Narcissus by Caravaggio, from Wikimedia Commons.

We think that the person with a narcissistic personality disorder lies to cover up their wrongdoing, but in their mind it is not a lie because they have replaced real memories with manufactured memories in which they are always right.

Here, in this story, Herman Cain says that he paid hush money to one of two women because he mentioned that she was the same height as his wife. If he believes this, it only demonstrates that Cain has not the slightest idea of what sexual harassment is. Of course if he doesn’t believe it then he’s simply a perspicuous liar who will say anything to get elected.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders defines narcissistic personality disorder as a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, in fantasy or behavior, need for admiration, and lack of empathy for others, among other symptoms. See all of the symptoms in this Wikipedia article and then you can view the presidential candidates (including the incumbent) through a new lens.

An interesting exercise.

Then it occurred to me that I could use the recent Import Image as Plane plugin to simplify this. All I had to do was import an image with this plugin, aim the camera at it, animate either the image or the camera, or both, and output the resulting movie clip.

Below is a little demo of my results, and below that I give some details of how I made it.

Okay, this is composed of a title image and five video clips, one clip for each image in the final video. I created each clip separately and then combined them in the Blender Video Sequence Editor to make the final video. I also used the Node Editor to create the scrolling credits, but let’s start with the point of all this first, the Ken Burns Effect. So each of the video clips was done with the following setup (refer to the screencap below):

1. Open a new Blender 2.60 window, select, then delete all the objects in the scene [A, A, X]
2. In the 3D View’s property panel, in the Display group, click on Toggle Quad View. If you can’t see the property panel, press the N key.
3. Put your cursor in the top view (upper-left) and add a camera [Shift+A, Camera]
4. At the top of the property panel, set the camera’s z-location to 5.000.

This would be a good time to set up your render options, so click on the Render icon in the Properties Window to do this. Here are the settings I changed (leaving all the rest at their defaults):

• Resolution: 100%
• Start Frame: 1
• End Frame: 2
• Frame Rate: 24
• Output: H.264
• Encoding: select the H.264 preset
• Output: a convenient folder or file name

Also, you’re going to need some light, so go to the World settings in the Properties Window and tick Environment Lighting. Set the Energy to 1.000.

Now select the File menu, select Import, and then Images as Planes. Don’t see that option? No worries, select File/User Preferences, then, in the Blender User Preferences window, select Addons. Type “import images” into the search box and then tick the checkbox to the right of the “Import-Export: Import Images as Planes” entry. Dismiss the User Preferences window, and now select File/Import/Images as Planes and load your image.

Now decide what kind of camera motion you want to see in this clip to create the Ken Burns Effect. (Actually, I found it easier to manipulate the image instead of the camera, which I left at (0,0,5). That way, I could process one image after another without having to reset the camera every time.)

1. Set your Timeline scrubber to frame 1.
2. Select the image plane object and use translate and scale to position it to the starting point of the effect. Make your adjustments in the top view while watching the camera view to get it right.
3. Now create a keyframe: in the 3D View property panel, Transform section, right click on Location and select Insert Keyframes. Do the same for Scale, and if necessary, Rotation.
4. Move the Timeline scrubber to the last frame, translate and scale the image to your desired final position and then create Translate, Scale and Rotation keyframes.

That’s it. In the Properties Window, select the Render icon, and click Animation.

I assembled the final video using Blender’s superb Video Sequence Editor. If you need advice about the VSE, you can find plenty of tutorials on the web, and it is well-documented in the Blender Wiki manual — the illustrations there still show the 2.49 user interface, but they’re still perfectly clear.

Cheers, and Happy Blendering…
-Bill

Queen Victoria

In December, 1900, the future King Edward VII along with German Emperor Wilhelm II and numerous other royals of Europe gathered at Osborne House to celebrate Christmas with the Sovereign of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, Empress of India of the British Raj.

Queen Victoria was 81 years old and had reigned for over 63 years.

But on the 22^nd of January, 1901, the Queen died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and the British Empire died with her. The Queen’s death marked the end of that Way of Life we now call the Victorian Age. At the time, none of her subjects knew that the beginning of the end of their Empire was neigh; in fact, those at her bedside, who were in the most likely position to know, didn’t even know that the Empire was kaputt, as Wilhelm II might have said. The Empire was a vast organism and like any vast organism it would take a very long time for it to completely fall apart.

It took many decades and two “World Wars” to complete this process.

Vienna, Austria

Freud

For the last ten years or so of Queen Victoria’s life, a neurologist by the name of Sigmund Freud was in Vienna, Austria, working with “neurotic” patients. After trying and discarding hypnosis as a therapy, he discovered that some patients “recovered” after simply talking about themselves and in particular telling him about their dreams. So, just about the time Queen Victoria died he published what has been called his opus magnum, The Interpretation of Dreams.

Then, in 1905, he published Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality in which he asserted that because of social pressures we repress our sexual desires. This repression then causes us much anxiety and can even create bodily harm through a mechanism called psychosomatic illness.

