The Museum of Modern Art puts records of every exhibition it has ever presented online. These photos of paintings hanging in galleries are erie, writes Robinson Meyer, and they say a lot about what curators of the day were thinking about how to look at art. How “modern” of them..
Author: Douglas McLennan
Could This Really Be True? In The Gig Economy Jazz Instructors Can Make More Than Lawyers
“FlexJobs came up with a list of 10 of the best-paying part-time jobs based on real job listings from over 40,000 companies… For instance, you stand to make more money as a part-time jazz instructor than you can as a government contracts attorney. Part time clinical pharmacists make almost as much as part-time dentists.”
Narrative Architecture – How The New African American Museum Facade Tells Stories
David Adjaye calls this concept “narrative construction.” It’s a mode of architectural storytelling embodied in the museum’s façade, a three-tiered, trapezoidal structure inspired by the staggered crown of an early 20th century Yoruban sculpture that Adjaye encountered in a book from his personal library. (The same sculpture is currently a centerpiece of the museum’s fourth floor Culture Galleries.) Adjaye calls it “the Corona.” Its edges, he says, also mirror the rake of the neighboring Washington Monument.
The Latest Hotel Amenity? Artists In Residence
“As hotels work harder to distinguish themselves in the age of Airbnb, many have focused on using local art to give their décor a one-of-a-kind look. But with artist-in-residence programs, some hotels in the United States and abroad are going further, aiming to make the art experience even more immersive for guests.”
Miles Davis, Sorcerer Of Jazz
“Davis became known as “the sorcerer” because of his alchemical flair for transforming the humblest of materials—a Tin Pan Alley song, a simple bass line, even another musician’s wrong note—into an exalted form of expression. Shy to the point of taciturnity, he rarely spoke to his sidemen, except to offer the occasional cryptic instruction—“play [guitar] like you don’t know how to play the guitar,” he told the guitarist John McLaughlin—yet he knew how to inspire their best playing.”
How The Great Philosophers Struggled With New Ideas
“The metaphysical and epistemological problems that arose out of the scientific revolution are particularly difficult and abstract, and the responses of these thinkers are among the most formidable structures that philosophy has produced.”
The Giant Film Festival That Ate Toronto
“Toronto is now so big – 290 features and 110 short films in 2016 – that it is a festival of festivals. You could attend TIFF and happily spend 10 days at a European art-house festival, a documentary festival or a short-film festival. TIFF programmers are forever dreaming up new categories, acknowledging the golden age of television, for example, with a slate of TV shows added last year.”
Jurgen Habermas, Guide To The Enlightenment
“Even at his ripe age — he is now 87 — Habermas’s passion remains undiminished. As a public intellectual, however, he may seem an unlikely hero. We live in an age when what some of us still fondly call ‘the public sphere’ has grown thick with personalities who prefer the TED Talk to the printed word and the tweet to the rigors of rational argument. For Habermas, it’s clear that without the constant exercise of public deliberation, democracy will collapse, and this means that citizens must be ready to submit their arguments to the acid bath of rational criticism.”
Hate Poetry? Isn’t That Besides The Point?
“As long as we focus on what poetry isn’t and can’t be, how can we rediscover what it once was, and might be again?”
Andrew Sullivan: My Life Online Nearly Killed Me
“By the last few months, I realized I had been engaging — like most addicts — in a form of denial. I’d long treated my online life as a supplement to my real life, an add-on, as it were. Yes, I spent many hours communicating with others as a disembodied voice, but my real life and body were still here. But then I began to realize, as my health and happiness deteriorated, that this was not a both-and kind of situation. It was either-or. “