how we know things, if we are sure we know them, and to try to make sense of what they encounter.

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Shea Hembrey "How I became 100 artists."

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Shea Hembrey "How I became 100 artists."

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Module 1 Activity 5 - write a curatorial rational over his body of work.  Post your pdf as a separate document on this padlet. Secondly, post your blog answers on the Moodle in the Blog section on the right hand side of your homepage

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How do you stage an international art show with work from 100 different artists? If you're Shea Hembrey, you invent all of the artists and artwork yourself -- from large-scale outdoor installations to tiny paintings drawn with a single-haired brush.

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Shock Value in Art? TOK lesson

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On the timeline of human history, we've been exploring outer space for just the short blip of a few decades. But long before we launched satellites out of our atmosphere, artists imagined escaping our humble planet to aspire toward the heavens. Military defence spending and science have driven our exploration, though artists have continued to be instrumental catalysts in our quest to conquer the unknown, because they imagine the future before it happens - as the saying goes, life imitates art. Today, artists are joining in the space race, imagining the mysterious vacuum beyond our atmosphere as the next museum or gallery space.

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The artist known as Nahum resists the idea that space is ours to conquer. He argues that artists must be included in the conversation about how we explore space or else humanity - namely rich countries with well-funded aerospace programs - risk making the same mistakes the colonising empires made in the past. Who owns the surface of the Moon or a comet and has the right to exploit minerals or precious metals there? Fundamental aspects of our culture such as land ownership and borders are called into question as soon as we leave Earth, says the artist. "If [artists] have different skills and ways of understanding the world, we can only enrich the conversation," he tells BBC Culture.

Artists are, for the first time since scientists overcame the incessant pull of gravity to break free from Earth's atmosphere, beginning to imagine outer space as a platform for art. What does art look like after Earth? On 29 June 2018, years in the making, Nahum's long-time dream came true when he launched a one-of-a-kind interactive sculpture into orbit aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket bound for the International Space Station (ISS). Back on Earth, the artist orchestrated performances that allowed the audience to interact with the sculpture on the ISS, bringing the audience here on Earth closer to space, says Nahum.
Is space a place for art?
Space should also be used as a cultural laboratory, says Nahum, which is why his new project is especially designed around interaction with space. By interacting with the sculpture on board the ISS, viewers on Earth will feel as if outer space is more accessible, he says. The work is about the interconnectedness of all things, on a cosmic scale but also here on Earth; the interpretation of the unknown as part of what we don't see but what is inevitably part of the totality of our existence. "Sometimes I think of space as a black canvas," he says.

Why should scientists have unlimited reign? Why can't artists, or anyone else for that matter, have equal access to this new frontier? - Nahum

Other artists like Trevor Paglen, Tavares Strachan and Makoto Azuma have also conceived projects created specifically for outer space. On 3 December 2018 Paglen's Orbital Reflector, made in collaboration with the Nevada Museum of Art, and Strachan's Enoch, in collaboration with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) were launched into space after multiple scrapped attempts. The two works hitched a ride aboard the same SpaceX rocket.

At first, Paglen's sculpture might look like a scientific satellite, but it is in fact purely aesthetic and aspirational. The project sparked protest among astronomers who claimed that the highly reflective object would obstruct scientific observation. Nahum refutes their claim, though the project is among the first that calls into question the issue of who has a legal right to space or who owns Earth's orbit. Why should scientists have unlimited reign? Why can't artists, or anyone else for that matter, have equal access to this new frontier?

What I like about space exploration, is that most of the time it's about Earth - Nahum

Strachan's space sculpture looks more like what you might expect to see in a museum - a bust of Robert Henry Lawrence Jr, the first African American ever selected for the US space program. Lawrence died in a plane crash while still in training to become an astronaut and never realised his dream of going to space, until Strachan's sculpture put him there after the fact. The launch of Nahum, Paglen and Strachan's space sculptures marks a turning point for artworks in outer space, with three works by three separate artists orbiting around our planet at this very moment.