One can imagine that for most people just knowing that they weren’t the only ones to have repressed sexual fantasies was enough to relieve much of their anxiety. But in any given cohort there are bound to be a number of exhibitionists. Other people rushed to recite their repressed sexual fantasies.

As we all know, once we tell one person something we have never told anyone, its easier to tell other people, too. Not only that, but the deliciousness of siting down for an hour or so and talking about oneself was so intoxicating that people could not wait to share the experience with their friends. Thus was the psychoanalysis industry born, as well as the still-popular pastime of navel-gazing.

Bern, Switzerland

Albert Einstein

This same year, 1905, was Albert Einstein’s annus mirabilis, the year in which he published four papers in Annalen der Physikthat pretty much knocked physics on its ear. In these papers not only did Einstein demonstrate that space and time are inextricably coupled, but that they are both variable if you manage to travel speedily enough.

Next, he claimed that sunbeams actually consist of particles of light, which we now call photons. This idea was not to be accepted by physicists for at least 15 years, after experiments by Robert Millikan and a 1923 paper by Arthur Holly Compton which used special relativity to explain what we now call Compton Scattering of X-rays.

Finally, the assistant patent clerk in Bern showed that one could turn part of one’s kitchen table into energy in accordance with the equation E=mc²! Since “c” is the speed of light and a very large number, one could convert one’s kitchen table into an unconscionable amount of energy, which of course the United States demonstrated above two Japanese cities in the 1940s. Those first “atomic bombs” did not, of course, use anyone’s kitchen table, but only because it is easy to convert large unstable atoms into energy and difficult to do so with small atoms like those found in a kitchen table.

Institute for the Study of Business Activity, Moscow

Nikolai Kondratiev

In 1925, Nikolai Kondratiev, who toiled as director of this Institute, had the great misfortune to publish a book called The Major Economic Cycles. Kondratiev had correlated historical economic data and had identified a global economic cycle of boom and bust with a wavelength of about 50 years.

He saw this as a criticism of Western Capitalism but he did not realize the depth of Comrade Stalin’s paranoia. Stalin concluded that Nikolai’s work was actually an attack on his current five-year economic plan for the USSR. Therefore for his scholarly efforts poor Nikolai was removed from his post as director and sent to the Gulag, where he was executed in 1938.

According to Nikolai’s data, the worldwide economy had hit bottom near the turn of the Twentieth Century. So people were living in hard times when Freud and Einstein published their seminal works and dear Victoria moved on to what we hope is a better place, although it’s difficult to imagine what’s better than being the monarch of about one-quarter of humanity.

Future Shock

So in the span of a few years, the economy hit bottom, the social order that the majority of people on the planet had lived their entire lives under, that is, the Victorian Age, ended, the psychological stability that these people had all enjoyed by successfully repressing their sexual fantasies ended, and even the stable foundation of the physical universe was destroyed. Reality was now relative. Instead of having our feet planted firmly on terra firma, we were instead surfing the curvature of space-time as we sped around the sun.

Just as the world economy started to improve, the First World War fueled rapid technological progress. Afterward, technology continued to develop more and more rapidly as Western culture started to climb the next Kondratiev wave.

Alvin Toffler

In his 1970 book Future Shock Alvin Toffler defined it as a perception of “too much change in too short a period of time.” Later, in an interview in the New Scientist Toffler explained that future shock was analogous to culture shock except, “With future shock you stay in one place but your own culture changes so rapidly that it has the same disorienting effect as going to another culture.”

Here are some of the psychological symptoms of culture shock: anxiety, irritability, hostility, social withdrawal, rebellion against rules and authority, negative stereotyping of others.

Art

Art is communication, but not just any old communication. Art is communication at a higher-than-average esthetic level. For example, language is communication, so a natural question is, “Is language art?” Well, yes and no. If I order a cup of coffee in a restaurant, it is not art, no matter how elegant my elocution. But one of Shakespeare’s sonnets: that’s art!

Communication can fail. Since communication requires both a sender and a receiver, the most obvious way communication can fail is that one of these is missing. If I intend to tell someone something, but forget to do so, there’s no communication. If I remember to say it and say it when they are not present, there is no communication.

Likewise, if what I say is not understood, there is no communication. If I go into a coffee shop in America and order my coffee in, say, Swahili, my communication may fail and I most likely won’t get my coffee. As far as art goes, suppose Shakespeare invented a new language in which to write a sonnet, one that only he understood. Perhaps it would still be beautiful as it rolled off his tongue, but since no one else could understand him his communication would fail. The sonnet would not be art. It would simply be an artifact.

Actually, this example is not as ridiculous as you might think. There exists a book of over 350 pages that is completely incomprehensible because it is written in a language that nobody understands and contains illustrations of things that do not exist. It is called the Codex Seraphinianus and it was produced by Luigi Sarafini and published in 1981 in the mistaken belief that it was art. But it is merely an artifact, because it communicates nothing.

We may marvel at artifacts, but they are not art.

Painting

Vermeer could draw.

Art is a house of many rooms: poetry and other literary endeavors, visual arts, performance art, and so on. Here I want to talk about what we call “fine art” and especially painting.

