82 Animated Interviews with Living, Dead, Celebrated & Sometimes Disgraced Celebrities

in Animation, Film, Music, Television | November 19th, 2019

Who wants to live in the present? It’s such a lim­it­ing peri­od, com­pared to the past.

—Roger Ebert, Play­boy 1990

Were Ebert alive today would he still express him­self thus­ly in a record­ed inter­view? His remarks are spe­cif­ic to his cin­e­mat­ic pas­sion, but still. As a smart Mid­west­ern­er, he would have real­ized that the corn has ears and the pota­toes have eyes. Remarks can be tak­en out of con­text. (Wit­ness the above.)

Recent his­to­ry has shown that not every­one is keen to roll back the clock—women, peo­ple of col­or, and gen­der non-con­form­ing indi­vid­u­als have been reclaim­ing their nar­ra­tives in record num­bers, air­ing secrets, expos­ing injus­tice, and artic­u­lat­ing offens­es that can no longer stand.

If pow­er­ful, old­er, white het­ero­sex­u­al men in the enter­tain­ment busi­ness are exer­cis­ing ver­bal cau­tion these days when speak­ing as a mat­ter of pub­lic record, there’s some good­ly cause for that.

It also makes the archival celebri­ty inter­views excerpt­ed for Quot­ed Stu­dios’ ani­mat­ed series, Blank on Blank, feel very vibrant and uncen­sored, though be fore­warned that your blood may boil a bit just review­ing the celebri­ty line up—Michael Jack­son, Woody Allen, Clint East­wood hold­ing forth on the Pussy Gen­er­a­tion 10 years before the Pussy­hat Project legit­imized com­mon usage of that charged word….

(In full dis­clo­sure, Blank on Blank is an oft-report­ed favorite here at Open Cul­ture.)

Here’s rap­per Tupac Skakur, a year and a half before he was killed in a dri­ve by shoot­ing, cast­ing him­self as a trag­ic Shake­speare­an hero,

His mus­ings on how dif­fer­ent­ly the pub­lic would have viewed him had he been born white seem even more rel­e­vant today. Read­ers who are only pass­ing­ly acquaint­ed with his artis­tic out­put and leg­end may be sur­prised to hear him trac­ing his alle­giance to “thug life” to the pos­i­tive role he saw the Black Pan­thers play­ing in his sin­gle mother’s life when he was a child.

On the oth­er hand, Shakur’s lav­ish and freely expressed self pity at the way the press report­ed on his rape charge (for which he even­tu­al­ly served 9 months) does not sit at all well in 2019, nor did it in 1994.

Like the major­i­ty of Blank on Blank entries, the record­ing was not the interview’s final form, but rather a jour­nal­is­tic ref­er­ence. Ani­ma­tor Patrick Smith may add a lay­er of visu­al edi­to­r­i­al, but in terms of nar­ra­tion, every sub­ject is telling their own undi­lut­ed truth.

It is inter­est­ing to keep in mind that this was one of the first inter­views the Blank on Blank team tack­led, in 2013.

Six years lat­er, it’s hard to imag­ine they would risk choos­ing that por­tion of the inter­view to ani­mate. Had Shakur lived, would he be can­celled?

Guess who was the star of the very first Blank on Blank to air on PBS back in 2013?

Broad­cast­er and tele­vi­sion host Lar­ry King. While King has stead­fast­ly rebutted accu­sa­tions of grop­ing, we sus­pect that if the Blank on Blank team was just now get­ting around to this sub­ject, they’d focus on a dif­fer­ent part of his 2001 Esquire pro­file than the part where he regales inter­view­er Cal Fuss­man with tales of pre-cell­phone “seduc­tion.”

It’s only been six years since the series’ debut, but it’s a dif­fer­ent world for sure.

If you’re among the eas­i­ly trig­gered, liv­ing leg­end Meryl Streep’s thoughts on beau­ty, har­vest­ed in 2014 from a 2008 con­ver­sa­tion with Enter­tain­ment Weekly’s Chris­tine Spines, won’t offer total respite, but any indig­na­tion you feel will be in sup­port of, not because of this celebri­ty sub­ject.

It’s actu­al­ly pret­ty rous­ing to hear her mer­ri­ly expos­ing Hol­ly­wood play­ers’ pig­gish­ness, sev­er­al years before the Har­vey Wein­stein scan­dal broke.