Paglen says that he designed the space sculpture to encourage those of us bound by gravity on Earth to look up with a renewed sense of wonder. "What I like about space exploration, is that most of the time it's about Earth," says Nahum. In other words, these projects, though they are extra-terrestrial in nature, are meant to bring us together. Nearly every satellite ever made points toward Earth. In fact, the first camera ever launched into space took a picture not of the stars, but of Earth. Migration and nationalism are broken down when we imagine a future where we will simply say, "I'm from Earth," says Nahum. Beyond science or even science fiction, art can provoke new ways of looking outward into the heavens and also inward to our collective consciousness.
Art in space: A 50-year history
Nahum, originally from Mexico City but now working in Berlin, has been exploring space as a subject matter and a destination in his art for nearly a decade. "As artists, we have the responsibility to engage in whatever our subject matter is," he says. For a 2015 exhibition in Mexico City, The Matters of Gravity, Nahum along with a small group of artists travelled to Russia to experience the closest thing to zero gravity that we have on Earth: parabolic flight. Conceived as part of astronaut training and for scientific research, parabolic flights allow for short 30-second near zero-gravity experiences, through a specific series of manoeuvres aboard a specially designed airplane. Nahum and the other artists were the first to undertake artistic experiments in a zero-gravity environment. The results were displayed at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in the form of audio, video and sculpture.

In 2017 Azuma made space feel closer by recreating the art history standard of the still life with a bouquet of flowers hovering in the outer edges of the atmosphere. His works were necessarily impermanent, as if to suggest the fragile and temporary nature of everything alive and organic in the great cosmos, even the planet that we call home. So again, the artist's exploration in space comes back to our life on Earth.

The Voyager project epitomises the striving spirit of humanity reaching outward with a message of beauty and human creativity

Azuma's approach to reaching space was decidedly more DIY. Rather than launch his bouquets into space aboard a rocket, the arrangements were secured to gigantic balloons, reaching heights 100,000 feet above the Nevada desert. At -60C, the flowers began to break apart in the outer atmosphere before falling to Earth like colourful confetti. The photographic documentation is the only evidence of the adventure, capturing the grey area where Earth ends and space begins. The project called EXOBIOTANICA offers a poetic exploration of space, as if to say, we must dive into the unknown only if we bring beauty with us.

The history of art in space stretches back further than the last few years however. Two of the most famous aerospace missions, Voyager 1 and 2, identical spacecraft designed to reach the outer edges of our galaxy, carry with them two golden records full of art. After their launch in 1977, they continue to careen ever further into the unknown. With every second they become the farthest human-made objects from Earth ever. In December 2018, Voyager 2 left our Solar System, nearly 18 billion km (11 billion miles) from Earth, following Voyager 1, which left our Solar System in 2012. Truly one-of-a-kind, the Voyager project epitomises the striving spirit of humanity reaching outward with a message of beauty and human creativity. Each golden disk contains a message to a potential extra-terrestrial civilisation that might discover the spacecraft: images, music, and greetings in many languages from around the world.

Carl Sagan, charged with the impossible task of curating the content of the golden record to represent all human civilisation, called the disk "Earth's greatest hits; a gift across the cosmic ocean from one island of civilisation to another". In the four decades following, there has been no greater undertaking of art in space. Our exploration of the cosmos, whether artistic or brutal, is ultimately an exploration of our soul and the interconnectedness of the universe.
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On the timeline of human history, we've been exploring outer space for just the short blip of a few decades. But long before we launched satellites out of our atmosphere, artists imagined escaping our humble planet to aspire toward the heavens.

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Umber is a conundrum, a rusty riddle of a colour. A cross between the deep redness of blood and the blasé blandness of mud, umber is a havering hue with a haunting humidity all its own. Umber's ability to ebb and flow between shades of our interior self and those of the exterior world we inhabit make it the perfect pigment for painters as diverse as Bosch and Modigliani, Titian and Velázquez, to create scenes of enduring urgency - scenes we feel as much as see. Swipe umber from the paintbox of art history and the dramatic chiaroscuro of Caravaggio's canvases and the meditativeness of Rothko's 1962 work Untitled (Umber, Blue, Umber, Brown) would dissolve into drabness.
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So complex a mixture is umber's identity of the inner and outer worlds, its very name (originally in Italian ' terra d'ombra', or 'earth of shadows') is pulled in two directions. Some maintain the word is merely an echo of an actual location, Umbria, the mountainous region of central Italy where, sometime in the 15th Century, the pigment was first professionally concocted from soil rich in manganese and iron oxide.

