You May Never Learn What I Think of Tellurium

It's the tenth anniversary of Infinite Art Tournament (formerly L&TM5K)!!!

...which, in blog years, is like living to 580.  ...well, maybe not quite.  It's like dog years: keeping a blog for four months gets you to ripe middle age, after which you are pretty much aging in real time.  Perhaps.  Really, I'm just making this up.

Anyway, I thought I might celebrate the tenth anniversary by... stopping.  Everything except for the Tournament itself, of course.  We'll keep working the Tournament.  But the other features that have so singularly failed to go viral -- the saints! the elements! the movie reviews! the quizzes!  the boring postcards! -- well, I think maybe it's time to declare total victory and move on.  And with that comes my deepest gratitude to anyone who has to any extent followed any of this stuff over the years.

Unless I change my mind, of course.  See ya tomorrow for more Left Bracket Round Two action!

The Blog Turns Nine

It's the Fluorine anniversary of Infinite Art Tournament, formerly known at the Life & Times of Michael5000!

Having a blog with such an incredibly long debris trail means that there is a lot out there in the world that, although I wrote it, isn't exactly key to my current lifestyle.  One of my posts that has been read by the largest audience over the years, for instance, is a guide to Scrabble strategy that I wrote back in Year One, in November 2007.  Last week, along comes a comment:

Question: I have been playing Scrabble on my iPad with the computer as my opponent. Occasionally, a window comes up which says I'm playing with a beginner computer player. Is there a way to have the computer become more competitive? Thanks, Nahnah

Now, as much as I like to be a good host, this is a really tough question to answer.  For one thing, I'm not really an iPad guy, and I've never played much Scrabble against computers in general. But even more to the point, I haven't played Scrabble for at least five years.  Scrabble is so... so... aughts!!  Sorry, Nahnah.  If you have any Agricola questions, I'm your man.

Fluorine is a noble gas.  Nobility is all fine and good, but the noble gasses are also a notoriously inert section of the periodic table.  That's appropriate, perhaps, for a blog that has been a bit inert lately outside of the steady march of the Tournament.  But then how many internet ventures do you know of that have lasted nine years without ever asking you for money?  Probably just one!

And mind you: when I get my flow, I'm still Dr. On-the-Go.  [blog inside joke so deep inside that only I will get it]  Wish me joy of the tenth year, will ya?

State of the Blog Ventures 2016

Lately I haven't been keeping as tightly to the schedule of this little online publication as has been my habit for the last, oh, nine years. I have, in fact, been "phoning it in." The reason is that I "haven't been feelin' it."

Two years ago, I did an assessment of where we were in the various blog projects.  I was even silly enough to list other, new things I could do in the blog, such as starting to review movies again, or to talk about classical music. A handful of commenters said "yeah, do something with classical music!" so with my unerring instincts I started reviewing movies again.

Well.  Maybe it's just the spring, or even just an inkling that I might be better served by putting more energy into the home, friendships, career, or other aspects of so-called "real life."  Maybe I need to attend to my so-called "spiritual growth."  Whatever the case, I think it's time to take another good hard look at the blog content.  Doubtless the upshot will be a ruthless KonMari-ing of my little projects.

Ready?  Here goes:

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The Infinite Art Tournament
56ish%
Believe it or not, we are already well past the halfway point of the Tournament. The Play-In Tournament is a distant memory, and of the 500 artists in the big show, more than 3/4 have already entered the ring.  Hell, more than 1/4 have already left it.

Will we finish the Tournament?  Well, here's the unspoken rule: a quorum is nine.  We've only ever missed it once.  As long as we keep hitting it, I'll finish the Tournament if I'm able.  I think it's grand.


Through History With the Monday Quiz
26%
This one has been a real crushing chore, and no one likes it much -- but I've learned an awful lot from the process, and actually want to carry on with it.  And anyway, it's reaching the point where it's going to be a lot easier to write, and maybe even to take.
 
Element of the Month
57%
Elements are kind of fun to write about and all, but it's been a long time since I really felt like I needed to write about an Element every month. 

Michael5000 vs. Shakespeare
There was a time when Shakespeare had the second-best blog all to himself. I notice, though, that the last time I wrote on a Shakespeare topic was 2013. So, I'm going to declare this line of inquiry dead.

Michael5000 vs. Dickens
70%
Sure, I want to finish reading all of the Dickens novels.  Other than the Christmas ones, anyway.  I'm at 10 out of 14.5 novels.

Michael5000 vs. The Beatles
23%
This sounded a lot more interesting then it turned out to be. I declare the project dead.

The Songs of the 50 States
36%
These aren't interesting to anybody but me, but they help me organize my odd travels and they stoke my interest in seeing new places and new museums. So, they're still something I might do occasionally.

Saint of the Month
As with elements, it's been a while since I really tried to make sure there was a saint every month.  But unlike with elements, there is always something new and interesting (to me) when I look into a saint.  So, I might still do these.

The Wednesday Post
These are kind of fun, and -- strange as it may seem to some of you -- have a constituency. 

The Free Box Tapes
It sounded like a good idea at the time.  I declare the project dead.

The Jazz Thing
This thing barely got off the ground relative to its size as proposed, but even so I learned a hell of a lot about jazz, which now makes up perhaps 15% of my musical consumption.  So that's a win.  I declare the project dead.

Movie Reviews
Don't know if you noticed, but I put up a movie review every Friday for a year.  That was fun.  But it's also been kind of fun not trying to make that deadline.  I declare weekly publication at an end, but that's not to say I might not like writing about the occasional movie still.

(Other Blog Projects)

Michael Reads the Bible
I'd actually kind of like to go back to this someday.  Maybe after the Tournament is finished.

