It's a woman's world inside manga

By MATT LARKING
Special to The Japan Times
Photo:Contemporary bijin-ga: "Fenera " (1977) by Kai Yukiko © KAI YUKIKO


Bijin-ga (pictures of beautiful women), long a staple of ukiyo-e (woodblock prints) and its erotic sub-genre shunga (spring pictures), is mostly moribund in contemporary art. A variant form, however, lives on in shojo manga, serialized comic books that are often flush with romantic narratives and target, usually, a young female audience.

"Watanabe Masako and Kai Yukiko, Fantastic Journey" at The Kyoto International Manga Museum largely ditches shojo manga's coy plots to focus on two women manga artists and how they portrayed their female characters. The exhibition is part of the museum's regular series created to introduce the influence of well-known manga artists through faithful reproductions of their work.

Kai (1954-80), whose early death left a limited number of artworks, favored Art Deco patterning and often posed her figures against dramatic flowery backdrops that hint at a mid-1970s style. The pictorial conventions she employed were essentially a kind of comic version of Pre-Raphaelite painting.

Watanabe (b.1929), on the other hand, is able to show greater stylistic development. Though she is one of the artists who helped established the shojo genre, she later partly abandoned it. Her earlier works from the late 1950s, such as "Palace of the Raccoon Dog," which features plate-sized cutesy eyes and infantilized facial features, illustrate the kind of stylistic conventions that still define the genre today.

In the '80s, her material became much more sultry and sexual as she moved to targeting an adult audience through her adaptation of the erotic Chinese novel "The Plum in the Golden Vase." What is on display is relatively tame, but something of the thrust of her later work can be seen in "The Sadness of Miss Popolak, a Snake in the Bed" and in the smoldering look from her "Pale Lady."

"Genga — Exhibition Series: Watanabe Masako & Kai Yukiko, Fantastic Journey" at the Kyoto International Manga Museum, runs till May 15; admission is included in the ¥500 general entrance fee; open 10 a.m.-6 p.m., closed Wed. For more information, visit www.kyotomm.jp

Debut of the First Practical 'Artificial Leaf'

ScienceDaily (Mar. 28, 2011) — Scientists have claimed one of the milestones in the drive for sustainable energy -- development of the first practical artificial leaf. Speaking in Anaheim, California at the 241st National Meeting of the American Chemical Society, they described an advanced solar cell the size of a poker card that mimics the process, called photosynthesis, that green plants use to convert sunlight and water into energy.

"A practical artificial leaf has been one of the Holy Grails of science for decades," said Daniel Nocera, Ph.D., who led the research team. "We believe we have done it. The artificial leaf shows particular promise as an inexpensive source of electricity for homes of the poor in developing countries. Our goal is to make each home its own power station," he said. "One can envision villages in India and Africa not long from now purchasing an affordable basic power system based on this technology."

The device bears no resemblance to Mother Nature's counterparts on oaks, maples and other green plants, which scientists have used as the model for their efforts to develop this new genre of solar cells. About the shape of a poker card but thinner, the device is fashioned from silicon, electronics and catalysts, substances that accelerate chemical reactions that otherwise would not occur, or would run slowly. Placed in a single gallon of water in a bright sunlight, the device could produce enough electricity to supply a house in a developing country with electricity for a day, Nocera said. It does so by splitting water into its two components, hydrogen and oxygen.

The hydrogen and oxygen gases would be stored in a fuel cell, which uses those two materials to produce electricity, located either on top of the house or beside it.

Nocera, who is with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, points out that the "artificial leaf" is not a new concept. The first artificial leaf was developed more than a decade ago by John Turner of the U.S. National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Boulder, Colorado. Although highly efficient at carrying out photosynthesis, Turner's device was impractical for wider use, as it was composed of rare, expensive metals and was highly unstable -- with a lifespan of barely one day.

Nocera's new leaf overcomes these problems. It is made of inexpensive materials that are widely available, works under simple conditions and is highly stable. In laboratory studies, he showed that an artificial leaf prototype could operate continuously for at least 45 hours without a drop in activity.

The key to this breakthrough is Nocera's recent discovery of several powerful new, inexpensive catalysts, made of nickel and cobalt, that are capable of efficiently splitting water into its two components, hydrogen and oxygen, under simple conditions. Right now, Nocera's leaf is about 10 times more efficient at carrying out photosynthesis than a natural leaf. However, he is optimistic that he can boost the efficiency of the artificial leaf much higher in the future.

"Nature is powered by photosynthesis, and I think that the future world will be powered by photosynthesis as well in the form of this artificial leaf," said Nocera, a chemist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass.

Nocera acknowledges funding from The National Science Foundation and Chesonis Family Foundation.

'Can You Hear Me Now?' How Neurons Decide How to Transmit Information

Inhibitory circuits in the olfactory bulb use a novel, time-scale dependent strategy to mediate how neurons choose between encoding and propagating information. (Credit: Sonya Giridhar)

ScienceDaily (Mar. 28, 2011) — There are billions of neurons in the brain and at any given time tens of thousands of these neurons might be trying to send signals to one another. Much like a person trying to be heard by his friend across a crowded room, neurons must figure out the best way to get their message heard above the din.

Researchers from the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition, a joint program between Carnegie Mellon University and the University of Pittsburgh, have found two ways that neurons accomplish this, establishing a fundamental mechanism by which neurons communicate. The findings have been published in an online early edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"Neurons face a universal communications conundrum. They can speak together and be heard far and wide, or they can speak individually and say more. Both are important. We wanted to find out how neurons choose between these strategies," said Nathan Urban, the Dr. Frederick A. Schwertz Distinguish Professor of Life Sciences and head of the Department of Biological Sciences at CMU.

Neurons communicate by sending out electrical impulses called action potentials or "spikes." These spikes code information much like a version of Morse code with only dots and no dashes. Groups of neurons can choose to communicate information in one of two ways: by spiking simultaneously or by spiking separately.

To find out how the brain decided which method to use to process a sensory input, the researchers looked at mitral cell neurons in the brain's olfactory bulb -- the part of the brain that sorts out smells and a common model for studying global information processing. Using slice electrophysiology and computer simulations, the researchers found that the brain had a clever strategy for ensuring that the neurons' message was being heard.

Over the short time scale of a few milliseconds, the brain engaged its inhibitory circuitry to make the neurons fire in synchrony. This simultaneous, correlated firing creates a loud, but simple, signal. The effect was much like a crowd at a sporting event chanting, "Let's go team!" Over short time intervals, individual neurons produced the same short message, increasing the effectiveness with which activity was transmitted to other brain areas. The researchers say that in both human and neuronal communication alike, this collective communication works well for simple messages, but not for longer or more complex messages that contain more intricate information.

The neurons studied used longer timescales (around one second) to convey these more complex concepts. Over longer time intervals, the inhibitory circuitry generated a form of competition between neurons, so that the more strongly activated neurons silenced the activity of weakly activated neurons, enhancing the differences in their firing rates and making their activity less correlated. Each neuron was able to communicate a different piece of information about the stimulus without being drowned out by the chatter of competing neurons. It would be like being in a group where each person spoke in turn. The room would be much quieter than a sports arena and the immediate audience would be able to listen and learn much more complex information.

Researchers believe that the findings can be applied beyond the olfactory system to other neural systems, and perhaps even be used in other biological systems.

"Across biology, from genetics to ecology, systems must simultaneously complete multiple functions. The solution we found in neuroscience can be applied to other systems to try to understand how they manage competing demands," Urban said.

Co-authors of the study include Brent Doiron, assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Pittsburgh, and Sonya Giridhar, a doctoral student in the Center for Neuroscience at Pitt. Both are members of the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition.

The study was funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communications Disorders, the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation.

Arts Council told to sell off masterpieces in damning report by MPs• Funding body 'spending far too much on itself'

Photograph: Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Charlotte Higgins , chief arts writer The Guardian, Monday 28 March 2011 larger | smaller Article history

Works such as Her Blood by sculptor Anish Kapoor should be sold, say MPs. The Arts Council in England has been told to sell works from its art collection – which includes masterpieces by Anish Kapoor, Sarah Lucas, Mark Wallinger and Damien Hirst –in a highly critical report.

In what is to be a crucial week for the arts – English cultural organisations will be told on Wednesday how much public money they will receive from the Arts Council – the report from the parliamentary select committee on culture criticises the funding body for "spending far too much on itself".

The MPs on the committee, chaired by Tory John Whittingdale, condemn a "gross waste of public money" and "failure of leadership" over the body's conduct in relation to the Public, the West Bromwich gallery that cost £52m to build but went into administration before it opened.

The report also deeply criticises ministers' "disturbing modus operandi" in abruptly abolishing a number of cultural bodies, notably the UK Film Council. That episode was "handled very badly by the government", says the report. "It is extremely regrettable that a film-maker of the stature of Tim Bevan has, as a result, decided to take no further part in government-sponsored initiatives."

Bevan, the co-founder of Working Title and co-producer of films such as Fargo and Four Weddings and a Funeral, chaired the UK Film Council at the time of its abolition.

The Arts Council hit back at the report, with a spokesman calling its findings out of date and criticising the choice of witnesses called to give evidence, saying the committee would have "benefited from a wider range of viewpoints".

