Erica Galvin

Since its launch in 2015, Masterclass has not only expanded the variety of its online course offerings but sought out ever-bigger names for its teachers. Names don’t come much bigger than Metallica in the world of heavy metal, and indeed in the world of rock music in general. Hence the broad title of the new Masterclass “Metallica Teaches Being a Band.”  Having been a band for 40 years now, they presumably know more than a little about everything involved in that enterprise: not just recording hit albums like Master of Puppets and songs like “Enter Sandman,” but also weathering dramatic changes in both the music business and popular culture while cooperating for the good of the group. Not that, to the men of Metallica, such cooperation has always come naturally. “There’ve been times when it’s been fractured and it looks like we were on the verge of breaking up,” says guitarist Kirk Hammett in the trailer for their Masterclass above. He joined the band in 1983, wh...

Tianyuan Hu is a student at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her practice explores alienation, traversing spaces between “the lucid and the lunatic.” The Amorph series expresses these themes as drawn from observations during lockdown; the works depict unsystematic moments when identities and perceptions haven’t been theorised into any definitive meaning or criteria. A: In Issue 102 of Aesthetica, we feature a piece from the Amorph series. Have you always expressed notions of alienation through art? TH: I’m always drawn to the otherness lurking in daily life, along with other related notions such as alienation. Alienation is not just a feeling, but also a phenomenon of bordering. To some extent, I feel we should celebrate otherness and alienation, as they imply diversity and the power of becoming. They set new paths – disrupting boundaries within the predominant norms and majoritarian structures. In the series Amorph, I explore otherness and alienation by portraying the disintegrat...

Interviews I Remember Everything: Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Memoria by Jordan Cronk Do the Hustle: Sean Baker on Red Rocket by Blake Williams Cartooning Unlimited: Dash Shaw on Cryptozoo and Discipline by Sean Rogers Features To Sir, with Love: Maria Speth’s Mr. Bachmann and His Class by Michael Sicinski Next Stop Eternity Peter Tscherkassky’s Train Again and… from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/2ZAWx40 via IFTTT

Memoria arrives amidst a flurry of activity for the 51-year-old Thai filmmaker. In addition to the feature and the book, there’s Night Colonies, his contribution to the omnibus project The Year of the Everlasting Storm (which also premiered at Cannes); a solo exhibition of his video and installation work at the IAC Villeurbanne; and a career-spanning retrospective at FIDMarseille, where the director was on hand just days after Cannes to receive the festival’s Grand Prix d’Honneur. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/3bmxEuP via IFTTT

The erotic history of the car in cinema extends back nearly to the dawn of the medium: there’s Chaplin, in 1914, asserting in his first film that he’s a more enticing view than the soapbox derbies at the Kid Auto Races (no engines yet). from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/3CwJezz via IFTTT

way through uncertain, liminal spaces. At the same time, the documentary marks a sharp turn in Speth’s filmmaking approach, something all the more notable given the remarkable consistency of her first four films. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/3vWfMAJ via IFTTT

France this past July, the answer is a resounding “no.” And thankfully it was a sweltering summer, for if an event like the one Cannes mounted was to take place mostly with indoor dining, the film world would see numbers the size of Florida. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/315g3Wq via IFTTT

might leave a bigger scar. The Kindergarten Teacher (2014) and Synonyms (2019) already flirted with autobiography, but his fourth feature pushes forward into full autofiction, sending a director named Y. (Avshalom Pollak) to the Arava desert for a screening of one of his films, only to discover that open discussion of its content is frowned upon. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/3BsKIJU via IFTTT

“This is the unwieldy version of the movie,” said Quentin Tarantino on the Pure Cinema podcast in June about his new 400-page novelization of Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood (2019). “Unwieldy” is indeed the right adjective for QT’s new make-work project, and it’s also probably the last word on his creative sensibility. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/3CFNNre via IFTTT

While parental absence is a key trope of so many of the Spielberg(ian) youth films of 1980s Hollywood cinema—not only E.T. (1982), but also The Outsiders (1983), Explorers (1985), The Goonies (1985), Stand by Me (1986), The Monster Squad (1987), et al.—the aloneness of the young protagonists is always more a matter of narrative pretext than actual subject. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/3pRErFC via IFTTT

the seven years since P’tit Quinquin, it has become impossible to continue tagging Bruno Dumont with the longstanding clichés of Bresson criticism. Epithets like “ascetic,” “severe,” “punishing”—already limited descriptors of his first two works, La vie de Jésus (1997) and L’humanité (1999)—have only become more obviously incapable of describing Dumont’s recent films, from the carnivalesque contortions of Ma Loute (2016) to the musical extremes of his Jeanne d’Arc movies. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/3mqx4CD via IFTTT

