“Installing Shadows (1978-79) according to Andy Warhol’s precise instructions has always been tricky. Not only does this single, monumental work consist of multiple silk-screened and painted canvases (102, to be exact), but they must also hang in the round, edge to edge.”
Blog
Some Fields Seem More Difficult Than Others. But Maybe…
Perhaps there is no such thing as an easy or hard discipline. Maybe there are only easy and hard questions. Biology only seems so hard because it has been defined by a set of very hard questions. Physics only seems easy because centuries of effort by deeply insightful thinkers have produced a set of answerable questions.
The Evolution Of Police Training Simulators (Annals Of Unusual Media)
Ernie Smith offers a brief history of these law-enforcement teaching tools – “where they came from, how they inspired technology’s evolution, and their impact on fighting crime.”
Academic Journal Publishing Is An Outrageous Scam. Why Do Academics Put Up With It?
As things currently stand, it’s hard to deny that journal publishing appears little better than a scam. It’s perhaps not an irrelevant fact that the great fraudster Robert Maxwell began his business career in academic publishing.
The Incredible Drama Around ‘Doctor Zhivago’ And The Nobel Prize (A Dive Into The New York Times Archives)
“Sixty years ago, the Swedish Academy awarded the Russian author Boris Pasternak the Nobel Prize for Literature, but less than a week later, under pressure from the Soviet government, Pasternak rejected the award. The story, which had more twists and turns than a Cold War-era spy novel, played out in The New York Times with one front-page story after another.”
What’s Killing Classical Music? Music-As-Church
“As a person whose primary beat is writing about religion, I can’t help but notice the parallels between classical music and religion in America today. As an aging Christian population watches its congregations shrink, younger seekers who don’t feel welcomed give up on church. Americans still discover classical music in their youth, but even those who play enthusiastically in school often can’t afford to go to the symphony, or if they do, they’re asked to treat it like a religious space, which it isn’t. Classical music isn’t dying, but our ways of experiencing it are becoming ossified.”
The Vatican’s New Game App Is Like Pokémon Go, But With Saints
Follow JC Go “is based on the hugely popular Pokémon-catching game. But instead of collecting as many Pokémon as possible, players must try and find saints, biblical characters, and other religious figures to add to their Evangelization Team, known as an eTeam, and complete in-game challenges. Similar to Pokémon Go, Follow JC Go uses GPS to detect a user’s location in the city.”
How Fantasy Novelists Create Maps Of The Worlds They Dream Up
Anyone who’s flipped back and forth between the texts and the maps in books by J.R.R. Tolkien or Robert Louis Stevenson knows how much help they can be to the reader. But authors themselves find their maps to be a tremendous help, too.
Composer Ennio Morricone Wants Us To Know He’s Really A Modernist (Despite All Those Film Scores)
“[Playing in the avant-garde improvisation group] Nuova Consonanza really reunited me with the love of my life — composing absolute music, music that is not related to a film, or to a pop song. One of our rules was to avoid anything that was melodic, anything that was usual. We had to produce very strange sounds, very complicated sounds, because we wanted to get as far away as possible from the so-called traditions of classical music. The experience with them really helped me to bear the burden of working in the commercial sector.”
Verbatim Theatre As A Means Of Preserving History
As an example of Anna Deavere Smith- and Moisés Kaufman-style plays, assembled from eyewitness and participant testimony, as oral history documents, Richard Watts analyzes The Campaign, about the arrests at the Salamanca Markets in Hobart — Tasmania’s (approximate) equivalent of the Stonewall Rebellion.