Tag: art

Uglification As Control: The Assault on Beauty

This morning at 4 am, something not unusual (for me) happened: I woke with an insight after falling asleep mid-chapter reading C.S. Lewis’s Space Trilogy. Ransom, his main character, was based on J.R.R. Tolkien, and I had been having a conversation with Professor Tolkien in my sleep. 

What I wrote down was this: Triptych: Wealth. Power. Beauty.

These are the three things humans desire. Beauty is generally within our reach. Wealth and power must be worked for but are achievable in our great Western civilization. And these are precisely the things that socialist and Marxist movements, or indeed any ideology that seeks control over others, work to destroy. It’s not that they hate the good and the beautiful so much as that the desire to dominate is more powerful. In The Lord of the Rings, Sauron and Saruman knew that domination of others is easiest when people are hungry, diminished, and surrounded by the drab and the ugly.

Of the three, I am most fascinated by beauty. 

Power and Wealth

Everyone knows about the first panel, wealth. As socialism creeps into a system, we see more and more confiscation of wealth: progressive taxation, expensive regulatory tangles, redistributionism, and equity. Promises of fairness harden into, as the hobbits in “The Scouring of the Shire” discovered, the powerful gathering far more than is ever shared back out. The ordinary man is “given” just enough to stay sated but hungry, kept dependent upon the government.

Power follows quickly. Bureaucracies centralize decision-making in government and industry. HR departments make cold decisions about employee relations. Grant bodies and cultural gatekeepers decide what projects are funded. The independent powers — families, churches, businesses, local private organizations, local communities — are crowded out or regulated into irrelevance. Eventually, only the central powers are granting permission for things that were once free.

Beauty is different. Beauty affirms the spirit and soothes the soul, affirms dignity and self-worth, and makes people hard to rule. 

The Uglification of the Shire

Tolkien shows us exactly how it works. The ruffians and “gatherers and sharers” that took over the peaceful Shire don’t just loot; they uglify. They close the old inns, fell beloved trees, replace hobbit-holes with ugly, mean brick houses, pollute the water, and craft and post ugly rules and propaganda. But why bother making things hideous? Why is it important to destroy beauty? 

Because beauty is quietly powerful. The ordinary hobbit could go outside in the evening and smoke his pipe, gazing out across the lovely green hills of the Shire. Daily, they saw that life could be ordered, delightful, and worth defending. Once beauty is ruined, there is less to care about, less to fight for. Compliance becomes normal — after all, the Party Tree has already been cut down and left to rot, so there’s nothing to fight for. Quaint Bagshot Row is an open quarry. Gatherers take surplus and more, despoiling what they don’t take. The hobbits grumble, of course, but they are demoralized, hungry but not starving, and much easier to control because they just don’t care anymore.

We saw the same things in the old Soviet Union. Socialist realism, with its austere lines and solid colors, replaced real art with propaganda posters praising the USSR and the worker. Beautiful, graceful cathedrals and exotic Russian onion domes were replaced by brutalist concrete blocks. Fashion and music and gathering places, things of delight, were flattened into drabness, functional but not fun. Because the state could not redistribute beauty, and because beauty gives people joy and hope, beauty was pathologized, called bourgeois, and replaced with an antiseptic, dark aesthetic. The common man was given enough “culture” to be sated, but never enough to satisfy the hunger of his soul for beauty. Other, darker things filled that void.

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School librarians told to remove art books with ‘historic paintings of nudes’ in latest censorship row

School librarians are being told to remove art books with ‘historic paintings of nudes’ in the latest censorship controversy revealed today.

The ‘insane’ trend was revealed by a delegate at the annual conference of the National Education Union (NEU), saying she had heard ‘many accounts’ of art books being cut.

It comes after a school librarian at Lowry Academy in Salford, Greater Manchester, revealed last week she had been forced to remove books deemed ‘inappropriate’ by management.

Bosses used artificial intelligence to earmark almost 200 books for removal, including George Orwell’s 1984 and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight.

The school later admitted it had removed ‘a small number of books’ but said it had put most of them back, into ‘age-appropriate categories’.

The Lowry Academy case prompted the NEU to pass an urgent motion yesterday to ‘fight censorship and defend librarians’.

The union said that although the woman in the original controversy is not part of the union, it wanted to protect its own librarian members from suffering a similar fate.

Proposing the motion, Kristabelle Williams, a member from Lewisham, said: ‘We cannot ignore the issues that this case has brought up.

‘We can take action as a union now to try to make sure it doesn’t happen again.’

She said the support of the union would give librarians the ‘confidence to not self-censor and resist the chilling effect that this case will cultivate’.

She added members fear there is now an ‘increased risk of external complaints’ and ‘hate campaigns’ about books in their libraries.

Also speaking during the debate was Laura Butterworth, a member from Tameside Greater Manchester, which is near Lowry Academy.

