“Madness”, in the terms dictated by this rich literary history, bears no real relation to the objective reality of mental illness. The day to day business of mental illness is hard, boring and unrewarding, and though it can certainly provide benefits – increased empathy for other people’s pain, an ability to withstand intense periods of suffering – it rarely offers profound revelations about the human condition. “Madness”, on the other hand, sounds wild, romantic, even; a primal, primitive closeness to the essential truths of the universe.
Author: Douglas McLennan
How Scientists Are Replicating Ancient Places In 3D And Recreating Them
“The man who led the facsimile project, a proudly dishevelled Englishman named Adam Lowe, was admiring the fake walls alongside me. Lowe prefers to call them “rematerialized” walls. He whispered, “Amazing—it looks just like the real thing, doesn’t it?” He is fifty-seven years old, and looks like what Paul McCartney might look like had McCartney never undergone restoration.”
Auction Houses See Steady Market (But Their Guarantees To Sellers Suggests…)
“Values can be inflated when auction houses offer competitive guarantees to secure major consignments. These guarantee can then be transferred to a third party, who will either buy a work at a sale, or be rewarded for their unsuccessful bidding. More recently, some third-party guarantors — called “irrevocable bidders” at Sotheby’s — have also been paid fees if they are the purchaser. These confidential arrangements, denoted by symbols in the catalog, can have the effect of deterring bidding in the salesroom.”
This Notion Of Fakes In The Art World Prompts The Need For A Definition Of Real
“What is it about a specific piece of art that makes it become seen as an esteemed creation, while something entirely similar can be viewed as nothing more than (quite literally) a vessel for disposing of human excrement? This was the brazen question that researchers at the Faculty of Economics and Business at the University of Leuven in Belgium recently tackled using the scientific method. They published their results in the journal Human Nature in October.”
That Running Conversation You Have With Yourself Inside Your Head? It’s Called “Inner Speech” And We’re Learning About It
“I think it was assumed that inner speech was just this kind of monologue, the output of a solitary voice chattering away in your head. And we now think there are a few main kinds of inner speech. Inner speech varies according to how compressed it is, how condensed. We think inner speech varies according to how much it’s like a conversation between different points of view. We’re starting to tease apart these different qualities. And that fits with the idea that inner speech has a lot of different functions. It has a role in motivation, it has a role in emotional expression, it probably has a role in understanding our selves as selves.”
Each Age Imagines That Technology Will Make The World Better. There Are Problems With This Idea…
Technological utopianism is always self-aggrandizing. “We stand at the high peak between ages!” the poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti wrote in his “Manifeste du Futurisme” in 1909, predicting, among other things, that the Futurist cinema would spell the end of drama and the book. Every other modern era has seen itself in exactly the same way, poised at the brink of an epochal transformation wrought by its newly dominant technology, which, as Carr notes, is always seen as “a benevolent, self-healing, autonomous force […] on the path to the human race’s eventual emancipation.”
28 Things That Would Make The Visual Art World A Better Place
“What if the art world was a lot more integrated into the world world? What if the art world and the world world existed in a state of mutual accountability to one another? What if art was valued as a shared cultural transmission that brings people together despite difference, instead of as a luxury good that promotes class division?”
Poem Signed By Anne Frank Sells For $150,000
The eight-line poem, half of which was copied from a Dutch book of verse, is dated March 28, 1942, shortly before Anne and her family went into hiding from the Netherlands’ wartime Nazi occupiers in a secret apartment in an Amsterdam canal house.
Behind The Scenes Of Jon Stewart’s “The Daily Show” (And The Two Times He Quit)
A new book details it. “For all the fun it looked like everyone was having, it turns out the climate behind the scenes wasn’t always such a joy. (Though, to be clear, there was plenty of that, too. Tired joy, to read the staffers’ accounts. But joy nonetheless.)”
These Are The Biggest Hollywood Flops Of 2016
Comedies accounted for 50% of the flops on this year’s list of least profitable movies. The worst performing funny film: horror comedy Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which made back just 58% ($16.4 million) of its estimated $28 million production budget at the box office.