For even more evi­dence of “a dif­fer­ent world,” check out inter­view­er Howard Smith’s remark to Janis Joplin in her final inter­view-cum-Blank-on-Blank episode, four days before here 1970 death:

A lot of women have been say­ing that the whole field of rock music is noth­ing more than a big male chau­vin­ist rip off and when I say, “Yeah, what about Janis Joplin? She made it,” they say, “Oh…her.” It seems to both­er a lot of women’s lib peo­ple that you’re kind of so up front sex­u­al­ly.

Joplin, stung, unleash­es a string of invec­tives against fem­i­nists and women, in gen­er­al. One has to won­der if this reac­tion was Smith’s goal all along. Or maybe I’m just hav­ing flash­backs to mid­dle school, when the pop­u­lar girls would always send a del­e­gate dis­guised as a con­cerned friend to tell you why you were being shunned, prefer­ably in a high­ly pub­lic glad­i­a­to­r­i­al are­na such as the lunch­room.

I pre­sume that sort of stuff occurs pri­mar­i­ly over social media these days.

Good on the Blank on Blank staff for pick­ing up on the tenor of this inter­view and titling it “Janis Joplin on Rejec­tion.”

You can binge watch a playlist of 82 Blank on Blank episodes, fea­tur­ing many thoughts few express so open­ly any­more, here or right below.

When you’re done with that, you’ll find even more Blank on Blank entries on the cre­ators’ web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Alfred Hitch­cock Med­i­tates on Sus­pense & Dark Humor in a New Ani­mat­ed Video

Joni Mitchell Talks About Life as a Reluc­tant Star in a New Ani­mat­ed Inter­view

The Out­siders: Lou Reed, Hunter S. Thomp­son, and Frank Zap­pa Reveal Them­selves in Cap­ti­vat­ing­ly Ani­mat­ed Inter­views

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Decem­ber 9 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates Dennison’s Christ­mas Book (1921). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Download Stunning 3D Scans of the Bust of Nefertiti, Now Released by Berlin’s Neues Museum

in Art, Current Affairs, Museums | November 18th, 2019

Two years ago, a scan­dalous “art heist” at the Neues Muse­um in Berlin—involving ille­gal­ly made 3D scans of the bust of Nefer­ti­ti—turned out to be a dif­fer­ent kind of crime. The two Egypt­ian artists who released the scans claimed they had made the images with a hid­den “hacked Kinect Sen­sor,” reports Annalee Newitz at Ars Tech­ni­ca. But dig­i­tal artist and design­er Cos­mo Wen­man dis­cov­ered these were scans made by the Neues Muse­um itself, which had been stolen by the artists or per­haps a muse­um employ­ee.

The ini­tial con­tro­ver­sy stemmed from the fact that the muse­um strict­ly con­trols images of the art­work, and had refused to release any of their Nefer­ti­ti scans to the pub­lic. The prac­tice, Wen­man point­ed out, is con­sis­tent across dozens of insti­tu­tions around the world. “There are many influ­en­tial muse­ums, uni­ver­si­ties, and pri­vate col­lec­tions that have extreme­ly high-qual­i­ty 3D data of impor­tant works, but they are not shar­ing that data with the pub­lic.” He lists many promi­nent exam­ples in a recent Rea­son arti­cle; the long list includes the Venus de Milo, Rodin’s Thinker, and works by Donatel­lo, Berni­ni, and Michelan­ge­lo.

What­ev­er their rea­sons, the aggres­sive­ly pro­pri­etary atti­tude adopt­ed by the Neues seems strange con­sid­er­ing the con­tro­ver­sial prove­nance of the Nefer­ti­ti bust. Ger­many has long claimed that it acquired the bust legal­ly in 1912. But at the time, the British con­trolled Egypt, and Egyp­tians them­selves had lit­tle say over the fate of their nation­al trea­sures. Fur­ther­more, the chain of cus­tody seems to include at least a few doc­u­ment­ed instances of fraud. Egypt has been demand­ing that the arti­fact be repa­tri­at­ed “ever since it first went on dis­play.”

This crit­i­cal his­tor­i­cal con­text notwith­stand­ing, the bust is already “one of the most copied works of ancient Egypt­ian art,” and one of the most famous. “Muse­ums should not be repos­i­to­ries of secret knowl­edge,” Wen­man argued in his blog post. Pres­ti­gious cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions “are in the best posi­tion to pro­duce and pub­lish 3D data of their works and pro­vide author­i­ta­tive con­text and com­men­tary.”