State of the Craft
This was the most popular blog I did.  But, it's hard to keep interested in blogging about quilting when you don't quilt so much anymore.

Michael5000 Runs
For about a month and a half there, I was writing daily about the elaborate system of tracking and incentives I use to motivate my running.  I think I got that out of my system.

---

Conclusions

OK, here's what we'll do for now:

•  Mondays: Will bring a Monday Quiz, if I feel like it that week.
•  Tuesdays: Will continue to be a Tournament Day
•  Wednesday: I'll do a Wednesday Post, if I feel like it that week.
•  Thursdays: Will continue to be a Tournament Day
•  Friday: If I feel like it that week, Friday could be an Element or a Saint or a Dickens or a State or a movie review or, you know, anything else I felt like writing.  And if I felt like writing a lot, maybe I'd throw some of that stuff at a Monday or a Wednesday too.  
•  Saturdays: Will continue to be a Tournament Day.  The specifics of Tournament scheduling will need to be tinkered with soon, but that's another story.

OK.   I feel better for having talked this out with you.  Thank you for reading my little blog, as you apparently do. Even on days like this.

The Art Tournament at Four

That's right, today is

The Fourth Anniversary of the Infinite Art Tournament!!

(...in the sense of the actual Tournament, not the blog. The blog dates back to the 1830s)

Can you believe it has been four years?  I sure can!  Running the Tournament has required about as much time so far, and effort, as college. What I have a harder time believing is that it is well over a year since Halfway Week, which in my scattered memory seems like it was only a few months ago. But that's time for you.

Who's winning?

Back at the halfway point, I gave some first thoughts on the natural question of "Who's winning?" Now as then, it is impossible to say.  There's still plenty of artists still waiting for their Tournament debut, and if all other artists are going to be swept aside in the triumphant wake of Parmiagianino, or Patenier, or Pechstein, Perugino, Picabia, or Picasso, it will still be a while until we see the first signs.

There are now 183 artists -- 37% of the field -- who have already dropped out of the running. Among these, the leader is still Antonello da Messina, whose 2-1-1 record (he was forced out by a grudge match tie) included 35 votes in favor and only 15 against.  That's an impressive .700 batting average. Boccioni (3-2, 42-23, .646) and and Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (3-2-1, 47-30, .610) still hold the second and third spots. Rounding out the top ten:

• 4. Dali: 2-2-1, 41-28, .594 
• 5. Giacometti: 2-2, 27-19, .587
• 6. Bazille: 4-2, 44-31, .587
• 7. Gris: 2-2, 27-22, .551 
• 8. J Bruegel: 4-2, 43-26, .544
• 9. Donatello: 2-2, 27-23, .540
• 9. Hepworth: 2-2, 27-23, .540

(The artists who have fared worst so far  are Fautriet (.090), Domenichino (.125), and Lochner (.125); it's nice to be able to take poor Daubigney (.133) out of this list.)

But those are the mighty among the fallen, and one thing we know about all of them is that they can't possibly reach the final rounds

Among the eight undefeated artists that have entered the semi-finals so far, however, here are the Big Three at the moment:

3 (replacing Mary Cassatt, and .0009 ahead of Frederick Church): Gustave Caillebotte (59-21, .737)

2. Albrecht Dürer (44-10, .814)

1. Pieter Bruegel (50-10, .833)

We won't be moving on to the Sixth Round until the First Round is nearly or entirely finished, so these guys are going to be hard to knock out of their positions for a year or so yet to come.

Are we almost done?

Nah.  We're only about 67% done with the First Round, 62% done with Round 2, 60% with Round 3, and 47% with Round 4.  And that's only the Right bracket; the Left Bracket always and necessarily lags behind.  There's a whole lot more art left to evaluate.

Index of the Fifty States

Someday, maybe I'll be able to take a road trip or two to some of the art meccas that I've found through my "Songs of the Fifty States" write-ups.  And when that chance comes, I'll need an index.  So that's what today's post is.

The Art Meccas are either museums I've visited myself, or the museum that seems to be the state's top best collection of art in the Western tradition.  Figures in red show changes that have happened since the original post was published.

State	Counties	Run In	Geohashed	Ogled Art In	Art Mecca
Alabama	32/67	No	No	No	Birmingham Museum of Art
Arkansas	20/75	No	No	No	Arkansas Art Center
Hawaii	2/5	Yes	Attempted	Yes	Honolulu Museum of Art
Kentucky	6/120	No	No	No	The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky
Louisiana	14/64	No	No	No	New Orleans Museum of Art
Maine	16/16	No	Yes	Yes	Colby Museum of Art
Mississippi	20/82	No	No	No	Mississippi Museum of Art
Oklahoma	44/77	No	Yes	No	Philbrook Museum of Art
South Carolina	45/46	No	No	No	Columbia Museum of Art
Tennessee	10/95	No	No	No	Memphis Brooks Museum of Art
Texas	31/254	Yes	Yes	Yes	The Kimbell Art Museum
West Virginia	10/55	Yes	No	No	Huntington Museum of Art

Halfway Week: The Tournament State of Play

A natural question to ask halfway through a tournament is "Who's winning?" And the answer, of course, is that there's no telling. No matter how anybody is doing right now, it's always possible that Mark Tobey, or Kitagawa Utamaro, or Johann Zoffany -- or, say, Vermeer -- will eventually cut through the brackets like a hot chainsaw through butter, and we won't even see the first signs of it for a few years yet to come.