This, in a nutshell, is what happened to art in the twentieth century: artists, suffering from future shock, became anxious, irritable, hostile, and rebelled against rules and authority in art.

For example, in 1900, all artists knew how to draw, or as they would say, render. They were also well trained in composition.

Then the Fauves appeared in Paris in 1905. Their paintings were characterized by clumsy, distorted draftsmanship and the use of unnatural colors. They claimed to admire van Gogh, who, as we know, was mentally ill. Presumably their thinking was, in order to deliberately burlesque serious painting why not adopt a mentally tortured person as a model?

Things only got worse. Rebellion was contagious.

Something descending.

Marcel Duchamp was a good draftsman, judging by his early paintings. But by 1912 he was painting artifacts like Nude Descending Staircase, in which it is impossible to tell if the subject of the painting is male or female, or for that matter, human. A few years later he simply put a snow shovel in a museum and called it “art” because he gave it an ironic title. By this measure every artifact of western civilization is a “work of art” if we take the time to be ironic, sardonic or mischievous about it. Such nonsense may communicate our own cleverness, but it is not art.

Picasso, too, was a superior draftsman. His early paintings and drawings were true art. But future shock drove him to start producing so-called “cubist” paintings in which we are entertained to see women with two eyes on the same side of their noses. In addition, we know that some of them are women only because the artist has told us so outside the context of the painting itself.

(Picasso is an exceptional case, actually. It is my belief that when he found out he could sell these artifacts for a great deal of money he continued to produce them as a kind of colossal joke played at the expense of rich people who knew nothing about art and could be film-flamed by artsy psychobabble.)

So it was with Matisse, Chagall, Magritte, Kandinsky, Munch and a long list of others that succumbed to future shock in this period.

Then disciples came out of the woodwork: Pollock, Warhol, Rothko, Oldenburg, Rauchenberg, and so on. These followers looked at contemporary works and concluded that obviously one did not need to learn how to draw in order to produce similar artifacts. This inanity finally became so widespread that art schools stopped teaching drawing! Instructors claimed that one did not need to know how to draw to be a painter. This sick meme persists today: do a web search for “paint without drawing” and you will see what I mean.

Evolution of Art

Many years ago I read a book that presented what one could call a chaos theory of art. (I fervently wish I could remember this book’s author – if you do, please let me know.) The author addressed all forms of art, not just painting. His thesis was that all so-called “schools” of art started by being simply expressed. Then, as more and more people derived works the desire to be original (presumably to avoid being called a copyist or a plagiarist) caused them to elaborate upon the basic ideas of the early works. This elaboration continues until the works eventually become so distorted as to be completely incomprehensible. At that point, the entire “school” collapses under its own weight of foolishness and the cycle starts over again.

A Kandinsky artifact.

This is what happened to mainstream painting in the twentieth century. Look at this painting by Kandinsky, which he called Composition V. Is it not the very essence of incomprehensibility? After seeing this praised by contemporary “art critics” is it any wonder that Jackson Pollock subsequently produced artifacts that consisted of nothing but paint dribbled on the floor from sticks he found in the woods?

And here is the best thing about creating artifacts such as this: no skill is required! Of course, no skill also means no communication and therefore no art. But the attraction of being able to become a famous artist without actually having to work at developing any artistic skill is so strong that artists arrived at two compensating solutions. The first, and most immature, was to make these artifacts huge. Look at the size of this Pollock artifact from the early 50′s, for example.

A Pollock artifact.

The second compensation was more subtle: the creation of “artspeak”. Currently, artspeak is defined by Wiktionary as “a specialist vocabulary associated with art and artists”, which seems harmless enough, eh? But as John Seed, a writer about art and artists, says, “Artspeak is — for contemporary artists, curators and critics — what Latin was for Medieval priests: an esoteric language that separates and elevates.”

Artspeak reminds me of my first cotton candy experience as a young boy. Here I was presented with what looked to me like a huge treat, a treat at least the size of a basketball. But when I took a bite there was nothing there! Here’s an example of artspeak from Susan Robb’s website:

Robb’s work hits the target while being the target, acknowledging that as we experience, transform, and attempt to translate nature, it is doing the same to us. Whether parasitic, antagonistic, or symbiotic, Robb complicates who or what is on each side of those dialectics.

This, I submit, is utter nonsense.

Hope

Is there hope for the future of painting? I believe so. We are now into the third generation of people who have grown up with rapid technological change and they are well adapted to it. They are less affected by future shock.

Art schools are once more teaching people how to draw. There are more and more artists appearing that clearly have technical skill. As John Seed says in his article for “The Huffington Post,” I Don’t Deconstruct:

It does seem to me that the artists Donald Kuspit calls “New Old Masters” haven’t been written about as much or as well in the past decade as they should have been. Maybe that is because artspeak doesn’t apply very well to their work, which consistently demonstrates high levels of skill.

Skill, which is about practice and the mastery of techniques over time, doesn’t deconstruct well. It also connects to long standing values and traditions, something that can cause problems for artists who want to be part of a vanguard.