Wen­man waged a “3‑year-long free­dom of infor­ma­tion effort” to lib­er­ate the scans. His request was ini­tial­ly met with “the gift shop defense”—the muse­um claimed releas­ing the images would threat­en sales of Nefer­ti­ti mer­chan­dise. When the appeal to com­merce failed to dis­suade Wen­man, the muse­um let him exam­ine the scans “in a con­trolled set­ting”; they were essen­tial­ly treat­ing the images, he writes, “like a state secret.” Final­ly, they relent­ed, allow­ing Wen­man to pub­lish the scans, with­out any insti­tu­tion­al sup­port.

He has done so, and urged oth­ers to share his Rea­son arti­cle on social media to get word out about the files, now avail­able to down­load and use under a CC BY-NC-SA license. He has also tak­en his own lib­er­ties with the scans, col­oriz­ing and adding the blue 3D map­ping lines him­self to the image at the top, for exam­ple, drawn from his own inter­ac­tive 3D mod­el, which you can view and down­load here. These are exam­ples of his vision for high-qual­i­ty 3D scans of art­works, which can and should “be adapt­ed, mul­ti­plied, and remixed.”

“The best place to cel­e­brate great art,” says Wen­man, “is in a vibrant, live­ly, and anar­chic pop­u­lar cul­ture. The world’s back cat­a­log of art should be set free to run wild in our visu­al and tac­tile land­scape.” Orga­ni­za­tions like Scan the World have been releas­ing unof­fi­cial 3D scans to the pub­lic for the past cou­ple years, but these can­not guar­an­tee the accu­ra­cy of mod­els ren­dered by the insti­tu­tions them­selves.

Whether the actu­al bust of Nefer­ti­ti should be returned to Egypt is a some­what more com­pli­cat­ed ques­tion, since the 3,000-year old arti­fact may be too frag­ile to move and too cul­tur­al­ly impor­tant to risk dam­ag­ing in tran­sit. But whether or not its vir­tu­al rep­re­sen­ta­tions should be giv­en to every­one who wants them seems more straight­for­ward.

The images already belong to the pub­lic, in a sense, Wen­man sug­gests. With­hold­ing them for the sake of pro­tect­ing sales seems like a vio­la­tion of the spir­it in which most cul­tur­al insti­tu­tions were found­ed. Down­load the Nefer­ti­ti scans at Thin­gi­verse, see Wen­man’s own 3D mod­els at Sketch­fab, and read all of his cor­re­spon­dence with the muse­um through­out the free­dom of infor­ma­tion process here. Next, he writes, he’s lob­by­ing for the release of offi­cial 3D Rodin scans. Watch this space. 

via Rea­son

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Artists Put Online 3D, High Res­o­lu­tion Scans of 3,000-Year-Old Nefer­ti­ti Bust (and Con­tro­ver­sy Ensues)

The British Muse­um Cre­ates 3D Mod­els of the Roset­ta Stone & 200+ Oth­er His­toric Arti­facts: Down­load or View in Vir­tu­al Real­i­ty

3D Scans of 7,500 Famous Sculp­tures, Stat­ues & Art­works: Down­load & 3D Print Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

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

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David Lynch Visualizes How Transcendental Meditation Works, Using a Sharpie & Big Pad of Paper

in Science | November 18th, 2019

Sec­ond only to the Bea­t­les, David Lynch has become syn­ony­mous with the prac­tice of Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion. And while the results were cer­tain­ly mixed for the Fab Four, Lynch, in all his idio­syn­crasies, has become the face of TM. He didn’t dab­ble with it mid-career. Instead, med­i­ta­tion helped cre­ate his career, as both his prac­tice and the film­ing of Eraser­head start­ed around 1972.

“…[L]ooking back,” he said in a Dai­ly Beast inter­view in 2014, “I was filled with anger and took it out on my first wife and made her life mis­er­able. I had a low-grade depres­sion, and wasn’t real­ly self-assured. If I’d gone for­ward with­out the abil­i­ty to tran­scend every day, I think the pres­sures of the busi­ness could’ve got­ten me.”

His career has been tran­scen­dent for sure, and as head of his epony­mous foun­da­tion, he’s spread­ing the word, bring­ing TM to schools and call­ing in fel­low cre­atives to extol its virtues.

