The feverish nature of the art market during the Second World War, and ever since, offers at least one straightforward reason for both the Nazi art theft itself and for why items have never been restituted. “There is no cultural genre in which money plays as big a role as visual arts,” Rein Wolfs, the director of the Bonn Museum of Modern Art, told me. “Dance, or theater, they aren’t about goods. But art, it’s about goods. There’s so much confusion around it because there’s so much money involved.”
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What It’s Like To Write Sylvia Plath’s Obituary, At Long Last
The woman who wrote the “Overlooked” New York Times obit for Plath says, “The obituary I was going to write would be very different from the obituary we would have written when Plath died. In some ways, I think, it turned out to be more true to who she really was.”
Why We Can’t Simply Transfer Human Intelligence To Machines
“Minds are not made by nervous systems alone but rather by nervous systems in cooperation with many other and far older living systems of our body, including metabolic, endocrine, immune and circulatory systems. Nervous systems are late-comers in evolution. They are useful servants of the older life systems
English Speakers Love To Call Each Other Out For ‘Bad’ Grammar, But Why?
The internet has made the pace of language change much, much faster. “Now that every English speaker in the world can talk to every other English speaker in the world, the virus is mutating vociferously. The modern grievance airer must keep pace.”
As One Might Expect, The iHeart Radio Awards Are Just About The Opposite Of The Grammys
These awards happened this weekend, and yes: “If the Grammys are out of touch, the iHeartRadio awards are almost too in touch, celebrating the most popular of popular music and rejecting stuff that’s unnecessarily hip or cool.” (Er … unnecessarily?)
Do You Want To Spend Hours Reading Essays And Thinkpieces About ‘Black Panther’?
Well, the Los Angeles Times has you covered, with what they’re calling “the Pantherpedia.”
A New, And Much More Hopeful, Genre Is Emerging: Solarpunk
Instead, of, say, No Country for Old Men, this genre pulls from a different strand of thought. “Solarpunk prioritizes hope and resilience in the face of the climate crisis. The stories in each collection are typically set in futures where solar energy takes center stage. Many are utopian. Others are post-apocalyptic, and these articulate a Solarpunk attitude in their portrayals of humanity’s battle to renew the Earth.”
Director Of Ghent Museum Suspended For ‘Controversial’ Exhibit
The company in charge of the museum suspended Catherine de Zegher after months of mounting criticism and pending the results of an internal audit. Did she lie to the city’s cultural committee? Did she claim art historians had authenticated Russian avant-garde paintings when they had done no such thing – and then refuse to turn over any documents that would have supported her? Very, very possibly.
When Russia Banned This Director’s Movie, He Got All Kinds Of Congratulatory Emails – But He Says That’s Not The Right Reaction
Armando Iannucci: “This act of censorship gave me no joy; the overwhelming emotion has been one of sad disappointment that in the world of instant communication, and the anarchic dissemination of information, people still think it’s O.K. to ban stuff they don’t like. That they should ban a film making fun of repression is wonderfully ironic, I know, but I still don’t get any kick out of it.”
An Artist In Residence At The Tate Has Resigned After Remarks From The Director About Sexual Harassment
Liv Wyntner was one of four teaching artists-in-residence at the Tate for 2017-2018, but when Tate director Maria Banshaw made what seemed to many dismissive statements about harassment and abuse survivors, she wrote in an open letter, “I cannot describe to you the personal shame I feel as a survivor of domestic violence, to work for someone who could think so little of me whilst simultaneously profiting off of my ‘survivorness’ and the work I dare to make about it.”