The Banquet of Herod, in which di Panicale invents perspective.
Handsome as a movie star, Wade Guyton hails from Tennessee, can’t draw and had trouble getting NYC art fellowships. Got his start in NYC as a security guard at Dia.
Now his computer generated “paintings”, which he designs using images he scans from books designed by other graphics artists, get a prestigious “mid career” retrospective at the Whitney.
Wade Guyton, by Karsten Moran for the New York Times.
This is the one graf in the whole story which makes me stop screaming ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL.
By Daniel Clowes, from his comic book Eightball.
“I would drag Web pages over other printed materials,” he explained. “What I realized is that Microsoft Word has a structure to it. It has a language and margins. It has functions and a default size and a default color, which is black. And all those presets I decided to use as the structure for making drawings.”
Interesting. Ish. The problem is that the template is Bill Gates’, who will
- die more famous for screwing his partner and
- over-estimating his market penetration in Africa, which he had hoped to save by installing computers where electricity fears to tred,*
- and for losing the battle for software and hardware to Steve Jobs while quashing innovation, surviving disgraceful anti-trust suits, and ripping off competitors.
Unaesthetic doesn’t begin to describe Guyton’s medium. Recent stories about Gates’ anti-innovation business model underline the point.
Jeez, is everything bullshit?
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*Welcome to Soweto, white boy:
Gates looks back with some amusement at his belated realization that access to technological information might not be the answer to the world’s most serious problems. Microsoft was donating computers to poor communities in Africa in the mid-90’s, and during a visit to Johannesburg, Gates went to Soweto where he was proudly shown the town’s single computer. As he took in his surroundings, he recalls, he said to himself: ”Hey, wait a minute — there’s only one electrical outlet in this whole place.’ And yup, they had plugged in that computer, and when I was there, man, that thing was running and everybody was very thankful. But I looked around and thought, Hmm, computers may not be the highest priority in this particular place. I wondered, Who the heck is going to be really using this thing?”
Writing 