We can always look at the 94 artists who have already strutted and fretted their brief hour upon the stage, of course. Of the exited artists, the indisputable winner is Antonello da Messina. Forced out by a grudge match tie, he doesn't even have two losses. His 2-1-1 record saw him pile up 35 votes to only 15 against, an enviable .700 batting average. Also impressive among the departed are Boccioni (3-2, 42-23, .646) and the loveably schmaltzy Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (3-2-1, 47-30, .610). Of the big-name artists I still can't quite believe are gone, including Christo, Claude Lorraine, Correggio, and Van Dyck, the only one who got more yeas than nays was Marc Chagall (2-2, 30-26, .536). [The most soundly defeated arists to date -- it's only human to be curious -- are Fautriet (.090), Domenichino (.125), and Daubigney (.133), all of whom of course went two-and-out.]

But it doesn't make much sense, putting it bluntly, to look for a winner among the losers. Our best bet to find a big winner is to look at someone who is still undefeated after three rounds of action. There are several artists already who have reached 3-0 with heaps of momentum. Van Gogh has piled up a .800 batting average on 32 votes against 8, topping Church (.791), Eakins (.778), Botticelli (.750), and Giotto (.727).

The Big Three at the moment, however are:

3. Mary Cassatt (36-7, .837)

2. Albrecht Dürer (33-5, .868)

1. Pieter Bruegel (41-6, .872)

On the other hand, it seems just possible that an artist's success might be based not only on his or her own merit, but also the opponents he or she happens to be stacked up against. Conceivably! Bruegel's 3-0 record was stacked up against his son Jan, Daniel Buren, and Ford Madox Brown. Now, he's going up against Botticelli. Will that affect his .872 batting average? If it doesn't, it's sure going to affect Botticelli's .750!

In conclusion, this is a very ineresting tournament, and well worth studying.

It's Halfway Week at the Infinite Art Tournament!!!

Two unrelated facts: We are halfway through 2014, and halfway through the Infinite Art Tournament!!

Halfway Through the Infinite Art Tournament?!?

Sort of!  For when Lanyon entered the ring against La Tour on Saturday, they were the 255th and 256th artists out of the 512 that will ultimately be competing in this show!  ...or close enough, anyway.  If you are enough of a brackets maven to notice that I am fudging a little on this point, you can also see why I'm fudging on this point.


Of course, being halfway through the First Round doesn't mean we're halfway through the Tournament as a whole.  We are, for instance, only 43% of the way into the Second Round, 36% of the way into the Third Round, and 25% of the way into the Fourth Round.  That there is still plenty of Tournament still to go is best shown by the Semi-Finals Bracket, which has been kicking around for a while but which I am now officially taking out of beta:

We will celebrate the halfway point this coming weekend by kicking off the Fifth Round!!!

Kicking Off the Fifth Round!!!

That's right -- the Tournament will make a great leap forward, as the winner of Altdorfer/Fra Angelico takes on the winner of Balla/Basquiat in hopes of reaching the Sweet Sixteen.  After that, we'll start a contest from the semi-finals on the first weekend of every odd-numbered month.  Meanwhile, we'll still be running Fourth-Round matches on the first weekends of even-numbered months, so you'll be able to start every month with some of the most competitive names in the visual arts!

What About the Play-In Tournament?

It's all over!!  The last remaining details were resolved on Friday, with Escher toppling Bill Viola for a shot at Tournament glory and Wright of Derby successfully defending his bracket slot.  You'll see those guys again in a couple of years!

IAT "Fight for Their Right": Viola, Escher, di Paolo!

The Play-In Sub-Tournament is over!!!  

Or is it?

It is!  Over the past few years, we've put 96 artists through the grinder of direct democracy, and out at the other end have emerged our consensus favorites: Adams, Amador, Banksy, Benton, Bourguereau, Cartier-Bresson, Goldsworthy, Grandma Moses, Haeckel, Oudry, Rockwell, and Varo.  That's certainly not a list that any of us would have picked if it were all up to him or her, so that's cool.

So what's the catch?

There are two little pieces of outstanding business from the Play-In Sub-Tournament.  They stem from -- and it is painful to say this -- mistakes.  Errors.  Missteps.  Made by me, Michael5000.

It all started in July 2012 with the very first artist in the First Flight of Phase 1, Bill Viola.  And then it happened again in Flight 5, with Wright of Derby.  Neither of these guys did especially well.  Viola batted .333 and Wright .385, and they dropped out without making it to Phase 2.  It was only afterwards that I noticed that both of these guys are already on the main Tournament list! (Technically, Chuckdaddy noticed it.  But then he mentioned it to me, and then I noticed it.)

Well.  Could we just let them take their spots when we get to the Vs and Ws, as if nothing had happened?  After they had already lost in the Play-In Tournament?  That doesn't seem right!  But should we just give their Round 1 competitors (Marie-Louise-Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun and Grant Wood) a bye round? No, that doesn't sit well either. Instead,

Viola and Wright must fight for their right to enter the Tournament!

Each will compete in a three-way contest.  Their opponents will be the four remaining Play-In artists, among those who have not won their way into the main Tournament, with the highest product of Phase 1 and Phase 2 voting scores.  You can vote for one artist in each of these two rounds.  To avoid further complications, and to stack things in favor of the defendants, any pertinent ties will be resolved by seeding order, with Viola and Wright seeded first.   The winners will enter the tournament in two or three years, when we get to the end of the alphabet.

The "Fight for Their Right" contests will be open only until Friday, June 26.

---

#1 Bill Viola
Born 1951
American

Placed Sixth in Phase 1, Flight 1, with a voting score of .333.

---

#2 M.C. Escher
1898 - 1972
Dutch

Tied for First in Phase 1, Flight 4, with a voting score of .733.
Placed Third in Phase 2, Flight 4, with a voting score of .417.

---

#3 Giovanni di Paolo
Siennese
c. 1403-1482

Tied for Third in Phase 1, Flight 10, with a voting score of .636.
Tied for Second in Phase 2, Flight 1, with a voting score of .417.
Tied for Fourth in the Phase 2 Tiebreaker, with a voting score of .308.

