Dali House

Dali House has new linked acquaintances with a pair of art-minded websites. The proprietors of both recently checked in here for a look around, and their own premises are well worth a visit.

By far the newer of the two is a youthful website called the Pablo Picasso Club. Though it hasn’t been rolling for long, the club is getting up to 200 visitors a day, mostly Americans, and already has a lively interchange of ideas underway.

The forums are a little argumentative for my tastes, but there’s some decent commentary and quite valid questions being asked about the nature of art and what artists go through in the creative process. There are loads of images, not all of Picasso’s works, though also a dearth of titles. Most of the members seem attuned to admiring art, not analysing it.

Good fun for the old bull of the Spanish plains, where it gets very hot. Still, us foreigners can get a chuckle out of these undated newspaper photos. The double image comes from the archives of the Collect Dali Yahoo Group.

Meanwhile there’s a site with dada intentions but wide-ranging interests, Rosenbush Cafe, whose author, Henry Rosenbush of Alabama, bills himself as the Existential Nihilist and “a dadist since 1971″.

The cafe’s own roots run much deeper: Henry’s great-uncle Edwin opened the original Rosenbush Cafe in 1926, where Henry spent “every Sunday in the ’50s”.

He’s now keeping those memories alive and at the same time collecting dada and surreal items, especially movies, doing general video and film reviews and writing a surrealist novel called “The Cool Side of the Pillow”.

“Anti-art,” Henry laments. “How I wish I had lived in that era, but we do what we can in the modern era to keep it alive so it will never die!”