What­ev­er Hip­pocrates meant when he said “art is long, life is short,” we usu­al­ly take the say­ing to illus­trate one indis­putable med­ical truth and one more philo­soph­i­cal: every­one dies, but art lives for hun­dreds, thou­sands, of years—and may in some sense be a kind of immor­tal­i­ty for the artist. This was prob­a­bly what Sal­vador Dalí meant when he said, “Si muero, no muero por todo”—“If I die, I won’t com­plete­ly die.” But maybe he knew he’d return one day in anoth­er form as well.

What if artists could go on liv­ing for­ev­er along­side their work? Or be called up any time we want to have a con­ver­sa­tion. Long a sta­ple of sci­ence fic­tion, holo­gram tech­nol­o­gy can now bring back famous pop stars, to vary­ing degrees of uncan­ni­ness. It has not, until now, sum­moned a deceased famous artist. But as long as there’s an exten­sive audio-visu­al record with which to recon­struct the cel­e­brat­ed dead, it can be done, and now it has. You can see the results your­self in the video trail­ers here.

Among mod­ern artists, only Andy Warhol left a more com­plete record of his pub­lic per­sona. The holo­gram Dalí—according to a press release from Dalí Muse­um in St. Peters­burg, Flori­da, who will debut him in per­son, so to speak, this com­ing April—comes alive through the work of an algo­rithm that maps infor­ma­tion culled from “hun­dreds of inter­views, quotes, and exist­ing archival footage” onto the body of an actor of sim­i­lar size and build. Dalí’s con­ver­sa­tion is not spon­ta­neous but con­struct­ed from his own writ­ings and reen­act­ed. It’s not the stuff of Star Trek yet, but maybe a sig­nif­i­cant step in that direc­tion.

“Greet­ings,” purrs Dalí in the trail­er at the top, from the Dalí Muse­um in St. Peters­burg, Flori­da. “I am Sal­vador Domin­go Felipe Jac­in­to Dalí i Domènech. And I am back.” Vis­i­tors to the Dalí Muse­um will see the ersatz Dalí in “Dalí Lives” and “expe­ri­ence his big­ger-than-life per­son­al­i­ty in an up close and per­son­al way.” Will they tru­ly “get the unique oppor­tu­ni­ty to learn more about Sal­vador Dalí’s life and work from the per­son who knew him best: Dalí him­self”? Will they feel like it’s worth the price of the tick­et, at least?

It cer­tain­ly seems con­vinc­ing. If you had told me these clips came from actu­al inter­view footage, I might have believed you. Except for the part about him return­ing from the dead after 30 years. If, how­ev­er, it were pos­si­ble to real­ly bring Dalí’s con­scious­ness back online, I doubt he’d be par­tic­u­lar­ly sur­prised. Though he con­fess­es his fear of death in the short video above, he also tells us, “I do not believe in my death.” Or as he once said else­where, “I believe in gen­er­al death but not the death of Dalí absolute­ly not. I believe in my death becom­ing almost impos­si­ble.” Or as he might also have put it, “art is long, and so am I.”

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Walk Inside a Sur­re­al­ist Sal­vador Dalí Paint­ing with This 360º Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty Video

Sal­vador Dalí Fig­urines Let You Bring the Artist’s Sur­re­al Paint­ings Into Your Home

Alfred Hitch­cock Recalls Work­ing with Sal­vador Dali on Spell­bound: “No, You Can’t Pour Live Ants All Over Ingrid Bergman!”

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

What pos­sessed the man who attacked Rembrandt’s The Night Watch with a bread knife in 1975, “jab­bing two-foot-long knife marks into the sur­face,” as Nina Sie­gal writes at The New York Times, “cut­ting a sev­en-foot-wide hole, and rip­ping off a sec­tion of the can­vas”? This was not the first time the paint­ing had been man­gled. In 1715, just a lit­tle over 70 years after the mon­u­men­tal work’s 1642 com­ple­tion, the Ams­ter­dam city gov­ern­ment decid­ed to move it, and removed a sig­nif­i­cant part to shrink it down for eas­i­er trans­port. The miss­ing top and left por­tions have nev­er been recov­ered.

