Kunstbar by The Petrie Lounge

November 18, 2002 3:47 AM

Kunstbar is funny, cultured and very well executed. [Flash]
posted by Pretty_Generic (23 comments total)

there was a person with a big, round, orange head - what was that a reference to?
posted by andrew cooke at 4:11 AM on November 18, 2002

if you say so
posted by carfilhiot at 4:16 AM on November 18, 2002

Like a wee dram from the hysterical hallucination of modernism.

Nice stuff, Pretty_Generic.

Any fellow MetaFilterers care to Flash their stuff?
posted by hama7 at 4:22 AM on November 18, 2002

Nice. Reminds me of a Walker Art Museum t-shirt I have, featuring four grotesque faces and the caption: "Art Can't Hurt You." Well, in Kunstbar world it can.

The big orange head has me flummoxed, too, andrew.
posted by kozad at 4:42 AM on November 18, 2002

Klee?
posted by crunchland at 4:49 AM on November 18, 2002

Re: big orange head. Magritte, I think? Can't find a link, though, so that's just a hunch based on a vague memory of a Magritte involving a man in a suit with a giant orange head. (magritte.com used to have an online "museum" of all of Rene Magritte's work, but apparently they don't anymore.)
posted by Trombone Borges at 5:05 AM on November 18, 2002

Indeed, the man with the orange for a head is Magritte. However, the man with the orange head is Klee.
posted by jeremias at 5:24 AM on November 18, 2002

Ack, what an opportunity lost! No Bar at the Folies Bergere!
posted by Slithy_Tove at 5:47 AM on November 18, 2002

Whatever you do: DO NOT ORDER THE BOSCH!
posted by wobh at 6:45 AM on November 18, 2002

I'm sure the well-read members of MeFi will shame me, but I didn't 'get it'. That Flash movie just struck me as someone's imaginative LSD trip being transposed onto streaming video. Nothing more... Frankly, I thought it sucked.

Still, it seems I'm in the minority. I'm cool with that. No one's looking for my stamp of approval anyway. I'll show myself out, sans turning into a human pinwhell, I might add.
posted by Dark Messiah at 7:53 AM on November 18, 2002

Read up, Dark Messiah!
posted by falameufilho at 9:30 AM on November 18, 2002

It's great to see that Steve Whitehouse is making new stuff. He was one of my favorite artists during the brief internet animation boom.
posted by muta at 9:41 AM on November 18, 2002

thanks! (it was the magritte). dark messiah - it's one of those trainspotting things that probably only works if you know a limited selection of the main modern (mainly) iconic paintings. i guess if you know more or less than me (for example), it's probably either boring or pointless. or maybe it's more fun with sound (i'm at "work").
posted by andrew cooke at 10:06 AM on November 18, 2002

The Thinker lapping up the Guinness slayed me.
posted by oflinkey at 1:01 PM on November 18, 2002

great post, pretty_generic - loved it!
I liked The Thinker too, oflinkey, as well as the lounging Modigliani...I liked it all.
Slithy_Tove, good suggestion. I thought of one of the Absinthe Drinkers as good potential too - there are many to choose from.
posted by madamjujujive at 4:33 PM on November 18, 2002

Ok. that was strange. I just posted a comment in a neighboring thread (iconomy's) about Miro's Blue series and then I come here and see it used as a Menu.

The opening landscape, by the way, is from the under-appreciated Di Chirico.
posted by Winterfell at 8:44 PM on November 18, 2002

I liked the blue stuff. Where does the blue horned figure playing the bass come from?
posted by wobh at 10:52 PM on November 18, 2002

You mean Chagall?
posted by Winterfell at 12:11 AM on November 19, 2002

For what its worth, I thought this film was one big wank-fest.

Call me a rarefied aesthete, if you will, but this had that feel of a badly curated museum or of a K-tel greatest hits collection - uninspired cacophony. It was painful to watch.
posted by Winterfell at 12:34 AM on November 19, 2002

Was it not Kant who stated "Art, although externally complex to the observer, may be fundamentally divided into the strata of 'good' and 'wank-fest' "?
posted by Pretty_Generic at 3:32 AM on November 19, 2002

Thank's Winterfell. I wrote all the names on the menu and looked up the ones I didn't recognize google. I hadn't seen that one in the Chagall galleries I found.

I'm sorry you didn't like it (and for the opposite reason as Dark Messiah above). For me it hit all the right notes, it was an inside joke I was in on, but also introduced me to mysterious new images for me to explore. I don't know that I would have the same appreciation of Chagall or Morriseau if I hadn't seen those images in a playful and fun context such as this.
posted by wobh at 6:22 AM on November 19, 2002

Don't know if anyone else looked, but this Kunstabar is just one of the winners on the Flash Award website.
posted by crunchland at 6:42 AM on November 19, 2002

Kunstbar, it means artcafe. (if anyone was wondering)
More nice stuff to see on the Flash Award site.
posted by ginz at 8:25 AM on November 19, 2002