But how does Lynch him­self explain Tran­scen­den­tal Med­i­ta­tion? In this video, Lynch, armed with a pad of paper and a Sharpie, takes us on a sci­en­tif­ic jour­ney down past atoms and pro­tons, and down to the uni­fied field the­o­ry of quan­tum physics. A “no-thing” out of which all mat­ter emerges. Sci­en­tists can’t take us into the uni­fied field…but the mind can. Hence, med­i­ta­tion.

“The mantra is the key that opens the door,” he explains. (What is that mantra? It’s a per­son­al one that the Mahar­ishi, or some­one high on the TM chain will give you after training…if you believe the TM pitch. Not every­body believes it needs be so pro­pri­etary, or expen­sive.)

With a mantra the mind can dive deep and then deep­er: “Each deep­er lev­el of mind and each deep­er lev­el of intel­lect has more hap­pi­ness,” he says. Go deep enough and the mind hits the equiv­a­lent of the uni­fied field, and there…transcendence.

“Pure, unbound­ed, infi­nite con­scious­ness…” he promis­es. “Tran­scen­den­tal med­i­ta­tion is just the vehi­cle to get you here.”

This can’t be the first time Lynch has drawn this dia­gram, but it real­ly is one of the best visu­al­iza­tions of how sci­ence and med­i­ta­tion have arrived at the same con­clu­sion. And it’s also why sci­ence is now study­ing the effects of med­i­ta­tion on the brain. For those look­ing for more on Lynch and med­i­ta­tion, we have you cov­ered.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

An Ani­mat­ed David Lynch Explains Where He Gets His Ideas

David Lynch Mus­es About the Mag­ic of Cin­e­ma & Med­i­ta­tion in a New Abstract Short Film

David Lynch Talks Med­i­ta­tion with Paul McCart­ney

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the artist inter­view-based FunkZone Pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, read his oth­er arts writ­ing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

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How Art Nouveau Inspired the Psychedelic Designs of the 1960s

in Art, Music | November 18th, 2019

“In the late 1800’s new tech­nol­o­gy was chang­ing the way the world worked, and the way that it looked,” the Vox video above explains. “Some peo­ple, espe­cial­ly artists, liv­ing through the tech­no­log­i­cal rev­o­lu­tion, were not so into all the new indus­try. To be blunt, they thought it was ugly.” They respond­ed with organ­ic forms and intri­cate pat­terns that evoked a pre-indus­tri­al world while simul­ta­ne­ous­ly show­cas­ing, and sell­ing, the most mod­ern ideas and prod­ucts.

Draw­ing on the hand­craft­ed aes­thet­ic of the Arts and Crafts Move­ment, the Goth­ic revival, the florid, ornate paint­ings of the Pre-Raphaelites, a fas­ci­na­tion with Japan­ese wood­block prints, and the strange, beau­ti­ful illus­tra­tions of sea crea­tures by Ernst Haeck­el, artists began to chal­lenge late Vic­to­ri­an ortho­dox­ies. The style we now know as Art Nou­veau emerged.

It went by many names: Jugend­stil, Mon­dernisme, Tiffany Style, Glas­gow Style, Stile Lib­er­ty, Sezes­sion­stil. Each iden­ti­fied a col­lec­tion of traits with which we are now famil­iar from the many hun­dreds of posters and adver­tise­ments of the time. Grand, flow­ing lines, intri­cate pat­terns, vibrant, often clash­ing col­ors, bold hand-let­ter­ing, fem­i­nine fig­ures and elab­o­rate, exot­ic themes….

The descrip­tions of Art Nouveau’s qual­i­ties also apply to the poster and album cov­er art of the psy­che­del­ic 1960s, and no won­der, giv­en the sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence of the for­mer upon the lat­ter. The artists of the acid rock peri­od rebelled not so much against indus­tri­al­iza­tion as the mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al-com­plex. At the epi­cen­ter of the move­ment was the San Fran­cis­co of Jef­fer­son Air­plane and the Grate­ful Dead.

Venues like the Fil­more and the Aval­on adver­tised the hip­pie rev­o­lu­tion with eye-catch­ing posters inspired by those that once lined the thor­ough­fares of Europe in an age before TV, radio, and neon signs. Art Nou­veau-like designs had already returned with the flower pat­terns pop­u­lar in fab­rics at the time. 60s graph­ic design­ers saw these seduc­tive styles as the key to a new psy­che­del­ic vision.