---

Vote for one artist only in the comments. Commentary and links to additional work are welcome. 

Two Things I Stopped Doing, but Have Started Doing Again

#1 - Geohashing

In April 2012, I had a bit of a crisis of faith in geohashing, and that summer -- usually high geohashing season -- I gradually petered out and quit, and became a confirmed ex-geohasher.  Then, about a year ago, I went on a few convenient expeditions, and then structured a big aimless roadtrip around geohashing, and before you could say boo I was back in action. 

Geohashing?

If you don't know me personally, you probably think I am misspelling "geocaching."  No.  Geocaching is a perfectly respectable game where people hide little boxes around the landscape, and then give you coordinates and perhaps clues as to how to find them.  I occasionally do a little geocaching, if I want to go for a walk and need a destination, but I don't especially care for it.  The hide-and-seek aspect makes me feel foolish, possibly because I am pretty bad at it.

Geohashing is the quest not for a hidden box but for a random point, generated daily (and on Friday for the weekends) by a complex formula.  Most days, you check the point in the morning and see that your local "hashpoint" is inaccessible in one of a hundred ways -- in water, in mountains, on a farm or other private property, down a deep canyon, etc.  But sometimes, the hashpoint is accessible, and then you go there, take a picture or two, and write it up for the geohashing wiki.

Could you give us an example?





I've talked about geohashing before, but I bring it up again because frequent voter and commenter Morgan has brought to my attention the Eupeode's Map application.  This is one of a number of websites that will calculate your local hashpoints for you, but it is both very, very good, and makes the concept relatively clear for new geohashers.  Here, for instance, is what the hashpoints looked like last Saturday around my home graticule of Portland, Oregon:

Most of the surrounding hashpoints were in mountains and forests, but the one in Portland itself looked promising!  I zoomed in:

This looked extremely excellent -- right on a footpath in a public park near an industrial area.  Eagerly I programmed my GPS and headed for the point!  However, in this case....

...the lake had swollen with the spring rains, and I was twarted.  But the point is, I had an adventure!  Kind of. 

Hopefully, Niece #4 has better luck today in the parking lot that I sent her to in her home graticule.

Anyway, geohashing is a fine pastime, and everyone should be doing it.

#2 - The Bible Blog

MichaelReadstheBible never really came back from Christmas Break 2009, but it staggered along in dribs and drabs to fall 2011 before I put it in mothballs altogether.  But last Monday, it rose back to life phoenix-like, or perhaps zombie-like, right where it left off at Jeremiah 26.  There's another post today. 

How can I be sure that it's really back, on the strength of two measly posts?  Fair question!  But I really want it to be back, hence sticking my neck out publicly here.  A Monday publication date may mean that I skip some Mondays here at IAT, but I bet you can cope with that.

Esoteric Bracket Mechanics: Five Ties

Occasionally, the convoluted rules and strangely small voting population of this enterprise result in situations complicated enough that they get their own posts.  These are provided for the three or four bracket enthusiasts to dork out on.  Understanding this sort of thing is not necessary to vote, let alone enjoy the art!

Today's situation is a cluster of cascading ties in the Second Round.  It all started with this January 2013 match:

Daumier
David

Nothing much happened with that until August, when another Second Round tie happened:

Gainsborough
Gauguin

Daumier clobbered Gainsborough in the top tiebreaker, but in the lower match David and Gauguin fought their way to another tie.  

Meanwhile, though, Goya and El Greco had run into a tie of their own.  At this point, the spot on the brackets that had originally been for the Gainsborough/Gauguin match now held the David/Gauguin tie, and another round of tiebreakers could pair off the "top" artists and the "bottom" artists:

David
Gauguin

Goya
El Greco

In the bottom tiebreaker, El Greco got away from Gauguin (1-1-1) and will progress along the same path he would have traveled if he had beaten Goya in the first place.  In the upper tiebreaker, however, Goya and David... tied.

So!  Daumier and El Greco progress with records of 2-0-1!  Gauguin (1-1-2) and Gainsborough (1-1-1) hope for better things in the Left Brackets.  The old Gainsborough/Gauguin bracket slot looks like this:

David
Goya

...with Goya (1-0-2!) and David (1-0-3!) waiting for the next Second Round tie.

State of the Blog Ventures

The recent completion of the Reading List, which for a long time was the leading personal raison d’etre of this here blog, has made me wonder where things stand in the rest of the blog ventures. Here’s a quick look:

The Infinite Art Tournament
32%
Strange though it might seem, it looks as though the eponymous art appreciation exercise of the blog in its modern form is already 1/3 complete. We are still a few months shy of the halfway point of the First Round, mind you, but subsequent rounds rapidly get a lot smaller as artists begin to leave the tournament. Heck, we’ve already lost 76 of the 500 artists who get to play in the big show, and the Play-In Tournament, which is only a few months from finishing up, has ground through more than 60 more.

Element of the Month
45%
Fans of fundamental materialism can relax; there are plenty more silvery-grey metals to go through. The original list, which we have been progressing through in random order, only went as high as Meitnerium, nine shy of the 118 elements that are currently on the books. On the other hand, I doubt I’ll have much to report about Ununtrium, Ununpentium, Ununseptium, and Ununoctium, and may combine those and a few of the other lately-named under an “Extremely Fakey Elements” omnibus post.

Michael5000 vs. Shakespeare
10% Texts
13% Performance
24% Film Adaptation
This is one that has been off-again and on-again. It is certainly way down from the heyday when it had a blog all to itself. The theoretical goal is to post on the/a written text of, a performance of, and a film adaptation of, all of the Shakespeare plays. Realistically, I’d like to read all the texts. Eventually. If I live a long and healthy life.