She defended the organisation's record, saying, "The Public is old news and is not representative of the Arts Council's investments in capital projects." And she poured cold water on the recommendation that the council gets rid of artworks: "Selling off works of art from the Arts Council collection is also not a sensible solution to the current budget cuts."

The collection, now containing 7,500 works, was founded in 1946 to buy modern and contemporary art to lend to public galleries and museums nationwide. It also organises touring exhibitions, such as that devoted to Anish Kapoor now on in Manchester. Works from the collection have never been sold before.

Leading figures in the arts defended the council's record. Sir Nicholas Hytner, artistic director of the National Theatre, said the body "has our confidence" and Anthony Sargent, general director of the Sage arts venue in Gateshead, called it a "transformed institution".

On top of recommending the council sell, or "strategically deaccession", artworks to make it more financially sustainable, the report suggests amalgamating the art collections of the organisation with those of the government and the British Council.

The committee also said it was not convinced there was a need for so many symphony orchestras to receive funding from the council and the BBC; claimed heritage had been underfunded compared with the arts; and expressed concern at the deep level of cuts to funding for culture proposed by some local councils.

The arts world is waiting anxiously for the results of public funding applications, which are due to drop into email inboxes up and down England between 7.30am and 9.30am on Wednesday.

Grant applications have been made by 1,300 organisations; almost half will be unsuccessful.

The Arts Council received a 29.6% cut in its grant-in-aid from central government at the last comprehensive spending review, making heavy cuts inevitable, although the council has promised not to "salami-slice" and to protect excellent organisations from the deepest cuts.

The Arts Council, which cut its running costs by 15% in a restructuring completed in April 2010, has been told by the government to cut its running costs again, this time by 50%, with only 15% of the cuts being passed to the "front line".

Senior figures in the arts defended the council's recent record.

"The process has been as good as it could have been," said Hytner. He said many unsuccessful applicants would be "hugely aggrieved", but added: "I don't see how it can be avoided."

Director Sir Richard Eyre said Arts Council chief executive Alan Davey was "a good thing" and said the body had been put in a "hellish position" because of overall cuts from central government.

Sargent said" "Three years ago, the council was a disappointing laughing stock. I am not saying it's perfect, but as far as they can, Davey and [the body's chair] Liz Forgan have played a difficult hand with real skill."

A spokesman for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said a formal government response would be published in due course.


Main points

• Arts Council England has been "spending far too much on itself"


• ACE "played a major role in the gross waste of public money" on the Public, West Bromwich


• "Strategic deaccessioning" – ie, selling of artworks – from the Arts Council Collection is advised


• The committee was "disturbed" by the number of local authorities proposing substantial cuts to arts


• Small arts organisations are at greater risk from funding cuts than large ones, a matter of "great concern"


• Committee "not convinced" there is a need for so many subsidised orchestras


• Abolition of the UK Film Council was "handled very badly by the government". Similar "disturbing modus operandi" followed for other abruptly axed cultural bodies


• Heritage "suffered disproportionately" in funding cuts compared with arts

The drain in Spain: the country's arts crisis

The country spent a fortune trying to place itself at the centre of the art world. So why do its best artists all leave? Adrian Searle travels to a nation in the grip of a cultural crisis.

Adrian Searle guardian.co.uk, Sunday 27 March 2011 21.31 BST larger | smaller Article history

A man inspects Renaissance portraits at the Prado, Madrid. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images 'Spain is different," the tourist board once touted. It is also complicated. Although a lot of energy, confidence and black money swirled around the Spanish art world over the past quarter of a century, today something is wrong. However lively Madrid or Barcelona might look, and a visit to any regional city greets you with a spanking new public art gallery, something is missing. For all the late dinners and cocaine nights, gleaming museums and prestigious international shows, there is an air of crisis.

"The party's over," Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Reina Sofía museum in Madrid told me. Previously director of Macba (Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona), Borja-Villel is Spain's most influential museum director. He sees the current economic crisis as an opportunity, even if it is an unwelcome one. There is talk of cuts of up to 50% in the arts. How can art institutions compete with hospitals and education, whatever the talk of the necessity of culture?

From the 1980s until recently, new museums by big-name architects opened all over Spain. Private foundations opened their doors and savings banks formed international art collections, setting up cultural centres as part of their social remit. As I write, I am installing a show for a cultural centre run by the Caja Madrid bank. Around the corner, queues line up for the Prado museum, for the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection and for the Reina Sofía, Spain's largest and liveliest museum of contemporary art, which opened in 1990. Private galleries flourish – and sometimes struggle – in the small streets behind the museums.

Spanish institutions have always been prey to changes in government, with money and museum directors coming and going whenever political change happens at national, regional and even municipal levels. By achieving greater autonomy, the Prado has extricated itself from this damaging cycle, and the Reina Sofía is set to follow. The two museums now have a far more fruitful collaborative dialogue than the Tate and National galleries in London have ever had, co-ordinating exhibitions and lending works to each other. Regional and smaller Spanish institutions are less protected.

In the early 1980s, the Iberian peninsula felt far from the centre of the arts world, and both Spain and Portugal put a great deal of effort into building new artistic institutions. "We used to think that media attention and crowds coming through the doors was the signal to success and social usefulness," says Borja-Villel. "We mistook our place in the world. We imagined we had centrality. But we were never the centre. Spanish art institutions and artists were like good, diligent students. We didn't realise that there is no centre any more."

But the real problem is a deeper one. Art itself, the only real indicator of cultural vitality, has somehow lagged behind. Going round shows here for over a quarter of a century, I keep thinking it should be better. Why is painting so lousy here? Why is so much meek and secondhand? Of course there are always exceptions, but you often have to leave Spain to find them.

Which partly explains why so many of the best Spanish artists have always left – not just to escape the former dictatorship. Ambitious artists of the post-Franco period, such as Juan Muñoz and Pepe Espaliú, moved to London, Paris, New York. Turner prize contender Angela de la Cruz took off in the mid-1990s. Ambitious young artists still leave. "Everyone should, at some point," said Borja-Villel.

Paloma Polo, still in her 20s, escaped a conservative, moribund university art school in Madrid as soon as she could. "It was like a handicrafts school," she told me from Amsterdam, where she now lives. "There is no real scene of young artists in Madrid," she added, paradoxically putting part of the blame on the grants and prizes young artists have been given. "They get big-headed, even though in the end they're unambitious to be anything more than local artists. No one outside Spain knows or cares about them. I knew from day one I had to leave."

A mountain range of the mind

Unlike the UK, there are few alternative spaces, warehouse shows or ad hoc events in Spain. Those that take place are treated with suspicion. The sense of collaboration, which had certainly existed in the heady days of the 1980s, when I started coming here, did not last long. The sense of being part of a larger art world is somehow still stalled by the Pyrenees, though it is a mountain range of the mind.

Spain has few serious collectors, and those who only began collecting a few years ago are giving up. They're broke, Catalan artist Ignasi Aballí told me. Aballí is surviving the downturn. He's showing everywhere from São Paulo to Ikon in Birmingham. "The only way to survive is to show outside Spain," he said. This was true of artists like Muñoz, too, who died in 2001. He lived and worked near Madrid, but developed his career outside Spain.

The economic downturn is making everyone reassess the place of visual art in Spanish culture. Projects both modest and grandiose are floundering. La Caixa, a Catalan savings bank, has recently donated its collection to Macba. The future of another new project, the Canòdrom contemporary arts centre, still being built on a neighbourhood dog track in Barcelona, is stalled. An overblown new "city of culture", designed by architect Peter Eisenman on the outskirts of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia, eats millions of regional euros and looks unlikely to be completed anytime soon. Cities and regions look for the miraculous "Bilbao effect", the kind of urban and regional regeneration bought about by Frank Gehry's Guggenheim museum in that city, but it is an elusive panacea.

Elsewhere in Galicia, Marco (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo), housed in Vigo's old panopticon prison, is having problems. They're soon mounting Spain's first show of Scottish artist Martin Creed, but the programme is slowing down. "[To us], 100,000 fewer euros is the same as a €1m cut for a bigger institution," Marco's director Iñaki Martinez, told me.

Martinez was also recently appointed president of Spain's Association of Directors of Contemporary Art. "Artists are the ones who are suffering most," he said. "The first thing that is revised is the acquisitions policy. Many public Spanish collections have been blocked, others have reduced their capacity to develop and build their collections. No one knows for certain what is going to happen next with regards to the cultural activity of the savings banks. There are a number of foundations dedicated to the work of single artists that are questioning their continuity." Chillida-leku, the foundation dedicated to the legacy of Basque sculptor Eduardo Chillida, in the Basque region, has recently closed.

"Spain has rushed to create a cultural infrastructure which previously did not exist," says Martinez. "In many cases it was carried out without planning, giving priority to the container, not the content, and now we do not know what to do with all these buildings. The current situation simply demonstrates the result of the politics of waste and showbusiness."

Borja-Villel remains optimistic. "Smaller institutions need to find their own identity," he says. He sees the development of a sense of real communality as a solution. "The question is how to use these spaces in a different way. We cannot be alone any more, we are living through a change in history, and must not be afraid to make mistakes." Better questions and better mistakes would seem to be the answer.

Spain's five hottest artists
Ignasi Aballí (Barcelona, 1958) is an heir to the spirit of conceptualism. Signature works include listings made up of newspaper cuttings and his explorations around colour.


