Steve Jobs, Sesame Street, Assasins Creed and the Nazis

So, some of you may be aware that I gave a lecture in Dr. Ciganko's art appreciation class for freshman non majors before we left for break. It was about art and pop culture. I talked about Steve Jobs, Assasin's Creed, Sesame Street and the Nazis.

I talked about how Steve Jobs' interest in the Bauhaus influenced the design of Apple products. After he recently died, I started hearing all about him, and I'm reading is biography at the moment. His insistence on beauty even on the inside where people couldn't see makes me want to take better care when building my paintings. Also, did you know that on the inside of the Mac, the names of the people who worked on it are engraved on the inside of the system? I guess its not just visual artists that sign their names on something they worked on and are proud of.

I played a clip of Bert and Ernie talking about the ptg George Washington Crossing the Delaware River. (in 1988, there was a movie called "Don't Eat the Pictures", where the Sesame Street crew gets locked inside the Met after Big Bird goes missing. The title of this movie is a song the Cookie Monster sings when he's told that he can't eat Cezanne's fruit). Anyway, Bert tells Ernie that Washington "didn't stay in his warm, toasty bed, or stay home to open his Christmas presents. No, not the father of our country!" And Ernie goes on to ask why he didn't just do what everybody does, "and take the George Washington Bridge?" Another fun fact, this painting is the image on the NJ quarter.

I talked about Assasin's Creed because one day while Jonathan was playing it, I walked through the living room and saw that while Lorenzo deMedici is giving you contract kills, you can collect Renaissance ptgs. I got so excited, because I was studying these ptgs at the time, and they were in the game! When I was talking with Cory about this, he told me that you can actually walk up to the baptistry doors and see the bronze relief sculptures. Thats so cool! While I'm typing this up, the movie Angels and Demons is on the background, and I wish I had talked about that, too, because the last time Jon and I watched it, I kept interupting to point at all the art in the Vatican.

And I talked about the Nazi's, because I wanted to talk about the Great German Art Exhibit and the Degenerate Art exhibit. The Nazi's looted German art galleries and museums to hold a show about modern art, which they considered to be fundamentally anti-German, and held a concurrent show made by party loyal German artists who celebrated the superiority of the Aryan race. The point that I wanted to make was that many of the artists included in the Degenerate show are considered the most important artists of the 20th century, even if the Nazis tried to eradicate the work that they made. (Another fun fact, the Bauhaus was a school that voluntarily closed its doors before the Nazi's could force them to do so).

So these were the things that I'm thinking about.