Michael5000 vs. Dickens
55%
The goal here isn’t so much to post about all of Dickens, but merely to read all of the non-Christmas Dickens that I hadn’t got to already. Right now I’m standing at 8 out of 14.5 novels.

Michael5000 vs. The Beatles
23%
With only 13 canonical albums to plow through, you would think I’d make more progress with this one. But it turns out they are very labor-intensive to write.

The Songs of the 50 States
12%
I’ve skipped a few months here. But, the combination of chronicling my banal travels and stoking my desire to see new places, and new museums, is really too good not to bore you with.  I'm also thinking of tossing in the Provinces as a gesture to my country's vast northern bestie; that would knock me down to 10%.  Also, if this were to continue over the long term, there would likely be some revisitation involved.

Saint of the Month
7%
I’ve only done a couple of dozen saints, nowhere near enough to fill up a full daily calendar. The saints project has a very narrow constituency – consisting of Mrs.5000, pretty much – and I’ve thought about pitching it in on a number of occasions. But then, I always find something new and interesting to read about, and dive in for just one more saint.

The Free Box Tapes
3%
There have been some technical hiccoughs here, including a couple of tape players breaking down and the tape that I am supposed to be listening to currently going missing. I expect to pick up the pace in the fullness of time.

The Jazz Thing
2%
This is a long-term, slow-burn project by design. It’s also logistically clunky, as I’ve found it hard to get my paws on some of the recordings without spending money, which I am naturally loathe to do.

Michael Reads the Bible
50%ish, if memory serves, although you'd have to think the New Testament would go a lot slower.
This project still has its own blog, but it is in mothballs and has not been advanced for nearly two and a half years. I would like to return to it someday.

Blog Projects I Completed
100%

• The Reading List
• The Great Movies
• The More Movies List
• The Forgotten Lands
• Flag Fridays
• 100 Thursday Quizzes
• 90 Monday Quizzes
• 90 Wednesday Quizzes

Of course there have been plenty of boring postcards, droll anecdotes, philatelic ephemera, and such like along the way, and also short-term projects like Classical Wednesdays and the recent map reviews, but I'm only thinking about the extensive lists.


New Blog Projects I Sometimes Think About Launching, Because I’m an Idiot
0%

• Another round of Movies.
• A Tour of the arts holdings in the Castle5000 Collection
• A big tournament-style classical music showdown
• More Quizzes
• Language of the Month

The Infinite Art Tournament Turns 2

So that pairing, Guardi v. Guercino, was #99.  Next week will be the hundredth First Round pairing, and our exciting introduction to artists whose last name begins with the letter "H."  Indeed, we are only three First-Round matches from the bottom of the third sheet of our eight-page bracket.  Meanwhile, the Play-In SubTournament has moved into its second phase and within a month or two will actually launch a few artists out into the main bracket.  It is an exciting time to be alive.

People still occasionally find ways to let me know that the Tournament is dumb.  Well, duh.  It should be obvious that the Tournament is not trying to be particularly smart.  The Tournament is just a machine for art appreciation, and I daresay it works pretty well if you let it.

This is the kind of thing we pass on, because we have an embarrassment of riches.

Nevertheless, I had more sympathy than usual for the naysayers a few weeks ago, when I had the opportunity to spend several hours at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.  It was instructive, for instance, to spend some time with the paintings of Daubigny.  He inspired no affection among us at all.  With only four votes for and 26 against, he has the worst relative score of anyone who has left the Tournament to date.  But in person, his proto-Impressionist landscapes are gorgeous, beautifully executed and -- this bugged me, somehow -- much, much smaller than I had expected.  Jean Arp, a flash in the Tournament pan, is puckish and charming in a museum setting.  Derain, a recent 2-and-out, was magnificent.  The Boston MFA has a huge American collection, and it seemed that every time I stopped in front of one to say "wow," it turned out I was looking at an Allston, the very first artist we voted out of the Tournament, or a Copley, one of the most recent.

(Note: since I wrote the first draft, Domenicino -- a painter once designated by a fairly representative critic as the fourth best of all time, before he fell out of fashion -- passed Daubigny as the artist with the most painful Tournament record.)

Well, the nature of a tournament is that competitors get eliminated, I guess, and since this is a tournament of acknowledged masters there shouldn't be too many we are downright delighted to see booted out.  (Naturally there are a few.  For me, I look forward with unseemly glee to taking Gilbert and George and, even now, Roy Lichtenstein off of the brackets; I'm sure you have a few artists you are looking forward to seeing on the Wednesday Post yourself.)  But for a few days, I admit I felt like this little Tournament was somehow a negative little thing, trivializing the art through its own triviality.

Don't worry, I'm back now. We've got some topsy-turvy madness coming up in the brackets this week!!  Plus, at least one of us will enjoy some gratifying schadenfreude.  It's gonna be great!

Domenichino tallied a vote total of 3-21 and suffered the Tournament's first shutout
on the way to a hasty exit.  His St. John the Evangelist, however, was auctioned
in 2009 for £9.2 million. Somebody still loves him.

The Play-In SubTournament Phase 1 Results!

Fourteen months in the making, here is the first culling from the 96 nominees to the Play-In Sub-Tournament.

Phase 2 begins August 29, 2013

The gory procedural details are outlined below, but basically these 42 artists are going to duke it out in six more sessions.  From them, 12 will emerge into the Tournament proper, where they will either trample over the hapless unseeded competition or disappear immediately in a cloud of anticlimax!