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AI-Generated Art Can’t Receive Copyright Protection After Supreme Court Declines Case

The advancement of AI-generated art suffered a crucial blow this week when the Supreme Court left in place a lower-court ruling that such works cannot be protected under U.S. copyright law.

The original plaintiff, a computer scientist from Missouri named Stephen Thaler, appealed to the Supreme Court after “lower courts upheld a U.S. Copyright Office ​decision that the AI-crafted visual art at issue in the case was ineligible for copyright protection ​because it did not have a human creator,” per Reuters.

Thaler, of St. Charles, Missouri, applied for ⁠a federal copyright registration in 2018 covering “A Recent Entrance to Paradise,” visual art he said his AI ​technology “DABUS” created. The image shows train tracks entering a portal, surrounded by what appears to be green and ​purple plant imagery.

The Copyright Office rejected his application in 2022, finding that creative works must have human authors to be eligible to receive a copyright.

According to The Verge, the U.S. Copyright Office issued new guidance last year saying that AI-generated could not enjoy copyright protection, potentially destroying the profitability of text prompts with no original source material. Thaler had also tried to patent his AI-generative works, which has also faced several legal challenges.

“The US federal circuit court similarly determined that AI systems can’t patent inventions because they aren’t human, which the US Patent Office reaffirmed in 2024 with new guidance, stating that while AI systems can’t be listed as inventors on a patent, people can still use AI-powered tools to develop them,” noted The Verge.

Thaler’s lawyers argued admitted that the Supreme Court’s rejection could likely hurt the advancement of AI-generated artworks.

“Even if it later overturns the Copyright Office’s test in another case, it will be too late,” Thaler’s lawyers claimed. “The Copyright Office ​will have irreversibly and negatively impacted AI development and use in the creative ​industry during ⁠critically important years.”

Without copyright protection, AI-generated works would fall under public domain, allowing anyone to copy, sell, or use, essentially destroying the potential to create commercial intellectual property.

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Rock art from at least 67,800 years ago in Sulawesi

The Indonesian archipelago is host to some of the earliest known rock art in the world1,2,3,4,5. Previously, secure Pleistocene dates were reported for figurative cave art and stencils of human hands in two areas in Indonesia—the Maros-Pangkep karsts in the southwestern peninsula of the island of Sulawesi1,3,4,5 and the Sangkulirang-Mangkalihat region of eastern Kalimantan, Borneo2. Here we describe a series of early dated rock art motifs from the southeastern portion of Sulawesi. Among this assemblage of Pleistocene (and possibly more recent) motifs, laser-ablation U-series (LA-U-series) dating of calcite overlying a hand stencil from Liang Metanduno on Muna Island yielded a U-series date of 71.6 ± 3.8 thousand years ago (ka), providing a minimum-age constraint of 67.8 ka for the underlying motif. The Muna minimum (67.8 ± 3.8 ka) exceeds the published minimum for rock art in Maros-Pangkep by 16.6 thousand years (kyr) (ref. 5) and is 1.1 kyr greater than the published minimum for a hand stencil from Spain attributed to Neanderthals6, which until now represented the oldest demonstrated minimum-age constraint for cave art worldwide. Moreover, the presence of this extremely old art in Sulawesi suggests that the initial peopling of Sahul about 65 ka7 involved maritime journeys between Borneo and Papua, a region that remains poorly explored from an archaeological perspective.

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60,000-Year-Old “Highly Unusual” Etchings Could Point to Humanity’s Earliest Use of Geometric Design

Evidence of early human use of geometric concepts in prehistoric art has surfaced in southern Africa, revealed in a series of archaeological discoveries that point to complex patterns and repetition in ancient etchings on ostrich eggshells.

The remarkable finds, uncovered at a series of archaeological sites throughout southern Africa, are believed to have been engraved by early Homo sapiens in the regions close to 60,000 years ago—far earlier than previous examples of organized markings suggestive of the use of geometric rules.

The new findings were made by a research team based at the University of Bologna and reported in a study published in PLOS One.

Echoes of Early Geometry?

As the branch of mathematics that involves spatial properties such as shape, size, and relative position, it is known that the Ancient Babylonians began using geometrical calculations to track the movement of planets like Jupiter at least 1,400 years earlier than previously believed.

To compare the etchings uncovered by the team led by Silvia Ferrara, a Professor at the University of Bologna’s Department of Classical Philology and Italian Studies, to the capabilities of the ancient Babylonians would be off base. However, evidence of more rudimentary geometric thinking—obvious repetition, use of parallel lines, presence of angles (orthogonality), and other distinctive geometric organization—in the ancient African discoveries is hard to ignore.

“These signs reveal a surprisingly structured, geometric way of thinking,” Ferrara said in a statement provided to the University of Bologna’s Unibo Magazine.

