Dali House

Relax, kids, it’s only Granddad’s gas mask from the Great War!

Halloween was a lot more fun back in the olden days when they could make scary stuff out of such authentic materials as elephant ivory, not that the elephants ever raised any objection to plastic once it was invented.

This ivory model of a skull has a cylinder at the base that family physicians pushed to activate the eyes, tongue and lower jaw and demonstrate what was wrong with family members’ heads — and to scare the daylights out of everyone.

It’s one of those historical artefacts now regarded as grin-inducing curiosities, and is owned by Britain’s Science Museum, where every day is Halloween.

Once the 18th-century doctor had calmed his patients down again, he whipped out the wax vanitas seen below and popped off the abdominal lid, gave them a minute to catch their breath, and showed them which of their internal organs he was going to cut out with his scary knife.

Actually, the wax vanitas was a common device to signify the brevity of human existence. A model gravestone or an hourglass was even better at reminding you that, no matter how old you are, time’s nearly up.

Children fond of playing with sharp sticks might be more easily cautioned with this display. You see the point?

Dali House was listed last December among the “100 Must-see Art Blogs” at ArtCareer.net (under “art history” at #78). See the listings here and my post about it here.

And now this site has been included in the “50 Best Blogs for Art History Buffs” at OnlineCollege.com.

It all boils down to traffic stats from Google, but it’s another feather in the fedora regardless. I collect feathers.

This new list offers “the best blogs about art history for students, professors or enthusiasts”, listing “general” subject matter through #21 and “niche” specialists from there, with Dali House at #31.

I thanked OnlineCollege sincerely, but I had to point out that Dali House isn’t a “niche” blog about Salvador Dali, as it states in its recommendation. It’s about a much larger swath of art, of course.

The Salvador niche is occupied by my other art blog, Dali Planet, but alas that one’s still too young to be showing up on Google’s hit parade. Hopes are higher than its current ranking.

Not exactly the first subject that springs to mind when you’re designing a hot-air balloon, but the end result is quite … uh, well, it’s pretty bizarre, actually.

The good ship Vincent Van Gogh has been rendering friendly skies around the world a little more startling since March 30, 2003, when it was inflated for the first time in Zundert, the Netherlands.

Professional balloonist Hans Zoet is usually, if not always, the pilot, on behalf of the Dutch brewery Bavaria, a bottler that’s even older than Vincent would be if he were still around to see his head floating monstrously if harmlessly through space wearing an advertising banner around his neck.

The photos here come from various sources, including Airliners.net, which seems a bit of a stretch, and different shutterbugs in New Zealand and Australia.

In the latter country the 30-metre-tall Vincent Van Gogh took part in the Canberra Balloon Fiesta. Australia’s quaintly named Liquorland booze chain distributes Bavaria and its sister beer Hollandia.

Rik Pavlescak, the founder of the Collect Dali Yahoo Group, came up with an interesting analogy toward the end of a lively recent discussion among the members about copyright. He cited a 2006 article by Boston Globe columnist Alex Beam on the debate over Roy Lichtenstein’s use of comic-book panels in his pop art.

Beam in turn pointed to the website of David Barsalou, who was then teaching art at the High School of Commerce in Springfield, Massachusetts. On Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein, Barsalou stacks more than 100 paintings by the artist next to their original comic images. He also published a book with the same title.

Even better are Barsalou’s Flickr pages, which have a lot of well-sourced background information and biographies and photos of the original comic artists, placing credit where it duly belongs.

Barsalou’s efforts demolish the common belief that Lichtenstein created entirely new images based on the look of 1950s and ’60s comics. Even the cartoons’ balloon captions were often scalped intact.

“He tried to make it seem as though he was making major compositional changes in his work, but he wasn’t,” Beam quotes Barsalou as saying. “The critics are of one mind that he made major changes, but if you look at the work, he copied them almost verbatim. Only a few were original.”

Lichtenstein Foundation executive director Jack Cowart argued that “the panels were changed in scale, colour, treatment and in their implications” and Roy never made an “exact copy”.

Amusingly, the foundation’s website can’t be visited unless you first click to agree that you won’t violate the copyright within, and the warning is illustrated with Lichtenstein’s “Grrrrrrrrrrr!!”, a painting of an angry dog that came directly from a comic strip drawn by Joe Kubert. See the rest.

Two and a half years ago Dali House had a gripping yarn about elephants that can paint pictures. Surely there couldn’t be much more in the trunk?

Imagine my shock to learn that that sneaky zoologist Desmond Morris has spilled the beans on the little trick that pachyderms are packing when they seem to whip up a figurative painting — as opposed to some random abstract.

As shared with the world last month via Britain’s Daily Mail, Morris was dispatched to Thailand by “his friend the scientist” Richard Dawkins to uproot the truth about elephant artistry.

To see tuskers with brushes, Morris was assured, he only had to travel outside Bangkok as far as dirty little Pattaya a couple of hours away. He set off for the Nong Nooch Tropical Garden, which has in its floral midst a dusty circus area where the elephants do their stunts.

Spying from among the mob of tourists, he watched three young female elephants painting flowers. The animals’ mahouts handed them a series of brushes daubed in different colours and seemed to stand aside while art was created.

But Morris noticed the trainers tugging on the elephants’ ears. A yank up and down was the signal to make a vertical line, a sideways pull for a horizontal one. Blobs were formed when the ears were pushed forward.

And it turned out, Morris reported, “that each of the so-called artistic animals always produces exactly the same image, time after time … Mook always paints a bunch of flowers, Christmas always does a tree, and Pimtong a climbing plant.”

Morris nevertheless graciously gave the beasts a rave review for “translating” the nudges “into attractive lines and blobs” with great precision.

In the end, Morris the secret agent was outed. The mahouts dragged him out into the open in front of the crowd, laid him on the ground and ordered one of the tuskers to give him a massage with its foot.

“I saw one of the largest elephants approaching with what I swear was an eager gleam in her eye …”

Read the ghastly conclusion on the Mail’s website. No one likes an art critic.