Hacker Cinema
Tim's Vermeer
2013 · Film · documentary · 80 min
Directed by Teller
Tim Jenison, a Texas based inventor, attempts to solve one of the greatest mysteries in all art: How did Dutch Master Johannes Vermeer manage to paint so photo-realistically 150 years before the invention of photography? Spanning a decade, Jenison's adventure takes him to Holland, on a pilgrimage to the North coast of Yorkshire to meet artista David Hockney, and eventually even to Buckingham Palace. The epic research project Jenison embarques on is as extraordinary as what he discovers.
31 positive5 negative1 mixed5 neutralfrom 42 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
44 comments on Hacker News
This reminds me of a couple things:
== Tim's Vermeer ==
Specifically Tim's quote "There's also this modern idea that art and technology must never meet - you know, you go to school for technology or you go to school for art, but never for both... And in the Golden Age, they were one and the same person."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim%27s_Vermeer
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/quotes/?item=qt2312040
== John Lind's The Science of Photography ==
Best explanation I ever read on the science of photography https://johnlind.tripod.com/science/scienceframe.html
== Bill Atkinson ==
Bill (yes, of hypercard fame) used to have some incredible articles on the science of photography that were linked from photo.net back when Philip Greenspun owned and operated it. A detailed explanation of digital sensor fundamentals (e.g. why bigger wells are inherently better) particularly sticks in my mind. I haven't been able to find that content since philg sold photo.net. Much karma to anyone who can unearth those.
Using a camera obscura for this directly does not actually work for color paintings. As soon as you start painting you get the color projected atop your paint, making it essentially impossible to match the colors. You need a small modification with a mirror so you can see the projection "next" to your painting instead of atop it.
Tim's vermeer is a highly amusing documentary on the topic. I've got no real clue (or stake) in its accuracy, but it's worth watching for the idea alone.
I highly recommend the movie "Tim's Vermeer" about the likelihood that Vermeer used something like a lightbox to paint his paintings. Specifically, his ability to reproduce light and color is unmatched while he only had basic training as a painter and never let anyone see him work. A fascinating engineering problem to deduce how he might have accomplished this.
Have you seen the documentary Tim's Vermeer? Its thesis is that Vermeer, through advanced lenses at the time, was able to paint essentially mechanically rather than having a fine grasp of artistic brushstrokes in the traditional sense. Some, as well as in the documentary itself, think that it'd ruin the purpose of the art but I see it differently, especially with all of these AI artists now online, where the intent of the human making the art is all that matters, not the instrument or manner in which they do it.
Fun fact: it's a different device, but the principle is the same as the device used in the documentary Tim's Vermeer. It results in the images overlapping between your left and right eye and you simply paint until the difference goes away.
I've definitely heard it too - the only place I can think of is an interview Penn did with Tim Ferriss (https://tim.blog/2020/01/09/penn-jillette/) but my scratchings from that episode don't include this particular anecdote so maybe it wasn't that.
The way I heard him describe it was "To any normal person this would seem like a totally unreasonable amount of time, EXCEPT to a magician [because that's their job]", or something like that.
EDIT: Maybe it was actually an anecdote from his movie Tim's Vermeer? Been a long time since I saw it...
For how photorealistic paintings can be made with little painting skill, a setup with mirrors, and lots of patience:
Tim's Vermeer https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388
> I want to see Michelangelo's statue of David and be awestruck at how a human being could carve the 17 foot (5 meter) tall likeness of a man out of a solid block of marble with just a hammer and chisel.
Say you learn the feat was done using some clever use of mechanical 3D tracing or casting and chemicals that rapidly dissolve the rock and took no effort at all just knowledge of the trick. Now you would no longer be awestruck? Value for you is in the difficulty not the result?
Btw: Highly recommend “Tim's Vermeer” documentary about old mechanical art technique being reverse engineered:
https://youtu.be/WPL7D0Ha1kQ
> If you believe human produced art is valuable then you should care about verifying whether or not a human actually produced it.