It sur­vived intact for two cen­turies then faced its first knife attack in 1911. Then it sur­vived two World Wars only to endure the sec­ond attack. Then, in 1990, it was set upon by a man armed with sul­phuric acid.

Thanks to the quick think­ing of a Rijksmu­se­um guard, only the painting’s var­nish sus­tained injury. These are just some of the facts we learn in the inter­ac­tive doc­u­men­tary Expe­ri­ence The Night Watch, a joint cre­ation of NTR TV chan­nel and the Ams­ter­dam Rijksmu­se­um.

You can read or hear the painting’s his­to­ry in Dutch or Eng­lish, learn the names of the his­tor­i­cal fig­ures depict­ed in it, learn about Rembrandt’s com­mand of com­po­si­tion and chiaroscuro, and much more. (Enter the inter­ac­tive doc­u­men­tary here.) The painter’s mas­ter­ful, dra­mat­ic use of light and shad­ow to cre­ate a sense of depth—probably the most famous exam­ple of his use of the technique—is respon­si­ble for the painting’s usu­al title, since most of its view­ers have assumed that the assem­bled vol­un­teer mili­tia depict­ed in it came togeth­er in the dead of night. (The shad­ows had dark­ened con­sid­er­ably over the years until a thick lay­er of var­nish was removed in the 1940s.)

But Rembrandt’s mas­ter­piece was orig­i­nal­ly called Mili­tia Com­pa­ny of Dis­trict II under the Com­mand of Cap­tain Frans Ban­ninck Cocq, and it records not a troop of sea­soned sol­diers but a gentleman’s shoot­ing com­pa­ny, one of the bands of civic guards that had “effec­tive­ly devel­oped into a social club for well-to-do cit­i­zens” who would “turn up most­ly as cer­e­monies or to quell minor riots.” Each of the men memo­ri­al­ized paid to have his like­ness includ­ed. We may nev­er have known their names except that in 1715 they were added inside a shield paint­ed by an anony­mous artist for some rea­son. The work is full of oth­er such mys­ter­ies.

Who is the small girl in white, bathed in angel­ic light, to whom our eyes are inevitably drawn? “She does not have any trace­able iden­ti­ty,” our nar­ra­tor tells us, “she is Rembrandt’s inven­tion,” a sym­bol of the com­pa­ny. And yet behind her, almost com­plete­ly shroud­ed, is anoth­er girl, iden­ti­ty unknown, who most of us would prob­a­bly nev­er have noticed had she not been point­ed out. “In The Night Watch,” we dis­cov­er, “noth­ing is what it seems.”

Learn more of the painting’s secrets at the online doc­u­men­tary project here, see sim­i­lar­ly inter­ac­tive art his­to­ries from NTR on M.C. Esch­er and Hierony­mus Bosch, and, above, lis­ten to an Art­sy pod­cast fea­tur­ing Rijksmu­se­um cura­tor Pieter Roelofs and oth­er Rem­brandt experts who explain what makes The Night Watch so wild­ly famous that more than one per­son has felt dri­ven to destroy it.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

300+ Etch­ings by Rem­brandt Now Free Online, Thanks to the Mor­gan Library & Muse­um

Rijksmu­se­um Dig­i­tizes & Makes Free Online 361,000 Works of Art, Mas­ter­pieces by Rem­brandt Includ­ed!