It’s easy to see why. Flow­ers, curves, pea­cocks, updates of Art Nou­veau images from the past (includ­ing skele­tons and roses)—dialed up to 11 with “eye-vibrat­ing” colors—made the per­fect visu­al accom­pa­ni­ment for the acid-fla­vored Roman­ti­cism that took root dur­ing the Viet­nam era. Even the fonts were poached from turn-of-the-cen­tu­ry graph­ic art. Famous 60s design­ers like Wes Wil­son con­fessed their admi­ra­tion for mod­ernism, “the idea,” Wil­son told Time in 1967, “of real­ly putting it all out there.”

Just as Art Nou­veau flow­ered into an inter­na­tion­al style, with some pre­scient­ly trip­py man­i­fes­ta­tions in Brazil and oth­er places, so too did the 60s psy­che­del­ic poster, spread­ing from San Fran­cis­co to every cor­ner of the globe. And as Art Nou­veau became the house style for the coun­ter­cul­ture of the ear­ly 20th century—celebrating sex­u­al and cul­tur­al exper­i­men­ta­tion and occult interests—it announced the birth of flower pow­er and its recov­ery of mod­ernism’s expres­sive free­doms.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Har­ry Clarke’s 1926 Illus­tra­tions of Goethe’s Faust: Art That Inspired the Psy­che­del­ic 60s

Ernst Haeckel’s Sub­lime Draw­ings of Flo­ra and Fau­na: The Beau­ti­ful Sci­en­tif­ic Draw­ings That Influ­enced Europe’s Art Nou­veau Move­ment (1889)

Down­load 200+ Belle Époque Art Posters: An Archive of Mas­ter­pieces from the “Gold­en Age of the Poster” (1880–1918)

Behold the Beau­ti­ful Designs of Brazil’s 1920s Art Deco Mag­a­zine, Para Todos

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

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What Ancient Chinese Sounded Like — and How We Know It: An Animated Introduction

in History | November 18th, 2019

No stu­dent of Chi­nese has an easy time with pro­nun­ci­a­tion. Even lin­guist Joshua Rud­der, who tells ani­mat­ed sto­ries on his Youtube chan­nel Native­Lang about lan­guages around the world and how they came to be, admits his own strug­gles to get it right. “But late­ly I’ve been bury­ing myself in hun­dreds of pages of Chi­nese lin­guis­tic his­to­ry, and you know what? I’m in good com­pa­ny,” says Rud­der in the intro­duc­tion to the video above, “What ‘Ancient’ Chi­nese Sound­ed Like — and How We Know.” “Chi­nese pro­nun­ci­a­tion puz­zled experts in Chi­na for a long, long time.”

This leads into the sto­ry of one par­tic­u­lar expert, a 19th schol­ar named Chen Li who sought to recov­er Chi­nese pro­nun­ci­a­tions that even then seemed to have been lost to his­to­ry. “How do you recov­er the sounds immor­tal­ized in clas­si­cal texts? How do you make the old poems rhyme again?” And how do you do it when “you have no record­ings, no pho­net­ic tran­scrip­tions, not even an alpha­bet — you’re work­ing with char­ac­ters.” Ah yes, char­ac­ters, those thou­sands of logograms, evolved over mil­len­nia, that still today bedev­il any­one try­ing to get a han­dle on the Chi­nese lan­guage, not exclud­ing the Chi­nese them­selves. That goes espe­cial­ly for some­one as lin­guis­ti­cal­ly ambi­tious as Chen Li.

Chen Li’s research on the cor­rect pro­nun­ci­a­tion of ancient Chi­nese brought him to the Qieyun, an even then-1200-year-old dic­tio­nary of fan­qie (反切), or the pro­nun­ci­a­tion of sin­gle char­ac­ters described by using com­bi­na­tions of oth­er char­ac­ters. (On Wikipedia, you can find assem­bled links to scanned frag­ments of the text cur­rent­ly held in places like the British Library and the Bib­lio­thèque nationale de France.) Draw­ing on not just the Qieyun but oth­er sources as well, Chen Li’s painstak­ing work of recon­struct­ing old pro­nun­ci­a­tions over­turned the long-stand­ing teach­ing that the Chi­nese lan­guage had 36 ini­tial con­so­nant sounds. He found that it had 41. But even after that dis­cov­ery, the nature of these “pre­cise sounds” remained unknown, an incom­plete­ness of knowl­edge chipped away at by the Swedish schol­ar Bernard Karl­gren in the 1900s, who took into account “the many liv­ing vari­eties” of the Chi­nese lan­guage.