Others contend that the colour's name is less a geographical allusion and more a mystical designation inspired by the spiritual depths that the pigment enables artists to plumb, one that owes its origin instead to the Latin ' umbra ', meaning 'shadow'. If we mix the two hypotheses together, we discover perhaps something closer to the truth: a paradoxical shadow-land of a hue, one that binds into a single substance the material grittiness of this world and the immaterial gloom of one that lies just beyond our perception.

The use of umber by artists dates back to our earliest image-making ancestors who smeared soil on cave walls as a suitable approximation for the auburn fur of beasts. Flash forward a few millennia, from the neolithic age to the cusp of the Renaissance, and umber begins to come into its own as a subtle aesthetic force - adding a ruddy depth to more garish pigments when combined on the artist's palette.
Down to earth
Reacting against the naiveté of simplistic perspective and the crispness of colours often found in Medieval altars and icons, artists began to experiment with more realistic figurative proportions as well as with greater complexities of pigment, adding earth-tones such as umber and sienna (which hailed from an adjoining province), in both their raw and burnt forms, to their inventories. Without a rich assortment of browns to keep things rooted and real, Humanism might never have got off the ground.

Years before Hieronymus Bosch began work on the carnal carnival of colours for which he would be most remembered, his famous triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (1503-1515), the Early Netherlandish master would find himself seduced by the shabby solemnity of umber. Bosch's teasing tondo (or round painting) The Wayfarer, undertaken around 1500, captures a limping pedlar, overburdened by the wares and weariness of this world.

Although the laden figure appears to be heading for a gate that leads to pastoral purity, he looks back in the direction of a squalid house of sin behind him. This structure, from which he may have recently emerged, relies for its sense of shadiness on an admixture of shadowy umber and sickly, syphilitic ochre. Caught between the temptations of the flesh and spirit, Bosch's subject is forever halted in his progress towards salvation by the lures of a debauched world - a paralysis intensified by the pallid gloom of umber that shadows him.

Soon after Bosch created his allegory, umber can be found unsettling the ambience of another Renaissance masterpiece, this time at the orchestration of the Italian prodigy Raphael, then in his early 20s. Raphael's oil-on-wood portrait of Catherine of Alexandria, completed around 1507, depicts the 4th-Century Christian martyr leaning against a wooden 'execution wheel' - a bone-crushing torture device to which Catherine had been sentenced after refusing the advances of the Roman Emperor Maxentius. According to legend, the implement, also known as a 'breaking wheel', broke the instant Catherine touched it.

Catherine's ecstatic gaze upwards is intended to fix our focus on the promise of heaven hinted at in the gleaming clouds above her, but our eyes cannot help drifting back to earth and to that brutal wheel against which she strikes a strangely casual pose. Raphael has carefully fashioned the horrendous hoop's wood grain from a sophisticated cocktail of yellow, azurite and vermillion. But it is the secret ingredient of umber - newly introduced into the artist's palette - that keeps both the wheel (forever about to shatter into splinters at Catherine's touch) and the painting itself, grounded and real. The umber wheel is what helps the painting navigate its course through the shadowy realms of suffering and faith.

Umber began to emerge from the shadows to define shadows in its own right

By the end of the 16th Century, umber was no longer content to play merely a supporting role in paintings, and began to emerge from the shadows to define shadows utterly and in its own right. Caravaggio's high-contrast canvases, for example, where the drama of dimly-lit interiors is articulated by the gutter of an unseen candle that flickers somewhere outside the frame, would not be possible without the artist's wholesale reliance on the profound power of umber.

The young musician in The Lute Player (1596), for instance, which the artist believed was "the best piece that he ever painted", plucks himself into melodious existence against an umbral abyss echoing behind him. Here, the heaviness of umber's encroachment, intensified by carbon black, threatens to engulf the lutist, yet is held in eternal abeyance by music's mystical light.

In the centuries since Caravaggio steeped his subjects in umber, no artist would experiment with its moving metaphysics more profoundly than Rembrandt. Umber is the inexhaustible bog from which the 17th-Century Dutch master dredged the faces and stares of those who sat for his soulful portraits.

Rembrandt's incessant self-portraiture, moreover, is itself a ceaseless churning of earthiness and shadow, made possible by the potency of umber as a colour that can conjure simultaneously the fleetingness of flesh and durability of spirit.

