Watch an Art Conservator Bring Classic Paintings Back to Life in Intriguingly Narrated Videos

in Art | January 1st, 2019

Even in our age of unprecedentedly abundant images, delivered to us at all times by print, film, television, and especially the ever-multiplying forms of digital media, something inside us still values paintings. It must have to do with their physicality, the physicality of oil on canvas or whatever tangible materials the painter originally used. But in that great advantage of the painting lies the great disadvantage of the painting: tangible materials degrade over time, and many, if not most, of the paintings we most revere have been around for a long time indeed, and few of them have come down to us in pristine shape.

Enter the art restorer, who takes on the task of undoing, painstakingly and entirely by hand, both the ravages of time and the blunders of less competent stewards who have come before. In this case, enter Julian Baumgartner of Chicago’s Baumgartner Fine Art Restoration, a meditative short documentary on whose practice we featured earlier this year here on Open Culture.

You can see much more of it in these videos: in the one above, writes Colossal’s Kate Sierzputowski, Baumgartner “condenses over 40 hours of delicate swiping, scraping, and paint retouching into a 11.5 minute narrated video” showing and explaining his restoration of The Assassination of Archimedes.

The project, not atypical for a painting restoration, “involved cleaning a darkened varnish from the surface of the piece, removing the work from its original wooden panel using both modern and traditional techniques, mounting the thin paper-based painting to acid-free board, and finally touching up small areas that had become worn over the years.” Baumgartner’s Youtube channel also offers similar condensed restoration videos of two other paintings, Mother Mary and a portrait by the American Impressionist William Merrit Chase.

Baumgartner packs into each of these videos an impressive amount of knowledge about his restoration techniques, which few of us outside his field would have had any reason to know — or even imagine —before. They’ve racked up their hundreds of thousands of views in part thanks to that intellectual stimulation, no doubt, but all these physical materials and the sounds they make have also attracted a crowd that shares a variety of enthusiasm unknown before the age of digital media. I’m talking, of course, about ASMR video fans, whom Baumgartner has obliged by creating a version of his The Assassination of Archimedes restoration especially for them. Now there’s an art restorer for the 21st century.

via Colossal

The Art of Restoring a 400-Year-Old Painting: A Five-Minute Primer

The Art of Restoring Classic Films: Criterion Shows You How It Refreshed Two Hitchcock Movies

Rembrandt’s Masterpiece, The Night Watch, Will Get Restored and You Can Watch It Happen Live, Online

25 Million Images From 14 Art Institutions to Be Digitized & Put Online In One Huge Scholarly Archive

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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How Nirvana’s Iconic “Smells Like Teen Spirit” Came to Be: An Animated Video Narrated by T‑Bone Burnett Tells the True Story

in Music | January 1st, 2019

Credited with igniting the 90s grunge craze and putting Pacific Northwest punk and indie scenes on the map, Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit” has eclipsed hundreds of rock hits as “the most iconic song of all time”—at least according to the analytics of computer scientists from the University of London.

Whatever that designation means, it’s without a doubt the most iconic Nirvana song of all time, a tune whose influence may be impossible to measure. Kurt Cobain might have grown weary of it, but fans never stopped clamoring for the hit (his mom loved it, too). An anthem for a generation disaffected with corporate marketing and major label pandering, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” is also—like the decade it came to define—a nesting doll of irony.

Cobain played this up to a degree—the irony of an indie band announcing the second coming of charged DIY punk rock with a song that netted them a major label deal and put him on the path to superstardom. When Nirvana debuted their soon-to-be iconic hit live at Seattle’s OK Hotel on April 17th, 1991, the usually taciturn frontman introduced himself by saying, “Hello. We’re major label corporate rock sellouts.”

Given his sardonic sense of humor, fans have generally assumed some kind of anti-capitalist in-joke in the title of the song, with its reference to a popular brand of deodorant. But in a more dramatic irony, Cobain had no idea when he wrote and recorded it that “Teen Spirit was a product, aimed at teenage girls.” The song’s title, as you’ll learn in the short, animated backstory in the video above, originated with Bikini Kill singer Kathleen Hanna, who scrawled it on Cobain’s wall with a Sharpie after the two shared a night of heavy drinking and politically righteous vandalism.

Narrated by T‑Bone Burnett and animated by Drew Christie, the award-winning short “Drawn & Recorded: Teen Spirit” condenses the song’s story (which you can read about in more depth here) into two and a half minutes of pop culture history and commentary. Upon waking up and seeing Hanna’s message on the wall, Cobain was immediately flattered: “Kurt thought it meant he was a radical, a revolutionary, a feminist, a punk, an anti-authoritarian, anti-capitalist, anarchist crusader.” He got right to work on the song’s chorus.

But Hanna mainly meant to say he literally smelled like Teen Spirit, which happened to be the brand of deodorant his then-girlfriend—Bikini Kill drummer Tobi Vail—used. “I didn’t know that the deodorant spray existed until six months after the single came out,” he told Michael Azerrad in the biography Come as You Are. He didn’t intend to write an advertisement, of course. But in yet another grim twist, “after the song came out,” Burnett monotones, “sales of Teen Spirit went through the roof.”

The lesson, maybe? “Capitalism is very resilient”? Cobain understood this all too well though he may have inadvertently become the last thing he ever wanted, a product pitchman. But his creative misreading of Hanna’s joke also made music history.