Author: Douglas McLennan

Cruising For Art – The Bizarro World Of Cruise Ship Art Auctions

One gimmick in particular stood out: A pair of works presented turned away from the audience, and sold as one lot, without any idea of what they looked like. “They are going to be two of the most gorgeous works of art that anyone has ever seen,” Borotescu promised the audience. “Once you turn it around, if it’s something you don’t like, you don’t have to keep it.” – artnet

We Are The Stories We Tell Ourselves – And That’s Determined By Our Age

There’s a lot of research now that shows that in the teenage years we develop skills from what’s called autobiographical reasoning—which is the ability to derive personal meaning from your past—and that’s really the key to narrative identity. When you start doing that in your teenage years, then that kind of opens up a Pandora’s box that says “okay now you can actually create a story for your life that makes meaning about who you were and where you’re going. – Nautilus

Fascinating To Contemplate What We Define As “World Literature” (We Read So Little Of It)

“World literature happens when Russian novels remake English literature; when a Turkish writer takes inspiration from a Colombian writer; when Japanese critics review translations of Lebanese poetry. It almost always involves re-interpretation and misunderstanding: a Spanish monk sent to suppress Aztec literature ended up disseminating it instead; subsequently, Aztec hymns envision a Christian God urging revolt against the Spaniards. World literature is also nothing new under the sun.” – Harvard Magazine

Artists Take Over Power Station And Make Art That Generates Power

The contemporary arts centre E-Werk Luckenwalde will not only open exhibition galleries and studio spaces in a former brown coal power station 65km south of Berlin, it will also begin generating carbon-neutral electricity. Led by the artist Pablo Wendel and the curator Helen Turner, E-Werk Luckenwalde will power its own building with locally sourced biomass and sell the excess energy back to the grid to fund the whole enterprise. – The Art Newspaper

We’re Learning How Emotional Intelligence Drives The Brain

“With the help of neuroscientific and behavioural research, we are beginning to appreciate how the ancestral mammal brain is alive and well inside our higher neocortical systems. Unlike the computational approach to mind, the affective turn is deeply rooted in what we know about the brain as a biological reality. In the first decade of the new millennium, affective (or emotional) studies began to trickle into disciplines such as ethology (the study of animal behaviour).” – Aeon