Making Sense 1
February 22, 2014
Images hit the retina whenever our eyes are open. Mostly we let those images pass by, ignoring them in favour of more pressing thoughts. Sometimes an image deserves our attention and we take a perception, an action that makes sense of the visual manifold. There is a special kind of perception that we can take: …
Comedy is no Laughing Matter
November 17, 2013
‘The art of comedy’ is an expression that sometimes gets used but I’ve never known how seriously it’s meant to be taken. It’s far from obvious that comedy is respected as a credible art form and, just as the theatre of war is not a real theatre, talk of the art of comedy does not …
Photo Synthesis
September 29, 2013
The camera, even in my childhood a rare item, is a gadget that everyone I know now possesses. We used to choose our shots carefully. There were only 24 or 36 frames on a roll of film, which then required time and money to be developed and made into prints. Any movement led to a …
Propaganda and Art
April 14, 2013
What are we to make of art that is put to some morally dubious purpose? Can we still appreciate it as art or has it become tainted by its use? Politicians are acutely aware of the stirring and motivating power of art and thus it is natural that they put it to use in propaganda, …
The Soundtrack to your Life
March 24, 2013
Music is probably our greatest invention. What else can so quickly lift our spirits or reduce us to tears, the two often being only seconds apart? Philosophers debate whether music really was an invention. Perhaps it was discovered. It might exist in a Platonic realm, which is our aspiration to comprehend. Certainly there is a …
The Original
March 10, 2013
On the way home from a conference in Utrecht last week I had time to stop off at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. As far as I could tell, they have the biggest and best collection of Van Gogh paintings anywhere in the world. You can stand right in front of a Sunflowers or …