How to Be an Educated Consumer of Infographics: David Byrne on the Art-Science of Visual Storytelling

As an appreciator of the art of visual storytelling by way of good information graphics — an art especially endangered in this golden age of bad infographics served as linkbait — I was thrilled and honored to be on the advisory “Brain Trust” for a project by Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist, New Yorker writer, and Scientific American neuroscience blog editor Gareth Cook, who has set out to highlight the very best infographics produced each year, online and off. (Disclaimer for the naturally cynical: No money changed hands.) The Best American Infographics 2013 (public library) is now out, featuring the finest examples from the past year — spanning everything from happiness to sports to space to gender politics, and including a contribution by friend-of-Brain Pickings Wendy MacNaughton — with an introduction by none other than David Byrne. Accompanying each image is an artist statement that explores the data, the choice of visual representation, and why it works.

Visual Literacy in the Age of Open Content In 1853, Eugène Delacroix contracted photographer Eugène Durieu for a set of anatomical studies. As photographer and scholar Franck Van Deren Coke explains in Art Journal in 1962, these artifacts represent “one of the earliest indications of a prominent artist finding in photography a means of extending his vision so as to see the world in a different manner.” Delacroix experienced an intervention of sorts, one that changed his way of seeing the human body and the world of art. The story goes that Delacroix and Durieu collaborated on these nude portraits as studies for future paintings. Delacroix had such a strange reaction upon receiving the images that he showed several friends, watching for similar responses. Delacroix’s friends suddenly found the familiar engravings unsettling, grotesque. We have similar stories all throughout history: the moment when a perception—whether a literal way of seeing or a figurative mode of thinking—is assaulted and fundamentally shifts. By: Joy McEntee

Simon Schama’s Face of Britain- Exhibition Historian Simon Schama has joined with the National Portrait Gallery curators to take a fresh look at the Collection and present a cross-period exploration of the history of Britain through portraiture. Focusing on the themes of Power, Love, Fame, Self and People, he asks what makes a successful portrait and what this tells us about the individual and collective psyche of the time. Developed in partnership with the BBC, Simon Schama’s Face of Britain coincides with the broadcast of a five-part series on BBC2 (from 30 September 2015) and the publication of an accompanying book by Viking/Penguin Random House. #FaceOfBritain 1 of 52 of 53 of 54 of 55 of 5 New York Movie, 1939 by Edward Hopper A movie theater in New York, one of those elaborate mock palaces where Hollywood spirits us for a few hours into another world - in this case apparently the high mountains. Spirits us as audience, that is, but not the usher, who has probably seen the movie a thousand times and waits for the curtain, mulling over her own thoughts. Her stationary figure counterpoints the screen with its incessantly flickering illusions of places not here and not now. Like most of the female figures in Hopper's paintings, this one was based on his wife, Jo, who posed standing under a lamp in the hall of their apartment. The entire painting is concerned with leavetaking, with seeming to be sated with a wealth of illusions that includes the film and the building, and with allowing this artificial world to lull one into thinking that life is not alienating and that the modern world is wonderful because it provides larger-than-life experiences in the theater.