Electrician’s “treasure trove” of lost Picasso works sparks legal battle with estate

Via BBC:

A retired electrician in southern France who worked for Pablo Picasso says he has hundreds of previously unknown works by the artist. The treasure trove of 271 pieces includes lithographs, cubist paintings, notebooks and a watercolour and is said to be worth about 60m euros (£50.6m).

Pierre Le Guennec, 71, reportedly says Picasso gave him the works as gifts. But the estate’s administrators have filed a case for alleged illegal receipt of the works of art. According to French newspaper Liberation, the lost Picassos include a watercolour from his Blue Period. Experts say the nine cubist works in Mr Le Guennec’s possession are worth 40m euros alone.

The electrician installed burglar alarm systems at Picasso’s numerous houses in France, including his villa in Cannes, during the three years before the artist died in 1973.

In September, Mr Le Guennec approached the artist’s estate in an attempt to get the canvases authenticated by Picasso’s son, Claude. But Claude Picasso dismissed Mr Le Guennec’s explanation about how he came into possession of the art works. He said his father would never have given so many works to a single person.

“To give away such a large quantity, that’s unheard of. It doesn’t add up,” he told Liberation. “It was a part of his life.”

Once the works were authenticated, the family contacted France’s specialist art police who have reportedly already raided Mr Le Guennec’s home on the Cote d’Azur, confiscating the paintings and interviewing him under caution. The BBC’s Christian Fraser, in Paris, says a multimillion-euro legal battle over the ownership of the paintings will now begin.

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art says Picasso produced more than 20,000 works of art during his long career, but hundreds have been listed as missing – in part because he was so prolific, the AP news agency reports.

Monday Morning Surrealism

Norma Bessouet, St. George, 2009

Oxygen discovered on moon of Saturn, could (but probably doesn’t) indicate life

Via the Guardian:

A spacecraft has tasted oxygen in the atmosphere of another world for the first time while flying low over Saturn’s icy moon, Rhea.

Nasa’s Cassini probe scooped oxygen from the thin atmosphere of the planet’s moon while passing overhead at an altitude of 97km in March this year.

Until now, wisps of oxygen have only been detected on planets and their moons indirectly, using the Hubble space telescope and other major facilities.

Instruments aboard Cassini revealed an extremely thin oxygen and carbon dioxide atmosphere that is sustained by high-energy particles slamming into the moon’s surface and kicking up atoms, molecules and ions.

Astronomers have counted 62 moons orbiting Saturn. At 1500km wide, Rhea is the second largest and is thought to be made almost entirely of ice.

“This really is the first time that we’ve seen oxygen directly in the atmosphere of another world,” said Andrew Coates, at UCL’s Mullard Space Science Laboratory, a co-author of the study published in the journal Science.

“Active, complex chemistry involving oxygen may be quite common throughout the solar system and even our universe,” said team leader Ben Teolis of Southwest Research Institute in San Antonio, Texas. “Such chemistry could be a prerequisite for life. All evidence from Cassini indicates that Rhea is too cold and devoid of the liquid water necessary for life as we know it.”

Monday Morning Surrealism

by Giorgio de Chirico

First planet outside of Milky Way galaxy described

Via The Guardian (for some reason, WordPress doesn’t want to hyperlink, so cit. : http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/nov/18/wandering-star-planet-galaxy):

HIP13044b is the first planet ever detected in the Milky Way that was born outside our galaxy.

Thanks to improvements in telescope technology, astronomers have found evidence for almost 500 extrasolar planets in the past 15 years, heavenly bodies of different sizes orbiting distant stars. But all of those confirmed by scientists have originated within the Milky Way.

The newly discovered planet has a mass at least 1.25 times that of Jupiter and orbits a star called HIP13044, a giant near the end of its life that is part of the “Helmi stream”. This is a group of stars that once belonged to a dwarf galaxy before it was cannibalised by the Milky Way between six and nine billion years ago.

“This discovery is very exciting,” said Rainer Klement of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy (MPIA) and author of a paper published today in Science Express. “For the first time, astronomers have detected a planetary system in a stellar stream of extragalactic origin. Because of the great distances involved, there are no confirmed detections of planets in other galaxies. But this cosmic merger has brought an extragalactic planet within our reach.”

HIP13044 is around 2,000 light years from Earth and appears in the southern constellation Fornax. Astronomers detected the planet by looking out for the small, gravitationally induced movements of its star as the planet orbits. The researchers measured the wobbles using a spectrograph connected to a 2.2-metre telescope at the European Southern Observatory’s La Silla Observatory in Chile.

“This discovery is part of a study where we are systematically searching for exoplanets that orbit stars nearing the end of their lives,” says Johny Setiawan, also from MPIA and a co-author of the Science paper. “This discovery is particularly intriguing when we consider the distant future of our own planetary system, as the Sun is also expected to become a red giant in about five billion years.”

