2025.10.26
22:04:25
2024.10.26
451 Rhawn Gallery
Unexpectedly started dabbling with sculpting again today.
2015.10.26
2D CAD database
15102602.db IQ grid 2200 wide bands Northeast Philadelphia 1848 [the red circle in the center top marks the original location of 451 Rhawn Gallery]
2009.10.26
Really, what boundaries have you pushed?
Vatican Psycho (1972)
American Psycho (1991/2000)
Now imagine it's 1963 and you're seven years old and this is one of your favorite television shows.
See, there's an answer for everything.
2006.10.26
5233 skylight even
2004.10.26
Mercer House auction catalogue
...taken apart one of the Mercer House auction catalogues, and there are seven full page views of the house interior. These pages will be apposed with laser prints of the single page jail letters. If the letters, albeit reduced in size, come out legible, then the resultant work will indeed be copyright infringement, thus not really for sale. . . . At least they will be Artifacts of Ottopia.
...have the portraits cut out and new collage art "inserted", plus new text could be laser printed and the title of the pieces are lines from the jail letters.
...text about the letters could be printed on a number of the pages to comprise a small book.
auction catalogue pages
Like the idea for the Mercer House portrait pages, the paintings represented on catalogue pages could be manipulated into new works of art...
2002
Denis Diderot "Encyclopedia"
Diderot, Denis. "Encyclopedia." The Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert Collaborative Translation Project. Translated by Philip Stewart. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, 2002. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.did2222.0000.004 (accessed 26 October 2026). Originally published as "Encyclopédie," Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers, 5:635–648A (Paris, 1755).
151/192
One must indicate the origins of an art, and follow its stages step by step when they can be known, or substitute conjecture and hypothetical history for the real one. It can be affirmed that in this the novel would often be more instructive than reality.
152/192
But the origin and progress of an art are not like the origin and progress of a science. Scientists converse; they write; they put forward their discoveries; they refute; they are refuted. Such contestations manifest the facts and fix the dates. Artists on the contrary live unknown, hidden, isolated; they do everything for their interests, and almost nothing for their glory. There are inventions that are kept within a family for centuries: they pass from fathers to sons, are improved or atrophy, without anyone knowing either by whom or when the discovery can be said to have been made. The incremental steps by which an art progresses toward perfection also confound dating. One man harvests the hemp; another soaks it; a third scutches it: first it is a crude cord, then a thread, and ultimately canvas: but a century goes by between each of these stages. The man who would develop a product from its natural state all the way to its highest use, could hardly escape notice. How could it be impossible for a society to find itself all of a sudden wearing a new fabric, without asking who was to be thanked? But such cases do not occur, or occur only rarely.
153/192
Chance commonly suggests the first attempts; they bear no fruit and remain buried; another tries again: he has a partial success, but not the kind people talk about; a third walks in the second's footsteps; a fourth in the third's; and so on, until the end product of these experiments is excellent: and this product is the only one that creates a sensation. It also occurs that an idea has barely blossomed in a workshop before it gets out and about. Work goes on in several places at once: each man operates separately; and the same invention, claimed at the same time by several, properly belongs to none of them, or is only attributed to the one it makes rich. If the invention has come from abroad, national jealousy mutes the inventor’s name, and it remains unknown.
154/192
The government ought to allow entry to its manufactures to watch the men work, ask them questions, make drawings of their instruments, machines, and even the premises.
155/192
There are circumstances in which artists are so closed-lipped that the quickest means would be to become an apprentice oneself, or have an associate do so.
156/192
There are few secrets one could not manage to learn by such means: these secrets without exception ought to be divulged.
157/192
I know that this opinion is not shared by all: there are narrow minds, unkind souls, indifferent to the fate of the human race, and so focused on their little society that they see nothing beyond its interests. These men want to be called good citizens; and that is all right with me, provided they allow me to call them cruel men . One would think, to hear them, that a well-made encyclopedia , a general history of the arts, should be nothing but a big manuscript carefully locked up in the monarch's library, and unavailable to any eyes other than his: a book of state, and not of the people. What good is it to divulge a nation's knowledge, its hidden transactions, its inventions, industry, resources, secrets, arts and all its wisdom! Are these not things it owes in part to its superiority over rival, neighboring nations? That is what they say; and here is what they could further add. Would it not be preferable, rather than enlightening the foreigner, to shed ignorance on him, and plunge the rest of the world into savagery, the better to rule over it? They fail to notice that they occupy no more than a point on this globe, and will last but an instant; and to this point and this moment they wish to sacrifice the happiness of future centuries and the entire species. They know better than anybody that the average life of an empire is less than two thousand years, and that in less time than that, perhaps, the name French , that name that will last forever in history, will be impossible to find on the surface of the earth. These considerations do not expand their vision; it seems that to them the word humanity is devoid of meaning. Were they at least consistent! But at other times they will rave at the mystery shrouding Egyptian temples: they will deplore the loss of ancient knowledge; blame the negligence or silence of the writers who were mum or spoke so inadequately of countless important objects; and they will never realize that they are demanding of earlier men what they call a crime today, and fault the others for having been what they take pride in being.