Do you not question whether the enormous amount of time and effort various historical works cost was well spent? What if that time and effort was instead spent researching something useful? Does the principle of compound interest not apply to useful knowledge? What happens with compound interest over long time scales? What might our lives be today if instead of placing value on paintings / carvings / etc those before us placed more value on discovery and preservation of useful knowledge?
> This was a scandal precisely because people value the human element of chess.
It was a scandal because many use costly signals (ability to play sports / games or create or acquire stuff like “art”) to rank each other in hierarchies. What matters is the ranking. If the result mattered, anything that improves the result would be welcome, not rejected as “cheating”. Are science research / publications such an activity? For some, yes. For others, no. How do you see it?
> Just like the author of the article didn't enjoy having her work credited to a chatbot, Niemann probably didn't enjoy having his work credited to a chessbot (if he's indeed innocent).
AI assisted writing when it looks like AI assisted writing is often “empty” -- it has the right look but lacks substance. If the author of the article was told her work looked like a high schooler did it that also may have upset her.
If instead the author was told it was the work of a genius and not hers that may actually be accepted as a compliment -- if she maintains that high quality in the future what else can that be but an honest compliment on the quality of her work?
>> When you are unwell do you seek medicine? What does medicine say you are? Are you not a biochemical machine?
> I'm not sure what this passage accomplishes besides a redefinition of terms.
You said above: “I'm legitimately curious about how you see the world.” The passage above reveals how I see the world. Many see a sharp difference between “human” and “machine” yet the medicine we rely on assumes we are machines. I think many know this but do not realize the implications. To think about it can be uncomfortable.
>> Today our minds exist in one form. In the future, might our minds exist in other forms? If you had the power to upgrade various parts of yourself with better parts would you reject this?
> No, I'm not a transhumanist. I believe in using technology to help people with differing abilities (e.g. I'm fine with cochlear implants), but I'm not planning on amputating my limbs to replace them with robotic prosthetics.
Your attitude I suspect is because you do not see you already are upgraded from what you would be otherwise. Your mind has been upgraded with language and is full of useful concepts and techniques that are not your own. To aid communication and memory you rely on speech and writing for information. You are surrounded by technology that upgrades you (and your life) but it is invisible to you and you do not think about it much.
I really enjoyed Tim's Vermeer (about how Tim painted a Vermeer):
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/
Back in the 1990s I was at film school at the point they were transitioning from Amigas / Toasters to an Avid suite, so I bought an Amiga 4000 with Video Toaster off them on the slightly-cheap. I got fairly proficient in Lightwave but all I ever used it for was making short 16mm film loops for projecting on huge screens at raves from a bank of Elf projectors nailed to a plank.
Edit: Tangentially related, it's well worth seeking out the film Tim's Vermeer about NewTek founder Tim Jenison trying to recreate Vermeer's style. It's fantastic.
For those who haven't seen it, check out the documentary "Tim's Vermeer." Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WPL7D0Ha1kQ
I've had many artists explain to me that they are in fact engineers - there is much calculation, chemistry, optics and then some - but I'd say that programmers are more like lawyers than engineers. Sorry, but it's symbolic work, not physical work. "Software Engineer" is just a title someone gives you and means no more than "Software Developer" or "Computer Programmer" ever did.
Of course lawyers and "real" engineers have to get professional certification that can be legally revoked; programmers and artists don't.
And the documentary Tim's Vermeer is pretty good.
Tim’s Vermeer : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim's_Vermeer
Produced and directed by Penn and Teller who I thought were just magicians. It mixes art and technology with a little bit of historical puzzle solving. As someone who knows little about art history, I found it fascinating.
It's a fair point, and thanks for teaching me a new term!
There's a lovely documentary called "Tim's Vermeer" about Tim Jenison's - one of the founders of NewTek, the people behind Video Toaster and LightWave, incidentally both tools that made hard visual art tasks accessible to wider audiences - hobby side project to prove that Vermeer used sophisticated optical tools to capture and copy his scenes from physical sets, rather than e.g. paint his famous grasp on lighting purely from his own mind. He builds such tools himself and then proceeds to successfully create his own Vermeer-alike painting, despite possessing very artistic skill himself.