Dora García (Valladolid, 1966) will represent Spain in the Venice Bienniale. Her work has a complex performative dimension originating in her interests in literature and the conflict between reality and fiction


Lara Almarcegui (Zaragoza, 1972, pictured) investigates the relation between nature and urban landscape. She recently weighed and recorded the open spaces of different cities.


David Bestué (Barcelona, 1980) and Marc Vives (Barcelona, 1978) are a good example of how the young generations look at the art of the 60s and 70s from an ironic perspective. Their sardonic approach has strong echoes of Dada.


Paloma Polo (Madrid, 1983) has a profound interest in the cinematic. Her latest work evolves around the subject of light as a metaphor for the emergence of knowledge in the modern era.

Javier Hontoria, art critic of El Cultural; elcultural.es

Un telescopio capta materia un milisegundo antes de entrar en un agujero negro

El observatorio espacial 'Integral' mide la polarización de rayos gamma de Cygnus X-1
A.R. - Madrid - 25/03/2011

A una distancia de unos pocos cientos de kilómetros de un agujero negro, del límite a partir del cual ya es prácticamente imposible escapar, el espacio es una vorágine de radiación y partículas que se precipitan hacia el pozo definitivo a casi la velocidad de la luz, alcanzándose temperaturas de millones de grados. En un milisegundo las partículas cruzan esa distancia final, pero algunas pocas se pueden salvar, según sugieren las últimas observaciones realizadas, explican los expertos de la Agencia Europea del Espacio (ESA). Gracias al telescopio Integral de este organismo, un equipo internacional de astrónomos ha logrado medir procesos precisamente de ese milisegundo último que permiten comprender mejor qué pasa en el borde del agujero negro. En concreto, han medido la polarización de la luz emitida.

Philippe Laurent dirige ese equipo internacional que ha estado observando Cygnus X-1, un sistema binario situado a unos 6.000 años luz de la tierra y formado por una estrella masiva y un agujero negro compañero que está arrancando y atrayendo hacia sí la materia gaseosa del astro, y emitiendo en rayos X. "Cygnus X-1 es, probablemente, el agujero negro de un sistema binario mejor conocido de nuestra galaxia", afirman Philippe Laurent (CEA Saclay, Francia) y sus colegas en la revista Science al presentar los nuevos resultados. El sistema binario ha sido observado con muchos telescopios, desde hace tiempo, en todos los rangos del espectro, desde las ondas radio hasta los rayos gamma, añaden.

Con el Integral, un telescopio espacial diseñado para ver los rayos gamma y los rayos X, Laurent y sus colegas se han centrado en el caótico entorno del agujero negro y han visto que los campos magnéticos están ahí están fuertemente estructurados, formando un túnel de escape por el que algunas partículas huyen en el último instante de la atracción definitiva del agujero negro y forman chorros de materia hacia el espacio, explica la ESA en un comunicado. Las partículas de esos chorros siguen trayectorias espirales siguiendo los campos magnéticos y eso afecta a su polarización, con un patrón característico.

Esa polarización específica de los rayos gamma es lo que han logrado medir ahora los astrónomos, obteniendo una visión directa de la naturaleza de muchos procesos astrofísicos que puede ayudar a entender mejor los mecanismos de emisión de Cygnus X-I como modelo de otros sistemas binarios con un agujero negro.

"No sabemos aún exactamente cómo la materia que está cayendo en el agujero negro se transforma en estos chorros; hay un gran debate entre los teóricos, pero estas observaciones les ayudarán a decidir", dice Laurent. Se habían visto ya chorros alrededor de agujeros negros con radiotelescopios, pero esas observaciones no mostraban el objeto con suficiente detalle como para determinar cómo de cerca del agujero negro de originan, puntualiza la ESA.

France's female new wave

The French insistence on regarding cinema as art has helped produced formidable women directors. But is the next generation the most wide-ranging yet?

Agnès Poirier guardian.co.uk, Thursday 24 March 2011 23.00 GMT larger | smaller Article history
Photo: No quirky adolescent tale … Love Like Poison.

There's a feeling out there that France may be on the verge of another new wave: not of the politically radical 1950s kind, but one in which young, driven, women film-makers will be at the fore. Names being mentioned are Mia Hansen-Løve, Rebecca Zlotowski and Katell Quillévéré; their films have already electrified France and are beginning to spread elsewhere.

Of course, on one level, there is nothing unusual about French women film directors. From Agnès Varda to Claire Denis, Coline Serreau to Agnès Jaoui, women have been able to make their presence felt in French cinema. NT Binh, film critic for the film magazine Positif, says: "It's not a wave but a deluge, one that has been going on for more than 50 years."

In fact, it all started in 1896. Who remembers Alice Guy? The world's first female film director and producer was French. She directed her first film in 1896, aged 23, and went on to direct Gaumont's first blockbuster, The Life of Christ, in 1906, with 300 extras. After moving to California with her British camera operator husband Herbert Blaché, she directed more than 600 films for Charlie Chaplin's film company and then for Warner Brothers.

Christophe Leparc, currently managing director of Cannes' Directors' Fortnight, started his career at the Festival de Films de Femmes, the only significant inter-national event dedicated to women film directors. Created in Créteil, just outside Paris, in 1979, it screens 130 films each year, attracting an audience of more than 20,000 people. Says Leparc: "I think the French system encourages the emergence of talents, women and men alike, by its generosity and emphasis on culture as art. But in the last 30 years, it has particularly focused on helping women assert themselves within the cinema milieu. There is no inhibition. Cinema is today as much a woman's as a man's medium."

If they embrace a great variety of subjects, there seems to be one genre the new generation of women film-makers particularly dislike: romantic comedy. Perhaps because, in France, cinema is still considered more of an art than a business. The youngest French women directors are often graduates in philosophy or literature – such as 30-year-old Rebecca Zlotowski whose first film, Belle Epine, was selected for the Directors' Fortnight last year, or Katel Quillévéré, whose Love Like Poison is released in the UK in May. Many have been trained at the FEMIS (École Nationale Supérieure des Métiers de l'Image et du Son), France's prestigious national film school. Alix Delaporte – whose first film, Angèle et Tony, was selected for the Venice film festival last September – was a former student, as was Céline Sciamma, who directed the acclaimed Water Lilies and is back this year with her second feature, Tomboy, selected for the Berlin film festival this year.

Have these films de femmes anything in common? There must be something that draws them together, something akin to a common spirit. Could it be sex? Are they portraying it differently? "Take newcomers such as Isild le Besco, Mia Hansen-Løve and Rebecca Zlotowski; they treat sex in a rather raw and caustic way. But more importantly, their films are almost always unexpected," says Laura Gragg, an American production consultant living in Paris, former deputy head of ACE, a network of European producers.

Unexpected might actually be the key word to understand the recent crop of French women film directors. Their topics are wide-ranging and original. Think of 30-year-old Quillévéré's Love Like Poison. Set in deepest Brittany, it focuses on a 14-year-old's battle with her Catholic faith. For veteran film critic Gérard Lefort, "Quillévéré spares us yet another so-called quirky adolescent tale. Her film deals with a teenager who actually believes; this places the director in an unusual place in French cinema." Not surprisingly, Quillévéré cites Rivette, Bresson, Cavalier, Pialat, and Bergman as her favourite directors. Once herself a devout Catholic, she says: "Cinema gave me a healthy distance from religion. Cinema is religion's best rival in that it also negates death and is, by definition, a liberation process."

Lily Sometimes (aka Les Pieds Nus Sur les Limaces), Fabienne Berthaud's second film, recently impressed the French public with its tale of two sisters, played by Ludivine Sagnier and Diane Kruger. The elder looks after her little sister after their mother dies, in the big family house somewhere in an idyllic part of the French countryside. "Difficult to define, this film is not a French comedy," Libération's Didier Péron wrote. "Dealing with rather solemn issues, its characters are however highly whimsical and funny. The film's strength lies in its energy and lightness, in the delicate balance between frivolity and depth. Its ambition is to bear witness to humanity's many eccentricities".

In a totally different genre, in fact, at the extreme end of the auteur spectrum, 30-year-old Géraldine Nakache's first film was another unexpected hit, which attracted more than 1.4 million people in France last year. All That Glitters (Tout Ce Qui Brille) is a clever take on two ambitious girls, one Jewish, the other Muslim, who dream of Paris, buying expensive shoes and going to trendy places. Having been brought up in a quiet suburb of Paris, they suffer from belonging to the grey and banal middle France – neither the elite, nor the "rabble" as Sarkozy calls them, but the France that is never talked about. "It's a film about lukewarm France, the one never mentioned in pop culture, which much prefers to talk about the burning France. Although this is a first film, All that glitters has the intelligence of old wise men," Péron says. "Dialogue is sharp, witty and quick. It's a film that tells us about French youth today: diverse, multifarious, and tormented by life's many tricks and dilemma."

Is their cinema feminine or feminist? "French women film directors hate the word feminist, although they are the most independent and the most driven women I know," Gragg says. "Like most French citizens, they refuse the gender distinction so dear to outsiders. If you ask them, they'll tell you that they are just film directors and that there are no such things as women films, there are just films, bad or good.

"They are right, of course. However, they do offer better and stronger parts to actresses, and their films have contributed to changing the way we consider women, not women as girls but women as individuals."

Love Like Poison is released on 29 April.

