Abstract Art

Italian artist Salvatore Garau has auctioned an invisible sculpture titled Io Sono (“I am”) for 15,000 euros. The buyer receives a certificate of authentication and agrees to display the nonexistent artwork in a private home in an unobstructed area 5 feet square.

Last month the artist displayed another immaterial sculpture, Buddha in Contemplation, near the entrance to the Gallerie d’Italia in Milan. The area of its location was marked off with tape.

Garau said that the titles of his works “activate” viewers’ imagination. “When I decide to ‘exhibit’ an immaterial sculpture in a given space, that space will concentrate a certain amount and density of thoughts at a precise point, creating a sculpture that, from my title, will only take the most varied forms. After all, don’t we shape a God we’ve never seen?”

(Thanks, Sharon.)

Time Games

Armenian pianist Tigran Hamasyan writes music of densely sophisticated rhythmic complexity, arranging subdivisions of grouped tuplets over a ground pulse that’s sometimes withheld, leading the ear into assumptions that are later revealed to be mistaken. Below, composer David Bruce analyzes some of his work.

Mosaic

drabing mosaic

Reader Shane Drabing sent this rendering of Von Glitschka’s immortal penguin logo assembled from 2,000 images that have appeared on this site, a sort of composite summary of Futility Closet.

The full image is here (24 MB), and a GitHub repository for Shane’s program is here. (Thanks, Shane.)

Tribute

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Holbein_Ambassadors.jpg

Hans Holbein’s 1533 painting The Ambassadors famously contains the distorted image of a skull — it resolves into its proper shape when viewed from the correct angle.

South African artist Jonty Hurwitz created the three-dimensional homage below. “Hans Holbein the Younger is thought to be one of the fathers of Anamorphic Art. This sculpture is my tribute to his genius and inventiveness. It is an expression of gratitude for the influence he has had on my life.”

Attention to Detail

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Image-Dadd_-_Fairy_Feller%27s.jpg

English artist Richard Dadd had established himself as a painter of fairies and other supernatural subjects when in August 1843 he became convinced that his father was the devil in disguise and killed him with a knife. In the Bethlem psychiatric hospital he was encouraged to continue painting, and when the head steward requested a fairy painting Dadd spent nine years investing The Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke with minute detail, using a layering technique to create a three-dimensional effect.

He wrote a long poem in which he names and gives a purpose to each character. The painting is now in the Tate Britain collection.

Dadd painted many striking images — the portrait below of one of his doctors, Alexander Morison, hangs in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alexander_Morison_Dadd.jpg
(c) National Galleries of Scotland; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

Memorial

https://www.flickr.com/photos/socialcriteria/34748537233/
Images: Flickr, Wikimedia Commons

The gravestone of urban planner Ildefons Cerdà has a unique design: It commemorates the Eixample, the distinctive “extension” of Barcelona that Cerdà designed in the 19th century.

The Nightingale Monument

https://www.reddit.com/r/Damnthatsinteresting/comments/mo2i8k/the_tomb_of_lady_elizabeth_nightingale_who_died/

Elizabeth Nightingale died of shock at a violent stroke of lightning following the premature birth of her daughter in 1731. In his will, her son ordered the erection of this monument, which was created by Louis Francois Roubiliac and stands in Westminster Abbey. Elizabeth is supported by her husband, who tries in horror to ward off the stroke of death. Washington Irving called it “among the most renowned achievements of modern art.”

The Abbey’s website says, “The idea for this image may have come from a dream that Elizabeth’s brother in law (the Earl of Huntingdon) had experienced when a skeleton had appeared at the foot of his bed, which then crept up under the bedclothes between husband and wife. … It is said that one night a robber broke into the Church but was so horrified at seeing the figure of Death in the moonlight that he dropped his crowbar and fled in terror. The crowbar was displayed for many years beside the monument but it no longer remains.”

Progress

“Wherever there is a phonograph the musical instrument is displaced. The time is coming when no one will be ready to submit himself to the ennobling discipline of learning music. Everyone will have their ready-made or ready-pirated music in their cupboards.”

— John Philip Sousa, New York Morning Telegraph, June 12, 1906