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Category: open-source

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Open source art history

An easy, interesting, free site for learning art history, available to everyone.

All art survey courses start with the Venus of Willendorf (courtesy of Naturhistorisches Museum)…

A reader asked how she could learn more about art history. My normal answer would be to go to the library and take out a copy of Janson’s History of Art. But she can’t do that.

A while ago, another reader sent me this listing of free art-history courses online. Most of them are narrowly-focused, making them more interesting to the enthusiast than to the beginner. But the list led me to SmartHistory. It has a detailed set of syllabuses that takes you through the development of western art, from the Venus of Willendorf to Pop Art. (Those of you looking for an analysis of the last fifty years will have to wait.)
And go to this (Chartres cathedral c. 1220)…
These are:
A syllabus is an outline for a course, a description of where you’ll go and how you’ll get there. You get them the first day of class, put them in the front of your binder and refer back to them when you’ve forgotten something. SmartHistory’s are interactive, so they end up driving your learning. You walk through them step-by-step, just as you’d go to lectures at university. I sampled several lessons and found them complete, interesting, and thorough. And there are graded quizzes.
And then to this study of a horse by Leonardo da Vinci (courtesy of ‌Royal Library, Windsor Castle)…
SmartHistory started in 2005 as an audio guide series for use at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art, and as a resource for college students. It has now published 1500 videos and essays on art and cultural history. While these include the art of Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Oceania, they’ve not yet written syllabuses for non-western art.
“Publishers are adding multimedia to their textbooks, but unfortunately they are doing so in proprietary, password-protected adjunct websites. These are weak because they maintain an old model of closed and protected content,” they wrote on their webpage.
And then to Impressionism, represented here by Monet’s Impression, soleil levant, 1872 (Musée Marmottan Monet)…
That, to me, gets to the heart of the matter. Individuals and institutions may own individual paintings, but nobody owns our history or our heritage. Doling it out at $25 for a ticket to the Met or $100 for an access code to a textbook is contrary to our goal of building an educated, thinking society with common values. A person who follows these syllabuses meticulously is going to learn everything they’d study in a college survey course in art history.
And end up somewhere around Roy Lichtenstein’s Drowning Girl, 1963 (Museum of Modern Art, New York).
Smarthistory launched its first custom-designed website in 2007. Between 2011-2015, it was supported by Khan Academy and remains its official partner for art history. And this is the first I’ve heard of it. Somedays I feel like the last one to the party.
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Paintings, paintings everywhere!

The Amathus sarcophagus (5th century BC, Cyprian archaic period) was excavated by General Cesnola in Amathus, Cyprus and purchased from General Luigi Palma di Cesnola in 1874. Frankly, it’s absurd to talk about intellectual property rights for objects purchased from tomb robbers. 
I believe that our shared art heritage should be available to all (especially the parts that were plundered in the first place). The Metropolitan Museum of Art  recently announced that it has released 400,000 digital images of its collection into the public domain. While the Met has always had images online, the new database includes high-resolution views suitable for scholarly study.
Two misconceptions need to be cleared up. First, this is not the Met’s whole collection, which numbers far more than 400,000 items. Also, no online viewer can “let you see the pieces as you might if you visited the museum in New York City, in person,” as one breathless reviewer wrote. There is no substitute for a real walk around a museum.
George Caleb Bingham, Fur Traders Descending the Missouri, c. 1845. It’s a lot more fun to see this in person and enter the inevitable debate about whether that’s a cat and if so, why it’s on a boat. But when it’s on the internet, it’s definitely a cat.
On the other hand, many of these objects can’t be viewed in the museum at all, since they’re not on display. That makes this online collection invaluable.
The Met is following a general trend in the art world to make access to artwork easier. The Farnsworth Art Museum bucks this trend, and I wish they’d stop. There is so much that can be learned from studying the technique of a master painter, and not all of us can go to Rockland to look at Andrew Wyeth’s preparatory sketches. (But if you want to, join me for my workshop in Belfast this summer.)
Young Woman with a Water Pitcher, 1662-65, Johannes Vermeer. To choose one work to demonstrate the breadth and depth of the Met’s collection is impossible, so why not start here?
The Met allows dissemination of images for scholarly purposes. What does that mean? Essentially, it means anything that isn’t for commercial gain, like reprinting images on umbrellas, scarves, and coffee mugs—those rights they reserve for themselves alone.
You can view the Met’s collection here.