For the lyrical landscape artists of the ensuing 18th and 19th Centuries, and particularly for the Romantic visionaries J M W Turner and John Constable, umber would come to dominate the foregrounds of scenes that feel as if they depict as much an aspect of mind as an actual spot of time and place. Though historians might wear themselves out parsing the relative achievement of these rivals, they share a reverence for the rituals of umber.

The affecting pencil-and-watercolour sketch Coast of Yorkshire (c. 1806-7), over which a wash of unadulterated umber alchemises the dramatic scene into nostalgia, is testimony to Turner's total faith in the colour. "When we speak of the perfections of art," Constable asserted in a lecture in 1836, "we must recollect what the materials are with which a painter contends with nature. For the light of the sun he has but patent yellow and white lead - for the darkest shades, umber or soot". The primary colours of being in the world are recalibrated by Constable and Turner - and umber is among their number.

Umber fell from favour towards the end of the 19th Century with the arrival of an Impressionist movement allergic to the allure of sombre browns. Kept embering in the soaring branches that scrape Vincent van Gogh's anguished skyscape The Starry Night, the colour then enjoyed a resurgence in the 20th Century thanks, in part, to the earthiness of African art and tribal masks with which avant garde artists became obsessed.

Perhaps no painting in Modern art more poignantly reasserts umber's ability to draw us into its mysteries than Amadeo Modigliani's haunting portrait of his lover and muse Jeanne Hébuterne, created a few months before the artist died of tubercular meningitis in January 1920. Two days later, the grief-stricken Hébuterne leapt to her own death from a fifth-story window. At first glance, Hébuterne's own eerie eye-less glare - a disconcerting trademark of the Italian artist's expressively inexpressive portraits - gives us the uncanny impression of staring at an empty mask, the wearer having already departed.

Bracketing the barren countenance, and determining the temperature of the space, are carefully calibrated modulations of umber traceable in Hébuterne's umber-rich hair and in the curdling golds of the armchair, tinged by the same pigment, upon which her life-in-deathness and death-in-lifeness is precariously poised. It is umber that summons us to the strange space she inhabits - one that is neither warm nor cold, real nor imagined, remembered nor prophesied.

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Umber is a conundrum, a rusty riddle of a colour. A cross between the deep redness of blood and the blasé blandness of mud, umber is a havering hue with a haunting humidity all its own.

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Reproductions and artist royalities-Portia DeRossi's new business venture

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Reproductions and artist royalities-Portia DeRossi's new business venture

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How important is the idea of orginal art? 1/1 artworks.

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Portia de Rossi Talks Her New Art Venture

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*Does Art have to have meaning?
*Artistic beauty is subjective?
*Accessibility influences popularity.
*By exploring the background of an artist, we can better understand the intention of their work.
*Can there be creativity without emotion.
*Should art be judged on its ability to please or shock?
*Is any art original?
*When we look at an artwork without any familiarity with the period in time or context in which it was produced, how can we relate to it?
*Does art have to have morals?
*what is the relationship between art and ethics?
*Is artistic talent learnt or genetic?
*Is the idea more important than the outcome?
*Can the arts shape peoples opinion?
*Are our identities based on our memories?
*Does art have to have meaning?
*What role does emotion play in the documentation of history? (Picasso-Guernica/Weeping woman)

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Theories in Art

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Cultural appropriation is the adoption of certain elements from another culture without the consent of people who belong to that culture. It's a controversial topic, one that activists and celebrities like Adrienne Keene and Jesse Williams have helped bring into the national spotlight. However, much of the public remains confused about what the term actually means.

People from hundreds of different ethnicities make up the U.S. population, so it's not surprising that cultural groups rub off on each other at times. Americans who grow up in diverse communities may pick up the dialect, customs, and religious traditions of the cultural groups that surround them.

Cultural appropriation is an entirely different matter. It has little to do with one's exposure to and familiarity with different cultures. Instead, cultural appropriation typically involves members of a dominant group exploiting the culture of less privileged groups. Quite often, this is done along racial and ethnic lines with little understanding of the latter's history, experience, and traditions.

Defining Cultural Appropriation

In order to understand cultural appropriation, we must first look at the two words that make up the term. Culture is defined as the beliefs, ideas, traditions, speech, and material objects associated with a particular group of people. Appropriation is the illegal, unfair, or unjust taking of something that doesn't belong to you.

