An evening of art

The Monet to Picasso exhibition @ UMFA was the highlight of my week. My friends and I waited for about 20 minutes in line to get in. And I had never seen the UMFA so crowded as that day.

While looking at the paintings, I realized that back then the artists used people they personally knew as the subject for the work. The portraits usually featured someone's wife or a friend, or the artist's mistress, etc. What was intriguing to me was the personal connection inherent to the paintings, there's always a story behind the well painted face. For example, one painting was a portrait of a store owner that the artist knew, and the description mentioned that the artist tried to save the store owner from bankruptcy. There's another one that featured one of Picasso's mistresses while on vacation. I am starting to think one of the reasons Picasso had so many lovers could be that women were the inspirations for his work. Anyways, it's interesting to note that contemporary art has gone commercial and switched to using paid models for painting and drawing. I wonder if using a non-personal subject would take away some of the "soul" in a piece of art work. Too bad I didn't see the exhibit with an artist to pose that question.

A bonus to the exhibit was free appetizers and desserts (cream puffs reminiscent of Beard Papas) served for us the students. :) I didn't know Gouda cheese tasted so good with plain bread.

Limiting privacy

There are times when I like to post some personal blogs, because I think my blogspot account is relatively private, where I can talk about more personal stuffs. However, when I googled my email (out of curiosity and boredom), it led to a comment I wrote on someone's blog, in which I had left my email in the comment (hence, it showed up in the search). I tried to outsmart google search by deleting the comment on that blog (sorry, Tanya). But to my surprise, the search results stayed the same. I guess all the geniuses working @ Google are too smart for me to outsmart them. :(

The Black Swan, the impact of the highly improbable

Black swan: a term coined for highly improbably event, such as the discovery of black swans in Australia in the 17th century. Before the discovery, people held the belief that "all swans are white".

Although I haven't finished it, Nassim Taleb's book "The Black Swan" is quite refreshing. I am not going to summarize the book, but I have one favorite passage so far.


"Numerous studies of millionaires aimed at figuring out the skills required for hotshotness follow the following methodology. [...] They look at what those big guns have in common: courage, risk taking, optimism, and infer that these traits, most notably risk taking, help you to become successful.

Now consider the cemetery. The graveyard of failed persons will be full of people who shared the following traints: courage, risk taking, optimism, etc. Just like the population of millionaires. [..] what truly separates the two is for the most part a single factor: luck. Plain luck".

Taleb is an anti-intellectual intellectual (if that makes sense). He makes fun of people (mostly finance analyst and CEOs) who thinks they have it all figured out. He argues that humans tend to generalize too much based on what we see, but neglect what we do not see. On the other hand, Taleb definitely understands what it means to take risk in one's career.

"If you are a researcher, you will have to publish inconsequential articles in 'prestigious' publications so that others say hello to you once in a while when you run into them at conference. [---->SO TRUE!]

Many people labor in life under the impression that they are doing something right, yet they may not show solid results for a long time. [...] No confirmation comes to them, no validation, no Nobel, 'How was your year?" brings them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the outside. Then bang, the lumpy event comes that brings the grand vindication. Or it may never come".

So now I won't feel so bad if I don't "make it". : )