Art is a collaboration between God and the artist, and the less the artist does the better. Andre Gide (1869 - 1951)

This weekend I visited The Fine Arts Institute where an event was organized to promote Indian Arts & Artists.I was impressed by the fine artwork and the use of vibrant natural colours.I spoke to the Mural Painter from Wayanad, Kerala (a southern state of India).I came to know that Murals,one of India's ancient folk arts,is dying out from a lack of patrons and the initiative that are taken to protect both (The Art & The Artists) are "Too Little,Too Late!"

A few steps ahead from the Mural exhibition were the Gond Paintings,a tribal art from Madhya Pradesh (a state in middle India).I also spoke to the Gond artist who told me that each Gond painting is inspired by a folklore and he narrated to me the pictorial discourse of "Birth of river Narmada" through his painting.Although he was proud to show me the "Best Gond Painter Award" given to him by the Government but the sad undertone in his voice as a consequence of lack of business & patrons was palpable. Below is a visual representation of my experience.

View in Maps

This morning on my breakfast table when I read an article in supplement of The Economic Times which states that the buyers of Art/Paintings are more concerned about "who they are buying' rather than 'what they are buying!" I feel that our poor and genuine artists are losing out in this digital age of shameless self publicity with big media houses and investment bankers only promoting the self-proclaimed "celebrity artists" which left me with a bitter breakfast aftertaste. I believe that ,with you, WE can make a difference! I request you to spare two minutes of your busy schedule to fill the form here and enable me with your valuable suggestion so that WE can find a way to resurrect this dying art form.I would publish this survey result shortly and based on the result of this survey SurprisedCloud would sponsor the entire application development and deployment effort for this cause.
By the way there were other handicrafts on display in the exhibition. I have also uploaded this video for a complete virtual tour.

Are you a modern traveler? Do you research through the
endless travel sites, bulletin boards , google maps mashups with travel sites to get context sensitive travel data ? You may need to re-think before you do so next time!!As a recent study suggests that entities with vested interest are trying to manipulate the wisdom of crowd by giving incentives for a favorable review.As explained here

Consequently,the economist travel advisory is moving away from the bottom of the pyramid where the so-called wisdom lies to the vertex of the pyramid towards the single-source guides!(Referece:The Economist)

But what I feel is the better model would be not to base ones deductions on the object of interest , say hotel if you are a traveler.Instead you would be more precise and less gullible if you base your decision making process with the selected sample size of the crowd who have similar tastes or likings.
I do agree that there is a huge challenge in finding the right sample population from the astronomic crowd.But applications like Likaholix
are taking steps in this directions.

I believe that wisdom of crowd is still relevant provided we use it as a vector quantity having both magnitude and direction rather than a scalar quantity with only magnitude!

Image Courtsey : The source of this image is Rathika Ramasamy and is available under the following creative commons license.

Is someone predating on Collective Intelligence by Shudh-Eternally surprised Blog is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 India License.