Descubren un agujero negro que 'devora' a una estrella

Rosa M. Tristán | Madrid
Actualizado miércoles 23/03/2011 14:47 horas

Un nuevo agujero negro que está 'devorando' a una estrella figurará desde ahora en los mapas del Cosmos. Este sistema binario, llamado XTE J1859+226, ha sido descubierto por un equipo de investigadores del Instituto de Astrofísica de Canarias (IAC), quienes han comprobado que su masa es 5,4 veces la masa del Sol.

Los astrónomos, dirigidos por Jesús M. Corral-Santana, captaron los espectros de rayos X del agujero negro y la estrella en observaciones realizadas en el Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC), que seguía la pista de este sistema desde que en 1999 fuera detectado por el satélite RXT de la NASA.

"Entonces se intuyó que en esa región, que está más allá del centro de la Vía Láctea, en la constelación Vulpecula, podía haber un agujero negro binario, pero hasta ahora no había podido confirmarse", explica a ELMUNDO.es Corral-Santana. Se estima que está a 45.600 años luz de la Tierra.

Estos sistemas binarios de rayos X, de los que se conocen sólo 17 en nuestra galaxia, aunque se cree que hay unos 5.000, están compuestos por un objeto compacto (que puede ser una estrella de neutrones o un agujero negro) y una estrella 'normal'.

Este objeto compacto va arrancando materia de la estrella y la incorpora lentamente a su propia masa a través de un disco que se forma en torno a él. En definitiva, se la va 'tragando'. En este caso, los astrónomos comprobaron que el objeto compacto era un agujero negro en el que la masa absorbida va cayendo.

El satélite detectó el sistema en un momento de erupción, pero luego volvió a la normalidad, al estado de quietud que es habitual en la mayor parte de la vida de las binarias transitorias de rayos X. Así pueden permanecer muchos años, pero nosotros desde 1999 hemos estado buscando en esa zona hasta que hemos comprobado su existencia", explica el astrofísico, primer firmante del artículo en la 'Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS)'.

Los investigadores han combinado las mediciones fotométricas del Isaac Newton Telescope (INT), el William Herschel Telescope (WHT) del año 2000 y las del Nordic Optical Telescope (NOT) de 2008, con los espectros realizados con el GTC en 2010, los primeros publicados de este objeto.

De hecho, Corral-Santana comenta que "debido al bajo brillo del sistema observado, necesitábamos telescopios de 10 metros para poder obtener espectros. En este sentido, haber podido observar desde el GTC ha resultado determinante". El GTC, con su espejo de 10,4 metros, es ahora el telescopio más grande del mundo.

Desaparición de la estrella
Dentro de miles de millones de años, la estrella acabará desapareciendo dentro del agujero que le está robando la masa.

Tanto las estrellas de neutrones como los agujeros negros son los restos que deja una estrella masiva al morir. La mayor parte de las estrellas de neutrones conocidas tienen masas en torno a 1,4 veces la masa del Sol, aunque en unos pocos casos se han medido valores superiores de hasta dos veces la masa del Sol.

Para medir la masa, los investigadores calcularon, mediante complejas ecuaciones, la velocidad de rotación de la estrella y lo que tarda en dar una vuelta. Los astrónomos creen que a partir de unas tres masas solares las estrellas de neutrones no son estables y colapsan formando un agujero negro.

Corral-Santana explica que "es determinante medir la masa de los objetos compactos para saber de qué tipo de objeto se trata". Si tiene más de tres veces la masa del Sol, sólo puede ser un agujero negro y en este caso son 5,4 veces, por lo que no había duda.

Las medidas fotométricas permitieron determinar el período orbital de la binaria (6.6 horas) mientras que los espectros proporcionaron, además, información sobre la velocidad de la estrella alrededor del agujero negro. La combinación de estos dos parámetros resultó imprescindible para calcular la masa del agujero negro.

What the lives of the wives tell us about the art of their men

The influence of Camille Monet and Effie Gray compared and contrasted
By James Hall | From issue 222, March 2011
Published online 21 Mar 11 (Books)

Claude Monet, "Camille Monet and Child in the Garden", 1875 and right, Thomas Richmond, "Euphemia (“Effie”) Chalmers ( née Gray), Lady Millais", 1851. Courtesy of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts

The idea of collaboration has been one of the most creative catalysts for modern art. A collaborative ideal first emerged from the 19th-century cult of the Middle Ages, and the belief that medieval artisans co-operated with each other (as well as with God) to produce the great cathedrals. The socialised anonymity of the medieval artisan was contrasted with the soulless, atomised individualism of the modern “artist-genius”. These theories stimulated the formation of many avant-garde groups, from the Arts and Crafts Movement to the Bauhaus and beyond: during the development of cubism, Picasso and Braque dressed down in workmen’s overalls, and painted indistinguishable, unsigned pictures. Picasso later stressed the importance of team work and anonymity.

That said, these groups and double-acts were far from being conventional mirrors of society. They tended to be brotherhoods (Picasso joked that Braque was his wife), and the collaborative aspects were often somewhat fetishistic or attenuated. Underpinning the doctrine of “truth to materials”, espoused by Henry Moore and many others, was the idea that you “collaborated” with the material, respecting its “natural” proclivities. In other words, the inspiration came as much from the material as from the artist. For Duchamp, art was a collaborative act between the artist, artefact and spectators, whose interpretation and presence completed the work.

Feminism has recently added a newish component to the collaborative ideal: the wife, lover or model as muse and co-author. More often than not (as in the case of Camille Claudel, the sculptress mistress of Rodin), the female “partner” is claimed to be—pace Shelley—an “unacknowledged legislator” of the artist’s world. One of the most striking consequences of this phenomenon is the way in which Christo and Claes Oldenburg have latterly given their project-manager wives equal billing. More mis­chiev­ously, Patrick Brill trades under the name of Bob and Rob­erta Smith, and before their acri­monious divorce, Jeff Koons dubbed Cicciolina “one of the greatest artists in the world”.

The latest to pursue this line is American clinical psychologist and art historian Mary Mathews Gedo, who claims in Monet and his Muse that Camille Doncieux, Monet’s model and first wife, “assumed the status of his first artistic partner”. As Camille died in 1879, about 13 years after she first sat for the artist, and as Monet’s second wife had him destroy all Camille’s papers and effects, proving this is a tall order, but psychoanalysis has rarely been unduly concerned by lack of evidence. Any portrait or figure painting requires the collaboration of the sitter or model, but it is quite another thing to claim them as muse—especially when the artist is not primarily considered a figure painter, and when his figures are not massively individualised.

In Monet’s mural-scaled Luncheon on the Grass, 1865-66, Camille “bears mute testimony to the forceful impact of Camille’s continuous presence on the quality of her lover’s artistic production”. So why then did Monet fail to complete the picture, deeming it a failure, and then cut it up, transforming it into what Gedo now calls “the most mutilated of the children of his fancy”? Camille remains mute throughout, a blank screen for Gedo’s increasingly colourful projections. Meanwhile Monet is prey to oedipal rivalries and narcissism; his blindness “originated in his psyche”; he exploits the “crybaby technique” when he sees his parents (has Gedo been subconsciously influenced by the American pronunciation of the artist’s name—moan-ay?).

At the outset Gedo briefly notes that the central characters of Zola’s novel L’Oeuvre, 1886, are based on Monet and Camille. If this were the case—and Cézanne is the most likely inspiration for the doomed painter who repeatedly slashes, and finally destroys his masterpiece—it would undermine her argument, for the painter in the novel loves the nude woman depicted in his picture more than his wife. His human wife is duly horrified when she finds out she means nothing to him. This is a brutal reworking of the Pygmalion myth. Zola was satirising the idea, popularised in Cesare Lombroso’s Genius and Madness, 1863, that many great men and women remain unmarried and/or childless, with their work being their one true love and offspring. Some artists, Rodin included, believed ejaculation entailed a loss of creative energy: Vasari had credited Raphael’s premature death and decline to excessive love-making.

John Ruskin is one of the great childless “bachelors”, barely laying a finger on the gorgeous Effie from their marriage in 1848 to their divorce in 1854 on the grounds the marriage had never been consummated. On their Venetian honeymoon, Ruskin notoriously preferred clambering over medieval buildings and poring over books and papers to mapping the body of his new wife. Suzanne Fagence Cooper retreads this well-worn terrain with her biography of Effie, The Model Wife: the Passionate Lives of Effie Gray, Ruskin and Millais. For the most part it is efficiently done, even if there are too many Mills & Boon moments (“The answer lies hidden behind the curtains drawn tight around her canopied bed”; “Effie held her breath as her maid laced her corsets a little tighter”).

Cooper has been given access to Effie’s family photographs, and to letters from the time of her marriage to Millais, but these tend to confirm the existing picture of social whirl and climbing as Millais sold out and became a society portraitist. When Effie is not being a hostess and mother, she researches details of historical costumes and runs them up, thus becoming “an essential part of the production process”. Although Cooper has previously written about the pre-Raphaelites, her concern here is primarily with social history. She claims that Effie’s bold repudiation of Ruskin, and her success in gaining an annulment, helped to “reshape Victorian femininity”. This thesis ends with a whimper rather than a bang, however, as Effie has no time for the late Victorian “new woman”, attending university astride a bicycle and forging a professional career.