2020 may go down as The Year From Hell, but at least it gave us The Tsugua Diaries. Rudely interrupted by the COVID pandemic in proceeding with not one, but two productions—Savagery and Grand Tour—Maureen Fazendeiro and Miguel Gomes opted to do exactly the opposite of what everyone, including undoubtedly the Portuguese Film Commission, expected: they went and made a movie, deciding, just like the NBA, to create a bubble environment (at a farmhouse compound near the Atlantic coast) and hope for the best. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/3mrDJfQ via IFTTT

With a new gallery show and a museum retrospective in the works, the New York-based abstract painter has fully arrived. It’s been a long time coming. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/3bpfU1W via IFTTT

In just the past year, volunteers working for the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign have played a role in the return of seven artifacts. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/3jM1QEg via IFTTT

When Kurt Vonnegut first arrived in Dresden, a city as yet untouched by war, crammed into a boxcar with dozens of other POWs, the city looked to him like “Oz,” he wrote in his semi-autobiographical sixth novel  Slaughterhouse-Five . After all, he says, “The only other city I’d ever seen was Indianapolis, Indiana.” When Vonnegut and his fellow GIs emerged from the bowels of the pork plant in which they’d waited out the Allied bombing of the city, they witnessed the aftermath of Dresden’s destruction. The city formerly known as “the Florence of the Elbe” was “like the moon,” as Vonnegut’s “unstuck” protagonist Billy Pilgrim says in the novel: cratered, pitted, leveled…. But the smoking ruins were the least of it. Vonnegut and his fellow prisoners spent the next few days removing and incinerating thousands of bodies, an experience that would forever shape the writer and his stories . Whether mentioned explicitly or not, Dresden became a “death card,” writes Philip Beidler, that Vo...

Their apartment is “a piece of art we created together,” Tom Shivers said. Now the vast collection assembled with his late husband, Neil Zukerman, will help start a museum. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/3Csd8Fe via IFTTT

Most of the items were seized from storage space operated by Subhash Kapoor, a former Manhattan gallery owner facing illegal trafficking charges in both India and the United States. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/3bmAH6p via IFTTT

A little more than a month after the terrorist attacks on 9/11, with the nation and world still reeling from that day, Madison Square Garden hosted The Concert for New York City . A benefit concert of the first order, it was also a thank you to the sacrifice of NYC’s fire and police departments, which had lost many members during that day. (The former had lost 343 firefighters.) But like a lot of things about that day twenty years later, it has sort of vanished down the cultural memory hole. However, if you need reminding, the Who came out of retirement and delivered what some considered the set of the night. Tom Watson, writing in Forbes magazine , called it “The Night The Who Saved New York.” The concert was free to any firefighter or policeman who came in uniform. Watson describes the vibe thus: “To say that occupancy laws were stretched that night is to undersell the size of the place. Picture a Knicks game, then double the crowd. From the start, the building ran on a riv...

Tina Sturzenegger (b. 1978) is a self-taught photographer based in Switzerland. Inspired by the “colourful and playful” element of food, she constructs lavish scenes with croissants, pretzels, oranges and coconuts. The resulting images are reminiscent of vintage 1960s cookbooks: rich in saturated reds, pinks and greens. Stylised with film grain, they appear to have been ripped from the pages of antique volumes. Featured here are images from There Must Be Lights Burning Brighter Somewhere, a series about the pressures of life in today’s digital world. It taps into the narrative surrounding unattainable lifestyle goals, which are often perpetuated on social media. As we scroll, we are encouraged to eat better, exercise more and perfect the work-life balance. It can be overwhelming, with the desired results just out of reach. “It’s a story about trying and failing,” she says. You should eat veggies and fruits but instead you’re smoking cigarettes… The story goes on and on and on, but...

From MIT comes The Human Brain , a series of 18 lectures presented by Professor Nancy Kanwisher . They’re from a course that “surveys the core perceptual and cognitive abilities of the human mind and asks how they are implemented in the brain. Key themes include the representations, development, and degree of functional specificity of these components of mind and brain. The course will take students straight to the cutting edge of the field, empowering them to understand and critically evaluate empirical articles in the current literature.” Watch all of the lectures above, and find them added to our list of Free Biology Courses , a subset of our collection 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities . The Human Brain: A Free Online Course from MIT is a post from: Open Culture . Follow us on Facebook and  Twitter , or get our Daily Email . And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses , Free Online Movies , Free eBooks ,  Free Audio Books , Free Foreig...

The return to Benin of 26 ransacked objects will be the first large-scale act of restitution to Africa by a former European colonial power. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/3vUuyHX via IFTTT

The large-scale arrival of new and veteran dealers has given the neighborhood its first unifying theme in 60 years. Here are three walks with our critics, a springboard to explore. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/3pMUFjk via IFTTT

Brescia, Italy, was one of the first Western cities devastated by the pandemic. It has adopted a famed ancient statue, “Winged Victory,” as the emblem of its recovery — and a prod for visits. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/3mlMQP7 via IFTTT

The artist’s “A Line,” her first New York solo show, sets the tone for the ambitious new 52 Walker, run by the gallerist Ebony L. Haynes. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/3Ckyowu via IFTTT

Wassily Kandinsky could hear colors. Maybe you can too, but since studies so far have suggested that the underlying condition exists in less than five percent of the population, the odds are against it. Known as synesthesia , it involves one kind of sense perception being tied up with another: letters and numbers come with colors, sequences take on three-dimensional forms, sounds have tactile feelings. These unusual sensory connections can presumably encourage unusual kinds of thinking; perhaps unsurprisingly, synesthetic experiences have been reported by a variety of creators, from Billy Joel and David Hockney to Vladimir Nabokov and Nikola Tesla. Few, however, have described synesthesia as eloquently as Kandinsky did. “Color is the keyboard,” he once said. “The eye is the hammer. The soul is the piano with its many strings. The artist is the hand that purposely sets the soul vibrating by means of this or that key.” That quote must have shaped the mission of Play a Kandinsky ...

More than a dozen experts suggest candidates deserving new appreciation. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/3nEwBw2 via IFTTT

A look at design-world events, products and people. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/3nEiu9Z via IFTTT

Roman and Williams are opening a New York gallery devoted largely to ceramics (yes, they’re back). from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/3BmhQ6a via IFTTT

Our critics and writers have selected noteworthy cultural events to experience virtually and in person in New York City. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/3bg7Ws0 via IFTTT

Are you irked  when a movie or video you’re attempting to enjoy is constantly interrupted by the commentary of a chatty fellow audience member? If so, don’t watch archivist  Rick Prelinger ’s 2017 assemblage,  Lost Landscapes of New York , in the company of a New Yorker. Unlike Open Culture favorite  NASS’s  five minute sample of  Lost Landscapes of New York , above, which adds color and ambient audio to the unvarnished found footage,  Prelinger — described by the New York Times’  Manohla Dargis  as a “collector extraordinaire…one of the great, undersung historians of 20th century cinema” — relishes such mouthiness from the audience. His black and white compilations are mostly silent. If you are a New Yorker, view that as an invitation  here . For everyone else, on behalf of New Yorkers everywhere, we concede that our confident utterances may indeed drive you out of your gourd… Tourists with just one visit to th...

For 60 years now, the name Edsel has been synonymous with failure. In a way, this vindicates the position of Henry Ford II, who opposed labeling a brand of cars with the name of his father Edsel Ford. The son of Ford Motor Company founder Henry Ford, Edsel Ford died young in 1943, and thus didn’t live to see “E Day,” the rollout of his namesake line of automobiles. It happened on September 4, 1957, the culmination of two years of research and development on what was for most of that time called the “E car,” the letter having been chosen to indicate the project’s experimental nature. Alas, all seven of Edsel’s first models struck the American public as too conventional to stand out — and at the same time, too odd to buy. You can hear the story of Edsel in the two videos above, one from transportation enthusiast Ruairidh MacVeigh and another from Regular Car Reviews . Both offer explanations of how the brand’s cars were conceived, and what went wrong enough in their exe...

Norway-based Canadian architect Todd Saunders (b. 1969) is responsible for defining much of our sense of contemporary Nordic style. Dominic Bradbury’s new book, New Northern Houses, casts an eye over Saunders’ unusual – yet harmonious – synthesis of cultural and artistic influences. In many ways, the affinity of Canadian and Norwegian architectural styles is a matter of topography and climate. These are northern realms, with northern weather, northern social rituals and economies: crisp sunlight and early evenings, dense dark foliage, cold outside and warmth inside, bleakly beautiful expanses of land. Fishing and forestry have supported regional cultures for centuries, and in many areas continue to do so. As Bradbury points out in his introduction to this book, the “shared ideal of the summer cabin, often situated by the water or a lakeside,” serves to unite the built heritage of the nations. So too does the contrasting “winter refuge, or hut, high up in the hills or mountains. All o...

Petrit Halilaj became one of Kosovo’s most acclaimed artists with work that reflects on his country’s past. Now, he’s getting personal. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/2XVtlDW via IFTTT

Art and science are often viewed in opposition. Yet creative minds have always been responsible for technical innovations the world over: from Leonardo da Vinci’s Renaissance anatomical studies to Olafur Eliasson’s climate activism. Kendra Troschel also believes in these similarities: she worked as a microbiologist for many years and is now a practising painter. “It might seem a little far from art,” she notes, “But I think there is an innate curiosity shared between the two fields.” Troschel describes herself as a “magpie”: picking, adapting and combining various visual tropes from art history. It’s this spirit of inquisitiveness which drives her practice. “I try to absorb a lot, so I’ll flick through images, movies, poems until I find one particular thing that interests me – a motion or a position of a figure. I’ll think about it and what it means to me: the feeling or essence of it. The rest of the painting is done subconsciously, adding colours and objects that feel right and tryi...

Don’t be fooled. The work of Thomas Demand (b. 1964) may, at first glance, appear to show empty mundane-seeming interiors. In fact, these are highly politically charged locations painstakingly re-staged in paper and cardboard using found photographs as a guide. Room (Zimmer) (1996), for example, is inspired by photographs of the hotel room where Scientology founder L.Ron Hubbard developed his theory of Dianetics, whilst Kitchen (2004) is based on shots taken by soldiers of the compound in Tikrit where Sadam Hussein was captured. Once Demand has photographed these impressively realistic-looking sets with his large format camera, he destroys them, leaving only the still photograph. In his latest exhibition at the Spanish contemporary arts venue Centro Botín, however, the Berlin and LA-based artist takes this further, creating an entire cityscape. Eight architectural paper constructions are suspended from the ceiling of the gallery, some decorated with wallpaper crafted by the artist...

“We have to celebrate Columbus because he discovered America.” “No he didn’t. Leif Erikson got there first.” “Nuh-uh.” “Uh-huh….” etc… I paraphrase here from the halls of my elementary school circa sometime in the late 20th century, when many of us were convinced the first Europeans to set foot on the continent were not the Spanish and their bloody-minded, treasure-seeking Italian captain, but what we thought of as bloody-minded, treasure-seeking Vikings. Which side was right? Our grade-school objections to Columbus were not necessarily moral or intellectual. Most of us chose team Viking for the helmets (more on that later). But evidence that Vikings landed in North America dates back hundreds of years to historical accounts and sagas about Leif’s father, Erik the Red . These accounts tell of a place called Vinland , identified as lying somewhere along the Northeastern coastline where the Norse found wild grapes. In the 20th century came the suggestion that Vinland might ...

Few jazz guitarists today could claim to be entirely free of the influence of Django Reinhardt . This despite the fact that he lost the use of two fingers — which ultimately encouraged him to develop a distinctive playing style — and that he died 68 years ago. The unfortunate abbreviation of Reinhardt’s life means that he never built a substantial body of solo work, though he did play on many recorded dates that include performances alongside Coleman Hawkins and Benny Carter. It also means that he left even less in the way of footage, though we do get a crisp and illuminating view of him and his guitar in the 1938 documentary short “Jazz ‘Hot,'” previously featured here on Open Culture . “Jazz ‘Hot'” also features violin-playing from Stéphane Grappelli , who founded the group Quintette du Hot Club de France with Reinhardt in 1934. As they deepened their knowledge of jazz, the two influenced each other so thoroughly as to develop their own style of music. Grappelli liv...