It's full of good ruminations (and good at sparking more) on tools-vs-artistry but also execution-vs-method, and whether designing and adopting innovative tools and the tedious process to use them made Vermeer less of a genius, or just a genius of a different kind than otherwise presumed.
It's very accessible and doesn't require knowing anything in particular from the art world.
The start of the article reminded me of the movie Tim's Vermeer (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim%27s_Vermeer), which I highly recommend.
The tools used to obtain photo-realistic paintings, even in the 17th century, might contradict some of the more romantic notions of observation and beauty that we typically associate with art.
I think this is a perfect post to bring up the theory of Vermeer's work presented in this film, "Tim's Vermeer." The focus of the movie, Tim Jenison of NewTek, hypothesized the use of a mirror to allow an almost paint-by-numbers recreation of the sitting subject.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/
>"Tim's Vermeer"
A neat but sorta terrible documentary. The central claim is that Vermeer absolutely must have used a camera lucida because his detail would otherwise be impossible. In particular I remember the 'expert' claiming that a certain smooth gradation was impossible to paint without optical tools. Maybe for a modernist like Hockney, but there are painters with academic training who achieve that kind of work without optical tools.
I'm not saying Vermeer didn't experiment with such tools, but the claims to their criticality in his process are a joke.
According to the movie "Tim's Vermeer", at least one Vermeer (The Music Lesson) is in Buckingham palace and not generally accessible to the public. How do you get to see that one?
Tim's Vermeer is an excellent documentary that looks at the possibility that Vermeer used optical technology to produce his paintings. Pretty convincing documentary, imo.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/
This article [0] would seem to agree with that feeling you can't shake; not that it's a "hoax" per se, but that it's bullshit ;)
> So what does it lack? The film implies anyone can make a beautiful work of art with the right application of science. There is no need for mystical ideas like genius.
> But the mysterious genius of Vermeer is exactly what's missing from Tim's Vermeer. It is arrogant to deny the enigmatic nature of Vermeer's art. If this art looks "optical", it can also look abstract. It is an act of seeing nature, not a work of copying it. Whether or not he made use of optical instruments, Vermeer looked at the world with a uniquely penetrating eye. He was able to paint what he saw with a delicate hand. If you can't see the astonishing nature of his talent when you are standing in front of his paintings you should walk away from them – not make a film about how easy they are to replicate.
> Tim's Vermeer is the equivalent of someone hanging a painting-by-numbers version of a masterpiece over the mantelpiece and claiming it's as good as the real thing. At last, an art film for philistines.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2014/jan/28/tims-vermeer-fails
If you're a basic techie with little appreciation for the fine arts, watch a film called "Tim's Vermeer". It will make you want to go to this exhibition.
I don't think they should have messed with it.
(I do look at it differently since watching Tim's Vermeer though. I wonder if the conservators looked at the painting a bit differently after seeing the documentary? Like hay, "Maybe it's not the masterpiece we thought?")
You should watch the documentary Tim's Vermeer.
Good post to plug the documentary "Tim's Vermeer" ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/), which is a joy to watch as they try to reverse-engineer the particular style Vermeer painted in.
I got vaguely fascinated by the documentary Tim's Vermeer a few years back, where Tim Jennison makes the argument that Vermeer used something not unlike a couple of these to project his scenes onto a canvas so he could effectively paint-by-numbers. Whether that's true or not, I found the idea fascinating, I just don't have a good enough understanding of optics to understand how the system of lenses and mirrors works to be able to know how to replicate it.
> the young woman in the painting... isn't even real
There is some evidence that Vermeer could have been using optical tools to create his photo-realistic paintings.
If so, she would have been a real person, as that is how the technique is imagined to work - use an optical apparatus that allows you to see your painting and the subject in the same view, and then paint so that they blend into each other.