Oth­er Asian lan­guages with vocab­u­lary descend­ed from Chi­nese also come in to play. Rud­der takes the exam­ple of the word for “coun­try,” pro­nounced guó (國) in mod­ern Man­darin but kuk in Kore­an (국), koku in Japan­ese (国), and kuək in Viet­namese (quốc), all sug­gest­ing a com­mon ancient Chi­nese ances­tor word end­ing in a K‑like con­so­nant sound. But how­ev­er much progress has been made, this research into “ancient” Chi­nese has turned out to be research into a lin­guis­tic peri­od of “mid­dle Chi­nese,” which reveals evi­dence of “an even old­er lan­guage to uncov­er, a thou­sand years old­er still.” The work of a lin­guis­tic his­to­ry, just like the hum­bler work of a Chi­nese lan­guage-learn­er, is nev­er done.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Free Chi­nese Lessons

What Ancient Latin Sound­ed Like, And How We Know It

What Did Etr­uscan Sound Like? An Ani­mat­ed Video Pro­nounces the Ancient Lan­guage That We Still Don’t Ful­ly Under­stand

What Did Old Eng­lish Sound Like? Hear Recon­struc­tions of Beowulf, The Bible, and Casu­al Con­ver­sa­tions

Hear What the Lan­guage Spo­ken by Our Ances­tors 6,000 Years Ago Might Have Sound­ed Like: A Recon­struc­tion of the Pro­to-Indo-Euro­pean Lan­guage

A Map of How the Word “Tea” Spread Across the World

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 Face­book.

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Salvador Dalí’s Iconic Deck of Tarot Cards Get Re-Issued: It’s Out Today

in Art, Books | November 15th, 2019

Last month, we high­light­ed Sal­vador Dal­i’s deck of Tarot cards. Orig­i­nal­ly cre­at­ed in 1984, the tarot deck is now being re-issued by Taschen in a beau­ti­ful 184-page art book. For those inter­est­ed, the offi­cial release date is today. Read all about the famous deck here. Or pur­chase your own set of Dal­i’s tarot cards here.

If you would like to sign up for Open Culture’s free email newslet­ter, please find it here. Or fol­low our posts on Threads, Face­book, BlueSky or Mastodon.

If you would like to sup­port the mis­sion of Open Cul­ture, con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your con­tri­bu­tions will help us con­tin­ue pro­vid­ing the best free cul­tur­al and edu­ca­tion­al mate­ri­als to learn­ers every­where. You can con­tribute through Pay­Pal, Patre­on, and Ven­mo (@openculture). Thanks!

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The Seven Road-Tested Habits of Effective Artists

in Art, Computer Science, How to Learn for Free, Life, Philosophy, Software | November 15th, 2019

Fif­teen years ago, a young con­struc­tion work­er named Andrew Price went in search of free 3d soft­ware to help him achieve his goal of ren­der­ing a 3D car.

He stum­bled onto Blender, a just-the-tick­et open source soft­ware that helps users with every aspect of 3D creation—modeling, rig­ging, ani­ma­tion, sim­u­la­tion, ren­der­ing, com­posit­ing, and motion track­ing.

Price describes his ear­ly learn­ing style as “play­ing it by ear,” sam­pling tuto­ri­als, some of which he couldn’t be both­ered to com­plete.

Desire for free­lance gigs led him to forge a new iden­ti­ty, that of a Blender Guru, whose tuto­ri­als, pod­casts, and arti­cles would help oth­er new users get the hang of the soft­ware.

But it wasn’t declar­ing him­self an expert that ulti­mate­ly improved his artis­tic skills. It was hold­ing his own feet over the fire by plac­ing a bet with his younger cousin, who stood to gain $1000 if Price failed to rack up 1,000 “likes” by post­ing 2D draw­ings to Art­Sta­tion with­in a 6‑month peri­od.

(If he succeeded—which he did, 3 days before his self-imposed deadline—his cousin owed him noth­ing. Loss aver­sion proved to be a more pow­er­ful moti­va­tor than any car­rot on a stick…)

In order to snag the req­ui­site likes, Price found that he need­ed to revise some habits and com­mit to a more robust dai­ly prac­tice, a jour­ney he detailed in a pre­sen­ta­tion at the 2016 Blender Con­fer­ence.

