Log24

Wednesday, September 1, 2021

Obiter Dicta

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 6:58 pm

The title is a phrase from Tom Wolfe's The Painted Word —

"the seemingly innocuous obiter dicta ,
the words in passing, that give the game away"

The President on July 23, per USA TODAY —

"And there’s a need, whether it is true or not,
there is a need to project a different picture."

Related material —

EVERY LAST EASTER EGG AND REFERENCE
IN EPISODE 6 OF HBO'S WATCHMEN .

Wikipedia — "For the 72nd Primetime Emmy Awards, 
Damon Lindelof and Cord Jefferson won the award
for Outstanding Writing for a Limited Series, Movie,
or Dramatic Special for this episode."

Wikipedia on Lindelof —

See also . . . The Bard of Teaneck —

"What if Shakespeare had been born in Teaneck, N.J., in 1973?

He would call himself Spear Daddy. His rap would exhibit a profound,
nuanced understanding of the frailty of the human condition, exploring
the personality in all its bewildering complexity: pretension, pride,
vulnerability, emotional treachery, as well as the enduring triumph of love.

Spear Daddy would disappear from the charts in about six weeks."

—  Gene Weingarten in the Washington Post,
     Sunday, Oct. 2, 2005

Weingarten's remarks were quoted here  on that Sunday, along with
the following illustration —

Spear Daddy!

'The Deceivers'— A novel by Alfred Bester, author of 'The Stars My Destination

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Obiter Dictum

Filed under: General,Geometry — m759 @ 7:59 pm

The title is both a legal phrase and a phrase
used by Tom Wolfe in his writings on art.

See, too, the pattern of nine triangular half-squares
arranged in a 3×3 square used in the logo of  the
Jean Stephen art galleries in Minneapolis…

IMAGE - Former location of Jean Stephen art galleries

… and in a print at the Tate in London  (click to enlarge)—

See as well an obit of the print’s artist, Justin Knowles, who reportedly died
on Feb. 24, 2004.

Some instances of that date in this journal are related to Knowles’s aesthetics.

Monday, September 19, 2022

Ob Iter

Filed under: General — Tags: — m759 @ 1:49 am

Friday, April 25, 2014

Creativity

Filed under: General,Geometry — Tags: — m759 @ 2:45 am

Quoted here on April 11 —

“…direct access to the godhead, which
in this case was Creativity.”
— Tom Wolfe, From Bauhaus to Our House

From “Today in History: April 25, 2014,” by The Associated Press:

“Five years ago… University of Georgia professor
George Zinkhan, 57, shot and killed his wife
and two men outside a community theater in Athens
before taking his own life.”

Related material:

A Google Scholar search for Zinkhan’s 1993 paper,
“Creativity in Advertising,” Journal of Advertising  22,2: 1-3 —

Obiter Dicta:

“Dour wit” — Obituary of a Scots herald who died on Palm Sunday

“Remember me to Herald Square.” — Song lyric

“Welcome to Scotland.” — Kincade in Skyfall

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Art Wars

Filed under: General — m759 @ 7:00 pm

Frederick Hart’s 1982 sculpture “Ex Nihilo” for Washington’s National Cathedral—

Related material — Tom Wolfe on Frederick Hart, said to have been
published in The New York Times Magazine  of Sunday, Jan. 2, 2000—

In 1982, Ex Nihilo  was unveiled in a dedication ceremony. The next day, Hart scanned the newspapers for reviews… The Washington Post… The New York Times… nothing… nothing the next day, either… nor the next week… nor the week after that. The one mention of any sort was an obiter dictum in The Post ‘s Style (read: Women’s) section indicating that the west facade of the cathedral now had some new but earnestly traditional (read: old-fashioned) decoration. So Hart started monitoring the art magazines. Months went by… nothing. It reached the point that he began yearning for a single paragraph by an art critic who would say how much he loathed Ex Nihilo… anything, anything at all!… to prove there was someone out there in the art world who in some way, however slightly or rudely, cared.

The truth was, no one did, not in the least. Ex Nihilo  never got ex nihilo  simply because art worldlings refused to see it.

Art worldings are one thing, Hollywood another.

Al Pacino’s moving wall sculpture in “The Devil’s Advocate” (1997)—

“After the film’s initial release, sculptor Frederick Hart sued Warner Bros.
claiming that a large sculpture prominently featured in the film
(on the wall of Al Pacino’s penthouse apartment) is an unauthorized copy
of his work ‘Ex Nihilo,’ displayed at the entrance of Washington’s Episcopal
National Cathedral.” — IMDb

Friday, December 1, 2006

Friday December 1, 2006

Filed under: General — Tags: , — m759 @ 4:07 am

Day Without Art

From the Online Etymology Dictionary:

crucial – 1706, from Fr. crucial… from L. crux (gen. crucis) “cross.” The meaning “decisive, critical” is extended from a logical term, Instantias Crucis, adopted by Francis Bacon (1620); the notion is of cross fingerboard signposts* at forking roads, thus a requirement to choose.

“… given the nature of our intellectual commerce with works of art, to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial— the means by which our experience of individual works is joined to our understanding of the values they signify.”

— Hilton Kramer in The New York Times, April 28, 1974

“I realized that without making the slightest effort I had come upon one of those utterances in search of which psychoanalysts and State Department monitors of the Moscow or Belgrade press are willing to endure a lifetime of tedium: namely, the seemingly innocuous obiter dicta, the words in passing, that give the game away.

What I saw before me was the critic-in-chief of The New York Times saying: In looking at a painting today, ‘to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial.’ I read it again. It didn’t say ‘something helpful’ or ‘enriching’ or even ‘extremely valuable.’ No, the word was crucial….

The more industrious scholars will derive considerable pleasure from describing how the art-history professors and journalists of the period 1945-75, along with so many students, intellectuals, and art tourists of every sort, actually struggled to see the paintings directly, in the old pre-World War II way, like Plato’s cave dwellers watching the shadows, without knowing what had projected them, which was the Word.”

— Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word

For some related material from the next 30 years, 1976-2006, see Art Wars.

* “Note that in the original Latin, the term is not by any means ‘fingerpost’ but simply ‘cross’ (Latin Crux, crucis) – a root term giving deeper meaning to the ‘crucial’ decision as to which if any of the narratives are ‘true,’ and echoing the decisive ‘crucifixion’ revealed in the story.”

— Wikipedia on An Instance of the Fingerpost.

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