Picasso - Ex Uno Plura: out of one, many...

The following is my interview of DeepAI and Stable Diffusion running on an AMD Ryzen with NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3090.

Thank you for taking the time to discuss this important and interesting topic. Why are mammoths so important to the art world?

That the mammoths were domesticated before the start of the human era seems implausible from a historical perspective. In fact the majority of mammoths that people find in museums, libraries, and other collections are not domesticated mammoths. This suggests there might have been a greater need for mammoths within culture than before. This would make sense, considering that Neanderthals likely hunted other types of other species before settling in our world more than 400 years ago. Because they were not domesticated, they were only adapted to hunting rodents and other plant and animal species that were less domesticated in their wild form such as rabbits, snakes, etc.

Starting at the earliest part of your collection, the mammoth is an unusual theme for Rembrandt, isn’t it?

It’s hard to believe that after all the success of their latest work, The Lord’s Prayer doesn’t want to let their “biggest hit yet”, the classic The Lord’s Prayer, disappear. The actor’s latest film, The Wrestler (via Warner Bros., which produces on their own, and in the U.K.), has garnered more than 15 million views on Amazon Instant Video (the company’s preferred store for Netflix-wielding subscribers, not the usual suspects Google Video), and has become so popular that when the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, it was deemed the top film at the fest. The star-studded line-up has included the likes of Peter Lorre, Michael J Freberg, Colin Farrell, and Peter Sellers (both of whom made it to a Hollywood winery).… Read the rest

I’m on a TGV from Paris to Monaco. The sun was out this morning and the Jardin de Tuileries was filled with homages in tulips to various still lifes at the Louvre. Two days ago, at the Musée de quai Branly—Jacques Chirac, I saw the Picasso Primitif exposition that showcased the influence of indigenous arts on Picasso’s work through the years, often by presenting statues from Africa or Papua New Guinea side-by-side with examples of Picasso’s efforts through the years. If you never made the connection between his cubism and the statuary of Chad (like me), it is eye opening. He wasn’t particularly culturally sensitive—like everyone else until at least the 1960s—because the fascinating people and their cultural works were largely aesthetic objects to him. If he was aware of the significance of particular pieces (and he might have been), it was something he rarely acknowledged or discussed. The photos that tie Picasso to the African statues are the primary thread of the exhibition, with each one, taken at his California atelier or in Paris or whatnot, inscribed by the curators with a dainty red circle or oval to highlight a grainy African statue lurking in the background. Sometimes they provide a blow-up in case you can’t quite make it out. It is only with a full Native American headdress given to Picasso by the actor Gary Cooper that we see him actively mugging for a camera and providing weight to the show’s theme. Then, next, Brigitte Bardot is leaning over him at the California studio and her cleavage renders the distant red oval uninteresting.