Price con­fess­es that the chal­lenge taught him much about draw­ing and paint­ing, but even more about hav­ing an effec­tive artis­tic prac­tice. His sev­en rules apply to any num­ber of cre­ative forms:

 

Andrew Price’s Rules for an Effec­tive Artist Prac­tice:

  1. Prac­tice Dai­ly

A num­ber of pro­lif­ic artists have sub­scribed to this belief over the years, includ­ing nov­el­ist (and moth­er!) JK Rowl­ing, come­di­an Jer­ry Sein­feld, auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal per­former Mike Bir­bli­gia, and mem­oirist David Sedaris.

If you feel too fried to uphold your end of the bar­gain, pre­tend to go easy on your­self with a lit­tle trick Price picked up from music pro­duc­er Rick Rubin: Do the absolute min­i­mum. You’ll like­ly find that per­form­ing the min­i­mum posi­tions you to do much more than that. Your resis­tance is not so much to the doing as it is to the embark­ing.

  1. Quan­ti­ty over Per­fec­tion­ism Mas­querad­ing as Qual­i­ty

This harkens back to Rule Num­ber One. Who are we to say which of our works will be judged wor­thy. Just keep putting it out there—remember it’s all prac­tice, and law of aver­ages favors those whose out­put is, like Picasso’s, prodi­gious. Don’t stand in the way of progress by split­ting a sin­gle work’s end­less hairs.

  1. Steal With­out Rip­ping Off

Immerse your­self in the cre­ative bril­liance of those you admire. Then prof­it off your own improved efforts, a prac­tice advo­cat­ed by the likes of musi­cian David Bowie, com­put­er vision­ary Steve Jobs, and artist/social com­men­ta­tor Banksy.

  1. Edu­cate Your­self

As a stand-alone, that old chest­nut about prac­tice mak­ing per­fect is not suf­fi­cient to the task. Whether you seek out online tuto­ri­als, as Price did, enroll in a class, or des­ig­nate a men­tor, a con­sci­en­tious com­mit­ment to study your craft will help you to bet­ter mas­ter it.

  1. Give your­self a break

Bang­ing your head against the wall is not good for your brain. Price cel­e­brates author Stephen King’s prac­tice of giv­ing the first draft of a new nov­el six weeks to mar­i­nate. Your break may be short­er. Three days may be ample to juice you up cre­ative­ly. Just make sure it’s in your cal­en­dar to get back to it.

  1. Seek Feed­back

Film­mak­er Tai­ka Wait­i­ti, rap­per Kanye West, and the big goril­las at Pixar are not threat­ened by oth­ers’ opin­ions. Seek them out. You may learn some­thing.

  1. Cre­ate What You Want To

Pas­sion projects are the key to cre­ative longevi­ty and plea­sur­able process. Don’t cater to a fick­le pub­lic, or the shift­ing sands of fash­ion. Pur­sue the sorts of things that inter­est you.

Implic­it in Price’s sev­en com­mand­ments is the notion that some­thing may have to budge—your night­ly cock­tails, the num­ber of hours spent on social media, that extra half hour in bed after the alarm goes off… Don’t neglect your famil­ial or civic oblig­a­tions, but nei­ther should you short­change your art. Life’s too short.

Read the tran­script of Andrew Price’s Blender Con­fer­ence pre­sen­ta­tion here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Dai­ly Habits of Famous Writ­ers: Franz Kaf­ka, Haru­ki Muraka­mi, Stephen King & More

The Dai­ly Habits of High­ly Pro­duc­tive Philoso­phers: Niet­zsche, Marx & Immanuel Kant

How to Read Many More Books in a Year: Watch a Short Doc­u­men­tary Fea­tur­ing Some of the World’s Most Beau­ti­ful Book­stores

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Join her in NYC on Mon­day, Decem­ber 9 when her month­ly book-based vari­ety show, Necro­mancers of the Pub­lic Domain cel­e­brates Dennison’s Christ­mas Book (1921). Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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Download Hellvetica, a Font that Makes the Elegant Spacing of Helvetica Look as Ugly as Possible

