Postmodernism Intro

• It is a mix of a lot of different types of cultures. "Simply turn on the TV and you might hear a world music group singing a blend of Irish love song, Indian raga, heavy-metal anthem, Mongolian Buddhist chant -- and all to the tune of peyote drums, gamelans, didgeridoos, panpipes, nose flutes, alpenhorns, sitars, and tambourines."
• Artists try to go back into the past centuries and plug in the unknown and try to represent it.
• "These postmodern artists or architects simply take note of the new mix of messages, symbols, cultures and media, and then create a video, song, painting or building that reflects the Postmodern condition." This quote shows what a postmodern artist's main goals are.
• Realism -> Modernism -> Postmodernism

Jean Baudrillard

• Social microcosm is what draws the crowds to Disneyland, not the imagery.
• Outside in the parking lot is nothing special, but once inside, it is like an entirely new world with much more gadgets to use other than your car.
•  "Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the "real: country, all if "real" America, which is Disneyland (just as prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, which is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact all of Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but of the order of hyperreal and of simulation."

Jameson

• Two different ways to read Van Gogh's painting of peasant shoes. The first way being for sheer decoration, the second way is to stress the raw materials, the initial content, "which it confronts and reworks, transmaterials are to be grasped simply as the whole object world of agricultural misery, of stark rural poverty, and the whole rudimentary human world of backbreaking peasant toil, a world reduced to its most brutal and menaced, primitive and marginalized state."
• "This equipment," he goes on, "belongs to the earth, and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. . . . Van Gogh's painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth. . . . This entity emerges into the unconcealment of its being."
• There is definitely a warning of postmodernism art. It is easy to just view what the art has on its surface.

George Kubler - The Shape of Time

We read the section of George Kubler's "The Shape of Time" called "The Limitations of Biography". This part of Kubler's work then has many different subsections in italics. The most interesting subsection that I read was Talent and Genius. Here, he mentions that it is so difficult for people to judge artists based on their talent. "It is meaningless to debate whether Leonardo was more talented than Rafael. Both were talented. Bernardino Luini and Giulio Romano also were talented. They came late when the feast was over through no fault of their own," (Kubelr 6). He is trying to get the point across that the latter of the artists may have been just as talented as the famous Leonardo and Rafael, but they just weren't in the right time period. They could have had the same talent as Leonardo or Rafael, maybe even more, but art just was not what it was during DaVinci's era. Clearly, it is very interesting to talk about talent when differentiating artists and their pasts.This is one of Bernardino Luini's paintings, Madonna del Roseto.

Data Visualization

Data visualization is a really cool way of showing data and a good way to get your point across. It is a linear process of decision making based on a few basic principles: the designer, the reader, and the data itself. In the video, a few data maps that stuck out to me were the ones about Facebook users around the world and flights taken in the United States. All of the different dots and lines for the data are all so interesting and nice to look at. It also shows the hot spots of where the most people are on Facebook or where the most flights were taken. Josh Smith said, "Data is just a clue to the end truth." The data's goal is to get truth across in a visually pleasant way. There is also always a hero of the piece. This is normally the central point of data that most people look at first and will look around following it. As you can see, data visualization is a very cool way to show data but it is all about showing different ways to interpret it.