{"id":296,"date":"2009-08-20T07:20:11","date_gmt":"2009-08-20T15:20:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/?p=296"},"modified":"2009-08-20T07:20:11","modified_gmt":"2009-08-20T15:20:11","slug":"a-favorite-painting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/2009\/08\/a-favorite-painting\/","title":{"rendered":"A Favorite Painting"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of my favorite paintings is “The Fighting Temeraire being Towed to Its Last Anchorage to Be Broken Up” (known also by various other titles). In addition to Turner’s artistry, I am captured by its message.<\/p>\n

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The romantic, beautiful sailing ship is being towed by an ugly, polluting, industrial tugboat to be destroyed. The sailing ship represents the past, and the tug the future, making it a conservative image.<\/p>\n

It is also an appreciation of old technologies, a subject I have written on before<\/a>. I insist that my reception is better on my rotary dial phone, that music sounds better on long-playing records, and that Microsoft Word 5.1a was a great program.<\/p>\n

New technologies answer new needs. In most cases the needs are speed, portability and convenience. All of these, of course, are demanded by a speeded-up life, and themselves speed up life even more. Since an iPhone isn’t ugly and choking with smoke like Turner’s tugboat, people don’t realize that new technologies both enable and cause a different quality of life.<\/p>\n

A trip on the sailing ship would be slow and inconvenient. It would take weeks to arrive at my destination, and we’d be at the mercy of the winds. But, like the romantic painters, I’m not sure the steam ship would be as good for the soul. Or that cleaning a record and gently lowering the needle isn’t as good a use of my time as checking email.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One of my favorite paintings is “The Fighting Temeraire being Towed to Its Last Anchorage to Be Broken Up” (known also by various other titles). In addition to Turner’s artistry, I am captured by its message. The romantic, beautiful sailing ship is being towed by an ugly, polluting, industrial tugboat to be destroyed. The sailing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-296","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-musings"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lisahistory.net\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}