You know that feeling when you discover something you and suddenly you see it everywhere? This is phenomena has a name - The Baader-Meinhof. (Now you can not unlearn it, and you will probably hear this name “more often”). Also called Frequency Bias (or Illusion), recency bias and selective attention bias, The Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon is the seeming appearance of a newly-learned (or paid attention to) concept in unexpected places. Apparently our brains are trying to reinforce newly acquired informationAfter watching the documentary about Ray and Charles Eames this spring, suddenly everywhere I see their furniture, their movies, their designs and books about their furniture, their movies and their designs. Last weekend I “found” a coffee table book about their work for $2. Oh, brain…
Side note: The phenomena is named after West German terrorist group that was active in the 1970s. It may go back to a discussion board in the mid-1990s, when someone became aware of the Baader-Meinhof gang, then heard several more mentions of it within a short period. Lacking a better phrase to use, the concept simply became known as Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. And it stuck. It is pronounced “bah-der-myn-hof.”
When I first saw paintings by Henri Rousseau I assumed he was a daring adventurer-painter, venturing through jungles of Latin America or Asia and immortalizing the “far, far away” places for those who could not visit them. I was shocked to discover that he never left France or saw any jungle. He also never obtained any formal training as a painter - he worked as a customs officer for toll-collecting service. He started painting seriously in his early forties. His also did not receive recognition or acceptance. Yet you can find “a Henri Rousseau” in any major impressionist collection.
Rousseau’s flat, seemingly childish style gave him many critics; people often were shocked by his work or ridiculed it. Many observers commented that he painted like a child and did not know what he was doing. He is considered to be a naive or primitive painter, but few paintings in classical sections can make you feel so innocent and childishly awed like the paintings of Rousseau.
His most famous paintings, The Sleeping Gypsy and the Dream hang in MOMA, NYC. Barnes foundation owns 18 of his works. Flipping through his works I was truly surprised how many works were in American Museums (Washington, Philadelphia, Giggenheim, Detroit, Pittsburg). Similarly, we know that most of the Greek statues are not in Greece…
Further Reading:
Someone is maintaining his website
I like this chronological presentation from Art story
Heuristics -can be mental shortcuts that ease the cognitive load of making a decision. Simple heuristics explain the world to you in ways that allow you to keep moving without putting too much thought into a situation.
Further reading: if you want to go down the rabbit-hole of Wikipedia, may I recommend various forms of heuristics
“What is especially needed is great sensitivity: to look upon everything in the world as enigma….To live in the world as in an immense museum of strange things.” So wrote the Italian artist Giorgio de Chirico, who made paintings of classical piazzas populated with spectral figures and shadows, knitting together purposefully distorted perspectives and tilted grounds. These claustrophobic dreamscapes, with their atmosphere of melancholy and uneasy menace, captivated the French avant-garde of the 1910s and later inspired the Surrealists.
Further Reading
* apparently MOMA has 109! Works
* he was the founder of the [Metaphysical art movement]
* Khan Academy videos about surrealists
Tea Machine late 18th century. The central urn stored hot water, the smaller urns brewed tea. If you see one for sale, please text me immediately!
One more thing: for those who were blown away by the weather information - here is the website that models the winds. Please keep in mind this is not what is going on - this is what our algorithms models it after.