I'm going to confess something right now: I don't get the worldwide fascination with that painting. I will grant you that it is better than anything I could ever draw, because I can't draw a straight line with a ruler. However, if we're trying to decide whether or not something is beautiful, that feels like a particularly low bar. Also, I'm not saying it is bad, just that it is no better than hundreds of other paintings throughout history. I simply feel like it the only reason it is so famous is because it is old enough that by now everyone has been told it is famous and have just accepted that as the truth. Normally I would hold off on judging something like this until I had seen it for myself, but I don't have any problem with it in this case since I've heard from several sources that seeing it in the Louvre is actually underwhelming because it is so much smaller than you expect. I'm just worried because who knows who may be intercepting these transmissions? If we are trying to impress other beings, is a 500 year-old painting the first impression we want to make? They are going to think this is the best we can do and fly right on by. It would be a shame if we missed out on first contact because no one working on the project had ever taken a single art history class.
Sunday, January 20, 2013
Deep Space da Vinci
On Friday, NASA announced that they had successfully beamed an image of the famed Mona Lisa to a satellite orbiting the moon. This was a major break-through because traditionally they have used radio waves to communicate with objects in outer space and those don't get there quite as fast. Being able to use lasers going forward could exponentially increase the amount of data scientists can collect, not to mention being able to send and receive information from greater distances. Also, laser transmitters require less power than their radio counterparts, so they can transmit information for longer periods of time. Scientist used the Mona Lisa because they needed an image to see just how complex a message they could send before it was garbled by the trip through the cosmos. After running it through a program designed to correct any errors, the familiar half-smirk was there for everyone to see. (I have to say, I appreciate the irony of using the latest technology just to send an old picture.) I guess my only question is why they felt it had to be the Mona Lisa? I get why it couldn't be a Jackson Pollock painting, but of all the images in the world, why did they go with that one?
I'm going to confess something right now: I don't get the worldwide fascination with that painting. I will grant you that it is better than anything I could ever draw, because I can't draw a straight line with a ruler. However, if we're trying to decide whether or not something is beautiful, that feels like a particularly low bar. Also, I'm not saying it is bad, just that it is no better than hundreds of other paintings throughout history. I simply feel like it the only reason it is so famous is because it is old enough that by now everyone has been told it is famous and have just accepted that as the truth. Normally I would hold off on judging something like this until I had seen it for myself, but I don't have any problem with it in this case since I've heard from several sources that seeing it in the Louvre is actually underwhelming because it is so much smaller than you expect. I'm just worried because who knows who may be intercepting these transmissions? If we are trying to impress other beings, is a 500 year-old painting the first impression we want to make? They are going to think this is the best we can do and fly right on by. It would be a shame if we missed out on first contact because no one working on the project had ever taken a single art history class.
I'm going to confess something right now: I don't get the worldwide fascination with that painting. I will grant you that it is better than anything I could ever draw, because I can't draw a straight line with a ruler. However, if we're trying to decide whether or not something is beautiful, that feels like a particularly low bar. Also, I'm not saying it is bad, just that it is no better than hundreds of other paintings throughout history. I simply feel like it the only reason it is so famous is because it is old enough that by now everyone has been told it is famous and have just accepted that as the truth. Normally I would hold off on judging something like this until I had seen it for myself, but I don't have any problem with it in this case since I've heard from several sources that seeing it in the Louvre is actually underwhelming because it is so much smaller than you expect. I'm just worried because who knows who may be intercepting these transmissions? If we are trying to impress other beings, is a 500 year-old painting the first impression we want to make? They are going to think this is the best we can do and fly right on by. It would be a shame if we missed out on first contact because no one working on the project had ever taken a single art history class.
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