A pretty cool documentary was made about this called Tim's Vermeer[1] (starring Tim Jenison and directed by Penn & Teller), and led to an installation at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) in Hobart, Tasmania. Really interesting, and well worth experiencing both!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim%27s_Vermeer
"Tim's Vermeer is a documentary film, directed by Teller, produced by his stage partner Penn Jillette and Farley Ziegler,[2] about inventor Tim Jenison's efforts[3] to duplicate[4] the painting techniques of Johannes Vermeer, in order to test his theory that Vermeer painted with the help of optical devices."
I figure this might be of interest to anyone looking at the Camera Lucida.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim%27s_Vermeer
Riding Solo to the Top of the World (2006) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0903013/
The Atomic Cafe (1982) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083590/
At Sea (2007) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1829648/
The Vietnam War (2017) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1877514/
Lessons of Darkness (1992) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0104706/
Tim's Vermeer (2013) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/
Weiner (2016) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5278596/
Jodorowsky's Dune (2013) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1935156/
Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0379357/
The Art of Japanese Life (2017) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt7002974/
The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief (2006) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0493420/
The Triumph of the Nerds: The Rise of Accidental Empires (1996) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0115398/
The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (2015) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4299972/
Lots of great documentaries already mentioned, but one of my favorites "Tim's Vermeer" hasn't been yet. https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/tims_vermeer_2014
Not in the article, but I really enjoyed "Tim's Vermeer".
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/
I used to be a fine arts student and my favorite painters were/are Vermeer and Rembrandt and their circles. I always hated the theory that they used optics, but couldn't quite put my finger on why until I started reading press coverage of that documentary. The problem isn't with the argument (at this point I'm convinced that they did, it stands to reason given the context of them being artisans in the same time and place as people like Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, etc.) but with the way that some people in the press and public seem to see it as lessening their achievements.
I.e. Tim's Vermeer copies are held up as examples of how anyone can paint like Vermeer given the tools, whereas to me a direct comparison makes it even more clear how perfectly Vermeer chose when to use a technological aid and when to change things:
http://flyingfox.jonathanjanson.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/503208.jpg
Things like the bluriness of the paintings in the background and the slightly softer and more abstracted faces, the additional creams and blue tints in the whites of the walls, the blues that are picked out in the rug in the foreground, etc are what make me love Vermeer so much, not that he's photorealistic.
Anyway, I realize I'm constructing a partial strawman here because I don't think people like David Hockney or others supporting the optical argument are trying to claim that Vermeer is less talented than we thought, but it does seem like the press sometimes spins it that way.
As an aside, one of the only paintings of Carel Fabritius to escape the gunpowder explosion that killed him as well (made more famous recently by Donna Tartt's 'The Goldfinch') is a really cool example of a painting from the time that was clearly made using lenses. It looks to my eyes more or less exactly like a photo made using the iPhone's panoramic setting. Would be really cool if someone could find the same location in Delft and take the same type of image:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d9/FabritiusViewOfDelft.jpg/1280px-FabritiusViewOfDelft.jpg
Vermeer was also suspected to have used optics to help him paint, as highlighted in the documentary Tim's Vermeer [0]. Although their evidence is circumstantial, some color artifacts are difficult to explain in other ways. For instance, the falloff of light matches what would come from a video camera, but would be extremely difficult for an artist to see by eye.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS_HUWs9c8c
A neat documentary film about Tim Jenison, mentioned in the article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim's_Vermeer
For those interested in Vermeer, I highly recommand the movie called Tim's Vermeer [1][2]. It's about some graphic designer who's never painted (according to the movie) using mechanical/optical setups to paint scenes in order to acheive Vermeer's painting style. The final result is absolutely impressive in my opinion and the whole movie is a good watch.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tim%27s_Vermeer [2] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3089388/
I'm not going to discuss TV movies.
But let's look at the other ones, shall we:
2004's Kinsey. Kinsey's a hero to the social justice movement, also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Kinsey#Personal_habits
2009's Creation. Opened on 7 screens in the US. Hardly a cultural phenomenon.
2004's Aviator. Close, big surprise Hollywood chooses to mythologize a legendary director's early life.
Tim's Vermeer. "Inventor Tim Jenison seeks to understand the painting techniques used by Dutch Master Johannes Vermeer." Are you intentionally wasting my time?