Susan Scafidi, a law professor at Fordham University, told Jezebel that it's difficult to give a concise explanation of cultural appropriation. The author of " Who Owns Culture? Appropriation and Authenticity in American Law," defined cultural appropriation as follows:

"Taking intellectual property, traditional knowledge, cultural expressions, or artifacts from someone else's culture without permission. This can include unauthorized use of another culture's dance, dress, music, language, folklore, cuisine, traditional medicine, religious symbols, etc. It's most likely to be harmful when the source community is a ​minority group that has been oppressed or exploited in other ways or when the object of appropriation is particularly sensitive, e.g. sacred objects."

​In the United States, cultural appropriation almost always involves members of the dominant culture (or those who identify with it) "borrowing" from the cultures of minority groups. Black people, Asians, Latinxs, and Native Americans generally tend to emerge as the groups targeted for cultural appropriation. Black music and dance; Native American fashions, decoration, and cultural symbols; Chicano style and fashion; and Asian martial arts and dress have all fallen prey to cultural appropriation.

"Borrowing" is a key component of cultural appropriation and there are many examples in recent American history. However, it can be traced back to the racial beliefs of early America, an era when many white people saw people of color as less than human, and the federal government codified that ideology into law. Society has yet to move completely beyond those gross injustices. And insensitivity to the historical and current sufferings of marginalized groups remains apparent today.

Appropriation in Music

In the 1950s, white musicians appropriated the music their Black counterparts invented. Because racism relegated Black people to the sidelines of U.S. society, record executives chose to have White artists replicate the sound of Black musicians. The result is that music like rock-n-roll is largely associated with White people and its Black pioneers, like Little Richard, are denied the credit for the contributions that they deserve.

In the early 21st century, cultural appropriation remains a concern. Musicians such as Madonna, Gwen Stefani, and Miley Cyrus have all been accused of cultural appropriation. Madonna's famous voguing began in Black and Latinx sectors of the gay club scene in New York City, and Gwen Stefani has faced criticism for her fixation on Harajuku culture from Japan.

In 2013, Miley Cyrus became the pop star most associated with cultural appropriation. During recorded and live performances, the former child star began to twerk, a dance style with roots in the African American community.

Appropriation of Native Cultures

Native American fashion, art, and rituals have also been appropriated into mainstream U.S. culture. Major corporations have reproduced and sold indigenous fashions for profit, and eclectic religious and spiritual practitioners have adopted Indigenous rituals.

A well-known case involves the sweat lodge retreats of James Arthur Ray. In 2009, three people died during one of his adopted sweat lodge ceremonies in Sedona, Arizona. This prompted the elders of Native American tribes to speak out against this practice because these "plastic shamans" have not been properly trained. Covering the lodge with plastic tarps was just one of Ray's mistakes and he was later sued for impersonation.

Similarly, in Australia, a period occurred when it was common for Aboriginal art to be copied by non-Aboriginal artists, often marketed and sold as authentic. This led to a renewed movement to authenticate Aboriginal products.

Cultural Appropriation Takes Many Forms

Buddhist tattoos, Muslim-inspired headdresses as fashion, and White gay men adopting the dialect of Black women are other examples of cultural appropriation. The examples are nearly endless and context is often key.

For example, was the tattoo done in reverence or because it's cool? Would a Muslim man wearing the keffiyeh be considered a terrorist for that simple fact? At the same time, if a White man wears it, is it a fashion statement?

Why Cultural Appropriation Is a Problem

Cultural appropriation remains a concern for a variety of reasons. For one, this sort of "borrowing" is exploitative because it robs oppressed groups of the credit they deserve and often the capital owed to them as well. Many of the pioneers of rock music died penniless, while the White musicians who ripped them off earned millions.

Ultimately, art and music forms that originated with oppressed groups come to be associated with members of the dominant group. As a result, the dominant group is deemed innovative and edgy, while the disadvantaged groups they "borrow" from face negative stereotypes, implying they're lacking in intelligence and creativity.

When singer Katy Perry performed as a geisha at the American Music Awards in 2013, she described it as an homage to the Asian culture. Asian Americans disagreed with this assessment, declaring her performance "yellowface." They also objected to the song choice, "Unconditionally," for reinforcing the stereotype that Asian women are passive.

The question of whether this form of "borrowing" is an homage or an insult lies at the core of cultural appropriation. What one person perceives as a tribute, others may perceive as disrespectful. It's a fine line and one that must be carefully considered.