158/192
These good citizens are the most dangerous enemies we have had. In general, one should benefit from criticism, without answering it, when it is good; ignore it, when it is bad. Is it not pleasant, for all those who doggedly blacken paper against us, to think that if the Encyclopedia maintains for ten years the reputation it now enjoys, no one will talk about their writings any more, and even less so if it is itself ignored.
159/192
I once heard someone say to M. de Fontenelle that his apartment could not hold all the things that had been published against him. [85] Who knows a single one of them? L'esprit des lois and Histoire naturelle have only recently appeared, and the criticisms written of them are entirely forgotten. [86] We have already observed that among those who rose to censure the Encyclopedia , scarcely a one had the necessary talent to enrich it with a good article. I do not think it would be exaggerating to add that it is a book which they would do well to study a good bit. It was written in a philosophical spirit, and most of those who judge us are in that regard far from even the level of their century. I appeal to their writings. It is for this reason that they will not last, and that we dare presume that our dictionary will be even more read and admired in several years than it is today. We would have no difficulty naming other authors who have had or will have the same fate. Some (as we already said above), raised to the heavens, because they had written for the throng, because they had submitted to current thinking, and placed themselves within reach of average readers, have lost their reputation, as the human spirit progressed, and have finally been forgotten. Others on the contrary, too advanced for the times in which they appeared, were little read, little understood, not appreciated at all, and long remained virtually unknown, until the time when the century they were leading was past, and another century to which they belonged before it came, reached them, and finally did justice to their merit.
160/192
I think I have taught my fellow citizens to read chancellor Bacon; this wise author has been more pored over in the last five or six years than ever before. We are nevertheless far from appreciating the importance of his works; minds are not yet sufficiently advanced. There are too few people in a position to rise to the level of his meditations; and the number will perhaps never increase by much. Who knows whether the Novum organum , the Cogitata et visa , the book De augmento scientiarum , are not too far above the average reach of the human mind, to become in any century easy and common reading? Only time can resolve this doubt.
2002.10.26
Re: Monkeys and designers
You raise an interesting point. I've never heard of the 100th monkey notion, but I have from time to time wondered about the fact "that designers, that have never seen the work of another, and living across geographic bounds, can create similar art." In the mid-1980s I thought (to myself) that wavelengths, somehow literally and/or figuratively, had to do with an otherwise serendipitous creative/cognitive commonality. The wavelengths (if I try to expand this 'theory') emanate from individuals and these same wavelengths are picked up by other individuals, and in either case heightened sensitivity is involved. Like the 100th monkey notion, as more individuals incorporate a wavelength that is out there, the stronger the wavelength 'signal' becomes. Admittedly, this idea is easily flawed, and I only mention it now as something I used to think (about).
While your question (rightly) centers on creative similarities between disparate artists/designers, a related phenomenon in our time is the effective role of the hired publicist. Recently, I mentioned that Frank Gehry's cardboard furniture was featured in a 1972 issue of Life magazine. I have my own collection of 1972 Life magazines that I received by subscription back then and which I've been taking apart over the years, but I also recently purchased a lot of them via eBay, thus my renewed knowledge of what is in these magazines. I wanted to show the Gehry feature but I didn't bookmark it. So, instead of looking through all the magazines again, I looked up the article in a Gehry bibliography, and I was surprised to find that there were over a dozen 1972 publications that featured an article on
Gehry's cardboard furniture. In this case, the 100th monkey is more specifically the 100th magazine editor contacted by a publicist.
2000.10.26
Baroque beginnings?
A. asks:
To repeat a previous question: who designed the Baroque? OR How did the Baroque arise (emerge)? Any takers?
S. offers:
I think Michelangelo's architecture (which was more or less a product of his late life) manifested tremendous 'new' inspiration for 16th -17th century architecture. The details of the Porta Pia and the wholly integrated articulation of the Sforza Chapel offer architectures completely unprecedented until that time, which in turn inspired new architectures. Likewise, the 'undulating' wall of St. Peter's no doubt became the new paradigm, especially considering that St. Peter's then (as now?) represented the ultimate place of worship. In simple terms, it is best to learn from the best.
To this day, I am intrigued by Michelangelo's fortification designs for Florence (some executed and otherwise recorded as plan drawings). They exhibit many proto-Baroque flourishes, and it is interesting to note the military connection.
"This places Michelangelo's fortification projects among the incunabula of modern military architecture, just at the most fluid and inventive moment in its history, at a time when experience had established no proven formula of design. Unlike the situation in other arts, the lessons of antiquity and of preceding generations were of little account; this is one of those rare events in the history of architecture when technological advances altered the basic precepts of design."
James Ackerman, The Architecture of Michelangelo (Penguin, 1970), p. 127.
ps
I see architecture as the product of human imagination(s), and that is why I spend my time trying to figure out where human imagination comes from.
1992.10.26
3D CAD database
921026n1.db taken literally model
1966.10.26
1966. Wednesday, Philadelphia
Travels to Philadelphia for a meeting with the director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. On recounting that the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen would like to borrow from the Louise and Walter" Arensberg Collection for an exhibition in April 1967, Duchamp receives a favourable response from Dr Evan Turner, who requests an official letter from the two museums.
Ephemerides
1947.10.26
1947. Sunday, New York City
After finishing his chess game with Kiesler at one in the morning, Marcel returns in the evening at seven-thirty to dine at 56 Seventh Avenue.
Ephemerides
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