2011's A Dangerous Method. Look who got first billing and is on the center of the cover. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1571222/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1
2015's Experimenter. Do you not know who Milgram is? From the IMDB page the focus of the movie is his inhumane experiments. Whose case does "look at the horrible things this white guy did to people" help more?
1999's Insider. It's a stretch because it's a movie about a whistleblower who happens to be a scientist, but at least it was a big film with real actors.
2008's The Strangest Dream. A Canadian documentary that nobody's ever heard of. Doesn't even have a cover picture on IMDB or even one vote on Rotten Tomatoes. It's about the one guy who left the Manhattan Project. What are the odds that this is a vehicle to pass judgement on all the other guys who didn't leave the Manhattan Project?
> You for some reason switched to fictional scientists with Gravity (2013) and Interstellar (2014). Why is that? For that matter, you restricted me to scientists and mathematicians, while the protagonists of Gravity are engineers and astronauts - it's poor form to change your metric part-way through.
I hoped you would connect the dots that I was talking about large-scale, big-budget movies.
> If I expand the list to include engineers, astronauts, and similar occupations, then "Captain Phillips" (2013) concerns the captain of the MV Maersk Alabama, which was hijacked by pirates, "The Wind Rises" (2013) about Jiro Horikoshi, the man who designed Japanese fighter planes during World War II ... oops ! Sory, not a white man, though he would have been an "honorary white" in apartheid South Africa, " Zvorykin-Muromets" (2010) about the Russian inventor of television, "Flash of Genius" (2008) about the Robert Kearns and his invention of the intermittent windshield wiper,
At this point it appears you're intentionally wasting my time for effect, like maybe you're hoping somebody who glances over your post will assume it's well-researched and well-thought.
Naoki Mori? I was hoping you would notice from context I was referencing male scientists who were publicly disgraced as people, not as fraudulent scientists.
I'm sure you'll understand that I don't have enough time to fact-check your ridiculous list of movies and sift through all of your loaded questions, so I've left them unanswered.
> How do you define 'mythologizing' in such a way that it's at least roughly repeatable?....If you can't do that, then you don't really have a good metric.
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mythologize
At least you closed with Deep Web which might be an actual counterpoint.
That list was incomplete. I added a recent Indian film about Ramanujan and a Soviet film about Sofia Kovalevskaya from the 1980s. FWIW, there's also an upcoming film "Dau" (in post-production) about the Russian mathematical physicist Lev Landau.
One difficulty is that the Wikipedia list does not include made for TV movies and documentaries, like 'Dangerous Knowledge' (2007) on Georg Cantor, Ludwig Boltzmann, Kurt Gödel and Alan Turing, or the BBC documentary 'Isaac Newton: The Last Magician' (2013), or the PBS documentary 'Newton's Dark Secrets' (2005), or "Breaking the Code" (1996), another biography of Turing, or "Freedom Man" (1989) about the black American mathematician Benjamin Banneker, or the 1973 Italian TV movie "Non ho tempo" about Galois, or Simon Singh's 1996 documentary "Fermat's Last Theorem", focusing on Andrew Wiles but including other mathematicians.
Or the BBC documentary "The Birth Of Calculus" (1986) on Leibniz, the four-part BBC series "The Story of Maths" (2008), the 2008 "Julia Robinson and Hilbert's Tenth Problem", or ... I think you get the picture that there are many TV movies about mathematicians, and most of them are white males. BTW, none of them are "average".
When "Moneyball" was turned into a movie, people asked how a book that dealt with statistics could be turned into a movie, since statistics alone isn't that interesting. What big screen movie is there to make out of Dirichlet's life? Of Riemann's? Of Wiles'?
