He does not merely try to detect the artist’s invisible hand; he scours a painting for the artist’s fingerprints, impressed in the paint or on the canvas. Treating each painting as a crime scene, in which an artist has left behind traces of evidence, Biro has tried to render objective what has historically been subjective. In the process, he has shaken the priesthood of connoisseurship, raising questions about the nature of art, about the commodification of aesthetic beauty, and about the very legitimacy of the art world. Biro’s research seems to confirm what many people have long suspected: that the system of authenticating art works can be arbitrary and, at times, even a fraud.
However, the more Grann and others dug into his past, the more Biro seemed to be in fraudulent territory himself.
Pretty much why everyone else fails (minus a lack of intelligence).
1. Lack of motivation. A talent is irrelevant if a person is not motivated to use it. Motivation may be external (for example, social approval) or internal (satisfaction from a job well-done, for instance). External sources tend to be transient, while internal sources tend to produce more consistent performance.
My father was here [in the USA]. He came in 1913. We didn’t hear from him for many many years during World War I, and after this the revolution in Russia. Things were terrible. So we didn’t hear from my father for 12 or 13 years. We finally got a message. It came through from Warsaw, from HIAS, the Hebrew immigration society. So my mother went to Warsaw, she left us with my grandmother. She was there for two months, three months, and during that period my grandmother passed away, and my older brother who was 17 became our mother and father. And one winter day a big sleigh approaches the houses and a man comes out and asks if we are the Moel family. “We’re here to take you to the mother.”
La Central has its own postcode, its own 700-member police force, and its own border-style entry gates, but during my visit, its enormity truly hit home only when we had to take a taxi to get from flowers to fish. It was a solid fifteen minute ride from one section of the market to another!
Mother’s Day makes wives want to cheat on their husbands. Female sign-ups soared on ashleymadison.com (a dating site for married people) on the day after Mother’s Day.
31,427 women signed up for AshleyMadison.com yesterday — which is over ten times the average number of women who typically sign up on any given Monday.
The day after Valentine’s Day is even busier on the site.
The Library of Congress has uploaded a whole bunch of early film footage of NYC to their YouTube account. Like this 1905 pararama from the top of the Times Building in Times Square:
A recent medical innovation holds out the promise that this might be the first generation of transsexuals who can live inconspicuously. About three years ago, physicians in the U.S. started treating transgender children with puberty blockers, drugs originally intended to halt precocious puberty. The blockers put teens in a state of suspended development. They prevent boys from growing facial and body hair and an Adam’s apple, or developing a deep voice or any of the other physical characteristics that a male-to-female transsexual would later spend tens of thousands of dollars to reverse. They allow girls to grow taller, and prevent them from getting breasts or a period.
From Oobject, a collection of “first” images: the first color photograph, the first photo taken in space, the first x-ray image, the first image of a molecule, etc.
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