“We are talking about people who did not simply draw lines,” Ferrara adds, “but organized them according to recurring principles—parallelisms, grids, rotations, and systematic repetitions: a visual grammar in embryo.”

An Ancient Tale Told on Ostrich Eggs

Ferrara and her team have hypothesized that the primary purpose of these ostrich eggs was to transport water. Probing more deeply into the curious markings that covered many of the eggshell fragments recovered from a trio of southern African archaeological sites, the team conducted a quantitative and systematic investigation of 112 samples.

Employing statistical analysis and geometric methods of investigation that had never been used for such artifacts before, Ferrara and her team reconstructed the lines and designs on the eggshells.

The results were surprising: Ferrara’s team discovered that more than 80% of the etchings they analyzed showed signs of “coherent spatial regularities” and evidence of repetitive orthogonality, with angles near 90° and angles resulting from the convergence of groups of lines drawn parallel to each other.

Ferrara and the team also point to the complexity in several of the etchings, which include repetitive hatched bands, geometric shapes such as simple parallelograms, grid-like motifs, and other features, which they argue as evidence of complex cognitive operations. Beyond the etchings themselves, the markings reveal evidence of rotation, translation, and repetition by the ancient designers, who displayed remarkable capabilities 60,000 years ago at sites in South Africa and Namibia.

Geometric “Mastery” in Ancient Southern Africa

“These engravings are organized and consistent,” Ferrara said, “and show mastery of geometric relationships.”

“There is not only a process of repeating signs: there is real visuo-spatial planning, as if the authors already had an overall image of the figure in mind before engraving it,” she adds.

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Rock art from at least 67,800 years ago in Sulawesi

The Indonesian archipelago is host to some of the earliest known rock art in the world1,2,3,4,5. Previously, secure Pleistocene dates were reported for figurative cave art and stencils of human hands in two areas in Indonesia—the Maros-Pangkep karsts in the southwestern peninsula of the island of Sulawesi1,3,4,5 and the Sangkulirang-Mangkalihat region of eastern Kalimantan, Borneo2. Here we describe a series of early dated rock art motifs from the southeastern portion of Sulawesi. Among this assemblage of Pleistocene (and possibly more recent) motifs, laser-ablation U-series (LA-U-series) dating of calcite overlying a hand stencil from Liang Metanduno on Muna Island yielded a U-series date of 71.6 ± 3.8 thousand years ago (ka), providing a minimum-age constraint of 67.8 ka for the underlying motif. The Muna minimum (67.8 ± 3.8 ka) exceeds the published minimum for rock art in Maros-Pangkep by 16.6 thousand years (kyr) (ref. 5) and is 1.1 kyr greater than the published minimum for a hand stencil from Spain attributed to Neanderthals6, which until now represented the oldest demonstrated minimum-age constraint for cave art worldwide. Moreover, the presence of this extremely old art in Sulawesi suggests that the initial peopling of Sahul about 65 ka7 involved maritime journeys between Borneo and Papua, a region that remains poorly explored from an archaeological perspective.

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ECHR to rule on religious symbols in public buildings

The European Court of Human Rights is currently considering a case seeking the removal of religious symbols from public buildings, the ruling from which could affect public institutions’ ability across the 46 Council of Europe states to display such symbols.

The ‘Union of Atheists v. Greece’ case involves two applications in which the applicants, who identify as atheists, requested the removal of Christian symbols displayed in Greek courtrooms during hearings related to religious education issues.

According to the case filing, the applicant association requested the removal of a Christian orthodox icon of Jesus Christ from the courtroom, arguing that its presence violated the prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion under Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Article 14 of the Convention concerns the prohibition of discrimination, stating that enjoyment of the rights and freedoms set forth in the Convention shall be secured “without discrimination on any ground such as sex, race, colour, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, association with a national minority, property, birth or other status”.

The applicants additionally argued that the presence of religious symbolism in the courtroom hindered their right to a fair trial and brought the court’s objective impartiality into question.

The Greek courts rejected the applicants’ requests to remove the icons, with an argument advanced that in the context of “the dominant Christian Orthodox religion”, the presence of Christian symbolism was a practice which had long been followed in all courtrooms “according to custom and the orthodox tradition”.

The applicants complained that as the subject matter of the trials related to the right to freedom of religion, the rejection of their requests to have the icon removed from the courtrooms infringed their right to an impartial tribunal under Article 6 § 1 (concerning right to a fair trial) and their rights under Article 9 § 1 (concerning freedom of thought, conscience and religion) of the Convention. 

They also claim that there is a consensus among the Council of Europe member states against displaying religious symbols in courtrooms, and that the display of religious imagery in Greece is not provided for by law.

Legal advocacy organisation ADF International has intervened in Union of Atheists v. Greece to argue that religious symbols, including artwork, icons and other Christian imagery, reflecting a country’s history and traditions, “cannot be forced down under a false interpretation of religious freedom”.

