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There is a performance art piece happening all over Britain today. On Twitter the hashtag WeAreHere will find people's reactions. There's an article on it in The Guardian.

It's been a weepy day.

ETA:

Came across #wearehere at Glasgow Central Station on my way home. Caught my breath when they started to sing ..... pic.twitter.com/Z9f5EbKTUa

— Hazel Borland (@HazelNMAHPDir) July 1, 2016

#WeAreHere #Manchester @1418NOW @jeremydeller What an effective, poignant and moving tribute. Courageous men. RIP. pic.twitter.com/fZDkf1IjRS

— Catherine Shephard (@missshephard) July 1, 2016

WW1 soldiers at Manchester Piccadilly. They say nothing, give you a card. Walking ghosts. In tears. #wearehere pic.twitter.com/r1nKVSv7DV

— Matthew Cobb (@matthewcobb) July 1, 2016

We're here because we're here because we're here because #wearehere. pic.twitter.com/5u09KQjG6b

— National Theatre (@NationalTheatre) July 1, 2016

#wearehere & soldiers on the sand at St Ninian's Beach, Shetland. Blown away. #ww1centenar… https://t.co/n2x4CxpM4A pic.twitter.com/RzzptyeNhX

— Lisa Ward (@sheltielisa) July 1, 2016

I liked having to take Core classes in College. It was a great way to learn something new that I would never have considered taking if the requirements hadn't been there. I loved Criminology, and I think it's helped me dealing with "returning citizens" in my current job. Philosophy is important even if I found it dull at the time (not a great teacher).

My "I think everyone should take this" class is Art History. It was more helpful for art I didn't like. Having a framework in which to judge, understanding the aim of a movement or artist, and getting a cultural perspective on the crafts used helped to shift my perspective. I'm never going to be a huge fan of most pop art, but knowing why it happened as a movement is helpful in wider contexts.

It's also helped to accommodate shifts in my taste. By looking through informed eyes, I've come to deeply appreciate surrealists and other early 20th century art movements. I'm still not fond of cubism, but I can recognize that "Nude Descending a Staircase No. 2" (Duchamp) is a seminal work of the 20th century.

Since moving back to DC, I've begun going to the Hirshhorn. Again, most of the pieces in it -- Rodin excepted -- are not to my personal taste. On the other hand, I've found myself moved by pieces I would never have been exposed to. It's always more miss than hit for me, but the experience is still rewarding.

Back when Dad was advising 500+ students a semester, there came a day where I needed to cover the front desk for my department (which was at that time in the same building). The secretary was part-time and had left for the day, but as a package was expected, I had to be downstairs on one of Dad's advising days.

Steve was a friendly student who was complaining about Professor Dad trying to convince him to use his electives for something other than Political Science. Steve wanted to be a diplomat and was majoring in International Relations. He didn't even like having to take his English and Math requirements. If he could, his entire schedule would have been IR, Poli Sci, History, and, perhaps, a Foreign Language. It was ridiculous, he said, that Professor Dad wanted him to take Art History or Music Appreciation or a World Literature Class.

I asked him one question: "If you're at an embassy dinner and seated, as many junior diplomats are, between the wives of two cultural attaches from foreign countries, what will you talk about?"

The pause yawned widely.

I pointed out that part of diplomacy was the ability to speak intelligently on a wide range of topics to people who might not be of any direct use or importance, but whose tangential importance couldn't be overstated.

We spent the next twenty minutes ripping apart his class schedule and adding in his new electives. We changed his History requirement from U.S. History to, I think, a survey of World History (could have been European history). He took Art History covering Pre-History to about 400 A.D. (and took the 400 A.D. to Modern Art the following semester). He added a Music appreciation course in Classical Music, too.

After his appointment, Professor Dad formally made me Steve's advisor, and I remained so through the next 2.5 years until he graduated. Every time I saw Steve, he was raving about something new he'd learned. I think he's probably a pretty good diplomat, now.

So. I want to know if there's a class those on my friends' list thinks everyone should take.

I don't see well three dimensionally. When I didn't wear glasses, I saw in 2-D (kept glasses in the car for driving only, since I didn't need them the rest of the time) and even now, some prescription adjustments have me hugging walls for a day or two until I get used to this new concept of depth.

