The Mixtape: Death and Art, Drill Baby Drill, Data Politik
Welcome to Buffered Content - a newsletter where I share my opinions along with curated content from the web on - technology, media, culture, and other distractions.
Mortality and the Old Masters
by Peter Schjeldahl | The New Yorker
Respected art critic and writer Peter Schjeldahl, who also is a living embodiment of criticism as art, writes and wonders about what made the art from ‘the Old Masters’ have so much heft. In the process, he shares his feelings about the possibility of a personal reinterpretation of artworks – in museums and maybe outside by people, once the viral thundercloud is lifted (in whatever form that may come) and we are free to enter the hallowed museum walls again.
While I don’t share his misgivings about the virtual tours being “..spectacular, amorphous disembodiments of aesthetic experience”, I realize it’s coming from an aesthete who may also be a purist (I have just discovered him), and so close to his subject – pure love of art and artists, that any virtual experience of the old masters is an abomination.
In my millennial naiveté, I enthusiastically defend the power of the internet (specifically YouTube in this case) as a way to discover and experience high art in 4K streamed to my living room.
He associates the weight and influence of the great works on an acute consciousness of mortality in the era of pandemics and mass suffering – acting as inspiration and brought to cathartic effect in the art itself.
Consider the heaps of bodies that accumulate in Shakespeare’s tragedies: catharses of universal fear. The persistence of religion in art that was increasingly given to secular motives—Bible stories alternate with spiritually charged themes of Greek and Roman mythology—bespeaks this preoccupation. Deaths of children were a perpetual bane. Paintings of the Madonna and Child, most grippingly those by Giovanni Bellini, secrete Mary’s foreknowledge of her son’s terrible fate. The idea that God assumed flesh, suffered, and died was a stubborn consolation—Mary’s to know and ours to take on faith or, if we’re atheists, at least to marvel at as mythic poetry.
Reevaluating Las Meninas, Diego Velazquez’s intriguing masterpiece that already has voluminous interpretations over the years by art historians, he writes –
Presuming to grasp the whole is like hazarding a unified theory of relativity and quantum physics. Despite ending as I had started—mystified—I congratulated myself on parsing evidence of the artist’s chief ingenuity: a perspectival scheme that resolves at a viewing point not centered but offset to the right, face to face with a jowly dwarf and opposite Velázquez’s rendered position to the left.
I was in aesthete heaven. But, three months on, marooned by fear of the virus, I’m interested by an abrupt shift in my attitude toward the painting: from lingering exhilaration to vertiginous melancholy. “Las Meninas” is tragic, as an apotheosis of confidence and happy expectation that teeters precariously—a situation that Velázquez couldn’t have known at the time but which somehow, subliminally, he wove into his vision.
(viaAlexandra Schwartz)
Image Source: Wikimedia Commons
READ a review of Peter Schjeldahl’s book: HOT, COLD, HEAVY, LIGHT – 100 Art Writings, 1988-2018.
WATCH a video of Peter’s conversation with Steve Martin at the 2011 New Yorker Festival.
WATCH a fun and accessible video about ‘Las Meninas’ by the nerdwriter.
QUOTABLE
“To judge a work of art involves self-surrender. You are something other than your own person when in art’s spell.” - Peter Schjeldahl
WATCH: Google and Amazon are now in the oil business
The United States has been estimating peak oil production over many years but has never hit the mark of declining domestic production, owing to developments in exploration and extraction techniques since the post-war years.
In the era of massive techno-industrial growth, with rising global energy consumption, unless there is a huge shift to renewable sources, oil companies will continue to dictate the energy market without any regulatory obstacles. The industry has its challenges – price fluctuations, identifying promising wells, and making the extraction process efficient while generating max yield.
Enter machine learning.
Balancing the competing realities of rising energy needs to run our cars, airplanes and data centers, with concern about climate change – the leading tech companies have quietly, but substantially made big moves courting big oil to provide services using cutting edge big data, machine learning and automation tech.
While Google, Amazon and Microsoft operate in the pragmatic reality of Y-o-Y profitability trying to grab a piece of the extraction pie, any promises to become carbon net neutral in their own operations - will attract obvious scrutiny.
Brian Merchant, for Gizmodo –
Silicon Valley’s mythology has always been predicated on the notion that its firms and founders would behave differently, and more aspirationally, than the industries of old. “Changing the world,” while always a notably unspecific mantra, was supposedly intended to precede “into something better.” But industries don’t get any older than fossil fuels. And they don’t get any worse for the climate.
Fascinating, when you realize that this comes at a time when general awareness and coverage about climate change is at its peak than it has ever been. Full disclosure – I will continue using Gmail, Kindle and MS Office.
The Best Books on the Politics of Information
by Sophie Roell | Five Books
Political science professor Henry Farrell proposes five books to build a curriculum expanding our understanding of democracy and how to safeguard it in the era of information deluge and surveillance capitalism.
The technologist Maciej Ceglowski describes machine learning as “money laundering for bias.” That can have terrible consequences if machine learning reflects the categories of official thought, and then interprets the policy consequences in terms of these categories too, so that bias compounds bias. This then creates incentives for ever more distorted ways of understanding the world which are implemented through these algorithms and which then create these feedback loops which get worse and worse, and lead, perhaps, to human tragedy, but also to these authoritarian systems not working in the cool, clean, beautiful and efficient way that pundits like Harari expect.
QUOTABLE
“Basically, you’re saying that if we want to understand the politics and economics of the society we live in today, we do need to understand Silicon Valley.”
Great interview covering books from fiction and non-fiction, with thoughts on reimagining how classical theories (Hayek et al) in economics can be interpreted, and how notions of the efficiency of free markets and the role of the state need to be re-translated – in times of massive data availability, processing and feedback loops powering our digital economy.