Cooper regrets that Ruskin was such a negligent husband, but can posterity? “Sadly,” she writes, “he was so bound up with the big picture [writing The Stones of Venice], he failed to see what was needed on a domestic scale.” True enough, but would he have written so well or so much through a post-coital haze? He and Millais are textbook demonstrations of Lombroso’s theories. The Effie-resistant Ruskin produced a succession of towering masterpieces, while the Effie-ravishing Millais became a vapid face-painter. Aspiring geniuses of both sexes still have a clear choice.

James Hall

Art critic, art historian, and author of The World as Sculpture, two books on Michelangelo and, most recently, The Sinister Side: How Left-Right Symbolism Shaped Western Art (OUP)


Monet and his Muse: Camille Monet in the Artist’s Life

Mary Mathews Gedo, Chicago University Press, 272 pp, $55 (hb)

The Model Wife: the Passionate Lives of Effie Gray, Ruskin and Millais

Suzanne Fagence Cooper, Duckworth, 312 pp, £25 (hb)

Athena Tennis Girl makes cheeky comeback – in the name of art

Mark Brown, arts correspondent guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 22 March 2011 17.35 GMT larger | smaller Article history

Fiona Walker, the woman in the famous Athena poster, poses with an original copy to launch the Court on Canvas exhibition. Photograph: Stefan Rousseau/PA As an 18-year-old girl in the long hot summer of 1976

Fiona Walker, then Butler, cheerfully allowed her boyfriend, Martin Elliott, to photograph her knickerless, walking towards a tennis net. Elliott sold the image to Athena, and up it speedily went on the bedroom walls of boys everywhere, becoming one of the world's biggest-selling posters.

Now, the Athena Tennis Girl poster is to be included in what organisers say is the first exhibition exploring lawn tennis as a subject in fine art.

Walker was not then, nor ever has been, a tennis player. "I don't have the hand-eye co-ordination," she says. Nor has she made a penny from the poster. "I was naive and was paid nothing."

But she has fond memories of the photoshoot – in which she wore her dad's plimsolls – and harbours no embarrassment by the image. "It never ceases to make me smile when I see it. I have no regrets about it," she says.

Elliott – who did do very well out of the image – died last year.

Walker was reunited with the picture when she attended the launch of the exhibition called Court on Canvas. The show is being held this summer at Birmingham's Barber Institute of Fine Arts, less than half a mile from Ampton Road, Edgbaston, where the sport was played for the first time.

The exhibition will include more than 40 works by painters including LS Lowry, Stanley Spencer, Paul Nash, David Hockney and Eric Ravilious.

It will be curated by the Barber's director, Ann Sumner, a keen tennis player and fan. So keen, she recalls: "I was giving birth to my youngest daughter during the Steffi Graf Wimbledon final of 1991 and was very annoyed they didn't have a television available."

She hopes the show will be fun and illuminating but it also has a serious intent, not least as social history helping to chronicle the emancipation of women and the breakdown of class structures.

Lawn tennis was one of the first sports in which women could participate freely, but in the early works women are shown wearing heels, absurdly long dresses and hats as they serve and return. It was only in the 1930s that the legs came out.

"There are stunning images in the exhibition, and I think people will be amazed by their breadth," said Sumner.

The show includes art from the 1870s until the present day, with something of a gap from the second world war until the 1970s, during which period British interest in tennis declined.

The sexiness of lawn tennis will also be seen in a work going on public display for the first time, a portrait of 1930s Wimbledon finalist Bunny Austin – the man who controversially wore shorts – in which he is painted shirtless.

A parallel exhibition featuring memorabilia, photographs and outfits will chart the early history of the game created by two pals, Harry Gem and Jean Batista Augurio Perera.

• Court on Canvas: Tennis in Art is at the Barber Institute of Fine Art, Birmingham, from 27 May to 18 September.

Google patenta sus 'doodles'

La Oficina de Patentes y Marcas Registradas de EEUU (USPTO) ha aprobado la solicitud de Google para patentar sus logotipos personalizados que conmemoran efemérides, popularmente conocidos como 'doodles'.

La certificación llegó casi una década después de que la compañía pidiera a USPTO que reconociera como propio de Google lo que la empresa denominó "sistemas y métodos para tentar a los usuarios para que accedan a la página web".

El cofundador de Google, Sergey Brin, figuró como único creador de los 'doodles' en la petición que data del 30 de abril de 2001.

La concesión de esa patente ya ha sido calificada como de "absurda" por analistas como Matt Rosoff de Business Insider que apuntó que los 'doodles' según están descritos en la patente no tienen "nada de especial".

"No es como que Google tiene una forma única e increíble de cambiar su logo a diario", comentó Rosoff, mientras que desde Engadget se preguntan "qué opinarán otras compañías que también se divierten con sus logos de vez en cuando".

Es habitual que Google altere su logotipo en la página principal de su buscador para evocar algunas fechas señaladas como Halloween, el año nuevo chino o la llegada de la primavera, así como eventos deportivos como los Juegos Olímpicos o el Mundial de Fútbol.

"El Big Bang es parecido a un agujero negro pero al revés"

ALICIA RIVERA - Madrid - 23/03/2011

Kip Thorne es uno de los mayores expertos del mundo en agujeros negros, esos objetos del universo tan populares seguramente por su violencia extrema, porque engullen para siempre cualquier cosa que se acerque demasiado, incluida la luz. A Thorne también le gustan, y tiene sus motivos: "Me fascinan porque en ellos muchas leyes de la física que conocemos fallan, y así podemos aprender cosas nuevas de la naturaleza: para mí, un agujero negro es un laboratorio donde estudiar cómo se comporta el espacio". Le interesan, dice, las condiciones extremas del cosmos y, sobre todo, el inicio mismo del universo: si un agujero negro es una singularidad donde la gravedad más intensa curva infinitamente el espacio-tiempo formando el pozo definitivo del que nada puede salir, el Big Bang es lo contrario, una singularidad de la que todo emerge.

Thorne, de 70 años, estadounidense, físico teórico de Caltech (California), ha estado en Madrid para impartir una conferencia sobre El universo curvo, del ciclo Astrofísica y Cosmología de la Fundación BBVA. Amigo y colega de Stephen Hawking, con el que hace apuestas sobre agujeros negros y las gana, Thorne está metido también en un proyecto cinematográfico, una película en la que no faltarán los agujeros y los exóticos, y solo teóricos, agujeros de gusano.

Pregunta. ¿Entienden los físicos los agujeros negros a fondo?

Respuesta. Lo entendemos bien cuando se trata de un agujero negro estático, en equilibro, gracias a la relatividad de Einstein. Pero no entendemos tan bien los agujeros negros en situaciones dinámicas, es decir, cuando colisionan, cuando rotan a gran velocidad... Los estudiamos con simulaciones y esperamos conocerlos mejor con los detectores de ondas gravitacionales, como el Ligo [que funciona ya en EE UU, en su fase preliminar].

P. ¿Son todos iguales o hay agujeros negros de varios tipos?

R. Los hay de tamaños diferentes. Un agujero negro en equilibrio, en tanto que sea suficientemente grande para ser de tipo clásico, es un objeto simple en que todas sus propiedades (como forma y tamaño) están determinadas por su masa y su rotación y se pueden calcular con la teoría de Einstein. Pero en los agujeros negros muy pequeños, como los que podrían hacerse en un acelerador de partículas, intervienen las leyes de la física cuántica y pueden tener propiedades muy diferentes que solo ahora empezamos a comprender.

P. Pero no se pueden observar directamente.

R. Las simulaciones de ordenador y los telescopios nos permiten conocer muchas cosas del papel de los agujeros negros en el universo, pero las observaciones directas solo llegarán con los detectores de ondas gravitacionales [vibraciones del espacio-tiempo generadas en fenómenos como las colisiones de agujeros negros y que se propagan por el espacio].

P. ¿También los agujeros de gusano?

R. Es que los agujeros de gusano probablemente no existen, son una idea teórica, pero no hay nada en la naturaleza, que sepamos, que forme un agujero de gusano, mientras que conocemos bien procesos que forman agujeros negros, como una estrella masiva que se agota y se encoge hasta formar uno. Además, son objetos diferentes: un agujero negro es una singularidad donde todo se destruye, mientras que en un agujero de gusano no. De alguna manera, en teoría, un agujero de gusano conecta dos puntos del hiperespacio... por ejemplo, este lugar, en Madrid, estaría conectado con mi casa, en Pasadena.

P. Sería un medio de transporte óptimo.

R. Sí, pero no tenemos motivos para pensar que se forman en la naturaleza, claro que tampoco hay ninguna ley que lo prohíba. Tal vez una civilización mucho más avanzada podría construirlos artificialmente.

P. ¿Cuál es el reto cosmológico que más le interesa?

R. Lo más emocionante es el nacimiento mismo del universo y los detectores de ondas gravitacionales, en los próximos cinco o diez años, pueden ayudarnos a estudiarlo.

P. ¿Quiere decir el auténtico momento cero?

R. Sí. Las ondas gravitacionales nos pueden dar una imagen del inicio mismo. La teoría estándar dice que el Big Bang es una fluctuación de vacío e inmediatamente después una fase de inflación que amplifica el proceso. Depende de los detalles, pero se puede conservar información del momento inicial. Se está pensando construir un detector de ondas gravitacionales avanzado, el Big Bang Observatory, para ver directamente las ondas gravitatorias del nacimiento del universo y estudiar sus propiedades.

