Art Portals

Portal for art at artinfo.com and also artnet.com

Window Seat, Erykah Badu, 2010

Boston Common, Visualized by Color Analysis in the Time Domain

Fascinating. Beautiful. Not sure what it is good for otherwise. 

The Complete '53 to '89 Corvette Set

We especially like that they've been sitting, largely ignored, in a garage in Brooklyn.

Maybe this is how I'll decorate my new apt

Like finger painting, but with spaghetti.

Digital Photography

See, if only we had time, we would cultivate a skill/talent/hobby like photography. We have a nice little camera, so this is going to be our starter project: The Art of Panning, from Digital Photography School.

Terrariums

From an artist in NY by whom we're obviously impressed.

The Republican Party's Over

Election art from Zina Saunders.

Philadelphia Murals

from NYTimes.

Karin Rosenthal, Photographer

Saw some of Karin Rosenthal's work on display in a doctor's office, of all places. Good stuff, though:

Photoblog Update

Boston.com's Big Picture (not to be confused with the financial blog of the same name) has some spectacular photos, not just the previously mentioned Large Hadron Collider. See also Notions' Oceans new sidebar.

Most Wanted Paintings

The Dia Center for Art did surveys of people in 18 countries, and based on their tastes, compiled universally likable and universally unlikable paintings for each country. Both extremes look pretty bland.

I don't know if it's art, but I like it

Hot stuff from Meera Thompson, BU alumna:


*Actually, we do know. We just love the way Jack Nicholson delivered the line in Batman.

Hi-Res Wallpapers/Desktop Pics

At InterfaceLIFT. Some very good photography there.

Spectrum Arts Festival

Spectrum Arts. Brought to you by BU, of all people.

Shameless Plug for an Art Store

Or, Get Rid of Your Posters. PaintingsDIRECT.com.

Cool Photography... For a Purpose

You know that transparent screen trick people do with their computer wallpaper? Amnesty International has started doing the same thing with their ads:

If only the US were well-behaved enough that we could be friends with AI...

Life Imitates Art

The Washington Post has a headline ripped from the plot of The Constant Gardener: Pfizer, purveyor of life-saving medical therapies, tested an unregistered antibiotic in Nigeria back in the '90s without so much as telling the unsuspecting patients, and although they have been trying to deny the dirty truth of their little trial since at least 2001, but lawyers for the families of the test subjects finally found the company's reports. The drug, trovafloxacin, was briefly available in the US but later restricted from most uses due to liver toxicity, but it is worth noting that none of the drugs in its class are used in children because of reports of damage to growing cartilage. So Pfizer's notion that they were providing the drug as a humanitarian effort to ease an epidemic at the time is completely bogus, even if they could explain why their "humanitarian effort" ended before the epidemic.

What's more, according to the 2001 BBC article (above), the control group in this study received half the usual dose of a competing drug, and six of them died as a result of being insufficiently treated. Aside from the inhumanity of it all, such crappy scientific methodology takes the air out of Pfizer's argument that the high cost of drugs is because of the cost of the research involved in bringing a new drug to market, since they are not only morally degenerate but also cheap and sloppy when it comes to testing their drugs.

In all, a panel of Nigerian doctors figures that Pfizer violated Nigerian law, the international Declaration of Helsinki that governs ethical medical research, and the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child. We figure that the punishment for these crimes will amount to exactly nothing.

The guys at Ars Technica brought up the idea of boycotting drug cos for this kind of behavior, but 1) Pfizer, in addition to its stable of "me-too" drugs with sketchy profiles like this, has a number of drugs with proven safety and efficacy, and 2) all the other drug cos have similar records, and you gotta go somewhere to get better. We'd like to see their patents revoked, so that their drugs would go generic, effectively taking away the exclusive power over these drugs that they have demonstrated they are not qualified to wield.

More Photography

This guy is apparently a pro photographer, but since his site is in French, I can't be sure. His panoramas of the Paris skyline rock.