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Art dealer who told FBI about Epstein’s child porn affinity in 1996 says he threatened to BURN her house down

An art dealer who sounded the alarm on Jeffrey Epstein‘s sickening affinity for child pornography a decade before the FBI investigated the disgraced financier said he scared her into silence by threatening to set her home ablaze. 

Maria Farmer, who Epstein once hired to help him buy artwork, has long asserted that she filed a complaint against the sex offender in September 1996. 

On Friday, the FBI finally released a copy of the document – solidifying what Farmer has been arguing for years. 

‘I’ve waited 30 years,’ Farmer told The New York Times. ‘I can’t believe it. They can’t call me a liar anymore.’

But she said it does not negate the fact that investigators ‘harmed all of these little girls’ by not taking her concerns seriously. 

In the released complaint, which has Farmer’s name redacted, authorities wrote that she had taken photos of her 12 and 16-year-old sisters for her personal portfolio that Epstein stole. 

Farmer, who was 25 at the time, claimed that Epstein ‘sold the pictures to potential buyers’ and told her ‘that if she tells anyone about the photos, he will burn her house down,’ as per the document. 

The now 56-year-old visual artist clarified in an interview that the photos Epstein stole included nude images, according to the NY Times. 

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Neanderthals created the world’s oldest cave art

Neanderthals didn’t just survive Europe’s Ice Age landscapes – they ventured into deep caves and made art. What they left isn’t figurative like the later animal scenes of Homo sapiens.

Instead, it is a repertoire of hand stencils, geometric signs, finger-drawn lines, and even built structures. This type of artmaking points to creative intent and symbolic behavior long before our species arrived.

The latest synthesis of discoveries from France and Spain shows that these nonfigurative markings and installations predate modern humans in western Europe by tens of millennia.

The research moves the long-running debate about Neanderthal cognition from speculation to evidence.

Neanderthal art decoded

All confirmed examples so far are nonfigurative – no animals or humans. Instead we see hand stencils made by blowing pigment over a hand, “finger flutings” pressed into soft cave surfaces, linear and geometric motifs, and purposeful arrangements of cave materials.

Neanderthals inhabited western Eurasia from about 400,000 to 40,000 years ago and have often been caricatured as the archetypal “cavemen.”

Questions about their cognitive and behavioral sophistication persist, and whether they produced art sits at the center of that debate.

Despite proof that Neanderthals used pigments and made jewelry, some researchers resisted the idea that they explored deep cave systems to create lasting imagery.

New dating work from researchers at Université de Bordeaux has shifted that view. In three Spanish caves – La Pasiega (Cantabria), Maltravieso (Extremadura), and Ardales (Málaga) – researchers documented linear signs, geometric shapes, hand stencils, and handprints made with pigments.

At La Roche-Cotard in France’s Loire Valley, Neanderthals left suites of lines and shapes in finger flutings (the trails left when fingers move through soft cave mud).

Testing Neanderthal creativity

Deep inside the Bruniquel Cave in southwest France, Neanderthals broke off stalactites into similarly sized sections and assembled them into a large oval structure, then lit fires on top.

It was not a shelter but something stranger – and if you saw it in a contemporary gallery, you might well call it “installation art.”

Now that well-dated examples exist in Spain and France, more finds are likely. The challenge is timekeeping: establishing reliable ages for Paleolithic cave art is technically difficult and often controversial.

Stylistic comparisons and links to excavated artifacts can help, but they only go so far.

Aging art in stone

There are three main ways to anchor ages. First, if black pigment is charcoal, radiocarbon can date when the wood burned.

But many black figures were drawn with mineral pigments (for example, manganese), which can’t be radiocarbon dated, and even genuine charcoal carries a risk. The date reflects when the wood died, not when someone used it.

Second, calcite flowstone (stalactites and stalagmites) that overgrows art is a natural time cap. Uranium–thorium dating can pin down when the calcite formed, giving a minimum age for the pigment or scoring beneath it.

Using this method, researchers dated calcite on top of red motifs in La Pasiega, Maltravieso, and Ardales to older than ~64,000 years.

Even at that youngest bound, the imagery predates the first Homo sapiens in Iberia by at least ~22,000 years, and Middle Paleolithic archaeology – the Neanderthals’ “calling card” – is abundant in all three caves.

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“Art Must Always Tell The Truth”

Popular artist Banksy created a graffiti mural in London depicting the current state of the UK censorship system using the courts to trample the rights of British citizens…

As ‘sundance’ writes at TheConservativeTreeHouse.com, it did not take long for the authorities to cover the mural and eventually attempt to remove it.

I particularly like the fact the govt turned the CCTV camera, so they can monitor who might visit the scene of the criminal dissent.

Apparently, the British government doesn’t quite see the irony.

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