Simon Griffee

What: Art

• Centennial Celebration Logotype for Columbia University’s Core Curriculum

  

  A glimpse of the logotype design for Columbia University’s Centennial Celebration of the Core Curriculum.

  The background image in this test is a detail of Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People.

  It has been a pleasure to work with Columbia College on this project.

• Art Makes Society Kinder #

  We tested the hypothesis that engagement in the arts may act as a catalyst that promotes prosocial cooperation. Using “Understanding Society” data (a nationally representative longitudinal sample of 30,476 people in the UK), we find that beyond major personality traits, demographic variables, wealth, education, and engagement in other social activity (sports), people’s greater engagement with the arts predicts greater prosociality (volunteering and charitable giving) over a period of 2 years. …continue

• Advice to Artists #

  Stephen Bliss in an interview with Keisha Raines at Unrated: During your career there’s probably going to be many times when you think your work is awful and you’ll want to give up. That’s the Universe’s way of saying, “Ok, you’ve done a bit of good work, you’ve enjoyed a few days of thinking you’re a genius, now it’s time to get better… Take your despondency, survive it, work out why you think your work is shit, how can you make your work better? …continue

• Trivium Art History Project #

  The humanities are losing funding in academia, and people don’t see art history as relevant to their lives. Trivium’s goal is to bring art history back to culture.

• Pope John Paul II Lying on the Ground After Being Struck by a Meteorite #

  I like this one better than the golden toilet.

• STEM to STEAM #

  Science, technology, engineering, math + art & design = STEAM. Coincidentally, Steam is also the leading computer games digital distribution platform.

• Certainty is the Closing of the Mind #

  Milton Glaser: One must assume that failure is the way we learn in general. My favorite notion is that certainty is the closing of the mind. The possibility to fail is one of the means by which we have to develop ideas, and to explore possibilities. Once you’re certain of what you’re doing the possibility of change and exploration begins to diminish. So, the idea of being an amateur constantly is an old idea for artists, particularly those who want to continue learning things they don’t already know. …continue

• Seeing Through Photographs #

  Free online course from The Museum of Modern Art. I also recommend a couple of books : Looking at Photographs by John Szarkowski and Ways of Seeing by John Berger. The latter is also a BBC series, available in four parts on YouTube.

• The Serious and the Smirk The Smile in Portraiture #

  Why do we so seldom see people smiling in painted portraits? Nicholas Jeeves explores the history of the smile through the ages of portraiture, from Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa to Alexander Gardner’s photographs of Abraham Lincoln.

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• It’s Not Warming, It’s Dying #

  Glaser’s ‘It’s Not Warming, It’s Dying’ campaign aims to create a greater sense of urgency around climate change, moving away from benign language like “global warming”. Milton hopes to unite the climate change community under one slogan and one flag. He originally designed a simple visual for posters and button badges, comprising a green disk obscured by black smoke. The graphic suggests an aerial view of the Earth with only a narrow band of life remaining. …continue

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• Goodbye, Charles Harbutt #

  This sense of quickness, of being alive on this earth, of simple orgasmic sense perception, is the point at which great photographs are made. Photographs come from that moment in the process of cognition before the mind has analyzed meaning or the eyes design and at which the experience and the person experiencing are fully, intuitively, existentially there. Such images look like photographs, not paintings: there is a tremendous sense of stopped time, of the blinking shutter, of being alive and still there, of discovery (rather than analysis), of chance, not design, of quick emotion from an uncertain cause. …continue

• Seek Out Artists

  This is good advice I received once that I have been following this year. So far I’ve met:

  • Geoff Dyer
  • Peter van Agtmael
  • David Brandon Geeting
  • Sally Mann
  • Bruce Gilden
  • Ellen Lupton
  • Guy in train, “corner stores in the middle of the block”

• This Land is Mine #

  Incredible work by Nina Paley, who Amber introduced to me through Sita Sings The Blues.