Dali House

The always-amusing Photoshop wizards at Worth1000.com have risen to an overtly aesthetic challenge to combine two famous works of art in one wry image.

The above wedding of Norman Rockwell and William Bouguereau by a talented technie signing himself (or, alright, herself) “arsidubu” is definitely one of the best, but there’s loads more, and Dali came in very, very handy indeed.

Part of this picture is from William Bouguereau’s 1888 painting “Printemps”. Can you guess which part?
Click on the image to see the original (nudity alert).

You can tell any artist his work is “garbage” and it won’t cut nearly as deeply as the descriptive “kitschy”. The adjective is a sabre to the gut.

Except for kitsch artists, of course, who giggle and hope you’ll run them through again. And again. Mark Ryden shares this glee; Dali probably didn’t mind so much in his later years, because he was still seen as an iconoclast regardless and, besides, he was making buckets of money in his pursuit of corniness.

But read the diatribes of the Art Renewal Centre and brace yourself for some unamused bristling, because “kitsch” continues to be the operative epithet in defining much of the 19th-century painting it worships, and in fact, the brightest star in its heaven,
William Bouguereau, is for many the poster boy of kitsch. This is a shame because it was actually the copyists who mimicked him that submerged the West in slovenly sentimentalty. See the rest.

Khetsirin Pholdhampalit, editor of The Nation’s style section, came back from Paris recently with a doubly interesting story.

I didn’t know that every October 7 is Nuit Blanche there, a dusk-to-dawn arts festival in which exhibitions are held all over town, from the Eiffel Tower and Hotel de Ville to the galleries, churches, libraries and even sport centres. Apparently other European cities have copied the idea, as have Toronto and Montreal.

The other interesting bit was the contribution to the festival of Thailand’s Navin Rawanchaikul (pictured above), who screened a 10-minute film called “Navins of Bollywood” that had been commissioned by Singapore’s TheatreWorks for the Diaspora project it presented at the IMF-World Bank meeting in the Lion City last month.

If you’ve ever googled yourself, the movie’s concept sounds pretty intriguing. See the rest.

How China ensures the world an unending supply of art

There are 1.3 billion people in China, and every one of them who’s any good with a paintbrush works in a squashed little tenement of a “village” called Dafen, actually a hemmed-in suburb of Shenzhen, just across the former border from Hong Kong.

Okay, not every Chinese painter works in Dafen, but upwards of 10,000 do, and their nefarious work is churning out copy after copy after copy of famous artworks. The factories in this four-square-kilometre wedge of a settlement produces five million oil paintings a year for the European and American markets, 90 per cent of them copies.

I have no idea how they manage copyright and licensing. See the rest.

… No, not “Night Watch” – “Day Watch” – although Rembrandt’s 1642 conversation piece at the venerable Rijksmuseum will always be known as “Night Watch”. It is in fact “The Company of Captain Frans Cocq”, the militia that paid Rembrandt darned good money to paint their portrait in broad daylight, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble.

A quadracentennial Rembrandt relapse, last of three parts

Fully 300 years after he did, someone realised they were looking at it through a gloom of grit and this wasn’t suppertime at all. They sent it to the cleaners and it came back ready for breakfast, much cheerier now, thankyou.

You can scour the Internet all you want, though, and most of the images of it are still grubby. Maybe there’s a lot of smog on the Web as well as smut. On the other hand, it looks better darker, psychological proof that the night tells better stories. If you haven’t already, rest your cursor on the image above for a comparison.

Anyway, it’s cheerier and in mint condition once more, although it’s said that if you “see it in person” (as it were), you can spot the zig-zag of slashes added in 1975 by someone who evidently thought he was Zorro. The restorers couldn’t quite stitch it up right after the unfortunate critiquing, but never mind, “Night Watch” had endured worse before, as we’ll see.

Captain Cocq (no “Star Trek” jokes, please) and 17 members of his civic militia guards paid Rembrandt a tidy 100 guilders each to convey them in pigment. Sheer vanity, one might say, since they hired six other artists to do likewise at the same time. See the rest.