HIP13044b is relatively close to its star, say the scientists, at its closest approach reaching less than 0.055 times the distance between the Earth and the Sun, and taking just over 16 days to complete an orbit. The star itself has already passed the red giant phase, where it would have expanded to several times its original diameter as it ran out of hydrogen fuel – a fate that will befall our own Sun in a few billion years.

“The star is rotating relatively quickly,” said Setiawan. “One explanation is that HIP13044 swallowed its inner planets during the red giant phase, which would make the star spin more quickly.”

He added that there are unanswered questions about how the planet, which orbits a star containing very few chemical elements other than hydrogen and helium, was formed when there was seemingly such a small range of material available. Until now, very few planets have been discovered orbiting stars such as this.

“It is a puzzle for the widely accepted model of planet formation to explain how such a star, which contains hardly any heavy elements at all, could have formed a planet,” said Setiawan. “Planets around stars like this must probably form in a different way.”

The long dark night of the American Catholic’s soul

Though I am not myself Catholic, I am saddened and frustrated today by a development within the Roman church’s American organizational structuring.

Today, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops voted for a new president. This election comes in a time of hardship for the Chruch as great as the economic crisis that marked the 2008 presidential election. Roughly one third of those born Catholic are apostates by the time they reach adulthood; no doubt a large factor in this exodus has been the church’s atrocious handling of the clerical pedophiles and the bishops who shielded them. With this election, the Conference had the opportunity to reshape itself and recussitate its image by chosing a leader who had taken staunch and unequivocal stands against corruption within their ranks, someone embodying the courage and compassion needed to admit the sins of the church’s past.

Instead, they elected New York Archbishop Timothy Michael Dolan.

(above) Timothy M. Dolan

Here is a man whose history of public statements on the crisis is a record of self-pity, auto-victimization, and blame-shifting, a rhetorical fantasy game in which he has attempted to absolve his institution by seizing the laurels of martyrdom. This is barely even a metaphor. In a sermon from March 28 of this year, Dolan, speaking of Pope Benedict XVI, whose long and well-document career of inaction and secrecy in the handling of priestly abuse was then coming under media scrutiny, explicitly compared the pontiff’s embarrassment to Christ’s passion, claiming he was “being daily crowned with thorns by groundless innuendo.”

However, it is not so much what Dolan has said, but what he has remained silent on which casts his appointment in foul light.

In the summer of 2009, Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio, of the neighboring Brooklyn diocese, essentially blackmailed state legislators considering extending the statute of limitations in cases of child rape in NY state. According to the NY Post:

Brooklyn Bishop Nicholas DiMarzio threatened state lawmakers by vowing to close churches in their districts — and blame them for the closures — if they dared support a bill making it easier for people who were sexually assaulted as kids to sue, legislators told The Post.

They said the dark warning came during a “legislative breakfast” at DiMarzio’s Brooklyn residence, as he told the gathering of about 20 state and city politicians that he would retaliate against Albany lawmakers if they backed the Child Victims Act.

The controversial bill — which could be heading for an Assembly floor debate as soon as June 8 — seeks to extend the statute of limitations for lawsuits involving the rape or molesting of youngsters. It could cost the Church hundreds of millions in payouts to victimized parishioners.

Two lawmakers said the bishop brazenly bullied them during the coffee-and-doughnuts gathering at his stately brick residence in Clinton Hill on Oct. 21.

“He said, ‘If it passes, we will close a parish in each of your districts and we will tell your constituents that it was your fault,’ ” said one Assembly member who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“I was shocked,” he said. “I’ve never seen a threat like that made at any lobby meeting.”

A senator who asked not to be identified said: “The hair on the back of my head stood up. In my years of Catholic schooling, we were never taught to be so vindictive, and here’s my bishop saying, ‘I’ll close a church in your district.’ “

A City Council member said: “He brought up this bill, and he went on a tirade about it, saying, ‘We’ll have to close churches, and you’ll be the ones responsible for it. It will be your fault.’

“He basically threatened the room. I was appalled.”

Though Dolan was not implicated himself in the threats, he never publicly criticized his collegue DiMarzio. And, given that other archbishops in other parts of the country, including Dolan’s old stomping-grounds Milwaukee, have opposed similar victims’ protections bills, it seems a reasonable inference that in this case, qui tacet consentit–that Dolan’s silence gives consent. While in New York, Dolan never commented on the bullying tactics of his collegue, or condemned his efforts to keep the current statute in place.

But exactly how ugly Dolan has been in the crisis has yet to be seen. It is very possible he knowingly concealed an old but extravagant evil committed in his Milwaukee diocese. The most horrific revelation of this year’s unholy apocalypse was doubtless the career of Lawrence Murphy. The Milwaukee priest ran St. John’s School for the Deaf, whereat he molested some 200 boys over numerous decades. In 1996, then-archbishop Rembert Weakland, hoping to defrock Murphy, petitioned the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, the Vatican’s primary disciplinary body, then headed by Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI. The Congregation failed to respond to Weakland’s first two letters, but eventually did grant Murphy a reprieve from ecclesiastical investigation and censure when he wrote Rome himself, appealing to his poor health. Within three months, Murphy was dead, and allowed to be buried in clerical vestments.

