Cave art had a profound effect on its twentieth-century viewers, including the young discoverers of Lascaux, at least one of whom camped at the hole leading to the cave over the winter of 1940–41 to protect it from vandals and perhaps Germans. More illustrious visitors had similar reactions. – The Baffler
Author: Douglas McLennan
How Pop Music After WWII Fractured Lines Between High And Low Culture
Popular music aesthetics did much more than invert or blur the line between high and low culture. Instead, it provided the grounds for a thorough fracturing of those two positions into a new, intricate system of orders and relations. – LitHub
Has The Publishing Business Become Too Reliant On Huge Hits?
Though the hits-driven nature of publishing has not changed in recent years, the nature of those hits has. Due to a number of coalescing factors—including a shrinking physical retail market and an increase in competing entertainment driven by the proliferation of streaming TV platforms—book publishing has watched as a handful of megaselling titles have begun to command an ever-larger share of its sales. – Publishers Weekly
Now A Yayoi Kusama Macy’s Parade Balloon (And It Doesn’t Stop There)
Some attribute the Kusama craze to the Instagram generation, with young people lining up to take selfies in the artist’s “Infinity” rooms of mirrors, colors and lights. Others say her compelling personal story as an Asian woman who first traveled alone to the United States and has openly battled her demons (she lives in a Tokyo psychiatric institution) is resonating amid today’s heightened sensitivity to issues around identity politics, immigration and mental health. – The New York Times
The Exquisite Improvisatory Dance Between Silent Movies And Live Musicians
The combination of extemporaneous performance and preëxisting art form enacts a trust across time and space. In the heyday of silent pictures, filmmakers expected that their movies would be scored by a live musician, and thus silent films have always been a sort of incomplete form, waiting patiently for the act of creation to happen anew each time the film is shown. – The New Yorker
What It’s Like To Study Ballet While Black
Felicia Fitzpatrick: “With its European roots, ballet has always valued Eurocentric body shapes and skin color, leaving little opportunity for Black ballerinas to even attempt to engage with the art form. Even if they were allowed to participate, they were still othered and singled out for their race.” – Zora
Why Such A Glut Of Movies About Christmas?
It’s probably no surprise that Hallmark channels have increased their annual Christmas movie count by 20 percent since 2017, but Lifetime has more than quadrupled its output in the last two years and Netflix has doubled its in that same time. – The New York Times
Sean Spicer Is A Dancing Trainwreck. So Why Does He Keep Surviving “Dancing With The Stars?”
Gia Kourlas: “He had a different partner this week because his regular one, Lindsay Arnold, had a death in her family. It didn’t make his dancing better or worse. It remains consistent in its awfulness.” – The New York Times
New Pompidou Centre Opens In Shanghai
Situated along the banks of the Huangpu River on Shanghai’s version of Museum Mile, the new outpost is a collaboration with the West Bund Group, a Chinese state-owned development corporation that together with the local government has reportedly invested more than $3 billion in recent years to transform a former industrial neighborhood into a 7-mile waterfront cultural corridor. – The New York Times
Gary Wills: On Understanding The Patriarchy
“Alter the status of women and you have affected all the most intimate and significant nodes of life: the relation of wife to husband, mother to child, sister to sibling, daughter to parents, worker to coworkers, and employee to employer (or vice versa). This change in women’s standing that happened what seems like yesterday, and is still happening today at an accelerated rate, is the most profound revolution that can take place in a society.” – New York Review of Books