RSA Animate – 21st century enlightenment

Matthew Taylor's animated history of enlightenment and inquiry regarding 21st Century enlightenment. enjoy:

on warhol & the "striking image"

"The implications of Warhol's move to silk-screening, and to photo silk-screening in particular, were tremendous. Traditional, manual virtuosity no longer mattered. The fact that Warhol could draw [and he could] had no bearing on his art now: how an artwork was made ceased to be a criterion of its quality. The result alone mattered: whether or not it was a striking image. Making art became a series of mental decisions, the most critical of which was choosing the right source image: Warhol would contend some years later, 'The selection of the images is the most important and is the fruit of the imagination'" (Scherman & Dalton 113).

http://tinyurl.com/23q2pyv

on warhol & what i like

‎"Warhol was a master at suggesting meaning, without actually committing himself. He managed this in several ways: by choosing highly charged but indeterminate images (the dead superstar, the presidential widow, the suicide in midleap), by the many variations within a multiple portrait, which, though they invite interpretation, are in fact merely accidental and without meaning; and by the lack of clarity in the photo silk-screened image itself, a casually silk-screened print of a blown-up acetate of an eight-by-ten publicity glossy, itself a mechanically reprinted blowup of the contact sheet positive, itself a second-generation transfer from the original negative. As the critic David Antin put it, 'Somewhere in the image there is a proposition. It is unclear'" (Scherman & Dalton126-7).

image: http://tinyurl.com/2b9g5rk