Christopher Knight, art critic of the Los Angles Times, reviews the Whitney Biennial here. I thought better of the outdoor Peace Tower. Given Knight's review of the indoor show, I'm thankful for ultimate Whitney/Met switch.

-- Edward Tufte

Response to Museum visits on my birthday

Carol Vogel on the Met's website:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/29/arts/artsspecial/29web.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

-- Edward Tufte

Response to Museum visits on my birthday

I, myself, live in New York and frequent the museum scene here. I do this because I am a museum studies graduate student. I noticed on your trip to New York museums you didn't stop into the "Museum of Congnitive Art", I'm guessing you didn't because it doesn't exist. Yet.

For the last few months, I've been putting a great amout of time into theorizing what a museum might look like if it concerned itself with the exhibition of 'sociological' information through graphic display and interpretation. In this example the objects to be collected would mainly be 2-D charts or graphs of scholarly research. What would be displayed are the 3-D renderings of the collected 2-D material. Visitors would be encouraged to engage with the 3-D renderings on a deeper level than simply "cognitive art". They would be asked to compare the represented data with their own lives, hopefully walking away with a highened understanding of the world in which they live.

Have you ever been approched by museums to display quantitative information? Or have you ever given thought to 'freeing' data from paper and computer screens to 3-D renderings?

I know the cylintracial stone seals you favored so much at the MET, I also am intrigued by them. Interestingly they are accompanied with their positive relief. I would compare the relief to 3-D renderings of 2-D graphic information. Much easier to see and allows for a greater appreciation of the original work.

Happy belated birthday!

*Note* If this response is never published, I would still appreciate a direct response. I was interested in this topic before being introduced to Mr. Tufte's work but find it quite helpful. I feel that some sort of personal dialogue would benefit my research greatly and hopefully be of interest to Mr. Tufte as well. Besides this forum, I see no other way to contact him directly.

-- Jean-Luc Howell (email)

The Museum of Cognitive Art

High-level conceptual redesigns of the classics are extremely difficult, often impossible, and usually an embarrassment. Classic displays have a completeness, coherence, integrity, and historical priority such that after-the-fact interventions are crude, merely technological marketing, and without the care and craft of the original. There are, for example, a plague of deeply stupid redesigns of Minard's French Invasion of Russia that diminish the original and, even more so, its redesigners.

The classics illustrate (1) analytical design at its best, (2) the universality of theoretical principles involved in displays of evidence, (3) why it is worth celebrating excellence in design. But the perfection of the classics (a perfection partly within their time) often forecloses redesign. Redesigns are impertinent and crude, as redesigners arrogantly imagine that they will improve upon Minard or Marey. I have sometimes minor, and only minor, interventions on the classics (more explicit scales of measurement, improvements in the quality of reproduction, more detailed sourcing, explanatory annotation, better modern data sources, higher data resolution).

In choosing templates for workaday graphical productions, it is worthwhile to look for excellent, conventional templates. Conventional templates immediately solve a lot of graphical reading problems for the viewer of the display. But the classics are often classics because they are off-the wall, unconventional, idiosyncratic, one-off, brilliant, historically original performances. Tinkering with Minard's Napoleon's March is no better than an artist tinkering with Picasso's Guernica.

My conception of the Museum of Cognitive Art is theoretical (a room of graphics conveying evidence about causality, or a room showing time-series for the last 2000 years, or a gallery showing color representing data, or another gallery showing changes in resolution from then until now), historical, and craft-oriented. Or something of an illustrated sociology of ideas room, as in David Kaiser's excellent book, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics. One can almost already see a wonderful gallery on the history of Feynman diagrams curated by Kaiser; showing the physicality of the original publications would be a good supplement to the book.) And show originals of excellent work--Galileo's books and scientific notebooks, Playfair's original work, and, if possible the working methods behind great work (preliminary to final published versions). And I hope MOCA will be open on Tuesdays.

One reason that analytical design is such a wonderful field is that there are so many amazing displays over the last 6,000 years that can now be placed in the context of analytical design. Imagine that for the tens of thousands of years of painting and sculpture that there had never been an art historian or art analyst, and now you became the first historian or analyst. That's how I sometimes feel about analytical design.

-- Edward Tufte

Response to Museum visits on my birthday (and where was The Museum of Cognitive Art?)

In the essay Why Read the Classics, Italo Calvino takes his
reader through a dialectic on the classics:

• We use the words "classics" for books that are treasured by those who have read and loved them; but they are treasured no less by those who have the luck to read them for the first time in the best conditions to enjoy them
  
  
• The classics are books that exert a peculiar influence, both when they refuse to be eradicated from the mind and when they conceal themselves in the folds of memory, camouflaging themselves as the collective or individual unconscious.
  
  
• Every rereading of a classic is as much a voyage of discovery as the first reading.
  
  
• A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
  
  
• The classics are the books that come down to us bearing the traces of readings previous to ours, and bringing in their wake the traces they themselves have left on the culture or cultures they have passed through (or, more simply, on language and customs).
  
  
• A classic does not necessarily teach us anything we did not know before. In a classic we sometimes discover something we have always known (or thought we knew), but without knowing that this author said it first, or at least is associated with it in a special way. And this, too, is a surprise that gives much pleasure, such as we always gain from the discovery of an origin, a relationship, an affinity.
  
  
• Your classic author is the one you cannot feel indifferent to, who helps you to define yourself in relation to him, even in dispute with him.
  
  
• A classic is a book that comes before other classics; but anyone who has read the others first, and then reads this one, instantly recognizes its place in the family tree.
  
  
• A classic is something that tends to relegate the concerns of the moment to the status of background noise, but at the same time this background noise is something we cannot do without.
  
  
• A classic is something that persists as a background noise even when the most incompatible momentary concerns are in control of the situation.
  
  

-- Tchad (email)

I've visited the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York recently and pretty much agree with with Robert Smith assessments of the buildings here. MOMA's new sculpture garden seems like a corporate plaza compared to the cosy sanctuary of past times.

MOMA's art collection is stunning and for the first time I really appreciated contemporary art.

Bill Viola's 5-panel video art work at MOMA is amazing. The work provides mirror planes on the floor completely integrated into the work, an integration which solves a deeply difficult problem in art. It remains largely unsolved for sculpture: how to integrate piece-sized projection planes for shadows or reflections so that the planes are a coherent part of the work. I have good luck with some recent stainless steel bases that play with the light and shadows coming down onto the base. Integrated vertical projection planes are much more difficult, and probably have to be built directly into the work itself even though they have greater power a bit set off from the light-generating work itself.

-- Edward Tufte

Judd in the Tate

You can see some typically elegant Tate installations in this video tour of the 2004 Judd exhibition:

https://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/judd/serota_approaching.htm

As I discovered to my delight when preparing a travel report last summer, the same museum has exemplary walk-throughs of their exhibitions. So I was able to retrace my steps in the Albers/Moholy-Nagy show here:

https://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/albersmoholy/rooms/default.shtm

The only real flaw in the latter is the persistent presence of squares reading Image Not Available Due To Copyright Restrictions. If this isn't fair use, I don't know what is.

Graham Larkin

-- Graham Larkin (email)

A nice picture tour of "beautiful knowledge"

http://www.curiousexpeditions.org/2007/09/a_librophiliacs_love_letter_1.html

-- Daniel Meatte (email)