So, of "regular white guy scientists or mathematicians we've mythologized in the past 20 years", where I'll define "mythologized" to mean "made a movie about them", and I'll limit it to feature length films based on lives of actual scientists:
"Kinsey" (2004) on Kinsey, "Copenhagen" (2002, TV) on a meeting between Bohr and Heisenberg, "Creation" (2009) on Darwin, "Something the Lord Made" (2004) about heart surgeons (one of which was a white male), "Tim's Vermeer" (2013) though that's more an amateur scientist, "The Aviator" (2004) about Howard Hughes (aerospace engineer and inventor), "A Dangerous Method" (2011) concerning Jung, Freud, and Sabina Spielrein (the first two being white males), this fall the film "Experimenter" about Stanley Milgram will be released, "The Insider" (1999) is a drama based on the research scientist Jeffrey Wigand, and "The Strangest Dream" (2008) about the physicist Joseph Rotblat.
Those are movies about 10+ real scientists, all male, straight, and not disabled, plus a couple of others. (There were a few movies with other than white, male, straight characters, but certainly not this many.)
You for some reason switched to fictional scientists with Gravity (2013) and Interstellar (2014). Why is that? For that matter, you restricted me to scientists and mathematicians, while the protagonists of Gravity are engineers and astronauts - it's poor form to change your metric part-way through.
If I expand the list to include engineers, astronauts, and similar occupations, then "Captain Phillips" (2013) concerns the captain of the MV Maersk Alabama, which was hijacked by pirates, "The Wind Rises" (2013) about Jiro Horikoshi, the man who designed Japanese fighter planes during World War II ... oops ! Sory, not a white man, though he would have been an "honorary white" in apartheid South Africa, " Zvorykin-Muromets" (2010) about the Russian inventor of television, "Flash of Genius" (2008) about the Robert Kearns and his invention of the intermittent windshield wiper,
A problem with your list is it's easily interpreted as cherry picking. Jodie Foster was the protagonist of "Contact" (1997), a big budget sci-fi film. How does your choice now of "Gravity" indicate a changed pattern from nearly 20 years ago?
Another problem is that you haven't established what the baseline should be. Given the 12.2% of the US population is "Non-Hispanic Black or African American", what percentage of films with 'hero scientists' should have a "Non-Hispanic Black or African American" in that role? Given that 51% of the adult population in the US are women, how many hero scientist movies should have a women in that role? Perhaps it's more that these roles were previously underrepresented?
Is the pattern you see simply explained by the secular trend that people other than straight white males are becoming more frequent in science?
You ended by picking two items from a different context - postings to HN in the last month and 'male scientists who have been publicly disgraced in the past year', I think to establish a pattern. But you again lack the evidence needed to tell if your observations are really a pattern instead of cherry picking. What is the expected baseline?
If the ratio of men to women in science is 4:1, then we would expect a female scientist to be publicly disgraced with about the same ratio. (It's hard to give a good ratio since I think it's more likely that a senior researcher will be found out and reported in the international news. I believe there are more males in higher level positions than females. Also, "Japanese women account for only 10% of the researchers in Japan" and "only 12 percent of the science and engineering workforce in India was female in 2010", so the international ratio is probably more like 8:1.
Checking now, I searched "Retraction Watch" for all people described by the writers as being "disgraced". The complete list of male scientists in the last few years are: Naoki Mori, James H. Hunton, Dipak Das, Don Poldermans, Yoshitaka Fujii, Joachim Boldt, Diederik Stapel, and Woo-Suk Hwang.
The only disgraced female scientist mentioned is Bengu Sezen.
This 8:1 ratio is about what I expect from the percentage of women doing science in the world stage, and within the error bars for something with so few numbers.
What method did you use to count disgraced male and female scientists? I see you missed Haruko Obokata as another disgraced female scientist, so it doesn't seem like you've done a systematic search.
(A double-check search against sciencemag.org finds Jens Förster and Marc Hauser as additional 'disgraced' male researchers and no additional female researchers. Note that Science does not use the term 'disgraced' in articles about Haruko Obokata.)
Also, what do you use as the ratio for males in science vs. females in science? If it's 4:1 or higher then with 3 male disgraces you would expect less than a 50% chance of hearing about a female in the same situation, no?
Otherwise, if you're just making connections based on the latest hot gossip, then you'll be suffering from some serious bias error. You're not going to hear about Naoki Mori on HN.
