Tuesday, January 14, 2014

The James Webb Telescope Looks Amazing

The Verge has a very nice article about the successor to Hubble, the James Webb. It's got nice details on the construction of the scope and why it's highly anticipated by scientists who found that Hubble couldn't quite get all the information they'd hoped it would provide because the light from parts of the universe they'd hoped to observe with Hubble has red-shifted to the point of being outside its detectable spectrum. Given the images we've gotten from Hubble there ought to be some beautiful and surprising images coming once it's been launched in 2018.

Monday, January 6, 2014

Isn't Plagiarism Always Wrong?

A hat tip to Bob Eggleton, an amazingly talented artist whose Facebook post brought this to my attention. A video on YouTube on SothebysTV is entitled "Glenn Brown's Monumental Sci-Fi Fantasy Work". But the original work is one by Chris Foss done for the cover of a 1986 edition of one of Isaac Asimov's early novels, The Stars Like Dust. This is not the only piece by Brown that is basically a copy of some other artist's work as this BBC article shows he borrowed from another SF book cover illustration for a piece that was put up for a British art award, the Turner Prize. That piece is almost identical to one done by Anthony Robert for a 1974 edition of Double Star, a Robert Heinlein novel first serialized in 1956. Given that he sold the piece "inspired" by Chris Foss for 3.5 million pounds, wouldn't you think that something stinks about that deal? But I found references on artnet.com for several other pieces he's copied from Foss. And you thought that display art of cut up cows and similar things was the only thing strange about modern fine art. The SothebysTV Video http://youtu.be/b_-8v3TxPWg The Chris Foss piece XXX_0153_Chris_Foss_Untitled If the fine art world is interested in science fiction inspired art why not go straight to the originals like this one by the aforementioned Bob Eggleton? I actually bought the original of this piece from Bob the month it appeared as a cover of Analog Science Fiction magazine. eglton10 Cross posted at The Moderate Voice