Dali House

Until the Israelis got into another fistfight and spoiled the summer, Washington was basking in the promise of a much simpler slap-down with Iran and a visit by Henri Rousseau the scam artist.

The old customs officer’s sojourn at a DC museum had caused a considerable buzz that even my own newspaper in Bangkok picked up on (although we also delved into Paris Hilton’s first record album at the same time, so the point is moot).

What I found most interesting about the See the rest.

You have to scoot over Dorseyland to read about cat and elephant paintings (not paintings of them – the animals do the painting) (sort of), but Dali House tries to catch up with this limping tale of Scottish art critics going gaga for one elephant’s self-portraits.

Dali House is in Thailand, where pachyderms are practically on pedestals, though not for their artistic talents. Here, the saga of one unfortunate beast’s demise earlier this month made the news every day for a week, right up until the residents of the village he’d wandered into in Chanthaburi province dug a hole deep enough to bury him and hoisted his sorry 50-year-old carcass in, amid Buddhist chants and many tears (Nation photo).
See the rest.

If anyone else showed me this picture and said, “The is a piglet squid,” I’d have had a good chuckle and wondered to myself how long it’s going to take before I’m this good with Photoshop. However the person who came up with this is actually a god, er, rather The God.

I know no one’s pulling a fast one here, because this and many other barely believable marine images come from SerpentProject.com, a perfectly sober website devoted to undersea exploration that just had a photo contest. My thanks to 2Bangkok.com for bringing it to my astonished attention.

The pigmy squid swims around looking adorable off the coast of Nigeria, apparently. Dali House has a crate of other stunning fish photos coming along soon.

Meantime, look out, it’s a Chimaera monstrosa, clearly offering flying lessons, on the George Bligh Bank in the North Atlantic.

Here’s an artsy little time-waster: Mr Picassohead, a Flash application from Ruder Finn Interactive of New York that let’s you assemble a painting using typica motifs of Old Cubeball himself.
No actual drawing involved; just drag in the components of your choice, scale them up or down, flip ‘em around and choose the colours. Pablo would have a fit.

It looks as though some 487,000 people so far have not only “painted” a wee work of art but submitted it to the online gallery. I’m not entirely sure why – maybe they don’t have a blog! (If so, that’s a half-million fewer bloggers than I thought there was.)

I whipped this one up in a couple of minutes. Bidding starts at a dollar and goes down from there.

Somehow on September 15, 2001, The Guardian had the bad timing and/or the gall, and the space, to print a longish essay by John Sutherland on a then-upcoming show at the Tate Modern. It’s excellent, though, as was the headline, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak surrealist”. Some excerpts:

The word “surreal” is common linguistic property. You’ll find it even in the mouths of citizens who rarely go to art galleries and wouldn’t know a Tanguy from a tangerine, or Man Ray from a fish with a long spiked tail. It has become one of those all-purpose “intensifiers” for situations where other words fail. “Surreal,” one mutters, “bloody surreal”.

Useful as it may be, “surreal” is, on closer inspection, something of a misnomer. It comes from the French surréalisme, which translates into English as “super-realism”. Or, as the Spice Girls would have put it, something “reelly reelly reel”. See the rest.