P. ¿Tiene esto relación con los agujeros negros?

R. En cierto sentido la singularidad del interior del agujero negro es como la singularidad del inicio del universo, pero con el tiempo invertido: en el Big Bang todo emerge de la singularidad, mientras el agujero negro todo lo engulle. Es como dar la vuelta al tiempo de la singularidad.

P. Y nada de antes del Big Bang.

R. Bueno... eso nos gustaría saber. Hay teorías muy especulativas sobre si se conservaría información de antes del Big Bang a pesar de la singularidad inicial. Tal vez en 20 o 30 años podamos abordar este asunto.

P. Creo que fue Stephen Hawking quien dijo que plantearse el antes del Big Bang es tan absurdo como preguntar qué hay al norte del Polo Norte.

R. Sí. Stephen sostiene una idea del inicio del universo denominada sin fronteras. Es algo complicado: no define el inicio en función de espacio-tiempo sino solo de espacio y en ese contexto no tiene sentido el antes del Big Bang, pero no sabemos si esa idea es correcta o no.

P. Usted ha hecho apuestas con Hawking y las ha ganado.

R. Sí, pero Stephen es un auténtico líder mundial en agujeros negros. La primera apuesta fue en los años setenta acerca de si un objeto muy oscuro del universo podría ser un agujero negro y emitir en rayos X. El objeto resultó no ser realmente un agujero negro. Luego apostamos si la naturaleza permite que exista una singularidad desnuda, que sea observable desde fuera. Yo aposté que sí, mientras que la mayoría de los cosmólogos sostiene que una singularidad está siempre escondida dentro de un agujero negro, excepto la del Big Bang. Gané la apuesta.

P. Y ahora, además, está metido en una película.

R. Sí, soy coautor, junto con otras tres personas. Es una historia de ciencia ficción con agujeros negros, agujeros de gusano, estrellas de neutrones... Y no, no puedo decirle de qué trata, pero espero que esté lista en tres años. Además, quiero hacer una presentación adjunta a la película, explicando la ciencia que subyace. Mi objetivo es atraer a los jóvenes brillantes hacia la ciencia.

El xenófobo que divide a Alemania

Lleva vendidos 1.200.000 ejemplares. Thilo Sarrazin es el autor del libro donde se sostiene que los inmigrantes musulmanes son menos inteligentes y se integran peor, pero tienen más hijos y esto lleva a Alemania hacia la destrucción. Tesis conflictivas en un país con pasado nazi. "Me acusan de racista, pero las cuestiones que planteo mueven al 60% de la población", afirma
LAURA LUCCHINI 20/03/2011

Hoy día es posible hacerse rico y famoso en Europa por sostener que los musulmanes son "el corazón de todos los problemas" y que los inmigrantes de las zonas pobres del mundo, con su alta fertilidad, amenazan con bajar el nivel medio de inteligencia de un país tan culto y desarrollado como Alemania. Esto es precisamente lo que ha ocurrido con Thilo Sarrazin, de 66 años, exdirectivo del Bundesbank y miembro del Partido Socialdemócrata Alemán (SPD), a causa de su libro Deutschland schafft sich ab (algo así como "Alemania se destruye"), que se ha convertido en un caso editorial sin precedentes en su país.

En un primer momento, muchos periodistas e intelectuales alemanes, llamados a expresarse acerca del libro, liquidaron sus tesis por ser "delirantes" y lo archivaron como una provocación más. Pese a ello, el texto se ha convertido en el mayor superventas del país y en el libro de ensayo en lengua alemana más exitoso de las últimas décadas. Seis meses después de su lanzamiento se han vendido 1.200.000 ejemplares y ha sido objeto de un debate sin precedentes.

Se trata de un denso escrito plagado de estadísticas, articulado en dos líneas tan simples como xenófobas: por un lado, designa a los inmigrantes turcos y musulmanes en general como "el corazón del problema", debido a su escasa integración y su dependencia masiva de las ayudas sociales. Por otro, maneja teorías de "inteligencia genética" para sostener que la mayor fertilidad de las clases sociales bajas e incultas, en particular de inmigrantes musulmanes, rebajará el nivel medio de inteligencia del país. Alemania "se destruye", si no cambia urgentemente las políticas de inmigración, según Sarrazin.

Debido a la controversia, el autor se vio obligado a dimitir de su puesto de directivo en el Bundesbank, el banco central. La decisión recibió el apoyo de la canciller Angela Merkel y del presidente de la República Federal, Christian Wulff, quienes consideraron "ofensivas e inaceptables" sus declaraciones acerca de que "los judíos y los vascos tienen determinados genes que los diferencian" del resto de la humanidad, palabras que recordaron a muchos las teorías nazis. Estas frases no figuran en el libro, pero su autor las pronunció en la conferencia de prensa que sirvió para presentar la obra. El escándalo se convirtió en la causa directa de que tanto el Bundesbank como el SPD iniciaran la toma de medidas contra él.

Sarrazin ya era famoso por anteriores polémicas. Cuando fue senador y ministro de Finanzas de la ciudad de Berlín, aconsejó a los que pedían aumentos del subsidio de desempleo que se pusieran un jersey más para ahorrar en calefacción. Y en vísperas de las celebraciones del 20º aniversario de la caída del Muro, en septiembre de 2009, declaró a la revista Lettre Internacional: "La integración requiere un esfuerzo por parte de quienes se tienen que integrar. Yo no respeto a quien no quiera hacer este esfuerzo. No tengo por qué reconocer a quienes viven de las ayudas públicas, pero niegan la autoridad del Estado que las otorga, no educan a sus hijos y producen constantemente más niñas con velo. Esto vale para el 70% de la población turca y el 90% de la población árabe en Berlín".

El Bundesbank consiguió quitarse el problema de encima, pero no logró lo mismo el Partido Socialdemócrata Alemán, formación a la que pertenece Sarrazin desde hace décadas. A iniciativa de uno de sus dirigentes, Signar Gabriel, intentó expulsarle abriéndole dos expedientes; en el primero resultó absuelto de la acusación de racismo, mientras que el segundo expediente aún sigue abierto. Así que, de momento, Sarrazin es todavía miembro del SPD.

El hombre que ha incendiado a Alemania vive en Neue Westend, en Berlín Oeste. Se trata de un barrio de casas burguesas y ordenados jardines por donde pasean, lejos de los inmigrantes, mujeres enjoyadas acompañadas por perros recién salidos del peluquero. Thilo Sarrazin abre la puerta personalmente, ataviado con pantalones deportivos, un jersey y un par de pantuflas a cuadros. Invita a tomar asiento en un salón que aloja una gran biblioteca y reconoce que su vida ha cambiado desde que escribió su libro.

"Ahora soy muy conocido, viajo mucho, doy muchas conferencias, tengo muchas entrevistas. Es la vida de un escritor famoso", cuenta, mientras se frota los ojos detrás de sus gafas. Su tarea, que parece tomarse como una misión, consiste en explicar por qué Alemania y Europa en general se destruyen: "Alemania tiene desde hace 40 años una tasa de nacimiento de 1,4 niños por mujer; esto significa que la población alemana se hace más pequeña con cada generación; en España, aunque con años de retraso, también tienen el mismo problema con los nacimientos. Al mismo tiempo, la natalidad se distribuye en Alemania de manera irregular en los distintos niveles de educación. Esto significa que los estratos sociales menos instruidos obtienen un mayor promedio de nacimientos, y por esta razón el potencial de Alemania se anula aún más rápidamente que la población. En tercer lugar, el tipo de inmigración que tenemos no es el adecuado para resolver los problemas que nos afectan. Ahora solo necesitamos trabajadores cualificados. Si la tasa de nacimientos de los inmigrantes incultos, procedentes de Turquía y África, sigue constantemente más alta, en unas pocas generaciones Alemania tendrá una mayoría de población turca, árabe, africana y musulmana".

Pregunta. Cuando uno mira hacia Alemania, no se aprecia por ningún lado que la situación sea tan dramática...

Respuesta. La gente que tomaba copas en el bar del Titanic tampoco se daba cuenta de nada: la orquesta tocaba, todo el mundo estaba bien, y en las primeras horas nadie advirtió el problema. A pesar de eso, estaban condenados a muerte porque el agua seguía entrando en la nave. El tema es que lo que observamos hoy no dice absolutamente nada, porque falta perspectiva. Yo quería analizar estos temas y ver cómo evolucionaba la discusión.

De los siete millones y medio de extranjeros que viven legalmente en Alemania, un país de 82 millones de habitantes, tres millones son de origen turco, y 280.000, árabe. Son muchos los que consideran que el libro de Sarrazin y su éxito son "una reacción histérica frente a los cambios actuales en la República Federal", como escribió Arno Widmann, editorialista del Frankfuhrter Rundschau. Christian Staas, del semanal Die Zeit, condenó su "proyecto eugenésico". Fue criticado, asimismo, tanto por representantes de la comunidad musulmana como judía. Otros, como el excanciller Helmut Schmidt, le reconocieron, sin embargo, haber roto un tabú. Además, Schmidt se dijo contrario a su exclusión del partido, no sin criticar al exbanquero: "Encuentro absolutamente equivocado el hecho de mezclar las tradiciones civilizadoras de otros pueblos con la herencia genética".

Curiosamente, según una encuesta realizada por el diario sensacionalista Bild, el 18% de la población votaría a Sarrazin si se presentara a elecciones.

