A Little Writing On Smaller Rosetta Stone

the ebu color bars pattern used to calibrate color and luminosity of PAL video is comprised of horizontal bars of equal width, from left to right: white, yellow, cyan, green, magenta, red, blue, and black. via wikipedia
EBU Colour Bars Pattern (75/0/75/0) via wikipedia

Now I am not saying it makes up the global cultural suffering caused by their other major contribution to the modern media landscape, Eurovision, but the European Broadcast Union deserves praise for promulgating one of the most sublime, iconic, and minimalist images ever: the EBU color bars used to calibrate the chrominance and luminance of PAL format video signals and receivers.

And how does TV artist Nam June Paik, who spent more time surrounded by these color bars, on more monitors, than any other artist of the last hundred years, honor it? By making a perfect, little painting. Which apparently looked too much like writing paper to not fill the columns with a repeating series of delicately painted pictograms.

nam june paik painting is landscape oriented, with eight vertical bars of solid color, mostly of equal width, in the order (from left): black, blue, red, magenta, green, cyan, yellow, and white. It's the upside down order of the EBU color bars test pattern for PAL format video. in each column but the white, paik painted a series of tiny pictograms of heads/faces, natural elements like mountains or the sun, vehicles, and a seated buddha. selling at christies in feb 2025
Nam June Paik, Smaller Rosetta Stone (Ch 12), 1983, 11 x 14 in., oil on canvas, from Holly Solomon and Thomas Solomon’s collection, selling at Christie’s 28 Feb 2025

Maybe the interest for Paik was mediating our global shift from written to visual language, because he called the work Rosetta Stone. [Smaller Rosetta Stone (Ch. 12), actually, which implies the existence of a larger Rosetta Stone, or Rosetta Stones for the 11 other channels on the dial, or both.]

By the time he published Rosetta Stone prints a year later, in 1984, Paik flipped the color bars to the correct orientation, and framed the image in the convex rectangle of a CRT screen. And he made the translation reference more explicit by pairing his pictograms with their often-representational Chinese character counterparts. I just noticed that fifteen years later, in 1998, though it did use the specific logo () of Japan Post, NTT designer Shigetaka Kurita’s first set of emoji included no kanji elements, only Roman letters.]

Anyway, the painting belonged to Paik’s dealer Holly Solomon, and now her art advisor son Thomas is selling it. Unsurprisingly, it’s already past the estimate with a week to go.

28 Feb 2025, Lot 30: Nam June Paik, Untitled (Smaller Rosetta Stone Channel 12), 1983 [update: sold for $23,940, and honestly, if you asked if I’d rather have $23,940 or this painting? I think I’d say the painting.] [christies]

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