Regarding postings to HN, what is your criteria? For example, "Alain Badiou Is Making a Movie About Plato with Brad Pitt and Sean Connery" from 7 days ago is a movie about a guy. Is it mythologizing a male? What about "Deep Web (2015 Documentary) – The Story of the Silk Road" from a month ago - does it mythologize Ross William Ulbricht? How do you define 'mythologizing' in such a way that it's at least roughly repeatable?
If you can't do that, then you don't really have a good metric.
They really are different in real life if you've never seen them up close. As I understand, Rothko wanted people to stand right in front of them for awhile, to really have them take over your whole field of view. I never really "got" them until I did that, I was always much more aligned with you.
As for photo realism, have you seen the movie "Tim's Vermeer"? It's a great look at a possible technique for that and the movie is very interesting.
The article doesn't quite give the film justice. While there are certainly some "behind the scenes" like material, the documentary is more than just a "How to paint like Vermeer" type instructional video. It delves more into Tim's obsession with completing the project, showcasing both the "1% inspiration" and especially the "99% perspiration" moments. There is also some great subtext, it's a story of a man whose daughter goes off to college, and then he takes on this big project to fill the hole in his life (which also helps bring him closer to her, as she models the girl in the painting when she comes home for break). There is also an interesting scene at the end where Tim hangs his Vermeer on his mantle. Proud at his accomplishment, and yet it feels hollow, as Tim has not gained the artistic skill of Vermeer, he's only acted as a very, very slow human camera, taking many months to capture what a modern camera (even those used to film the documentary) could capture in seconds. I haven't seen Cove, and I don't know if this elevates Tim's Vermeer to your standards of art, but there's more to it than "an episode of This Old House".
I don't know if it will have broad appeal, but it only had a limited theatrical release, and I think it will be suited better to DVD and VOD like Netflix.
As far as vanity goes, I mean it certainly seems like Tim painted the Vermeer more to scratch his own curiosity than to make a big profit. Making the documentary might also have been a way to help him give himself incentive to finish the project, indeed in one part of the film he says "If the cameras weren't filming right now, I would just give up."
Just my humble opinion, but it doesn't matter how the artist achieved the results. The work speaks for itself.
Tim's Vermeer is probably a lot like watching a behind the scenes video. If you enjoy consuming information for information sake, you might find it interesting, but a lot of work and money goes into making a feature documentary and it should be a work of art itself. If it doesn't have broad appeal, it's referred to as a vanity project.
The Cove is a good example of a documentary that is also a work of art. The story has a beginning a middle and an end and they are all made big through the story telling. The same could have been true of Tim's Vermeer if the story was told differently.
I apologize if my original comment came across as negative. I sometimes feel let down if stories are told in lazy or inexperienced ways and the article makes the story play like an episode of this old house.
I don't, but I am a designer, with a graduate degree from RISD, if that qualifies for something. I don't think you understand sarcasm. The point is that it has been long assumed that Vermeer used at least a camera lucida to construct his paintings.
This Guardian article has been mentioned on this thread, but it really gets to what bothers me about this "study." http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2014/jan/28/tims-vermeer-fails
> So what does it lack? The film implies anyone can make a beautiful work of art with the right application of science. There is no need for mystical ideas like genius. > But the mysterious genius of Vermeer is exactly what's missing from Tim's Vermeer.
Edit: Added more for the downvoters to downvote.
I had been waiting to see this movie forever and finally did right when it came out, and I can tell you it is awesome. [...] So the awesome thing about Tim's Vermeer is he shows that if someone's using enough technology to make art then they become just a mechanical photo printer. Might as well be a photographer.
Those filthy fakers! You've certainly caught them in the act - hopefully all right-thinking people will discount their output appropriately in the light of this wicked artifice.
Seriously, you seem to have some sort of pent-up resentment towards people who paint, to the point that your obvious glee in deconstructing their technique has eclipsed your ability to enjoy the paintings as images.