"La controversia se debe a que mi análisis es incómodo, y a la política no le gusta mirar de frente las verdades incómodas", contraataca Sarrazin, eligiendo con calma sus palabras. "Yo dije que personas de diferentes culturas se portan de manera diferente, y esta diferencia no es igual para todos los grupos de inmigrantes. De esta manera, rompí un tabú político que dice: todos los hombres son iguales, y ya que esas personas están aquí, pueden ser todas consideradas como alemanas de nacimiento".

P. ¿Por qué define usted a unos determinados grupos de inmigrantes como "el corazón del problema"?

R. La integración se puede medir a través de tres indicadores: el éxito de los jóvenes en el mercado laboral alemán, los resultados en el ámbito de la educación y la frecuencia con la que los inmigrantes recurren a las ayudas estatales. Bajo estos indicadores, se observa que tanto la integración de la inmigración procedente del este de Europa como también la de Extremo Oriente no representan ningún problema. Los inmigrantes en este caso tienen trabajo, se integran en el sistema y recurren menos a las ayudas sociales. Todos esos indicadores, analizados en el contexto de los inmigrantes que proceden de países musulmanes, ofrecen como resultado, por término medio, los datos contrarios.

P. Por un lado, la indicación de un grupo étnico-religioso como "el corazón del problema"; por otro, sus teorías de inteligencia genética. ¿No debería uno tener cuidado con estos temas, sobre todo en Alemania a causa de su pasado nazi?

R. Una cosa no tiene nada que ver con la otra. El conocido psicólogo americano Martin P. Seligman escribió en su libro What you can change and what you can't que las importantes investigaciones de los nazis en materia de genética fueron injustamente desacreditadas, debido solo a los horrores perpetrados por el régimen nazi. Esto significa que la pregunta del pasado nazi no tiene nada que ver con los hechos del mundo de hoy.

Si se le pregunta a Sarrazin por las acusaciones de racismo, ya que designa a un grupo étnico como causa de la posible destrucción de Alemania, él disiente con la cabeza y, mirando hacia abajo, contesta nervioso: "No hace falta que lo vuelva a repetir. La acusación de que soy racista es absurda y no se me puede hacer". Y añade: "Por lo que se refiere a los musulmanes, yo digo que su falta de integración se debe a su cultura. Con respecto a su inteligencia media, yo no digo nada en mi libro".

P. El partido neonazi NPD distribuyó clandestinamente ejemplares digitales de su libro entre los miembros del partido...

R. La editorial ya está tomando medidas y eso no tiene nada que ver con nosotros.

P. Pero sus teorías apoyan ideales políticos extremistas.

R. La pregunta es si el libro describe factores importantes y verdaderos. No se trata de ver quién tiene una opinión particular sobre él. El hecho de que el partido NPD apoye algunos de los pasajes del libro se ha utilizado para difamarme.

A pesar de las condenas iniciales, la polémica causada por la idea de que "Alemania se destruye" ha producido algunos cambios sustanciales en el tono de la política alemana. Pocos meses después de la publicación del libro, y en pleno debate acerca de estas tesis, la canciller Angela Merkel dio por fracasado el multiculturalismo, tras haber defendido este modelo durante años. "Nosotros como Unión estamos a favor de la cultura alemana como guía y en contra del multiculturalismo. El multiculturalismo ha muerto", afirmó Merkel en octubre pasado frente a los jóvenes de su partido, tras argumentar que es necesario exigir más a los inmigrantes. Desde entonces han empezado a escucharse con más frecuencia frases de discriminación contra el islam. "El islam no pertenece a Alemania", repitió Horst Horst Seehofer, líder del partido socialcristiano bávaro, aliado político de la canciller. "No hay nada en la historia que demuestre que el islam pertenece a Alemania", comentó la semana pasada el recientemente nombrado ministro del Interior, Hans Peter Friedrich, también socialcristiano.

P. ¿Cree que el éxito de su libro ha influido en decisiones políticas posteriores?

R. No lo sé todavía. Pero los políticos han tenido que reconocer que las cuestiones planteadas por mi libro mueven al 60% de la población. No sé, sin embargo, si declaraciones como la de "el multiculturalismo ha fracasado" han sido oportunistas.

Representantes musulmanes en Alemania, por otra parte, denuncian constantemente que se sienten víctimas de discriminación en una disputa que les parece absurda y descaradamente parcial. La polémica está servida y se encamina, con mucha claridad, hacia una creciente tensión social.

Memory may be built with standard building blocks

13:47 17 March 2011 by Ferris Jabr


Many neuroscientists would agree that the human brain is like Silly Putty, that incredibly malleable children's plaything, in that learning can constantly reshape the ways in which neurons connect with one another.

But Henry Markram at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne thinks the brain may be more like another children's toy: Lego bricks.

A Lego set can be used to build all kinds of structures, but you cannot change the bricks themselves. Similarly, our brains may create new memories by rearranging discrete and fundamental building blocks of knowledge, Markram says.

"We have repeatedly observed how synapses change in response to stimulation and experience," he says, "but the question we were trying to answer was whether this is happening on top of a clean slate or on top of some kind of prearranged organisation."

Markram and his team devised a method of listening to the electrical activity in individual brain cells simultaneously using very fine needles threaded with wire. In over 200 experiments with brain tissue from two-week-old rats, the researchers recorded chatter in groups of 12 neurons, exciting one cell at a time and waiting for responses in the others, in order to map the connections between them.

Common neighbours
If the brain is like putty and can be flexibly moulded by experience, then any one neuron in the group should have an equal probability of being connected to any other neuron, Markram says. But that is not what he found. Instead, Markram's analysis revealed what he calls the "common-neighbour rule": the chance that any two neurons are linked, and the strength of the bridge between them, is directly proportional to number of neighbours they share.

The researchers constructed a computer simulation of 2000 neurons and applied the rule to determine how the virtual brain cells would hook up. When they used the simulation to replicate their experiments on rat brains, they got almost exactly the same results.

They also found that the common-neighbour rule created functional groups of 40 to 50 neurons, which Markram thinks are the "Lego blocks" of memory.

"We're all given the same building blocks, but it's how they are connected that matters," he says. "We think of them as elementary processing units. Because of these units, we can all perceive the same things but have unique memories."

Placeholders for knowledge
Markram says this is the first experimental evidence that basic blocks of knowledge are built into the brain's neuronal architecture. He also says it is possible that these Lego blocks act as placeholders or vessels for knowledge that will be gained throughout life.

"These are the smallest units of the brain that can hold knowledge," he says. "What we need to know now is what kind of knowledge they contain.

Journal reference: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1016051108

Abu Dhabi Guggenheim Faces Protest

A model of Frank Ghery's planned Guggenheim Abu Dhabi.
By NICOLAI OUROUSSOFF
Published: March 16, 2011, New York Times

A group of more than 130 artists, including many prominent figures in the Middle Eastern art world, says it will boycott the $800 million Guggenheim museum being built in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, unless conditions for the foreign laborers at the site are improved.

The new Guggenheim, designed by Frank Gehry, is one of the highest-profile construction projects in the Middle East. It is to be the centerpiece of a sprawling development called Saadiyat Island that includes a half-billion-dollar branch of the Louvre Museum designed by Jean Nouvel, a national museum designed by Norman Foster, luxury resorts, golf clubs, marinas and acres of private villas.

The artists’ group says it is responding to a range of abuses that have been reported on the island, including the failure of contractors to repay recruitment fees — which can lead to crippling debt for laborers — hazardous working conditions and the arbitrary withholding of wages. Such problems are not uncommon in a region where almost all low-skilled jobs are performed by foreign workers with few legal rights.

“Artists should not be asked to exhibit their work in buildings built on the backs of exploited workers,” Walid Raad, a Lebanese-born New York artist who is one of the boycott’s organizers, said in a statement. “Those working with bricks and mortar deserve the same kind of respect as those working with cameras and brushes.”

The artists say that until their demands are met, they will refuse to participate in museum events or to sell their works to the museum.

The threatened boycott comes at a particular tricky time for the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation and Museum in New York, which is trying to build a collection virtually from scratch to fill tens of thousands of square feet of gallery space before the Abu Dhabi museum’s scheduled opening in 2015. A large part of the museum is intended to focus on contemporary Middle Eastern art, and if well-known artists in the group like Shirin Neshat, Mona Hatoum, Akram Zaatari, Yto Barrada and Kader Attia refuse to be involved, it could open with an embarrassingly thin Middle Eastern collection.

Speaking by phone from Dubai, where he is attending an art fair, Richard Armstrong, the director of the Guggenheim Foundation and Museum, said, “I’ve been to the workers’ village, and the accommodations in themselves are peerless.” He was referring to a complex on Saadiyat housing the majority of the island’s roughly 15,300 laborers.

He added that the Tourism Development and Investment Company, the government-run agency that is developing the site and the rest of the island, recently announced that it would appoint a monitor to oversee labor practices there. “We have a good relationship with T.D.I.C. and are working together in good faith on these issues,” he said.

The first concerns over labor conditions at Saadiyat Island were raised in a report by Human Rights Watch, an advocacy group, in 2009. It said that laborers hoping to work in the Emirates pay fees to recruiters in their home countries of up to several thousand dollars, which can take years to pay back and put them in serious debt before they even start their jobs. Once they arrive, the report said, contractors have complete control over their welfare, often taking their passports and leaving them nowhere to turn when wages go unpaid. Some workers on Saadiyat said that companies threatened to fine them if they tried to quit.