How to Avoid Cultural Appropriation

Every individual can make the decision to show sensitivity toward others. On occasion, someone may not be able to recognize a harmful appropriation unless it's pointed out. This is why it's important to recognize why you're buying or doing something associated with another culture.

To behave responsibly and sensitively toward other groups, ask yourself a series of questions:

Why are you "borrowing" this? Is it out of genuine interest? Is it something you feel called to do? Or, does it simply look appealing and trendy?

What is the source? For material items such as artwork, was it made by someone from that culture? Has that individual given permission for the item to be sold?

How respectful is this work to the culture? Would people from that group object to the piece of art or to it being sold to outsiders?

The sharing of ideas, traditions, and material items is what makes life interesting and helps diversify the world. A genuine interest in other cultures is not necessarily wrong, but cultural appropriation raises questions that should not be ignored.

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Understanding Why Cultural Appropriation Is Wrong

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Cultural appropriation is a hot topic among racial and cultural lines. Explore its meaning, why it's a controversy, and discover how to avoid it.

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Entertainment and media news coverage from MarketWatch.

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Art in the Age of Instagram | Jia Jia Fei | TEDxMarthasVineyard

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The impact of technology on communication. An interesting article and concept 

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The impact of technology on communication. An interesting article and concept 

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Our colleagues want to go to that board meeting but pay attention only to what interests them. To some this seems like a good idea, but we can end up hiding from one another, even as we are constantly connected to one another.

A businessman laments that he no longer has colleagues at work. He doesn't stop by to talk; he doesn't call. He says that he doesn't want to interrupt them. He says they're "too busy on their e-mail." But then he pauses and corrects himself. "I'm not telling the truth. I'm the one who doesn't want to be interrupted. I think I should. But I'd rather just do things on my BlackBerry."

A 16-year-old boy who relies on texting for almost everything says almost wistfully, "Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I'd like to learn how to have a conversation."

In today's workplace, young people who have grown up fearing conversation show up on the job wearing earphones. Walking through a college library or the campus of a high-tech start-up, one sees the same thing: we are together, but each of us is in our own bubble, furiously connected to keyboards and tiny touch screens. A senior partner at a Boston law firm describes a scene in his office. Young associates lay out their suite of technologies: laptops, iPods and multiple phones. And then they put their earphones on. "Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks into cockpits." With the young lawyers in their cockpits, the office is quiet, a quiet that does not ask to be broken.

In the silence of connection, people are comforted by being in touch with a lot of people - carefully kept at bay. We can't get enough of one another if we can use technology to keep one another at distances we can control: not too close, not too far, just right. I think of it as a Goldilocks effect.

Texting and e-mail and posting let us present the self we want to be. This means we can edit. And if we wish to, we can delete. Or retouch: the voice, the flesh, the face, the body. Not too much, not too little - just right.

Human relationships are rich; they're messy and demanding. We have learned the habit of cleaning them up with technology. And the move from conversation to connection is part of this. But it's a process in which we shortchange ourselves. Worse, it seems that over time we stop caring, we forget that there is a difference.

We are tempted to think that our little "sips" of online connection add up to a big gulp of real conversation. But they don't. E-mail, Twitter, Facebook, all of these have their places - in politics, commerce, romance and friendship. But no matter how valuable, they do not substitute for conversation.

Connecting in sips may work for gathering discrete bits of information or for saying, "I am thinking about you." Or even for saying, "I love you." But connecting in sips doesn't work as well when it comes to understanding and knowing one another. In conversation we tend to one another. (The word itself is kinetic; it's derived from words that mean to move, together.) We can attend to tone and nuance. In conversation, we are called upon to see things from another's point of view.

FACE-TO-FACE conversation unfolds slowly. It teaches patience. When we communicate on our digital devices, we learn different habits. As we ramp up the volume and velocity of online connections, we start to expect faster answers. To get these, we ask one another simpler questions; we dumb down our communications, even on the most important matters. It is as though we have all put ourselves on cable news. Shakespeare might have said, "We are consum'd with that which we were nourish'd by."

And we use conversation with others to learn to converse with ourselves. So our flight from conversation can mean diminished chances to learn skills of self-reflection. These days, social media continually asks us what's "on our mind," but we have little motivation to say something truly self-reflective. Self-reflection in conversation requires trust. It's hard to do anything with 3,000 Facebook friends except connect.

