Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Floating Lantern Festival and Scale


            This festival is visually stunning to me. It is a great example of how something can be really spectacular if a lot of people can work together to create something beautiful and meaningful. Thousands of people gather together and launch hot-air lanterns into the night sky all about the same time. I think just for this is worth doing just for the visual alone and the sense of tradition but it also has a spiritual and personal aspect. The lanterns can represent a prayer being sent or it can be the bad things floating away. Whatever view you have on spirituality somehow something like this can make you feel like it must be a really amazing feeling to experience being there.
            Branching from a statement that I made above that it is really cool when a lot of people gather together to accomplish a common goal. I want to discuss scale and how that affects a piece of art. For example have one guy randomly start dancing in a crowd and almost none will even notice and the few that do will probably not care in the slightest, but if half the people in a crowded area stop what they are doing and start a choreographed dance. Pretty much everyone will notice and take some sort of interest in it. Scale seems to matter. Another example is the Mona Lisa. You see all the pictures of it online and it is a very well done painting but when you see it in person and it is so small and you cant see it up close and it seems to lose it’s wow factor. Is big always better though? I personally cannot think of an example where a piece of art is only better as it gets smaller. There very well might be though, but scale does play a large role in how impressive people are with a piece of art.
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