In the documentary they show a Pieter de Hooch and a Vermeer side by side:
"Het Melkmeisje" by Vermeer: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/20/Johannes_Vermeer_-_Het_melkmeisje_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
And "Die Goldwägerin" by de Hooch: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/78/Pieter_de_Hooch_005.jpg
Though these painters were heavily influenced by one another, the difference is remarkable. See also: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a5/Gerard_ter_Borch_d._J._004.jpg for a difference between Vermeer's walls and other painters of the time period.
But then I saw: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/7c/Pieter_de_Hooch_019.jpg and that closet nearly renders as real to me, it almost has one of those 60s cut-and-paste photoshop feel to it.
Really like the documentary too. Rekindled some of my awe with art and the process it takes. One thing I didn't spot in the documentary, but can see in detail in Tim's Vermeer: http://www.vanityfair.com/dam/2013/11/vermeer-the-music-lesson-method-02.jpg I think Tim painted his own feet in the mirror.
I had been waiting to see this movie forever and finally did right when it came out, and I can tell you it is awesome. It's a fantastic example of science and technology being used to solve a problem that just happens to be art. It's also a very compelling theory about the possible ways Vermeer did his more photorealistic paintings. Pretty much after this and spending the last year teaching myself to paint I can safely say if it looks like a photo, it's from a photo.
Another great book to check out is David Hockney's "Secret Knowledge", which covers how this is done in other ways, how projection devices were used by Kepler and others, how it could have been considered a guild secret among painters, and how when the photograph first came out people remarked how much the looked like "finished" paintings. His latest exhibit at the De Young was actually based on the research from this book where he cranked out a metric ton (quite literally) of art using various projection devices.
Another fun thing to do is "spot the laptop". You know how people are doing impressive hyperrealistic paintings like this:
http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/pictured-eloy-morales-stunning-self-portraits-3166130
These are amazing, until you realize he's getting the fidelity he needs by making the paintings huge, then taking pictures of them from farther away. Can't tell a painting's size on the internet, so it looks super realistic until you see it in person. Next, if you look carefully at that first photo, he's looking off in the distance at....a laptop most likely, or a projection. If you look in youtube or at various artist's blogs you start to catch them with a laptop sitting right there, or an ipad stuck to their easel with the image right on it.
If you check out these hyperrealists (they don't say photo 'cause that's a bad word) you can sometimes catch them with a laptop, image on it squared off, sometimes even zoomed in.
What modern "Vermeers" are doing is they're using computers and screen technology to get very exacting details and color harmony using combinations of large size projections (you can see Eloy's pre-drawn lines), gridded images, and zooming on a computer screen. So the awesome thing about Tim's Vermeer is he shows that if someone's using enough technology to make art then they become just a mechanical photo printer. Might as well be a photographer.
Here's another artist you can see copying a photo:
http://www.littleobservationist.com/2013/05/22/artist-interview-francoise-nielly/
Françoise Nielly at least interprets them, but I bet if you looked she probably uses the hell out of computers at first to get studies right.
What's interesting is many artists use technology like this, and many of them get into this "cheating" when they run into disabilities or time constraints. The problem isn't the technology though, it's whether they pretend they don't use any, which is what a lot of these hyperrealists try to get away with. But, take an artist like Richard Schmid and you find he started using a computer after a major back injury and he freely admits he uses photos and computers to do painting.
What I liked about Tim's Vermeer is it's at least proof that someone with zero talent can use technology to create an equivalent to what's considered a masterpiece. David Hockney's book also demonstrates that much of the art we consider painted using pure skill is actually just clever uses of technology to do photo reproductions with oil paint.
Sci-fi author Greg Egan has a disturbing short-story on similar themes, 'The Caress', part of the collection Axiomatic. (The full collection is just $2.99 via the author's self-published ebooks: http://gregegan.customer.netspace.net.au/BIBLIOGRAPHY/Ebooks.html#Axiomatic) It could make a great Blade Runner-like movie, and then that movie would be a perfect double-feature with Tim's Vermeer.
And in digging up links about 'The Caress', I came across a cool word, ekphrasis, that also applies to Tim's Vermeer:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekphrasis