Website = public art

Before this project, I never realized hoe much work went into making your own website (your own website that actually looks good anyway...). Websites are a form of public art. They require a lot of time and effort to design and make. The process can be made simpler by using a template, but if you are making your design from scratch like my group for our Art Guide project, it can be a long and tedious process. I think that making a website that way though is more rewarding than using a template, because you can say that made it yourself, and you can say it is your art.

Little Known Theatres in Atlanta

For my Art Guide to Atlanta website project for English, I am doing a theatre section fro my group's website. There are a surprisingly large number of theatres in Atlanta, and many of them are relatively unknown to most people, especially people at Georgia Tech. All students know the Fox Theatre and The Shakespeare Tavern, and most know the Alliance Theatre. But what about Horizon Theatre? Dad's Garage? Kudzu Playhouse? 7 Stages? These names are mostly unknown to Tech students. Horizon Theatre and Dad's Garage are both included in my section in my group's website, along with The Shakespeare Tavern, Alliance Theatre, and DramaTech, Georgia Tech's student-run theatre.

School Uniforms

My high school had school uniforms. School uniforms inhibit public art. Fashion can be considered a form of public art and artistic expression. Uniforms inhibit this because students are no longer able to freely express their artistic styles through their clothing. For example, at my high school, not only did we have uniforms, but we also had rules about the kinds of accessories we were allowed to wear. I think that suppressing students' artistic expression through fashion in this way takes a large amount of public art out of everyday life. On a daily basis, the vast majority of public art that you will see is through fashion and what people are wearing.

Battle of Beauty

We read an excerpt from a guerrilla girls book for english class. I completely agree that there should be more diversity of artists featured in art museums. Next time I get to go to the High Museum, I will definitely be more aware of the kinds of artists they feature in their exhibits.

What I really want to talk about in this blog post, however, is one  fact from the video of the guerrilla girls' lecture and presentation that we watched in class. They said that the first year they counted the number of female artists featured in museums, only 5% of the artists featured were female, but 85% of nude paintings were of women.

Nude paintings of women used to symbolize the ultimate form of beauty. However, it saddens me that women today see the skinny models in fashion shows as the "ultimate beauty." A lot of girls will do anything to try to be skinny and beautiful like fashion models, but they never want to look like the beautiful women in paintings. A lot of girls would even see a nude painting, and think that the woman in the painting is fat. Society's perception of beauty has changed dramatically, and I consider it to be a change for the worse.

Thanksgiving Turkeys

Baking a thanksgiving turkey can definitely be considered a form of public art. People who make home baked thanksgiving turkeys often take it very seriously. A lot of thought often goes into the presentation of a thanksgiving turkey, and a lot of people will comment on how "beautiful" and delicious the turkey looks. In this way, a thanksgiving turkey can be considered a form of art. It is just like any other "food art". People often see how bakers turn cupcakes into a work of art by making images or icing effects on the tops of the cupcakes, or just making amazing looking cupcakes. Not as many people would see a thanksgiving turkey as a work of art, but it follows the same concept as cupcake art.

Dreamweaver

My english class had a lecture about how to use Adobe Dreamweaver to create websites for our last project- to create a website that is an "Art Guide".  I am a Computer Science (CS) major, and I love learning to work with more software and computer applications. I had to make a website for my first CS class, and the assignment was to code it ourselves, which was very frustrating. I like how easy it is to use Dreamweaver. The features are easy to understand and use, even for people who don't know as much about computers and software. I will definitely enjoy using Dreamweaver to create a website, because I think it will look much more professional using Dreamweaver than hard coding a website, because it gives me the ability to do more on the website. There are some things that I could spend hours figuring out and coding myself, or I could just spend a few minutes making them in Dreamweaver. However, I also like learning HTML myself, and not having to rely on a program to code the website for me.

Picture Source: http://4sharedserialkeys.blogspot.com/p/serial-keys.html

Titian Exhibit

 I had the opportunity to go see the Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting Exhibition at the High Museum. The highlight and focus of the exhibition is the the two Diana paintings. I loved how the exhibit is set up in relation to the Diana paintings. People are encouraged to enter the exhibit, and start on the second floor of the building, where the lower level of the exhibit is located. This floor contained preparatory drawings and sketches from several venetian painters. So when you started going through the exhibit, you started seeing the drawings that precede the paintings, and the exhibit mentioned the Diana paintings in several places. And then when you go to the third floor, where the upper level of the exhibit is, you finally see the Diana paintings after hearing about them, building up anticipation. The Diana paintings are hanging in the middle of the room, and the walls are curved towards the two paintings. I really like how the exhibition built anticipation waiting to see the two famous paintings, and then they were revealed as the focal point of the upper floor of the exhibition. Furthermore, I also like that the walls of the exhibit are a dark red. It makes the exhibit feel more intimate and close together, and it provides more contrast to the drawings and paintings than the plain white walls that are in the rest of the museum would have. The white walls would have made the exhibition feel too spaced out, and would not have made the paintings feel as vibrant as the dark red.


The two Diana Paintings, painted by Titian:

Diana and Actaeon:

Diana and Callisto:

Pictures Source: http://www.high.org/main.taf?p=3,1,1,22,7