In January, Peter Beck sent his Humanity Star (described by irked scientists as a three-foot-wide disco ball) into orbit, and in October, Trevor Paglen’s Orbital Reflector will follow. In an article headlined “Hey Artists, Stop Putting Shiny Crap Into Space,” George Dvorsky looks at the origin of these two pieces and gets some choice words from each side of the divide.
Author: Matthew Westphal
Yale’s Intriguing “Leonardo” Examination Gets a Grade of “Incomplete”: Few Leonardos, Many Photos
Since another Leonardo “discovery” has been much in the news of late (including this recent twist, questioning its authorship), the Yale Art Gallery’s summer exhibition, Leonardo: Discoveries from Verrocchio’s Studio, has more topicality than the museum’s chief curator Laurence Kanter might have imagined when he began planning it.
Recent Listening In Brief
Cécile McLorin Salvant, Dreams And Daggers (Mack Avenue)
The two-CD collection has 23 songs, five of which have original lyrics by the singer. The other pieces are standards, some seldom heard, by Kurt Weil, Langston Hughes, Irving Berlin, Julie Styne, Bob Dorough, Noel Coward and Frank Loesser.
The Obsessive Fans Of ‘Twin Peaks’, And The Answers To The Questions They Obsess Over
The Internet was the perfect way for those who loved the original series to bat their theories back and forth, and from the medium’s days, that’s what they did. Joanna Robinson offers a brief history of that fandom and how it affected the Twin Peaks franchise and eventual reboot – and she gets a few mysteries clarified by co-creator Mark Frost.
So There’s A Word You Use Countless Times A Day That Stems From The African Slave Trade? Mmhmm.
Wait, so mmhmm counts as a word, even though it’s not in the dictionary? That’s what some academics are arguing – and they say that the word’s origin among enslaved Africans in the U.S. is the reason it never was recognized by dictionaries (and thereby had its spelling standardized).
A 1,600-Year-Old Poetry Trope, Revived For The Contemporary Middle East
“Stopping by the ruins” – wuquf ‘ala al-atlal – was one of the primary themes of pre-Islamic Arabic poetry: the poet visits the ruins of a spot where he once camped with his beloved, now lost to him. The trope was already being mocked as a cliché and parodied by the eighth century CE, but it held on, and today a new generation of writers and other artists is using the imagery of the ruins to address the devastation caused by wars and violence in the Arab world.
Contemporary Music Is Finally Like Contemporary Art – All Over The Place: Alex Ross
Ross looks at the zillion different directions new music has gone in since the eclipse of modernism. He also discusses what he calls the “Kandinsky Problem”: “In the art world, instinctive antagonism to the new, the weird, and the absurd is less common. People think nothing of queueing for hours in order to sit in a chair opposite Marina Abramović or to grope their way through a foggy tunnel designed by Olafur Eliasson. Indeed, composers can often find a more appreciative audience if they reclassify their music as an installation or as performance art.”
‘Ceci N’est Pas Une Rue’: Here’s What Happens When You Let Brussels Residents Name Streets
The area around a former freight train depot in the Belgian capital is being redeveloped into a neighborhood called the Tour & Taxis district, and officials decided to let the public – in René Magritte’s hometown – suggest names for the thoroughfares. So there will be Frites Street, Endive Street, Speculoos Street, Kriek Street (for the cherry beer), and (yes, really) Ceci n’est pas une rue (This Is Not A Street).
Berlin Train Station To Play Atonal Music To Drive Away Drug Users
“Germany’s national rail operator, Deutsche Bahn (DB), is planning to pipe ‘atonal music’ into the Hermannstrasse station in Berlin’s Neukölln district in an attempt to drive away people who use the place to take drugs. … The music has not yet been chosen, though, according to a report in Berlin’s Tagesspiegel newspaper, DB has opted for atonal music ‘because it completely undermines traditional listening habits.'”
Actress Barbara Harris, Co-Founder Of Second City, Dead At 83
“[She was] one of the last surviving members of the founding generation of Chicago-style improvisers and a shy, eccentric, brilliant, publicity-averse performer who preferred rehearsing to working in front of an audience, but who nonetheless pursued a successful Broadway and movie acting career.”