I’m at an opening at Clic Gallery of Jody Morlock tonight. As I write this, Jon Stewart, of the Daily Show walks in, I guess that tells me a little about the company I’m in.

In fact, that’s me with Jon Stewart, in the photo, below! What’s weird is the how Jon looks like he’s photo shopped behind me, but I’m actually holding his sholder. However, I suspect the reason why I appear distinct from Jon Stewart is that he projects a wall, due to his celebrity – I’m sure that’s it, and the camera picks it up.

I talked with the artist for a few minutes about her obession with numbers and writings on her photos.

Talking to Jody, it turns out her day job as a makeup artist for John Stewart, and he also collects her work.

Jody Morlock says her imagery comes lately from the photoshoots she does, the makeup work, and life in New York.

When I think of my life, now writing for VentureBeat.com, and for Entrepreneur.com, along with my industry blog, WebMetricsGuru, I feel blessed that I don’t have to find out where the party is, my life is the party, and it comes to me, especially when I just “be” and don’t try to make life be anything more than it is.

Getting back to Jody, I go back to her picture of “Lucky” and the other, “Naughty”, prints with writing all over them, but not the face. I asked her why she puts phone numbers and personal info in her photo paintings, and she mentioned there’s no bank accounts on her works, but there is interesting information in Jody Worlock’s work if you take the time to look … I did.

And you know what, she doesn’t usually paint the faces in her photo art, because that’s what she does for a living; however, there are works where she did …. Paint the face.

Jody Worlock … Glad I stumbled into your show.. And Jon Stewart, too.

Found an interesting piece in the New York Times tonight on how Banks Hoard Troves of Art where …

Deutsche Bank is believed to own the largest corporate collection in the world, with some 60,000 pieces of contemporary art. UBS owns 40,000 pieces, and JPMorgan Chase 30,000. Combined, that approaches the Museum of Modern Art’s trove. Banks have various explanations for their hoarding instincts: lots of walls to cover, clients to impress, corporate identities to build. Or perhaps just some past director was a devoted patron.

If banks were temples of culture rather than lucre, the collections would be easy to justify. As a financial asset, however, much of the art is of dubious value. Some 400 works owned by Lehman Brothers, including ones by Roy Lichtenstein, are expected to fetch only about $1 million at a coming auction. And it’s hard to believe Andy Warholor Damien Hirst ever helped get an initial public offering off the ground.

There’s been some outcry lately for Banks to do humanitarian work and Paul Krugman says it best in a post titled The Banks are not all right…

“…Ask the people at Goldman, and they’ll tell you that it’s nobody’s business but their own how much they earn. But as one critic recently put it: “There is no financial institution that exists today that is not the direct or indirect beneficiary of trillions of dollars of taxpayer support for the financial system.” Indeed: Goldman has made a lot of money in its trading operations, but it was only able to stay in that game thanks to policies that put vast amounts of public money at risk, from the bailout of A.I.G. to the guarantees extended to many of Goldman’s bonds.

So, from my point of view, and Krugman’s – if Banks can give back to the people in various forms, including lending Art out – they should.

MICHAEL KIMMELMAN muses on why visitors to the Louvre, or any modern museum, don’t look at the Art, anymore, they just snap a picture.    By the way, I do tend to stop and look and would rather take in a place the the Louvre, in several visits – trying to see it all at once is too hard, and the value of a visit like that – is much less.

See …

At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus

But, of course, if all you have is one visit – maybe there’s little choice but to snap pictures or videos and I did it myself, two years ago, when I spent a few afternoons at the Louvre and at Delacroix’s museum and then Aix in Provence and Cezanne’s studio, etc.

In Museums and the Public Understanding of Science -By John Durant, Committee on the Public Understanding of Science it’s put forward, on page 28, point 3, below,  that most of the value of a visit to a museum happens in the first 30 minutes:

On page 29, Museum Fatigue is mentioned – with the attempt to understand it – but I think the modern tendincy of the visitor to an Art Museum is not to look, but to snap a picture – and if that happens, according to this study, quoted above, your maximum value of what you want to look at is going to happen soon after you arrive.

With that in mind, I think a modern viewer ought to plan the first 30 minutes to exactly what they want to see first, if they know what that is, with out taking photos or videos, and then, afterwards, once attention span is less, to take pictures as one can, to process the information later.

Just read the Louvre Online to Open Database in English for those of us that don’t read or speak French.  According to the New York Times ArtsBeat blog post:

On Wednesday, the museum plans to announce that it will make an English-language version of its online database available on its Web site, louvre.fr, starting Thursday. The announcement was made in a news release by the group American Friends of the Louvre, which provided a $380,000 grant for the database. The database, called Atlas, will provide information on 22,000 works of art from the Louvre, as well as high-resolution images and the locations of works and galleries within the museum. That represents about 80 percent of the works available on the French-language version of Atlas, which catalogs 26,000 of the 35,000 works on permanent display at the Louvre.

It was never an issue for me, the times I’ve been in Paris, before and in the future – the real reason to go is to visit the museums, and maybe drink so wine – but having said that – I noticed there’s a lot about French Art, and Art in the Louvre, that’s not translated into English – maybe because of a lack of clear interest for it.

Hopefully, that issue will be solved, now.