Picasso's "Garcon A La Pipe"

The article "Picasso Breaks record at Auction" on CNN .com published in May 2004 talks about how a Picasso painting of his early days in Paris, "Boy with a Pipe" ("Garcon a la pipe") has broken the all time record sales at Sotheby's in New York. It sold for a whopping $104.1 million dollars to an anonymous bidder. The price easily beat the previous holder of the title, van Gogh's "The Portrait of Dr Gachet" which sold for $82.5 million in 1990's at Christie's auction.
This article discusses one of the masters of the avant garde masters that we've studied in class. Pablo Picasso is one of the most famous and influential artists of the 2oth century. He created thousands of works in different mediums and has changed modern art more than any other painter. He also created cubism with Georges Braques, another artist. Cubism's key concept is that an object's essence can be captured by showing it from multiple points of view simultaneously. Although a very short lived movement, it influenced 20th century art immensely(www.artcyclopeida.com). Some of his paintings include Les demoiselles D'Avignon, which we saw in class as an example of avant garde art, and his most famous work of art Guernica, which described the horrors of World war II ( the bombing of the hamlet of Guernica).

Sources:

Picasso Breaks record at Auction. Retrieved Dec 15th 2004 from www.cnn.com

Cubism. Retrieved December 15 2004 from http://www.artcyclopedia.com/history/cubism.html

Blogger Boom !

The article "Microsoft joins the blogging world" on CNN.com, published on the 3rd of december 2004, talks about Microsoft becoming the latest company to join the blogging revolution by setting up web spaces. Web spaces allow people to share online pictures, lists of favorite songs, etc. Other companies such as Google and AOL have already provided joined in the blogger revolution in 2003. The article then goes into detail about the company's new blogger service and it's features, including passwords for certain people to enter the person's blog.
This article relates to our course in many ways. The first and most obvious one is that I am writing this in my weblog as a course requirement. The second one is that weblogs are fast becoming an important tool of mass media. As mentioned by Drezner and Farrell, weblogs are rapidly becoming more influential as they affect media coverage. They do indeed have the potential to change governments as well as changing people's way of thought. The blogger also relates to this course as it is part of the Information Highway which we are living in now, along with the computer and internet.