Tom Service: “The recording industry tried to fix in the collective imagination what individual musical works should be, like the totemic masterpieces of the Western canon (or rather, like those pieces of music that were turned into canonised totems, in part by the recording industry): a series of desirable, aspirational cultural and commercial objects, a collection of black-lacquer-magicked things that could be literally possessed.” Not any more …
Author: Matthew Westphal
Seeing What “The Sun Also Rises” Might Have Been But Wasn’t
Ian Crouch explores the various drafts, notes and edits included in a new edition of Hemingway’s novel.
Disgraced Delaware Art Museum Selling Yet More Art
The AAMD sanctioned the museum in June for selling a piece from its collection to raise funds. Now that it’s already in museum-Siberia anyway, the DAM has decided to auction off two more works: Winslow Homer’s Milking Time and Alexander Calder’s The Black Crescent.
Shigeru Ban, Master Of Paper Tube Architecture
“In a profession often associated with showmanship and ego, Ban’s work appears humble, and appropriate to a historical moment that celebrates altruism, or its posture.” And yet: “You can live in a house designed by Shigeru Ban only if you are recently homeless or exceedingly wealthy.”
“Fighting” Illness: The Trouble With Metaphors In Medicine
“Metaphors are a fundamental mechanism through which our minds conceptualize the world around us, especially in the face of complexity. But evidence suggests they do more than explain similarities – they can invent them where they don’t exist, and blur the lines between the literal and the figurative.”
What Does A Minute Feel Like?
For that matter, what is a minute, really? Newton “believed that time was absolute – marked by God’s great metronome in the sky. It was certainly not subjective.” Einstein once wrote, “People like us, who believe in physics, know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” And then there’s David Lamelas’s conceptual piece Time.
The Weird Prescience of “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles”
“Of course, no parent walked out of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with their wound-up eight-year-old and thought, ‘That really captured our collective fear of being mugged by teenagers. Radical!’ But viewed today, it’s striking how much the [1990 film] encapsulated contemporary attitudes about delinquency and violence, and showed weird prescience about the decade to come.”
What It’s Really Like Being A New York Subway Dancer
“Rayquan Perez is a 19-year-old dancer with 2Live, a group that performs on the 4 and 2 trains. He spoke to Brian [Lehrer] about what it’s like to flip and somersault through a moving subway car, and about the crackdown on dancers.” (includes audio)
Top Posts From AJBlogs 08.07.14
The Future Of Art Book Publishing Is Here
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-08-08
Creativity and “Powers of Two”
AJBlog: CultureCrash | Published 2014-08-07
Sir Alan Peacock
AJBlog: For What it’s Worth | Published 2014-08-07
My Night with Reg, La Ronde and the Daisy-Chain Plot
AJBlog: Plain English | Published 2014-08-07
Ystad Concerts: Korb And Lundgren
AJBlog: RiffTides | Published 2014-08-07
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Is A Decrease In Testosterone Responsible For The Development Of Human Art?
“Human civilization, and the artistic activities associated with it, came about as a result of a measurable decline in testosterone levels that began accelerating around 80,000 years ago, according to a study published in the August issue of Current Anthropology.”