A three-panel painting by Francis Bacon (not the philosopher, unfortunately) entitled Tryptich, 1976, has sold at auction for over $86 million. Although I certainly know what I like and what I don’t, I can’t claim to be an art expert by any means. I’d love to hear from someone who is an expert who can defend such an astonishing price for what I consider a completely underwhelming painting.
Maybe I just need more education. I recognize that the more you learn the more you can appreciate things that once appeared to make no sense. And I am apt to defend abstract music that others may call noise. Towards the end of the semester, as I was leaving a class in the Music Building, there were a hundred identical metronomes set up on a brick wall, all clicking away at different tempi. It was György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique. There are no actual instruments, and, by its very nature the music has a huge degree of unpredictability and every “performance” will be different; the metronomes swing back and forth until they stop, at different times depending on how much they were wound. I wouldn’t compare it to the Missa Solemnis, but for what it is it’s okay.
Of course, nobody can put a price on a hundred clicking metronomes. And if they could, it wouldn’t be $86 million.
Filed under: Art, Cost of Living, Music, Musings, School on May 15th, 2008 | 1 Comment »
As you may have read yesterday, Monday witnessed two significant technological catastrophes at home: a broken air conditioner and computer. And, as you may have read, Kathleen helped solve the former on Tuesday afternoon.
On Wednesday afternoon (her birthday!) she called me at work and told me she’d see if she could wrangle me a loaner computer to use until Miriam and I could get a new laptop. And, sure enough, at 8:30 last night she and Steve came by with a computer and a CD-ROM of Windows XP with all the significant security updates and such. It was incredible and entirely undeserved. There’s kindness and generosity, and then there’s this.
So, Miriam and I will try perhaps this evening to shop for a laptop computer, and I am going to attempt to salvage the data from the hard disk of our deceased computer, but it isn’t looking good. When I plugged it in to our loaner, it immediately recognized the drive, but 90% of the data was missing, including all of my pictures and MP3s. I’m going to try and run some file-recovery software, but it’s a nerve-wracking process. The only consolation I have is that I have made DVD backups of my images going back several years, so the only total losses will be the most recent images – those from March and April, perhaps. Many of these have already been uploaded to Flickr, but many more haven’t, and they may be gone. Also possibly lost are the outtakes of photoshoots with GRR girls Patsy Clothesline, Ms. Rebel, and Demonomia and the outtakes from their first bout, too, though the Flickr galleries are safe, of course.
Filed under: Friends, Photography, Technology on May 15th, 2008 | No Comments »