Come paint with me in Belfast, ME! Information is available here.
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The internet and art

The Romans kept their ancestor-geniuses in boxes. (Okay, they were actually shrines.) This one, from the House of the Vettii in Pompeii, shows two Lares (or guardian angels), flanking the household’s ancestor-genius.
When I went looking for Iván Ramos’ photos, it was very easy to come up with them, because he is practicing an open-source business model. When I went looking for Van Gogh paintings of an orchard on Tuesday, I had no problems, because Wikipaintings is open source.
Open source started off as a software development model, but has become more generalized. It means universal access through free licensing, and universal distribution, including subsequent iterations. For artists, it’s about sharing your process and it means not worrying too much about the low-res images of your work that are spinning around on the internet. (That’s not too difficult, since we sell paintings, not images of paintings.)
We keep our geniuses in different boxes: Wikipaintings, for one, which claimed to have 75,000 paintings on line as of June, 2012.
That’s pretty much the norm in my world of visual arts, where painters are happy to share process and images of their work. But it is not universal.
I would love to show my students how Andrew Wyeth set up his paintings. But the Wyeths are very protective of their intellectual property, so if you want to study them in breadth, you have to hie over to a museum that holds their work.
I would love to show you Jamie Wyeth’s Seven Deadly Sins, which uses seagulls as models. However, the Wyeths are very tight with their intellectual property, and so you’re unlikely to see the series on the internet. Here are some ravens in Maine instead, which aren’t out of copyright and which Wikipaintings displays under fair use principles.
What does this exposure do to the Cult of Genius that has elevated the artist since the 18th century? Hopefully, it destroys it forever, since the idea of the artist locked in his garret and thinking brilliant but ultimately solitary thoughts, is pretty terrible for the actual production of art.
Artists never worked in a vacuum.


Let me know if you’re interested in painting with me in Belfast, Maine in August, 2014 or in Rochester at any time. Click here for more information on my Maine workshops!
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Is anyone out there?

A constantly-changing installation on my morning route. I’m sure many people just run right through it, judging by how frequently it’s been kicked around when I get there.

Sometimes I produce artwork that goes into galleries, where people come to say nice things about it (and occasionally even buy some). Other times, I produce work for which I can’t gauge the audience’s response, such as this Facebook album documenting the destruction and construction of a new grocery store in my neighborhood.
Much modern art is now open-source, which curtails any in-depth communication between the creator and his audience. YouTube, your blog, and your website will count your visitors, but that’s a pretty one-dimensional view of your audience. Pinterest and Facebook don’t even give you that. Either you’re the meme-of-the-week or you feel like you’re laboring inside a dark box, totally cut off from the world.
The original art at this site was this wire flower, which bloomed in mid-March.
I pass by a little arrangement of rocks, twigs and pine cones every day on a pedestrian bridge over an expressway.  It changes every day, and it always brings a smile to my face. It started with a wire flower, which then sagged into a drooping bloom during Holy Week, and was then replaced by the current collection.
Unless this artist is hiding in the shrubbery watching, he or she has no idea that I’m a fan. I see it as a sort of special greeting directed specifically to me. But how can the artist possibly realize that? In fact, I frequently see the arrangement kicked out of place by unmindful pedestrians.
By accident or design, the flower drooped during Holy Week, matching perfectly the pensive mood of that season.
 Ray Davies of the Kinks once sang

“Are you listening?
Are you listening to me?
Can you hear me?
Can you hear me clearly?
Around the dial…”
I hope that unknown artist on the pedestrian bridge doesn’t give up on me. I’m listening.
There’s still room in this summer’s Maine painting workshops. Check here for more information.