Spring Ahead: Bits & Pieces 2022 (1)

Well, Staten Island Chuck, our local meteorologist of the rodent persuasion, clearly got it wrong. We did indeed get six more weeks of winter, with a few scattered days of shirtsleeve weather along the way. Finally, however, spring has sprung here in the New York area, and not a day too soon.

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No AIPAD for Me in 2022

Had a recent intake visit with my new primary care physician in my Medicare HMO plan. Still have the results of bloodwork to review, but, aside from some predictable aches and pains and minor irritations, everything indicated that I remain in remarkably good health for a man my age.

Intending to keep it that way, I plan to abide by my policy of masking up in public, washing and sanitizing my hands regularly, and avoiding all unnecessary travel (even local) and social situations, especially contact with strangers. As someone of the senior persuasion, thus in a vulnerable cohort, and alert to the lurking possibility of a COVID resurgence via some stealth variant, this seems like basic common sense. I do understand the impulse to partay! — especially after a long, drab winter and two years of sequestering — but I’ve decided to hold off indefinitely.

Which means that, sadly, I’ll miss my favorite niece Alison’s wedding in Denver this fall and, more proximately, the first post-pandemic edition of The Photography Show, coming up on May 19-22, relocated this year to Center415 at 415 Fifth Avenue, between 37th and 38th Streets in New York City.

Presented as always by the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD),  The Photography Show will coincide with a number of the art fairs in NYC, including Frieze. Given the still relatively small size of the serious constituency for photography, should this year’s session become a super-spreader event it could have a devastating effect on the field as a whole.

So I’ll pass. Which means that if any of this blog’s readers elect to attend we won’t see each other there, which I’ll regret. Since I find AIPAD’s iterations overwhelmingly generic, my commentary on the 2016 edition should fit this one reasonably well, and I commend it to you as advance reading.

With that said, I remain always available via Zoom, FaceTime, WhatsApp, phone, and email.

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Speaking of which, notwithstanding the pandemic I continue to offer online project consultancy, small-group seminars, classroom visits, panel participation, etc. For example, on March 14th, 2022 I moderated a Zoom panel titled “History of Artists Talk on Art,” featuring two founders of that organization, Douglas Sheer and Lori Antonacci. (For short bios of these notables, click here.)

ATOA, inarguably the U.S. art world’s longest-running forum for artists in all genres and media, will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary in 2024. Its archives, including audio and video recordings of all its 800-plus public presentations, entered the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution in 2016.

I’m a close friend of several of the founders. I watched them give birth to this invaluable organization, served for a time on its advisory board, participated periodically as panelist and/or moderator, and attended quite a few more of its events. So I felt honored to guide this overview, which lays out the project’s history, premises, milestones, and current iteration. You can find the video at ATOA’s YouTube channel.

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Coming up shortly — on May 19, at 6 p.m. — I will moderate a Zoom panel titled “Presenting Photography Today” for the Woodstock Byrdcliffe Guild, a regional center for the arts located in Woodstock, NY. The “panel of local experts” will consider how Covid and its aftermath are impacting photo education, the exhibiting of photographs, and the digital future of the medium.

Panelists will include Hannah Frieser, former executive director of the Center for Photography at Woodstock (now in Kingston); Zachary Bowman, education director of the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art; and the above mentioned Douglas Sheer, who lives in Woodstock and has become a Byrdcliffe board member. I qualify for this role since I now spend half my time at a house in the hamlet of Stone Ridge, just 30 minutes south of Woodstock in the Catskills/Hudson Valley.

The meeting is open to the public, so readers of this blog are welcome to participate. Here’s the link:

Join Zoom Meeting

Meeting ID: 837 4575 4185

Passcode: 793587

So mark your calendar. I look forward to seeing you there.

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Your Visual-Bullshit Detector

My web browsing led me to an article by Kendra Pierre-Louis, “You’re probably terrible at spotting faked photos: Seeing isn’t believing,” published in Popular Science back in July 2017. It summarizes a then-recent study conducted by Sophie J. Nightingale, Kimberley A. Wade, and Derrick G. Watson at the University of Warwick (UK), titled “Can people identify original and manipulated photos of real-world scenes?” They published their results in the online journal Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications; you can read the paper online and/or download a pdf file thereof via the preceding link.

On average, according to the published study, participants recognized only 60 percent of alterations. From the researchers’ conclusion:

The growing sophistication of photo-editing tools means that nearly anyone can make a convincing forgery. Despite the prevalence of manipulated photos in our everyday lives, there is a lack of research directly investigating the applied question of people’s ability to detect photo forgeries. Across two experiments, we found that people have an extremely limited ability to detect and locate manipulations of real-world scenes.

If you want to take the same 10-minute test on which they based their experiment, and get feedback on your performance, click here.

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And Now For Something Completely Different

War criminal Vladimir Putin sings Fats Domino’s “Blueberry Hill” at a children’s fundraiser in St. Petersburg in 2018, for an audience including Goldie Hawn, Sharon Stone, Kurt Russell and Kevin Costner, and others, who probably wish they could take back their participation in this macabre moment. ‘Nuff said.

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Putin’s disastrous war on Ukraine continues — although certainly not going well for him, nor for Russia — at the time I publish this. The absolute best detailed coverage of this terrorist invasion of a peaceful country that I have found has come not from the New York Times or CNN or NBC or any major news outlet but from Markos “kos” Moulitsas,  Mark Sumner, and others at the Daily Kos online.

I’m talking about informed play-by-play running commentary by a team of knowledgeable observers, at least some of whom have actually served in the military and thus speak from direct experience, pulling no punches. Aware that they’re speaking to people who may lack that experience, these writers keep it blessedly unjargonized (as much as possible), with frequent glosses to explain things to those of the civilian persuasion. Addressing everything from the micro level (the nuts and bolts of a particular ambush) to the macro (the geopolitical shifts). Think of a handful of Roy Kents covering a football match, with the same directness but mostly minus the cursing (though you can infer its sotto voce presence).

If, as seems quite possible now, the hubristic ineptitude of a mediocre ex-KGB officer brings post-Soviet Russia to its knees and reveals it as a second-class power, you could serve up slices of that irony (without air quotes) at summer cookouts across the free world and have people queuing for seconds right up through Labor Day weekend.

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On a related matter, anyone reading coverage of the war has come across the neologism “ruscism,” a portmanteau word combining “Russia” and “fascism” and pronounced “RA-shist.” Sometimes transliterated as rashist or raschist, it got coined by the Ukrainians (in Ukrainian) to define the political credo of the Russian Federation under the Putin regime. If you have an interest in the nuances of language, I highly recommend Timothy Snyder’s April 22, 2022 New York Times article, “The War in Ukraine Has Unleashed a New Word.” In it Snyder explains lucidly the subtleties of the shade this new term throws on Russia, Russians, and Putinists, which the English translation thereof can only hint at. Fascinating.

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This post sponsored in part by a donation from Arthur Ollman.

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Special offer: If you want me to either continue pursuing a particular subject or give you a break and (for one post) write on a topic — my choice — other than the current main story, make a donation of $50 via the PayPal widget below, indicating your preference in a note accompanying your donation. I’ll credit you as that new post’s sponsor, and link to a website of your choosing.

And, as a bonus, I’ll send you a signed copy of my new book, poetic license / poetic justice — published under my full name, Allan Douglass Coleman, which I use for my creative writing.