As we get used to being shortchanged on conversation and to getting by with less, we seem almost willing to dispense with people altogether. Serious people muse about the future of computer programs as psychiatrists. A high school sophomore confides to me that he wishes he could talk to an artificial intelligence program instead of his dad about dating; he says the A.I. would have so much more in its database. Indeed, many people tell me they hope that as Siri, the digital assistant on Apple's iPhone, becomes more advanced, "she" will be more and more like a best friend - one who will listen when others won't.

During the years I have spent researching people and their relationships with technology, I have often heard the sentiment "No one is listening to me." I believe this feeling helps explain why it is so appealing to have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed - each provides so many automatic listeners. And it helps explain why - against all reason - so many of us are willing to talk to machines that seem to care about us. Researchers around the world are busy inventing sociable robots, designed to be companions to the elderly, to children, to all of us.

One of the most haunting experiences during my research came when I brought one of these robots, designed in the shape of a baby seal, to an elder-care facility, and an older woman began to talk to it about the loss of her child. The robot seemed to be looking into her eyes. It seemed to be following the conversation. The woman was comforted.

And so many people found this amazing. Like the sophomore who wants advice about dating from artificial intelligence and those who look forward to computer psychiatry, this enthusiasm speaks to how much we have confused conversation with connection and collectively seem to have embraced a new kind of delusion that accepts the simulation of compassion as sufficient unto the day. And why would we want to talk about love and loss with a machine that has no experience of the arc of human life? Have we so lost confidence that we will be there for one another?

WE expect more from technology and less from one another and seem increasingly drawn to technologies that provide the illusion of companionship without the demands of relationship. Always-on/always-on-you devices provide three powerful fantasies: that we will always be heard; that we can put our attention wherever we want it to be; and that we never have to be alone. Indeed our new devices have turned being alone into a problem that can be solved.

When people are alone, even for a few moments, they fidget and reach for a device. Here connection works like a symptom, not a cure, and our constant, reflexive impulse to connect shapes a new way of being.

Think of it as "I share, therefore I am." We use technology to define ourselves by sharing our thoughts and feelings as we're having them. We used to think, "I have a feeling; I want to make a call." Now our impulse is, "I want to have a feeling; I need to send a text."

So, in order to feel more, and to feel more like ourselves, we connect. But in our rush to connect, we flee from solitude, our ability to be separate and gather ourselves. Lacking the capacity for solitude, we turn to other people but don't experience them as they are. It is as though we use them, need them as spare parts to support our increasingly fragile selves.

We think constant connection will make us feel less lonely. The opposite is true. If we are unable to be alone, we are far more likely to be lonely. If we don't teach our children to be alone, they will know only how to be lonely.

I am a partisan for conversation. To make room for it, I see some first, deliberate steps. At home, we can create sacred spaces: the kitchen, the dining room. We can make our cars "device-free zones." We can demonstrate the value of conversation to our children. And we can do the same thing at work. There we are so busy communicating that we often don't have time to talk to one another about what really matters. Employees asked for casual Fridays; perhaps managers should introduce conversational Thursdays. Most of all, we need to remember - in between texts and e-mails and Facebook posts - to listen to one another, even to the boring bits, because it is often in unedited moments, moments in which we hesitate and stutter and go silent, that we reveal ourselves to one another.

I spend the summers at a cottage on Cape Cod, and for decades I walked the same dunes that Thoreau once walked. Not too long ago, people walked with their heads up, looking at the water, the sky, the sand and at one another, talking. Now they often walk with their heads down, typing. Even when they are with friends, partners, children, everyone is on their own devices.

So I say, look up, look at one another, and let's start the conversation.

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Our colleagues want to go to that board meeting but pay attention only to what interests them. To some this seems like a good idea, but we can end up hiding from one another, even as we are constantly connected to one another. A businessman laments that he no longer has colleagues at work.

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Shea Hembrey "How I became 100 artists."

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Shea Hembrey "How I became 100 artists."

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Could have students write a curatorial rationale on his body of work.

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How do you stage an international art show with work from 100 different artists? If you're Shea Hembrey, you invent all of the artists and artwork yourself -- from large-scale outdoor installations to tiny paintings drawn with a single-haired brush.