Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.
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Yves Béhar (who is in an epic struggle with Marc Newson to claim the title of "sexiest industrial designer alive") designed this vibrator. It looks like a Miyazaki cartoon creature.
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Michael Jackson's funeral cost one million dollars. His final outfit cost $35,000, and the flowers cost $16,000. Lord. Obviously I'm no MJ anyhow, but when I die, if there's a mil lying around? Feel free to bury me in nekkid dirt and use the rest to feed pie to starving kids.... More.
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Forget the telescope-- that kid has wings!
And my artsy fartsy friends don't understand why Picasso scares the shit out of me.
Photoshopped, obviously.
I'm more interested in how a 17th century artist got a Mac.
The painting also predicts the need for interior decorators.
Or maybe it's predicting pathological hoarding. Add about 93 cats to the picture and that place could be on A&E.
I've studied the painting for a good two minutes and I can't find any evidence that it predicted Thomas Kinkade.
There is also a giant time-turner in the lefthand side of the painting. Maybe it was the result of time travel.
telescope? what about the laptop she's plugging away on???
@scifijazznik
--don't worry; I'm a certified BFA carrying farting artist, and Picasso and co. don't do much for me either. Particularly the work that Picasso's "I had to spend years un-learning how to draw" comment resulted in. Fortunately, the wing of the art world that thrives on pretension is withering and dying as the world at large realizes that the emperor has no clothes. Exciting times are ahead as art becomes wonderful again. They're here now, actually, if you look in the right places and ignore the crap.
Why hasn't anyone yet suggested that the art community has simply misdated the painting?
@cratermoon
Spoilsport. I was envisioning a scenario where time travelers stranded in the 17th century convinced the artist to include the anachronism in order to alert their colleagues of their need for help.
Obviously it's just an arabic antique...
Looks like a regular old kaleidoscope to me.
I'm more curious about the multitude of flat panel displays and what appears to be a couple of tablet PCs behind the pooch. Computers, software, and the electricity to run them, all back then. Who would have guessed?
That Betamax tape bottom center is a little more worrying...
Total guess, but I figure there are records for when he painted it. Probably commissioned to do it and the financials are all on paper.
That doesn't mean that someone couldn't have painted a telescope on it LATER, though.
Alternatively, why isn't this considered evidence that we have the date for the creation of the telescope wrong? Frankly, that strikes me as more probable than someone making one in a painting that happens to look exactly like a real one.
The actual article doesn't say anything about "Art Predicting Life," it's more along the lines of "oh look, new evidence shows we may have been wrong about when and where this thing was invented."
Calling this "Art Predicting Life" is like finding a 80,000-year-old cave painting showing somebody hunting with a bow and concluding that the artist was predicting the future instead of adjusting your estimation of when the bow was invented.
his [patent] application was rejected, apparently because the idea was already well known.
---
I wish they would do it like that today.
It looks to me like she's sitting in front of her PC uploading naughty pictures of herself to the early internets.
The other possibility is that what looks to us like a telescope may have been intended to be something else (or several something-elses) entirely -- the "face on mars" effect.
For the people who didn't bother following the link, the painting isn't dated to before the invention of the telescope.
It's dated before the first known invention of the type of telescope that a couple of scientists who looked at this painting thought it looked like. So another alternative is that they are just wrong about what type of telescope it was.
I agree. One could easily deduce from the painting that it's a device to examine angel armpits or collect and distill angel armpit sweat.
isnt there a Joan Miro painting from the 40's that depicts a colorful character riding a skateboard?
I'm not shocked at this at all. There is evidence to support the idea that Caravaggio and other Baroque artists in the late 1500s used optics to produce the high level of detail and photographically accurate perspective and shading in their paintings.
If artists of the time were using optics, it's not that much of a stretch to think that perhaps scientists had been spending time playing with optics well before then.
I mean really is it that much of a stretch to think that a scientist after observing the effects of a single lens would try various configurations of multiple lenses? I don't think it would be long before some sort of telescope was created. I mean, a telescope isn't all that complex.
Perhaps it was one of those devices that was felt to be more of a gimmick at the time of it's first invention and it wasn't until Galileo started making all kinds of cool observations using it that it became so important. Suddenly everyone wanted to take the credit for it's invention.
If you're in the habit of hanging around naked, with a naked kid (winged or not), telescopes, monkeys and a pug in the room, you might want to pull the drapes. Just sayin'.
Michael Crighton's novel Timeline did just that. It was an o.k. book and a terrible movie.
Hated the book, myself- mostly because the characters' motivations made no sense whatsoever. I mean, what kind of supervillain has a time machine and decides to use it to build historically accurate amusement parks?
If you think that's something, wait until she figures out how to use the vibrator that I left behind.
If you don't write it down, it never happened....
@Brainspore
Haven't read the book or seen the movie, but it doesn't surprise me -- Crichton had amusement parks on the brain, it seems. Artificially intelligent robots? Amusement Park. Cloned Dinosaurs? Amusement Park. Time Travel? Amusement Park, why not?
There is a second painting, "Allegory of Sight and Sound", by the same artist that has a different telescope in it.
See it here:
http://www.wga.hu/html/b/bruegel/jan_e/2/5sense61.html
skateboards were invented in the 50s, as far as we know and multiple artists, including Miro painted charachters riding skateboards long before then.
"Art predicting life"?
Doesn't this just mean that this particular telescope design was invented earlier than previousely expected?
I read the book "Secret Knowledge" by David Hockney. It suggests that the telescope and various optical devices were semi-secret tools of the time. They were important to see invaders from far away and to plan defenses when the villagers decided to "storm the castle". There was a technical advance in art in Italy at the time of the development of optics. Private craftsmen have always been able to develop prototypes far ahead of the average manufactured example.
LMAO, agree. When will we see wings, with DNA technology, not TOO far away.
Are you saying Picasso was pretentious? And you call yourself an artist?
You are clearly an ignorant, er, artist, if there was ever an oxymoron since both categories are mutually exclusive.