Oddly enough, 3-D movies and illusions always have depth for me. The first 3-D movie I saw was Kiss Me Kate which was playing at Coolidge Corner about two years before I started wearing glasses full time. I actually gasped because it was the first time in my life I'd seen something like that. (On a side note, Mom and Dad saw it with me. For the first time, Mom understood why I'd been bad at games with balls -- baseball especially. If it was a flat object which kept getting bigger rather than moving through space, of course I couldn't catch it.)

All of this is a lead up to a video I saw on slate this morning, an anamorphic rendering of a glass of water. Deeply, deeply cool.

This is the link to make a donation to the rebuilding fund.

The fire started in the iconic library. This is what it looks like now.


And this is what it looked like before:

I've just found out that the Glasgow School of Art has had a fire. The Guardian is reporting that the building is 90% viable, but Mackintosh and his wife, Margaret MacDonald, were all about the details, and I worry that some of those may be lost.

I've loved Rennie Mackintosh's work for such a long time. It's one of my defining charatceristics, as strange as that may sound. Mom and I had a delightful weekend in Glasgow together (I know me, Mom and "delightful" in the same sentence!) going to Willow Tearooms and finding everything of his that we could that was open.

One thing I always notice is that if you want the future in a chair, go to Rennie Mackintosh.

Star Trek, in several iterations used his chairs, so did Babylon 5 and I even caught one in an episode of Fringe.

I hope the School is all right. Its legacy is priceless.

They've increased their open content again. It's now over 10,000 images. There are pages from illuminated manuscripts, people!

To see what's available, go here: http://search.getty.edu/gateway/search?q=&cat=highlight&f=%22Open+Content+Images%22&rows=10&srt=a&dir=s&pg=1

Song 1 is a new art work on the exterior of the Hirschhorn Museum. This is an article about the technique which is very visually oriented.

I walked by the museum in the evening last week, and I saw what I thought was the Mockingjay symbol from The Hunger Games projected on the building and thought the publicity for the movie had gone too far. Then I saw the article on Song 1. On Wednesday night, I walked past in the early evening and saw the work -- or at least 10 minutes of it. It's moving. I don't know why. I was fascinated by the areas where the images meet and, in some portions of the film, herringbone into each other. Many of the images, in the portion I saw, concern traffic, and it was interesting as a pedestrian to watch the movement of the cars on highways from a distance.

The various renditions of "I Only Have Eyes for You" are beautiful and add something touching to the work. It was odd to see the projections on the mall side as I was walking. There are windows on that part of the museum, so the images had voids in them. Walking to the Air and Space Museum side of the building gave me a full image with two seams at the edge of my vision for the herringbone.

I may revisit this after I've seen it again, or stayed for the full 45 minutes to view the whole. It's fascinating.

I don't particularly care for it, except when I do.

I was a bit of a prig as a kid and into my early twenties, and my tastes were very conservative. But there were always exceptions. I loved the Eero Saarinen buildings I saw -- and I still get a quiet thrill when I see that soaring wing of Dulle Airport -- had a fondness for Salvador Dali's jewelry (that's a YouTube link), and generally liked Man Ray's photographs.

I hated the Hirshhorn Museum and until I moved back here in 2008, I hadn't crossed its threshold since the opening weekend in 1974. About a year after I moved back, I started going to the special exhibits there. I don't like much of the permanent collection, although there are some fantastic Rodin's, and I don't always like the exhibits, but I'm refining my tastes and have often been surprised.

One of the exhibits that surprised me was the one on Louise Bourgeois. I actually went back to it because aspects of it had caught me. She uses a great many spiders in her works, but when you know that her mother was a weaver and lace maker who restored historical fabrics, those images start to make psychological sense. Many of the installations were "rooms," some tiny enough that I stood over them or next to them and looked in, some large enough to walk through, and some large enough to walk through that could only be looked in on. The one thing they all had in common was a marble piece -- it might be a carved block or a hand or just a raw piece of marble -- which worked as a symbol of the artist herself and her protection of her talent within her somewhat fucked up family.

I was sad to hear of her death. She was 98, and her work wasn't really recognized until she was in her 70s.

She gives me hope, and opened my eyes to other aspects of art.

I went to see the Magritte Exhibit at LACMA last week. The whole exhibit was carpeted like in the picture above and the ceiling had pictures of the Los Angeles Cloverleaf system.

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