Phase 1 Winners (Final):

1. Jean Baptiste Oudry (First Place, Flight 9) -- 1.000
2. Andy Goldsworthy (First Place, Flight 12) -- .923
3. Remedios Varo (First Place, Flight 3) -- .917
4. Henri Cartier-Bresson (First Place, Flight 11) -- .909
5. Kris Kuksi (First Place, Flight 1) -- .867
6. Abelardo Morell (First Place, Flight 8) -- .818
6. Thomas Hart Benton (First Place, Flight 10) -- .818
8. Timothy Ely (First Place, Flight 7) -- .813
9. Olafur Eliasson (First Place, Flight 2) -- .800
9. The Mysterious Book Artist in Scotland (First Place, Flight 6) -- .800
9. Ernst Haeckel (Second Place, Flight 1) -- .800
12. Nicholas Roerich (First Place, Flight 5) -- .769
13. Geertgen tot Sint Jans (Second Place, Flight 3) -- .750
14. Ansel Adams (First Place (tie), Flight 4) -- .733
14. M.C. Escher (First Place (tie), Flight 4) -- .733
14. Adolphe William Bouguereau (Second Place, Flight 2) -- .733
14. Hans Heysen (Second Place, Flight 6) -- .733
18. Pavel Filinov (Second Place, Flight 9) -- .727
18. Harald Sohlberg (Second Place, Flight 10) -- .727
18. Chuck Close (Second Place (tie), Flight 11) -- .727
18. Charles DeMuth (Second Place (tie), Flight 11) -- .727
22. Theo Jansen (Second Place, Flight 5) -- .692
23. Maskull Lasserre (Second Place (tie), Flight 7) -- .688
23. Andres Amador (Second Place (tie), Flight 7) -- .688
25. Saul Steinburg (Second Place (tie), Flight 8) -- .636
25. David Mach (Second Place (tie), Flight 8) -- .636
25. Giovanni di Paolo (Third Place (tie), Flight 10) -- .636
25. Grandma Moses (Third Place (tie), Flight 10) -- .636
29. Ilya Repin (Second Place, Flight 12) -- .615
30. Adolf Wolfli (Third Place, Flight 6) -- .600
30. Banksy (Third Place, Flight 2) -- .600
32. Pieter Saendredam (Third Place, Flight 3) -- .583
33. Dorothea Lange -- (Third Place (tie), Flight 5) -- .538
33. Norman Rockwell -- (Third Place (tie), Flight 5) -- .538
35. Charles A.A. Dellschau (Third Place, Flight 1) -- .533
36. Sharon Johnstone (Third Place (tie), Flight 4) -- .467
36. Robert Smithson (Third Place (tie), Flight 4) -- .467
38. Lois Dodd (Third Place (tie), Flight 12) -- .462
38. Albert Namatjira (Third Place (tie), Flight 12) -- .462
40. Baptiste Debombourg (Third Place (tie), Flight 9) -- .455
40. Clifford Tjapaltjarri (Third Place (tie), Flight 9) -- .455
40. Pierre Alechinsky (Third Place (tie), Flight 9) -- .455

SubTournament Rules and Logistics

Phase 1: 96 nominees competed in 12 flights of eight artists apiece between July 2012 and June 2013. These flights were designated and internally ordered by a random number generator.  Each voter identified up to four preferred artists per flight. All SubTournament flights were open for voting for approximately two months.

Phase 2: Artists have been ranked according to their number of votes received as a percentage of all votes cast in their initial flight. The first-, second-, and third-place artists in each flight will advance. The 42 artists so selected -- 36 + 6 extras due to third-place ties -- have been grouped by "serpentine seeding" into six new flights of seven artists apiece.  Each voter will have up to two votes in Phase 2.These seeded contests should begin about August 2013 and continue through the beginning of 2014.

Phase 3:The first-place and second-place artists in each Phase 2 flight will enter the regular tournament in the first round versus artists that tied in their initial first-round contests.  These matches will occupy the first of the four matches in each bracket cluster of eight, as needed and available, with the first available artist in each category (formerly tied artists and successful play-in artists) selected according to alphabetical order.  The first such match should occur in or around November 2013, with the winner of the first Phase 2 flight taking on Andre Beauneveu, the "upper" of the first pair of artists to fight to a tie in the first round.  Second-place ties in Phase 3 will be sorted out somehow.

The Carbon Anniversary

Heavens.  It is six years today that I have been keeping this blog.  This is post #1940.

Blogversaries are always occasion for a little navel-gazing about the point of the enterprise. So here goes: How I usually think of the blog is that it is a way for me to chase after knowledge and improve my faculties in an organized fashion, kind of like college but without the squalid living quarters. It's still working!  It goes without saying that I love learning about art, and in particular I love learning about art along with you, the commenting reader.  I've had a lot of my ideas challenged by votes that didn't go the way I expected, and that has been fabulous.  Everything else that comes along with the tournament is similarly a goad to my interests, from history and science to more fringe-y stuff like the arbitrary travel and exploring the new-to-me world of jazz.

Now the problem with being me -- like you care -- is that there are just way too many things I want to do.  Unfortunately, these don't tend to be the usual hobbies shared by people of my age and class, like hiking, international travel, dog fancying, cuisine, or raising children.  Instead, I tend to be torn between a set of concepts that evolves from year to year, but is currently something like this:

• I should take my quilting more seriously!
• I should spend time on musical projects!
• I should keep running more and more and more and more and more and more!
• I should try to make my house and garden amazing!
• I should try writing a novel!

Meanwhile, I am always having ideas for the blog:

• I should do another series of movie reviews!
• I should write about classical music!
• I should do more book reviews!
• I should record a song every month and put it on the blog!
• I should revive the quilt blog!
• I should revive the Bible blog!

Meanwhile, it bears mentioning that in civilian life I have something resembling a career to work on -- a challenging, engaging, and satisfying career, even -- so there is really a pretty strict limit to how many serious projects I can take on, especially since I discovered workaholism.