In June 2010 Mr. Raad and Emily Jacir, a Palestinian artist who lives part time in New York, approached Mr. Armstrong and Nancy Spector, the museum’s chief curator, to discuss conditions on Saadiyat Island. During a second meeting, the artists asked the Guggenheim to pressure the government to force employers to reimburse workers for recruitment fees and to appoint an independent monitor to ensure that international labor standards would be met during the museum’s construction.

Mr. Armstrong said that the Guggenheim has been working with the development agency to address these issues, and last week the agency announced that it was strengthening regulations to make contractors reimburse recruitment fees, and that it was appointing an outside monitor to address workers’ complaints.

But Human Rights Watch, which has been cooperating with the artists’ group, said that the monitor would only track compliance with Emirates law and the agency’s employment practices policy, which don’t meet stricter international labor and human rights standards.

“They’re paying lip service to some of the issues,” Mr. Raad said by phone from the Emirates. “But it’s been more ceremonial than actual.”

The artists said they had to act now because it is a moment when they still had leverage.

“They are just beginning construction on the museum and trying to build a collection at the same time,” Mr. Raad said. “They need the artists’ participation.”

Even a talent like Titian couldn’t resist copying

Then as now, the real issue concerned the quality of the work of art that emerged, which is why we variously refer to such derivations as plagiarism or homage
By David Eskerdjian | From issue 222, March 2011
Published online 9 Mar 11 (Opinion)

Fair copy: Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas, about 1575, and Giulio Romano’s drawing, a possible source

Alleged copyright infringements abound today (see related story), but neither the practice of artistic borrowing nor its potential legal ramifications are a novelty. In the first decade of the 16th century, the most important Italian printmaker of the day, Marcantonio Raimondi, produced what were to all intents and purposes engraved counterfeits of woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer, and in his Lives of the Artists, of 1568, Vasari alleges that when Dürer complained to the Venetian senate “he got nothing but the sentence that Marcantonio could no longer add the name or monogram of Albrecht to his works”.

A few years later, in the colophon to the 1511 edition of his Life of the Virgin, Dürer railed against “envious thieves of the work and invention of others”, and referred to the privilege he had received from the Emperor Maximilian.

Dürer’s objection inhabits a kind of no man’s land, because it is not clear whether what most infuriated him was the rape of his technical innovation or of his artistic invention, but more generally artists must have taken less comprehensive borrowings on the chin. It was a routine aspect of their training to copy the works of their great precursors—not least those of antiquity—and of their contemporaries. Even Dürer himself engaged in such practices. In consequence, they can hardly have been surprised if every now and then they themselves fell victim to what has been dubbed the sincerest form of flattery.

It was inevitably a short step from such learning exercises to the insertion of the poses of individual figures into new compositions. As a rule, Vasari does not single out these borrowings, but that does not mean he was unaware of them, not least since he too would have been obliged to plead guilty to such lifting. Moreover, in discussing Niccolò dell’Abate’s high altarpiece for the church of San Pietro in Modena (a painting which was destroyed in Dresden during the second world war, but whose appearance is known from photographs), he states that it represented “the beheading of St Peter and St Paul, imitating in the soldier who is cutting off their heads a similar figure by the hand of Antonio da Correggio, much renowned, which is in San Giovanni Evangelista at Parma”.

Another common Renaissance procedure was to commission what were in effect replicas of existing works of art, in which the dependence was contractually stipulated by a clause employing the formulation “modo et forma” (in the manner and the form). In the event, artists often preferred to create variants on their models, but the authors of the prototypes plainly had no control over the subsequent fates of their compositions.

In truth, then as now, the real issue concerned the quality of the work of art that emerged, which is why we variously refer to such derivations as plagiarism (boo!) or homage (hoorah!). The other point about homages is the extent to which they were meant to be recognised by their audience—it is hard to imagine artists with superb visual memories hoping to conceal borrowings from their peers, for all that some of them have taken centuries to be spotted by mere art historians.

A more interesting question is whether it is necessary for the prototype to be a work of distinction in its own right. As a rule, artists tended to borrow from what they took to be the major achievements of their predecessors, but over time it has not infrequently become apparent that they were actually plundering non-Leonardos, non-Raphaels, non-Michelangelos and so on. Of course, it goes without saying that some of these productions by lesser figures are excellent works of art, but it is hard to doubt that some of their appeal resided in the mystique of the name associated with them.

Perhaps the most remarkable transformation occurs in Titian’s harrowing late canvas of the Flaying of Marsyas in Kromeriz, whose source is either an undistinguished drawing by Giulio Romano or an even more dismal small fresco in the Palazzo Te in Mantua based upon it and executed by a talentless member of his workshop. Here it might be tempting to contend that the great Venetian’s brushwork or his ability to convey emotion make all the difference, and yet there is more to it than that. In an uncanny masterstroke, Titian found something magical in Giulio’s invention, which its far from ungifted creator—who in effect threw it away in a minor part of the decoration of the palace—was unable to see.

The writer is the professor of the history of art and film at the University of Leicester

Street artist Mr Brainwash sued over “copied” image

Photographer goes to court over image of rap band; more cases expected as “underground” art becomes ever more mainstream
By Anny Shaw | From issue 222, March 2011
Published online 9 Mar 11 (News)


LOS ANGELES. Street artist Thierry Guetta, better known as Mr Brain­wash, is being sued by a photographer for copyright in­fringement over a well-known image of rap group Run DMC (which we were unfortunately not allowed to reproduce for this article). Law­yers acting for photographer Glen Friedman say Guetta reproduced his 1985 photograph without authorisation and used it in unique works of art, prints and promotional material, including postcards for his 2008 debut exhibition in Los Angeles, “Life Is Beau­tiful”. Friedman’s lawyer, Douglas Linde, says they are entitled to a share of “indirect profits” from the exhibition. Linde is seeking unspecified damages for “damage to [Fried­man’s] business in the form of diversion of trade, loss of income and profits, and a dilution of the value of its rights”.


Guetta, who denies the copyright infringement allegations, is claiming “fair use”, which under US law allows for the limited reproduction of copyrighted works for the purpose of parody or other creative ends.


Copyright disputes have, until now, had little impact on the relatively new phenomenon of street art, however, the appropriation of pre-existing images has been a thorny issue in the wider art world for decades.


Jeff Koons, no stranger to copyright litigation having been successfully sued three times for copying other peoples’ work, recently threatened San Francisco gallery Park Life and Canadian company Imm-Living with legal action for allegedly copying his metallic balloon dog sculptures and selling them as $30 plastic bookends. Koons backed down last month after lawyers representing Park Life called for a judgement on the matter and filed a legal document which began: “As virtually any clown can attest, no one owns the idea of making a balloon dog, and the shape created by twisting a balloon into a dog-like form is part of the public domain.”


Koons’ large-scale metallic sculptures typically sell for upwards of $20m; with such sums on the line it is little surprise that perceived copyright infringements attract legal disputes. And as street art moves into the mainstream and works begin to attract hefty price tags—Banksy can command prices of up to £300,000 for a painting—the use of popular imagery by street artists is being called into question. Linde says it is likely more copyright infringement cases will be brought against street artists. “There should be more cases like [Friedman’s],” he says. “It definitely will go that way because of all the money [street artists] are making.”


Pop art, too, has seen its fair share of litigation. Its cut and paste culture and a reliance on photography and mass media imagery frequently exposed pop artists to copyright infringement cases—Warhol was sued by several photographers, including Patricia Caulfield after he used her image in his 1964 “Flowers” series (all disputes were settled out of court), while Robert Rauschenberg agreed to an out-of-court settlement with photographer Morton Beebe after a case was brought against him over his 1974 work, Pull.


While street art’s predisposition towards copying, sampling and riffing on pre-existing imagery may have an art historical precedent in pop art, its underground status has, until now, largely protected it from litigation. “Most street artists follow in the footsteps of Warhol by taking popular images as the basis of their work,” says street artist Ben Eine, whose work, Twenty-First-Century City, 2008, was presented to President Obama by David Cameron on his first trip to Washington, DC as Prime Minister last summer. “Street art is a culture of taking other works of art; appropriation feeds underground culture,” said Eine.


The ease with which photographs can be copied was seized upon in the mid-1970s by the Pictures Generation—a group of US artists including Robert Longo, Sherrie Levine, Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince—who borrowed from television, films, magazines and popular art forms. Levine in particular became known for her photographs of other photographers’ work, including that of Edward Weston and Walker Evans. Prince, too, turned to other peoples’ photographs for the basis of his work, for example re-photographing Marlboro adverts for his “Cowboy” series.


While cigarette maker Philip Morris never sued Prince over the series (the adverts were out of circulation by the time he started to make the works in 1980), the artist, and his dealer Larry Gagosian, are currently the subject of a copyright infringement case brought against him by photographer Patrick Car­iou, who claims Prince lifted his photographs of Rastafarian culture for a series of paintings entitled “Canal Zone”. The series was exhibited at Gagosian gallery in New York in November 2008, where, according to Gagosian’s court filing, eight of the 22 paintings were sold for between $1.5m and $3m. Prince, who claims his use of Cariou’s photographs are protected by “fair use”, said that the photographs are not “‘strikingly original’ or ‘distinctive’ in nature”, and that his “transformative” uses of the photographs were “done in good faith and reflect established artistic practices”.