Never let it be said that Twitter is utterly useless.  Mostly useless for sure, but not completely. Following Katrin Eismann, for example, left me with this nugget (YouTube link, via ArtInfo).

Shoot, I can do this. I’ll embed it here:

“Women in Art,” they call it, but it’s 500 years of iconic images of women, set to music & morphing from one to another. So really, it’s Women in Art, over time. It’s pretty neat, too – I’ve watched it several times now, each time focusing on something different.

The first time, I watched the eyes.  Always open, mostly gazing back at me.  They’re clear, a little too large, almost symmetrical. Beautiful, lovely, and exactly what they tell us to do when making portraits.

The second watch through, I watched the lips.  Small – almost too narrow to be natural, but delicate and lovely.  Over time they seem to shift from thick, to thin, then back to fuller proportions.  While narrower, there’s always an implied lushness of some sort in them.  What we do with lipstick nowadays, I suppose.

In later watching, I tried to absorb the entire faces.  It struck me that there’s always the smoothness, often a bit of a blush – again, what we do with makeup – but they’re also high-key.  Watch again: you’ll notice that features are washed out. Similar to a Hollywood glamor shot from the earlier 20th century.

While obvious up front, I noticed that the older images seemed to be more… well, honoring the beauty of the female.  As we get closer to the modern age, you’ll see more abstracts images, and more… creative interpretations.  While this is certainly a feature of our more modern age, I suspect that similar impressionistic work must have existed in days of old.  But it didn’t survive.

I suspect in 500 years, someone could make a similar montage, covering 1000 years.  And in doing so, much of what we see today would not be represented.

It make me wonder: what, of my own work (and the modern era) would really stand the test of time?