So, how will I resolve all this?  Who knows.  Incrementally, is a safe bet.   But I'll tell you this: as long as it has voters, the Art Tournament stays.  Because it is just way too much fun to give up.

Wow, did you really read all this?  Thanks, as always, for indulging my little online periodical!

-Michael5000

Oh For Crying Out Loud

So, the first thing that happened was, while setting up a Third-Round match for this week, I discovered that Daumier and David had fought to a tie in the Second Round.  This was very exciting, as it meant that there would be a resolution to the Fra Angelico/Anguissola snarl that has been knotting up the top of the first page of the brackets for more than a year now.

I set up the tiebreaker posts!  I wrote a little explanatory essay explaining how the whole cascading logic of the situation would work!  I was very pleased with myself.

Then along comes the Vice Dork of the Southern Region, Chuckdaddy, whose hypervigilance to the details of the Infinite Art Tournament is the sincerest form of flattery even when, as in this case, it is a great big pain in the ass.  Here's what he said.

Hmmm... I kind of want to keep this to myself... But it's looking like Fra won this outright. Wish I'd caught this earlier.

Naturally, I considered my options.  Burying Chuckdaddy and his secret deep, deep in the woods didn't seem practical, as he is a reliable voter.  Making a few troublesome votes go away was certainly tempting, but it turns out I'm kind of a goody-good.  Declaring that votes couldn't be revisited once I've staged follow-up contests seemed pretty reasonable, but after I discussed the matter with my war consigliere, I realized that I would be, absurdly enough, forever haunted by any breach of tournament purity.  Damn it.

The Various Implications

Policy Decision: If a vote-count error is brought to my attention before a subsequent match dependent on that vote begins, the tournament will proceed according to the actual vote tally.  Once subsequent matches have begun, any previous vote-count errors are moot. 

In the matter of Daumier v. David: This tie can't be resolved by matches against Fra Angelico and Anguissola, who were in fact never tied.  Therefore, they (and their subsequent matches) will be on hold until the next tie in the Right Bracket Second Round.

In the matter of Fra Angelico v. Anguissola: The Fra won -- it took a number of careful recounts to be sure -- by a score of 8 votes to 6.  He will advance to meet Arcimboldo today, while Anguissola will fall to the left bracket to take on the winner of the long-suspended Appel/Arp contest.

Tournament Integrity: You, the voter, can remain confident that your tournament is being conducted according to the highest possible standards of ethical standards and participant accountability.  There is perhaps room for improvement, however, in the vote-counting process. 

Behind the Scenes at the Infinite Art Tournament

Perhaps you occasionally think to yourself, "I wonder where Michael5000 puts together the engrossing weave of word and image that is the Infinite Art Tournament?"  I mean, hell, it's not likely that you think such a thing, but it's theoretically possible, right?  So I'll tell you.

Sometimes, of course -- like right this second, for instance -- I write from the confines of my comfortable home on the East Side, which I jocularly refer to as "Castle5000" in these pages.  But I generally spend a least a few hours every week working at each of two other locations.

1. Sound Grounds

The Sound Grounds coffeeshop, on Belmont Street, is within a stone's throw from home, if you have a good arm.  It's where I go of a weekend to drink somebody else's coffee instead of brewing my own, to use someone else's wireless connection, and to listen to music on my headphones instead of my stereo.  Strange behavior, arguably, but I've always enjoyed being alone-in-public.  I like the people and the vibe.  It's my "Third Space," if you will.  And -- this is important -- it has big south-facing windows.

In the dark third of the year, I try to spend at least a couple of hours on Saturday and Sunday at that window, absorbing as much daylight as I can in hopes of warding off the Seasonal Affective Disorder, and also zee Seasonal Affective Ennui.  It is a robust full-body lightbox, and it seems to work pretty well.

This is Bruno, my laptop.  At least 90% of the IAT content, and all of the actual tournament content, is researched, composed, edited, and stored on Bruno.  He is a rugged and capable machine, and I have a genuine affection for him.

Like many coffee shops, Sound Grounds has an eclectic collection of mugs, and like many regulars I have my arbitrary favorites.  There are four that I will use, but my first choice is the lightly chipped purple "Western Oregon State Mom" mug shown here.  I like that it is purple, slightly larger than average, and ridiculous.

Incidentally, if you are feeling in a healthy mood, the Big Salad is pretty tight.  Although I often err on the side of cinnamon rolls.

2. JavaMama

At least once a week, my work takes me to the western suburbs of Beaverton and Hillsboro, and on Wednesdays I celebrate the midweek by taking a long lunch at JavaMama, an improbably lovely shop tucked between a liquor store and a nails salon in a shopping center on 185th Avenue.  If Sound Grounds is my Third Space, JavaMama is my Fourth Space.

Here, too, there is a passive solar lightbox that nobody else uses.  And stellar coffee.  Before I started going to JavaMama, I put sugar in my coffee, but their coffee is so good that I stopped needing it.  They also carry a line of baked goods that inspired my life-concept of "pastry-for-lunch Wednesday," which has itself led to the life-concept of "the Wednesday night protein famine."  So worth it.

Because I'm there midweek, my JavaMama blogwork is a bit specialized.  It is sometimes the site of bracket maintenance, but it is also where I often do the the preliminary research and first drafts of the monthly saints and elements.

And my favorite mug there is the Big Green (rounded) mug.  (The Big Green (cylindrical) mug is good, too.)

---

I highly recommend both establishments.  Tell them Michael5000 sent you!  It will be funny, because they'll have no idea what you're talking about!

It's my hobby. Don't judge.

Crazy doings in the Art Tournament brackets this week!  But since, in the Venn diagram of IAT readers, the circles for "people interested in the art" and "people interested in the bracket machinations" are not co-...  co-...  Crap.  What's the word I'm looking for here, Morgan?

