McGee's Musings

	Monday, January 17, 2005

Copyrighted paintings - less to the story than meets the eye

Another "isn't the establishment evil and stupid story?" One paragraph after what's quoted here is the following from the original story:

Actually, the museum guard was mistaken. There was no copyright issue, and the museum apologizes and is telling artists to sketch away as long as they do not interrupt the flow of traffic in the always crowded gallery.

So perhaps we have a training issue or a somewhat overzealous and underinformed guard. Is this selective sharing of the story helpful? You know that this would have disappeared in a heartbeat if fully reported, while selective quotation gave it some blog legs. Isn't there enough actual dumb behavior out there that we can let this one pass?

Stop sketching, little girl -- those paintings are copyrighted!. Xeni Jardin: Museum security guard told a child to stop sketching paintings in a museum -- because they're copyrighted.

It is standard operating procedure for students of art to learn by example by sketching masterpieces in an art museum. A budding artist in Durham found that the time honored tradition was challenged while seeking inspiration at the Matisse, Picasso and the School of Paris: Masterpieces from the Baltimore Museum of Art exhibit in Raleigh.
Over the weekend at the North Carolina Museum of Art there were works by Matisse, Picasso, Monet, Degas and some Illanas. Julia Illana is a second grader who was visiting the popular exhibit there with her parents and was sketching the paintings in her notebook. "I love to draw in my notebook," Illana said.
Her sketch of Picasso's Woman with Bangs, which came out pretty good, and Matisse's Large Reclining Nude got the promising artist into trouble with museum security. A museum guard told Julia's parents that sketching was prohibited because the great masterpieces are copyright protected, a concept that young Julia did not understand until her mother explained the term.

Link (Thanks, Cowicide) [Boing Boing]

6:35:28 PM •

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Edward Tufte on presenting evidence

More insights from Tufte on how to be an intelligent consumer of data. At the same time, you would do well to take Tufte's observations with at least a grain of salt.

The tools of rhetoric precede those of data analysis by more than a few centuries and Tufte is a master of both. Tufte appears to see malice and venality in settings where I see predictable organizational pressures of time and cost. With the luxury of tenure, Tufte can find the all too real flaws in analyses prepared in the face of these pressures.

Tufte's guidelines and analyses are all worth contemplating. What would be intriguing is to understand what tools he would substitute for those (such as PowerPoint and Excel) he criticizes so harshly. Further, once we've learned to recognize the analytical flaws he identifies, what do we do next in order to learn to commit them less frequently?

Edward Tufte: New Chapter from Beautiful Evidence.

Tufte's new chapter, Corrupt Techniques in Evidence Presentations, from his forthcoming book Beautiful Evidence, is now online for a month.

"Here is the first of several chapters on consuming presentations, on what alert members of an audience or readers of a report should look for in assessing the credibility of the presenter."

[elearningpost]

6:15:18 PM •

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