Where does Dolan fit in all this? That is the question. Weakland was Dolan’s immediate predecessor as archbishop of Milwaukee. Given the gravity the Lawrence case had to the church’s credibility, Dolan was very probably briefed on the situation. In his position of authority, one would suspect he had full access to the diocese’s internal records on the abuse crisis (or at least all those records Weakland didn’t personally shred).

If Dolan did know about Murphy, he could have come forward with the story years before the NY Times broke it. If he had, it would have been a profound gesture of reconciliation with the victims; it would have shown a church official was willing to sacrifice his institutional reputation for the sake of doing what was right and acknowledging the pain of the abused, and admitting his organization’s part in magnifying their suffering.

But if he knew, he didn’t do this.

If he knew, his crusade to clear the pope’s name, and his silence in the face of protests against victim’s protections, appears no longer callous but cynical, an effort to absolve himself by redefining responsibility as it pertains to the church administrators who stood by as abuse happened. If this is the case, that cynicism can be applied to all those in the Conference who elected him.

But the cynicism cannot be applied to the millions of American Catholics as horrified by clerical rape as anyone, if not more so. After all, it is they who are made to pay the victims’ settlements in their weekly basket contributions, they who have been lied to most strenuously by the magisterium, they whose families who have been so wretchedly betrayed. The Conference has again let these people down.

Reverse-engineering beauty

Denis Dutton theorizes on the Pleistocene origin of our aesthetic sense at TED; illustrations by Andrew Park:

 

 Here is a brief interview Dutton conducted with Jorge Louis Borges, unrelated to anything discussed in the lecture. Why link it, then? Because of rational beings, one sort is divine, one is human, and another is such as Borges.

17.11.1989

Today marks the 21st anniversary of the beggining of the Velvet Revolution, a nonviolent mass protest which would affect the liberation of the Czec Republic from communist rule, an example for democrats worldwide.

Of metaphors and morals

Neurologist Robert Sapolsky argues “evolution is a tinkerer and not an inventor,” and that the brain grounds it moral thinking in metaphors derived frome experience of the material world:

In a remarkable study, Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto and Katie Liljenquist of Northwestern University demonstrated how the brain has trouble distinguishing between being a dirty scoundrel and being in need of a bath. Volunteers were asked to recall either a moral or immoral act in their past. Afterward, as a token of appreciation, Zhong and Liljenquist offered the volunteers a choice between the gift of a pencil or of a package of antiseptic wipes. And the folks who had just wallowed in their ethical failures were more likely to go for the wipes. In the next study, volunteers were told to recall an immoral act of theirs. Afterward, subjects either did or did not have the opportunity to clean their hands. Those who were able to wash were less likely to respond to a request for help (that the experimenters had set up) that came shortly afterward. Apparently, Lady Macbeth and Pontius Pilate weren’t the only ones to metaphorically absolve their sins by washing their hands.

This potential to manipulate behavior by exploiting the brain’s literal-metaphorical confusions about hygiene and health is also shown in a study by Mark Landau and Daniel Sullivan of the University of Kansas and Jeff Greenberg of the University of Arizona. Subjects either did or didn’t read an article about the health risks of airborne bacteria. All then read a history article that used imagery of a nation as a living organism with statements like, “Following the Civil War, the United States underwent a growth spurt.” Those who read about scary bacteria before thinking about the U.S. as an organism were then more likely to express negative views about immigration.

The most comprehenisve “popular” expositions of neural-metaphoric accounts of reasoning are two collaborations by linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By and Philosophy in the Flesh. The books have their flaws–Lakoff is notoriously thrifty with his citations, and is often accused of hiding his predecessors under a veil of silence, and passing off derivative work as groundbreaking and revolutionary–but they are more accessable to the lay audience than any other books on the topic.

Monday Morning Surrealism

Maureen Dowd’s role-models of the moment for the political woman: A god-queen seductress and a horse.

One of those aspirations is entirely impossible for today’s woman to achieve. Even if the physical difficulties of changing a woman’s species could be overcome, metaphysically it would be an undesireable option. As Spinoza tells us (Ethica bk.IV.preface),

 [A] horse would be as completely destroyed by being changed into a man, as by being changed into an insect.

 Likewise, if a woman were to become a horse, she would cease to exist where a horse would come into existence. Development and evolution after a sense is possible for an individual thing; but if it sheds all the properties and powers it originally possessed, there can be no continuity between the entities. One’s extinction births the other.  

But Dowd’s other option, seductress god-queen, is merely difficult to achieve, even for the most driven and creative of ladies. But both are silly goals.