Anyway, the point is: this is a separate post to explain what's going on in the brackets to those few people who could give a damn.  Hi, guys!


OK: First, Dou/Dove was a tie, the sixth First Round tie in the Tournament.  That's easily dealt with: Dou and Dove are off to the holding pen of artists who will be the victims, or the anticlimaxes, for the artists who have survived the carnage of the Play-In Tournament.

Secondly, Dubuffet beat Duccio.  That match moves up one slot in the brackets, and Dubuffet will play his Second Round contest as the "top" artist instead of the "bottom" artist.  But whom does he play against?

Thirdly -- and this is where it gets a little crazy -- we find that the NEXT most recent First Round contest, DuChamp/Dufy is also a tie.  This sends us scrambling to the rule book, because the holding pen for the Play-In artists is now full up.  Here's what we find in the Rules Section II.3 ("Handling Ties") Paragraph 4:

The first artist from the seventh First-Round tie will be held in suspension.  The first artist from the second tie will then compete against the second artist from the first tie; the first artist from the third tie will compete against the second artist from the second tie, and so on, in a simple offsetting process.  These tiebreak games will occupy the same spot in the brackets as the play-in games -- the first of the four matches in a bracket cluster of eight -- and will be played no sooner than three months after the discovery of the most recent tie involved.  The exception will be a contest between the second artist of the last tie and the artist brought back from suspension; this will be the last First Round contest of the entire tournament.  If that's a tie, it will be resolved by removing my personal vote.

Well, the wording there is a little dodgy, as the "seventh" tie transmutes into the "first" tie between the first two sentences.  But the upshot is:

a. Marcel DuChamp will be the artist held in suspension until "the last First Round contest of the entire tournament."  It kind of kills me that this had to happen to somebody as major-league and as interesting as DuChamp, but when I confessed the situation to Mrs.5000 she pointed out that he of all artists would probably LOVE being in such an absurd situation, and that makes me feel better.

b. Dufy enters a freshly-built holding pen (maybe it's more dignified to think of these as "locker rooms," or "green rooms") of artists who have tied in the First Round and are waiting for their second outing.  He'll have another go at the top of a bracket-of-eight at least three months after the NEXT First Round tie is discovered.  EVERYTHING IS UNDER CONTROL. 

c. We still don't have anybody for Dubuffet to square off against.  So,

Fourthly, Dürer beat Van Dyck.  Phew.  They started February 9th, so although it had a short run as First-Rounders go, that match was well over the minimum month.  It gets yoicked up two bracket slots, and we end up with a Dubuffet/Dürer pairing as the last match on the now-finalized second of the eight initial brackets.  (Looking ahead, the probable implication is that instead of both romping easily into Round Four, Dürer and Donatello will get thrust into a heartbreak Third Round Thriller.  But that's just guessing)  Much later update: So it came to pass.

Wow! 

Celebrating a Quarter of Infinity

Heavens, it seems like just yesterday that Jacques-Laurent Agasse and Josef Albers stepped into the ring and, with no fanfare whatsoever, began the first match of the First Round of the so-called “Infinite Art Tournament.” Can you believe that we’re already one-quarter done?  But we are! In a limited sense!

To be precise, as of last weekend, 128 of the 512 artists who will compete in the First Round have made their inaugural appearance. Of the eight bracket sheets necessary to show the first four rounds of the tournament, one and almost all of the second are already in play! (Not quite all of the second, because First Round matches get yanked out of their initial bracket placement if they result in a tie. But close!)

To celebrate the day, there are two very modest new features. One is a full and occasionally coherent statement of the tournament rules, which I prepared as an exercise in technical writing. (Finding: Technical writing is harder than it looks.) The second is the entire third bracket sheet, available over there in the sidebar. From Dubuffet to Hals, you can look up your favorite late-early alphabet artists to check whether they’re in the show and scope out their First-Round competition. Yow!

By the way, if you are feeling a melancholy sense of the party being over before it is fairly begun, remember that we’re only talking about the First Round here. This is what the semi-finals bracket – Rounds 4 through 7 – looks like so far.

We’re in no danger of running out of art


For those who love statistics, here’s how things are looking:

Main Tournament

Entered Competition: 128 artists

Currently Undefeated: 37

Currently 3-0: 4
Currently 2-0: 11
Currently 1-0: 12
Currently 1-0-1: 2
Currently 0-0-1: 8
First Match Unresolved: 16

Currently One-Loss: 60

Currently 2-1: 10
Currently 1-1: 16
Currently 0-1-1: 2
Currently 0-1: 32

Eliminated: 15

Eliminated with a record of 0-2: 9
Eliminated with a record of 1-2: 6

To the extent that we have a leader, so far it would probably be Bernini. He’s one of four artists who have made it to the Fourth Round, and with a running total of 33 votes for and only 15 votes against, he is clearly a crowd favorite. On the whole, we’ve had more close matches than routs, and no one has yet been skunked, but Cornell’s 13-1 pasting of Copley and Bernini’s 15-2 romp over Beuys couldn’t have been pleasant for fans of the losing artists. Beuys is the least fortunate artist in the early going.  Despite not arousing any particular hostility in the crowd, neither did he inspire many votes, and he retired with a painful total of 4 for and 24 against.


Play-In Tournament

Entered Competition: 48 artists (of 96)

Completed Phase 1: 32 (as of Saturday, Dec. 22)

Will advance to Phase 2: 12
Eliminated: 20

Leading the pack so far is Remedios Varo, with a batting average of .917 in her flight. Again, we’ve yet to see anyone fail to get any votes at all, but Anselme Boix-Vives and Anges Martin share a painfully low score of .067.