After Paradise – Contemporary Art in Iran

October 21st, 2008 · 2 comments or link to (permalink)

A documentary about Iran’s nascent contemporary art scene which started to re-emerge 20 years after the revolution. This was largely due to Iran’s baby boomers growing up, creating one of the youngest adult populations on Earth.

The fact that Iran has a very young population is very often overlooked. It gives hope for a more progressive secular culture as suggested by the odd fact that Iran was the third biggest country after the US and Brazil, on Google’s social networking service, Orkut.

Running time: 36 mins.

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Parkour Thermal Images Documentary

September 18th, 2008 · 1 comment or link to (permalink)

A documentary about an artist capturing Parkour with a thermal image camera. The idea is slightly better than the end reulst, unfortunately.

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Saul Bass Documentary

August 28th, 2008 · 2 comments or link to (permalink)

Ironic that the titles and production value of this documentary are actually terrible, considering that Saul Bass is the most famous title sequence designer. Nonetheless it is a mesmerizing look at some of the best movie title sequences of all time, narrated by Bass himself.

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BMW Art Cars – Roy Lichtenstein

August 12th, 2008 · 4 comments or link to (permalink)

This is in German, Lishtenshtein und BMW cars, so it sounds right, and is really just a prelude so that I can rant about the artist, or rather, his fans.

I once saw an interview with one of the impoverished comic book artists whose drawings Lichtenstein had blown up, back projected and traced. It was quite sad to see him timidly suggest that his composition was slightly better and that Lichtenstein had missed something. Lichtenstein was less of an artist, than a curator, but he realized that to make the, so called, intelligentsia comprehend how iconic American comic book art was, required dumbing it down by making it bigger, brasher and bite sized. How ironic, and post modern, indeed.

David Barsalou has been sourcing the original art that Lichtenstein copied, here and here.

My only real objection with Lichtenstein is that some people who wax lyrical about his work don’t realize what he did. I think it is quite possible to take the seemingly moronic, minimally creative task of identifying things and turn that into a popular art form. That, after all, is the idea behind this and the other Curations sites.

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Who Gets to Call it Art – Trailer

August 12th, 2008 · comment or link to (permalink)

A trailer for a movie, I must get, about the New York art scene in the 60s.

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