in Design | November 15th, 2019

Among typog­ra­phy enthu­si­asts, all non-con­trar­i­ans love Hel­veti­ca. Some, like film­mak­er Gary Hus­twit and New York sub­way map cre­ator Mas­si­mo Vignel­li, even made a doc­u­men­tary about it. Cre­at­ed by Swiss graph­ic design­er Max Miedinger with Haas Type Foundry pres­i­dent Eduard Hoff­mann and first intro­duced in 1957, Hel­veti­ca still stands as a visu­al def­i­n­i­tion of not just mod­ernism but moder­ni­ty itself. That owes in part to its clean, unam­bigu­ous lines, and also to its use of space: as all the afore­men­tioned typog­ra­phy enthu­si­asts will have noticed, Hel­veti­ca leaves lit­tle room between its let­ters, which imbues text writ­ten in the font with a cer­tain solid­i­ty. No won­der it so often appears, more than half a cen­tu­ry after its debut, on the sig­nage of pub­lic insti­tu­tions as well as on the pro­mo­tion of prod­ucts that live or die by the osten­si­ble time­less­ness of their designs.

But as times change, so must even near-per­fect fonts: hence Hel­veti­ca Now. “Four years ago, our Ger­man office [was] kick­ing around the idea of cre­at­ing a new ver­sion of Hel­veti­ca,” Charles Nix, type direc­tor at Hel­veti­ca-rights-hold­er Mono­type tells The Verge. “They had iden­ti­fied a short laun­dry list of things that would be bet­ter.” What short­com­ings they found arose from the fact that the font had been designed for an ana­log age of opti­cal print­ing, and “when we went dig­i­tal, a lot of that nuance of opti­cal siz­ing sort of washed away.” Ulti­mate­ly, the project was less about updat­ing Hel­veti­ca than restor­ing char­ac­ters lost in its adap­ta­tion to dig­i­tal, includ­ing “the straight-legged cap­i­tal ‘R,’ sin­gle-sto­ry low­er­case ‘a,’ low­er­case ‘u’ with­out a trail­ing serif, a low­er­case ‘t’ with­out a tail­ing stroke on the bot­tom right, a beard­less ‘g,’ some round­ed punc­tu­a­tion.”

The devel­op­ment of Hel­veti­ca Now also neces­si­tat­ed a close look at all the ver­sions of Hel­veti­ca so far devel­oped (the most notable major revi­sion being Neue Hel­veti­ca, released in 1983) and adapt­ing their best char­ac­ter­is­tics for an age of screens. Few of those char­ac­ter­is­tics demand­ed more atten­tion than the spac­ing — or to use the typo­graph­i­cal term, the kern­ing. But how­ev­er aston­ish­ing a show­case it may be, Hel­veti­ca Now does­n’t dri­ve home the impor­tance of the art of kern­ing in as vis­cer­al a man­ner as anoth­er new type­face: Hel­l­veti­ca, designed by New York cre­ative direc­tors Zack Roif and Matthew Wood­ward. Much painstak­ing labor has also gone into Hel­l­veti­ca’s kern­ing, but not to make it as beau­ti­ful as pos­si­ble: on the con­trary, Roif and Woodard have tak­en Hel­veti­ca and kerned it for max­i­mum ugli­ness.

The Verge’s Jon Porter describes Hel­l­veti­ca as “a self-aware Com­ic Sans with kern­ing that’s some­how much much worse.” If that most hat­ed Win­dows font has­n’t been enough to inflict psy­cho­log­i­cal dis­tur­bance on the design­ers in your life, you can head to Hel­l­veti­ca’s offi­cial site and “expe­ri­ence it in all its uneven, gap­py glo­ry.” Roif and Woodard have made Hel­l­veti­ca free to use, some­thing that cer­tain­ly can’t be said of any gen­uine ver­sion of Hel­veti­ca. In fact, the sheer cost of licens­ing that most mod­ern of all fonts has, in recent years, pushed even the for­mer­ly Hel­veti­ca-using likes of Apple, Google, and IBM to come up with their own type­faces instead — all of which, telling­ly, resem­ble Hel­veti­ca. We can con­sid­er them all weapons in the life of a design­er, which, as Vignel­li put it, “is a life of fight. Fight against the ugli­ness.” Hap­py down­load­ing…

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Com­ic Sans Turns 25: Graph­ic Design­er Vin­cent Connare Explains Why He Cre­at­ed the Most Hat­ed Font in the World

The His­to­ry of Typog­ra­phy Told in Five Ani­mat­ed Min­utes

Design­er Mas­si­mo Vignel­li Revis­its and Defends His Icon­ic 1972 New York City Sub­way Map

Van Gogh’s Ugli­est Mas­ter­piece: A Break Down of His Late, Great Paint­ing, The Night Café (1888)

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 Face­book.

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