I know something about art, but I know what I like anyway

Usually, looking at a painting, I think, hmm, okay, I wish I could do that, but once in a while I go whooaaa.... wow.... that's... wow...

Not unlike with a great musical performance.

So now, I'm suddenly, inadvertently, a person who writes about art.

I've noticed that people who write about music, especially popular music, tend to love music a lot; but people who write about art, sometimes give off the impression that they don't care, or they don't even get it.

My problem is that I know what I love but I don't know why. But is that really a problem?

I certainly don't have an overarching theory. Why should I? What makes great reggae and what makes great blues and what makes great jazz are different. I know what I want to listen to and what I don't when I hear it.

I also know what I want to look at when I see it. But I don't have or want some grand theory as to why.

I think basically everyone loves music but only some people love visual art for some reason.

Since everyone loves music, everyone who writes about music loves it. On the other hand, NOT all of the people who write about art are people who love it.

I know what I love in art, just as I know what I love in music. And I know a fair amount at least about art (and perhaps a bit less but still something about music). But I can't explain WHY I like what I like in some broad general terms.

You enjoy each bit of human creativity in its own terms.

I think anyone writing about art has to BEGIN by acknowledging the mystery. We love this stuff. We LOVE this stuff. Why? It's sort of mysterious.

We especially love SOME of this stuff. Which ones? Why?

It's totally experiential. In experiencing any art form, either your socks are knocked off, or they ain't.

If you have a talky personality you really WANT to talk about the stuff you love and what it means to you. And you don't so much want to talk about the stuff you don't love, except maybe to wonder why it didn't work.

But you wouldn't know it from a lot of people who are professional curators and art educators. They seem to have forgotten what they love about art, if there ever was anything.

Anyway, sometimes, the only thing you can say is wow... look at that...

--

painting is a field sketch by Tom Thomson ca 1916

GDJ #2: On crossing 1.5 C

Here's the recent temperature trajectory.  Image via RealClimate

There are two things to look at. One is the astonishing temperature spike of the past two years, which ahs no obvious precedent, and is quite likely an ecceleration of some kind.

The second, and the linked article has a lot to say about this, is whether we have already surpassed the 1.5 C warming threshhold that emerged from the Paris Agreement as an "aspiration" for a warming limit.

I think it's worth me making a few comments on the latter. (This is a revision of a series of tweets on BlueSky: https://bsky.app/profile/mtobis.bsky.social/post/3lfkiam33kc2g )

So the first thing is that 1.5 C is a benchmark, determined by communication constraints rather than any known physical or environmental constraints. To be sure, there may be points along the warming scale where impacts get dramatically worse, though that's probably an oversimplification. Even if there were such points, we don't and can't know where they are until we pass them. Rather, the point of having benchmarks into the unknown territory into which we are propelling ourselves is to gain some collective awareness of whether we are succeeding in slowing our advance into the unknown (probably a little) or stopping altogether (not close). It's a way to communicate our status.

When this benchmark was far away, it seemed adequate to have a fairly rough idea of what it meant. As we get close it is ill-advised. Gavin's text reveals something of the original vagueness of the goal.

The people have spoken, and they have collectively agreed that ‘pre-industrial’ can be thought of as the average of 1850 to 1900. There were other candidates – but the influence of IPCC AR6 is too strong to fight against. So, while I’ve been holding on to ‘late 19th Century’ (in practice 1880-1899) as a baseline, I have bowed to the inevitable and started producing anomalies with respect to the earlier baseline. But that raises a problem – how do you produce an anomaly with respect to a baseline that isn’t in your data set?

The first sentence implies confirmation of my understanding that at the time of the Paris Agreement the Parties to the COP had not bothered to be precise as to the meaning of "1.5 C' or "2 C" of warming. And much of Gavin's piece works toward making the 1850 to 1900 benchmark precise. It's a sensible pursuit. If we are going to have benchmarks it's better that they not be fuzzy ones. But the fuzziness of the benchmark can be overinterpreted as fuzziness of the trajectory! Admittedly one could make a case that establishing the baseline tells us a little bit about the climate sensitivity (how much forcing leads to a given warming). It's not information-free in that regard. But it's not the best way to address that question or even a good way! It's main import is conventional. As a measure of urgency, our attentions are better dedicated to the much better measured (and concerning) end of the record and what it means than to arguing about the baseline.

GDJ #1: Less people than Los Angeles County

So I found a graphic online claiming to show all teh states with smaller populations than Los Angeles County, but it was incorrect, as it included Michigan, North Carolina and Georgia.

There are 40 states with populations smaller than Los Angeles County. There are nine Canadian provinces in the same category, the exception being Ontario. 

The population of Los Angeles County is 9.6 million. There are a *lot* of people directly affected by the current fire disaster.


 

#graphicdujour

(For what it's worth I did this in an online tool called SmartDraw, which is a Canva competitor. I can't recommend it so far. In the map you see I accidentally moved Kentucky and was unable to put it back where it goes, whence the double border with Tennessee.)