How a Working-Class Couple Amassed a Priceless Art Collection
mentalfloss.com
mentalfloss.com
They were just on a shoestring budget and the only way to get their paws on it was to be frugal and skilled about acquiring it.
Great read.
I remember one of the pieces of their collection was a few inches of frayed rope with a nail through it. Art is always in the eye of the beholder, they always bought what they personally liked.
Sad to hear that Herb passed away a few years ago. Their like may never been seen again...
Thanks for posting.
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Rule #1 in entrepreneurship: always trust your gut :)
Curation is a severely under-appreciated art form. Its fascinating that they could realistically judge their own artistic talents to be lacking and then go find everyone else's.
If you want to try collecting yourself try the many open studios in SF. You can find many works for under $1000 and plenty under $500. Here's an example: http://www.artspan.org/sfopenstudios
With older artists it's easier to see - technology and art tended to overlap because it was a means to express ideas. But more recently? It seems that art-based philanthropy as a utilitarian endeavour would be difficult to justify.
I don't have any external justification for this beyond the fact that many people that I know who do important work refer regularly to art to inspire and help them push their ideas.
Maybe some people want things they've seen in startrek or in comics or sci-fi stories and the like, get inspired by great engineering feats that they see in their day to day - that kind of thing. But decent sci-fi has a fair bit of research behind it and most of the science-fiction related art would seem to be fairly well endorsed by those who enjoy it anyway. Not really a venture into the world of art and support artists kind of thing.
I find it very hard to believe that art in a 'involve yourself with art' and 'support the artists you owe more than you know' kind of sense has anything to do with inspiring people with regards to the future. I don't see the relationship between the sort of stuff that's generally passed off as art and anything to which one could aspire.
I'm not sure what you're referring to here, but it's surely not relevant. 99% of everything is shit. The only things that matter are the things that matter. That you don't know about them is not my concern.
Yes, science fiction serves a similar role. Fine art also informs science fiction. And vice versa. But they are different things that reveal different aspects of our culture, its evolution, and its direction. There is not only a single sense of 'seeing the future' that may be fulfilled by one or another discipline!
You sound like somebody who simply lacks an education in fine art. You would not be aware of the the influence of art if you were not immersed in, or if you hadn't studied in depth a culture that values, understands and makes use of it. I would argue further that cultures who do not value art in some form are impoverished, for they lack that particular perspective of highly sensitive people.
It's hard to be a working-class collector when there are a lot of upper-middle-class people who just want decorations for their walls.
If you're looking for good, cheap art, try looking around in a town which has a small art school. They always have graduation show and students work very hard on those pieces. And if you're interested in the valuation of art, be sure to attend an art history class.