Blog Assignment 6: Modern Vision

Authentic works of art these days are not seen in the manufactured world. People do not create an item once for one person as this is more effort for less profit which is what more artisans are focussing on now. Their is more of a sense of once you get an item that is mass produced, one must place their own authenticity on it by way of customising it. Their may well be a million sets of headphones like mine but if I paint my own design on them then their are none that look exactly like mine and I have now placed my own authenticity on that item. So where Walter Benjamin says “To an ever greater degree the work of art reproduced becomes the work of art designed for reproducibility. From a photographic negative, for example, one can make any number of prints; to ask for the authentic print makes no sense.”* and "In principle a work of art has always been reproducible. Man-made artefacts could always be imitated by man."* The key word here being imitated and not identical copies as we see today. While I agree that the authentic has changed and disappeared from the manufacturers hand I believe that we are entering an age where we become our own artisans for authenticity. That we take what has been mass produced and bought by millions and we make it our own and therefore make it authentic. So really I do believe that there is a role for the ‘authentic’ in an age of digital design and manufacture but it comes after this stage.

Blog Assignment 5: Colour—abstraction, perception and modernity

Colour Vision, in my opinion best seen in the above example of colour contrast where the same colour will look different to our eye depending on the surrounding colour. Our colour vision, our ability to perceive colour is something that has been experimented on by many over the centuries including painters and scientists and mathematicians. This colour contrast according to John Gage in Colours of the Mind* said that it was Leodardo da Vinci who first noticed this and himself said, "The mutual reaction of colours placed close to each other so when their appearance changes more or less noticeably, has long been noticed by painters and has been labelled contrast by them."* So painters have been aware of this for a long time and have been using it in their work to use surrounding colours to alter the appearance of others in our perceived colour vision.

*Gage, J. (1993). Colours of the Mind in Colour and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction (pp.191-212). New York: Thames and Hudson.

Blog Assignment 4: Ornament or Nature

The iphone one of the most used pieces of technology today shows exactly this quote of "The evolution of
culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from objects of daily use.” It shows how as we evolve and our technology increases the need for ornamentation decreases in fact the aesthetics of the iphone are as minimalistic as possible proving that now less ornamentation is beauty in our eyes. It all stems from this design for practicality where ornament has no place, ornament does not fit the shape of your hand or give useful clear information. Adolf Loos said "We have outgrown ornament, we have struggled through to a state without ornament. Behold, the time is at hand, fulfilment awaits us." Even he knew that we were moving past the need for ornament and moving on to the more practical, the minimal, and in our eyes now, the beautiful.