What Makes The Night Watch Rembrandt’s Mas­ter­piece

Enter an Online Inter­ac­tive Doc­u­men­tary on M.C. Escher’s Art & Life, Nar­rat­ed By Peter Green­away

Take a Vir­tu­al Tour of Hierony­mus Bosch’s Bewil­der­ing Mas­ter­piece The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights

The lines of the descent from the plu­to­crat­ic wealth and auto­crat­ic pow­er of the late 19th cen­tu­ry to the worst atroc­i­ties of the ear­ly 20th might seem appar­ent to some peo­ple. So too can we trace from the Gild­ed Age an insti­tu­tion­al sys­tem of mon­u­ments to art, cul­ture, and high­er learn­ing unique to mod­ern times. Whether by virtue of greed, guilt, or noblesse oblige, or some of all of the above, wealthy indus­tri­al­ists sought to show—as Andrew Carnegie wrote in his “Gospel of Wealth”—that “the hous­es of some should be homes for all that is high­est and best in lit­er­a­ture and the arts, and for all the refine­ments of civ­i­liza­tion.”

The trea­sures of world cul­ture were donat­ed back to the world, but the proud benef­i­cence of their givers lived on in the insti­tu­tions. In the case of Cleve­land tele­graph mag­nate Jeptha Wade, who was him­self a daguerreo­typ­ist and por­trait painter, the mem­o­ry of the gen­er­ous gift con­tin­ues in Wade Park, home of the Fine Arts Gar­den and the Cleve­land Muse­um of Art, cre­at­ed from his bequest.

Now, over 125 years lat­er, Wade’s patron­age lives on online. “Brace your­self for some meme-wor­thy Egypt­ian cats and gif-able Renais­sance babies,” as Zachary Small jokes at Hyper­al­ler­gic.

The muse­um has just announced its dig­i­tal col­lec­tion with a poignant quote from its founder declar­ing it an eter­nal dona­tion to humankind: “The state­ment ‘for the ben­e­fit of all the peo­ple for­ev­er’ was writ­ten into Jeptha Wade’s 1892 deed of gift for the land on which the muse­um stands… reflect­ing its founders’ belief that muse­ums should be places for inspi­ra­tion and for cre­at­ing won­der and mean­ing in people’s lives.”

This may sound like osten­ta­tious rhetoric, but the announce­ment also tells us that its free dig­i­tal col­lec­tion is “using Open Access,” which means “the pub­lic now has the abil­i­ty to share, remix, and reuse images of as many as 30,000 CMA art­works—“near­ly half of the museum’s entire col­lec­tion,” notes Small—are now “in the pub­lic domain for com­mer­cial as well as schol­ar­ly and non­com­mer­cial pur­pos­es.” Take even a small sam­pling of their open col­lec­tions and you may find more than enough inspi­ra­tion, won­der, and mean­ing.

Take, for exam­ple, Van Gogh’s The Large Plane Trees, J.M.W. Turner’s The Burn­ing of the Hous­es of Lords and Com­mons, El Greco’s The Holy Fam­i­ly with Mary Mag­dalen, and Edouard Manet’s Berthe Morisot. Take work from Rem­brandt, Velázquez, Mon­et, Cezanne, Car­avag­gio, Pis­sar­ro, Degas, Rubens, Poussin, Rodin. Take mas­ter­ful works like ancient Egypt­ian New King­dom Head of Amen­hotep II Wear­ing the Blue Crown and Timurid peri­od Iran­ian Roy­al Recep­tion in a Land­scape—as well as many from cen­tral Africa, Chi­na, India, Japan and Korea.

The Open Access col­lec­tion has swelled to over 34,000 images that can be down­loaded as jpgs or high-res­o­lu­tion tiffs. These and over 60,000 more online works come with descrip­tions, cita­tions, exhi­bi­tion his­to­ries, and more. What­ev­er con­flu­ence of his­tor­i­cal and con­tem­po­rary events brought Cleve­land’s dig­i­tal col­lec­tion into being, it does indeed seem to be for the great ben­e­fit of a great num­ber of inter­net-con­nect­ed peo­ple around the world. Take full advan­tage of its new­ly pub­lic resources here.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Art Insti­tute of Chica­go Puts 44,000+ Works of Art Online: View Them in High Res­o­lu­tion

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

Google Puts Over 57,000 Works of Art on the Web

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness