Erica Galvin

In 1948, Frédéric Bruly Bouabré had a vision that led him to invent a new writing system. The Museum of Modern Art explores his more than 1,000 drawings. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/NsAUC2I via IFTTT

I once had to tell a ten-year-old that the Harry Potter book series was not a historical literary classic but a recent publishing phenomenon that occurred in my lifetime. She was amazed, but she wasn’t silly for thinking that the books might date from a faraway past. They do, after all, make frequent reference to figures from centuries when alchemy flourished in Europe, and magicians like Paracelsus and Nicholas Flamel (both of whom appear in Potter books and spin-offs ) who plied their solitary craft, such as it was. Should we call it magic, early science, occult religion, outsider art, or some admixture of the above? We can call it “black magic,” but the term was not, as the Christians thought, a reference to the devil, but to the soil of the Nile. “Derived from the Arabic root ‘kimia,’” writes the Public Domain Review , “from the Coptic ‘khem’ (referring to the fertile black soil of the Nile delta), the word ‘alchemy’ alludes to the dark mystery of the primordial or First Matter...

It’s the rare Englishman who will readily defer to a Frenchman — except, of course, in the field of castle-building. This was true after the Norman Conquest of 1066, which introduced French castles to Britain, and it remains so today, especially under the demands of period accuracy. In order to learn first-hand just what materials and technical skills went into those mightiest structures of the Middle Ages, the BBC Two series  Secrets of the Castle had to go all the way to Burgundy. There Château de Guédelon has been under construction for the past 25 years, with its builders adhering as closely as possible to the way they would have done the job back in the thirteenth century, the “golden age of castle-building.” Hosted by historian Ruth Goodman along with archaeologists Peter Ginn and Tom Pinfold, Secrets of the Castle comprises five episodes that cover a variety of aspects of the medieval castle: its  tools , its defense , its architecture , its stonemas...

When Americans think of ghost towns, we think tumbleweeds and crumbling Old West saloons. These abandoned settlements are mere babies compared to Italy’s ancient necropolises. We know, of course, the famous dead cities and towns of antiquity – Pompeii , the ruins of Rome, etcetera. Such famous sites are only the most obvious haunted ruins on any itinerary through the venerable boot-shaped country. Can they be considered ghost towns? The first fell prey to a natural disaster that encased its residents in ash before they had the time to leave; the second thrives as the eighth-most populous city in Europe. It may be full of ghosts, but it’s hard to catch them in the throngs, traffic, and noise. That said, there are no shortage of towns that fit the bill. Italy contains “more than 6,000 abandoned villages,” the video above explains, and “according to conservative estimates, another 15,000 have lost more than 95 percent of their residents.” That’s an awful lot of abandonment. In the vid...

Telephones hovering in mid-air. Half full glasses of water. Clouds reflected in pitch-dark rooms. Zane Priede is a self-taught photographer based in Riga, whose captivating still lifes are borne from curiosity and “a tendency to collect and notice daily absurdities or small amazements.” The artist has a background in design, constructing scenes which blend aesthetics with an ambiguous sense of narrative. Shown below are images from SORRY CAN’T TALK RIGHT NOW, a series inspired by the music of electronic-pop duo PRAGA II. The atmospheric compositions are, in part, inspired by the band’s sound – translated into deep reds and purples. “It brought me to a place of dark autumn nights, saturated with the colourful reflections of streetlights and neon bars, smoky indoors, unfinished conversations in the background.” Also featured is INVISIBLE CITIES: abstract geometric sets based on the words of Italian magical realist writer Italo Calvino (1923-1985). “I’m trying to capture dreamy, poeti...

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/tTNUaek via IFTTT

The first Marvels of Media at the Museum of the Moving Image includes an awards ceremony, a festival and an exhibition. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/2S1pbyW via IFTTT

The first Marvels of Media at the Museum of the Moving Image includes an awards ceremony, a festival and an exhibition. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/K62sZCY via IFTTT

Whether you call “What Is the Object?” an exhibit or a collection, the display at Bard Graduate Center is utterly dependent on the good faith of its visitors. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/Xg3OYcT via IFTTT

Investigators said the sculpture, a depiction of a veiled woman, had been stolen decades ago from a temple at Cyrene, which was once part of ancient Greece. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/v8JK2Ql via IFTTT

The collar and other gifts from her family coincide with a posthumous recognition for the Supreme Court justice, who is to receive the institution’s Great Americans Medal. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/HU2pumE via IFTTT

All of us alive today perceive recent history as a series of decades. There exists, as far as we know, no quality of reality dictating that everything must recognizably change every ten years. But throughout the 21st century, it seems to have been thus: even if we weren’t alive at the time, we can tell at a glance the cultural artifacts of the nineteen-thirties from the nineteen-forties, for example, or those of the nineteen-eighties from the nineteen-nineties. Each decade has its own distinct fashions, which arose from its distinct worldview; that worldview arose from a vision of the future; and that vision of the future arose from changes in technology. Back in the nineteen-tens, says history Youtuber Hochelaga in the video above , “the invention of the first airplane opened massive potential in transportation, and sparked the imagination of the public.” The development of aviation encouraged predictions that one day “the world would go airborne; people would take to the ski...

Fifty years after its theatrical release, The Godfather remains a subject of lively cinephile conversation. What, as any of us might ask after a fresh semi-centennial viewing of Francis Ford Coppola’s mafia masterpiece, is this movie about? We need only ask Coppola himself, who has our answer in one word: succession. In the recent GQ interview above , he also explains the themes of other major works with similar succinctness: Apocalypse Now is about morality; The Conversation is about privacy. Such clean and simple encapsulations belie the nature of the film production process, and especially that of Coppola’s nineteen-seventies pictures, with their large scale, seriousness of purpose, and proneness to severe difficulty. “What we consider real art is a movie that does not have a safety net,” Coppola says, and that applies without a doubt to movies like The Godfather and Apocalypse Now. Much as Orson Welles once said of his own experience making Citizen ...

A much-referenced annual study found the market had recovered to prepandemic levels. Some industry observers question the methodology. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/cHOlnD3 via IFTTT

Since its launch last month, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has sent observers around the world scrambling for context. It is a fact, for example, that Russia and Ukraine were once “together” in the communist mega-state that was the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. But it is also a fact that such Soviet togetherness hardly ensured warm feelings between the two lands. An especially relevant chapter of their history is known in Ukraine as the Holodomor , or “death by starvation.” Spanning the years 1932 and 1933, this period of famine resulted in three to six million lives lost — and that according to the lower accepted estimates. “It was genocide,” says the narrator of the Vox “Missing Chapter’ video above, “carried out by a dictator who wanted to keep Ukraine under his control, and would do everything in his power to cover it up for decades. That dictator was, of course, Joseph Stalin, who accompanied brutal methods of rule with tight control of information . “In 1917, afte...

My looks don’t fit into classical ideals of order, proportion, symmetry. So what was I looking for in that gallery in Rome? from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/7ETCRIf via IFTTT

What should you do if you come across a manticore? Would you even know how to identify it? An unlikely occurrence, you say? Perhaps. But if you lived in Europe in the Middle Ages – and you were the type to believe such tales – you might expect to see one someday. Wouldn’t it be useful to have a field guide? You’d want it on paper (or parchment): no one’s carrying smartphones in misty 13th century York or over the rocky highlands of 15th century Lombardy. You could consult a reigning expert of the time, such as Sir John Mandeville , who either saw such things as blemmyae (headless humans with faces in their chests) near Ethiopia, or made them up. But this didn’t matter much. Truth and fiction didn’t have such rigid boundaries. Yet books were rare, and anyway, few people could read. If only there were YouTube…. “Medieval zoology is bizarre,” says the narrator of the video above — a brief “Field Guide to Bizarre Medieval Monsters” — “because half the creatures don’t even exist, and th...

The Royal Photographic Society’s International Print Exhibition (IPE) is the longest running photography exhibition, first held in 1854. Early editions featured prints by pioneers of the then new medium such as Julia Margaret Cameron, Roger Fenton and Edward Steichen. The latest iteration of the annual show, IPE163, presents the work of 57 photographers in Bristol this April. There were a record 8,000 entries from 50 countries and, as such, the show brings together multiple perspectives. The result is a collective portrait of the contemporary world; a world unlike anything the artists’ forebears could have imagined. Inevitably, the Covid-19 pandemic is a thematic presence in the works selected. There’s a group shot showing a mother and children from Looking Out from Within (2020), a series of cinematic portraits by Aesthetica Art Prize alumnus Julia Fullerton-Batten (b. 1970). The collection, now published as a standalone book, was shot through the windows of London homes du...

On Monday, the museum unveiled the opening date of its Richard Gilder Center for Science, Education and Innovation and shared details of what it will contain. from Art Life Culture https://ift.tt/IFq9opH via IFTTT

If you’re going to back Dave Grohl behind the drums, well…. As so many have said, in so many ways over the weekend, in poignant tributes to Foo Fighters’ drummer Taylor Hawkins, who sadly passed away at age 50 on Friday — you’d better be damned good. As the Foo Fighters formed with Grohl on guitar and vocals, the former Nirvana drummer, now frontman “needed someone who would not make fans keep wishing he had stuck with drums,” as NBC’s Daniel Arkin writes . Grohl almost did stick with drums, at least in the studio, recording the parts himself for the band’s first album, The Colour and the Shape, after conflicts with original drummer William Goldsmith. Hawkins was the touring drummer for Alanis Morissette at the time — a much bigger act than Foo Fighters in the late 90s. But the two kept bumping into each other “back stage at festivals around the world,” as Grohl wrote in his 2021 autobiography , The Storyteller: Tales of Life and Music . “Our chemistry was so obvious that ...

There are browser extensions designed to increase your productivity every time you open a new tab. Others use positive affirmations , inspiring quotes , and nature photography to put your day on the right track. We hereby announce that we’re switching our settings and allegiance to New Tab with MoMA . After installing this extension , you’ll be treated to a new work of modern and contemporary art from The Museum of Modern Art ’s collection whenever you open a new tab in Chrome. If you can steal a few minutes, click whatever image comes up to explore the work in greater depth with a curator’s description, links to other works in the collection by the same artist, and in some cases installation views, interviews and/or audio segments. Expect a few gift shop heavy hitters like Vincent Van Gogh’s The Starry Night , but also lesser known works not currently on view, like Yayoi Kusama ’s Violet Obsession, a rowboat slipcovered in electric purple “phallic protrusions.” Violet Obs...

Long before it was a nationalist rallying cry in Japan during WWII, the term Yamato-damashii referred to something less like racial imperialism and more like chivalry — the “Japanese Spirit” or “Old Soul of Japan,” as Greek-Japanese writer Lafcadio Hearn wrote. Perhaps surprisingly, the “Japanese Spirit” was not based in the martial arts of the samurai at first, but in the scholarship of China, as the ancient novel The Tale of Genji explains when defining Yamato-damashii as “a good, solid fund of knowledge… a fund of Chinese learning.” This would change when the code of Bushidō evolved, and the samurai, with his elaborate armor and elegant swords, became a central figure of honor in Japanese society. In The Japanese Sword as the Soul of the Samurai, the nearly half-hour documentary above by traveling American documentary filmmaker Ken Wolfgang , George Takei narrates the tale of the samurai’s sword. The film begins with the legendary character Yamato Takeru (w...

https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/partiallyexaminedlife/PMP_118_2-18-22.mp3 In light of the newly released, Kenneth Branagh-directed film Death on the Nile, Pretty Much Pop discusses the continuing appearance of the works of the world’s most successful mystery writer in film and TV.  Your host Mark Linsenmayer is joined by repeat guests Sarahlyn Bruck , Al Baker , and Nicole Pometti to discuss the recent films, the Sarah Phelps TV adaptations (like The ABC Murders), the Poirot BBC TV series, and some older adaptations. We take on the different characterizations of Poirot and how recent, grittier interpretations compare with those of James Bond and Sherlock Holmes. Also, how should a screenwriter adapt such fact-heavy novels? What works and doesn’t in terms of modernizing them to current audience expectations? How did Christie keep things interesting for herself writing so many mysteries? How deep do her meditations on psychology and ethics run in these bo...

The Aesthetica Art Prize is a platform for the world’s best artists. The award celebrates contemporary art in all its forms, taking the temperature of creativity today. We’re delighted to announce this year’s shortlist, which includes film, photography, sculpture and installation. Spanning the globe, these creatives address some of the most pressing issues facing us right now: climate crisis, inequality and new technology among them. Ideas of posthumanism appear amongst the entries; these artists look towards potential futures. Elsewhere, we see community activism and cultural engagement. Others tap into personal histories. Above all, this year’s cohort are united by a desire to make sense of the world. Meet them here: Artists’ Film Baff Akoto Akoto’s recent practice focuses on the artistic and conceptual potential of Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies to interrogate how the digital revolution might avoid the same prejudices, exclusions and inequalities which arose from our...