Living Well Is the Best Revenge by Calvin Tomkins is a classic New Yorker profile of Gerald and Sara Murphy, central figures of the Lost Generation social circle in 1920s France. F. Scott Fitzgerald created Dick and Nicole Diver, the central couple of Tender Is the Night, by merging himself and his wife Zelda, with the Murphys. Gerald was a
painter of note (examples:
1,
2,
3,
4), whose masterpiece
has been lost. After seven years of painting, Murphy stopped, and never restarted, for a
host of reasons, from the illness of his son to his
closeted gayness. But the Murphys are probably best known for "the special quality of their life." They hosted parties and
lived in a villa on the Mediterranean coast and were both painted by many artists,
including Pablo
Picasso. They were the subject of a
recent biography and an
essay collection.
posted by Kattullus
on Jan 11, 2013 -
10 comments
Paul Stankard is
a virtuoso with glass. Unlike most of his contemporaries in the studio glass movement, Stankard
started as a tradesman, a scientific glassmaker, and his work is not blown, but instead is
flameworked. He creates miniature botanicals—at first,
exact representations of existing flowers, and now,
credible but imaginary plants, complete with human roots. His work, and his day to day life, is
influenced a great deal by Walt Whitman. Stankard says, "I'm not wise enough, not educated enough to experience Whitman at his absolute fullest; I have to work at it." And he works at it through glass.
posted by ocherdraco
on Jan 9, 2013 -
12 comments
Gold, Golden, Gilded, Glittering - The Unexpected Double History Of Banking And The Art World
In fact, we have long entrusted the task of representing our ideas of value to members of two professions that might seem to have little in common: banking and art. And, in the last seven hundred years or so, it has happened more than once that visual and financial inventors have come up with strikingly similar representations. There is more than a shadow of resemblance between the purchase of the Hirst skull in 2007 and the mortgage-backed-securities debacle that made of Lehman Brothers in the following year one of the great public pictures of vanitas we’ve had. And, when you look further into these intersections, you often find that what is really at stake is a change in the way we feel and understand time.
[more inside]
posted by the man of twists and turns
on Jan 7, 2013 -
20 comments
The five scholars explored the question, “What is the meaning of food?” and debated its role in ethnic and religious tensions. They also examined the possibility that “food, which is something that all of us share, albeit in different ways, can be used to bring people together instead of differentiating between us.” According to Goldstein, one of the most important ideas to come out of the group was that food is a social process rather than a commodity and thus is central to multicultural understanding: “[Food] has to do with how we live and it’s not just an object that we ingest.”
Food: History & Culture in the West [PDF], was a 2010 UC Berkley Symposium exploring multiple links between food and culture:
[more inside]
posted by byanyothername
on Jan 7, 2013 -
14 comments
Starting in the early 1700s and exploding in popularity throughout the 1800s, Japanese woodblock prints depicted the fantastic world of
Kabuki actors,
courtesans,
warriors, and
nature. Ever since then keeping track of all of the incredible artwork has been a pain, traipsing between dealer and museum websites, awkwardly shuffling through academic library 'websites', wandering aimlessly through GIS, not to mention all the trouble a patron had to go through to see these
before the Internets. Well,
The Japanese Woodblock Print Database aggregates prints from a number of museums, dealers, and auction houses into a single resource, searchable by keyword and by image, and thereby provides a shining example of web-accessible art database interface. Enjoy!
[via mefi projects] [more inside]
posted by carsonb
on Jan 7, 2013 -
20 comments
"Defacement of currency is a violation of Title 18, Section 333 of the United States Code. Under this provision, currency defacement is generally defined as follows: Whoever mutilates, cuts, disfigures, perforates, unites or cements together, or does any other thing to any bank bill, draft, note, or other evidence of debt issued by any national banking association, Federal Reserve Bank, or Federal Reserve System, with intent to render such item(s) unfit to be reissued, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than six months, or both. Defacement of currency in such a way that it is made unfit for circulation comes under the jurisdiction of the United States Secret Service." - source
"Defaced Money" tagged Tumblr posts,
11 more impressive examples of creatively defaced currency,
101 Unusual, Impressive And Illegal Pieces Of Defaced Currency, and
some cool guitar picks.
posted by spock
on Jan 7, 2013 -
7 comments
Mondo picks it's alternative movie posters of the year:
1,
2,
3.
posted by Artw
on Jan 4, 2013 -
19 comments
With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else. December 2012 marks the 40th anniversary of
Invisible Cities -- the sublime metaphysical travelogue by author-journalist
Italo Calvino. In a series of pensive dialogues with jaded emperor
Kublai Khan, the explorer
Marco Polo describes a meandering litany of visionary and impossible places,
dozens of surreal, fantastical cities, each poetically reifying ideas vital to language, philosophy, and the human spirit. This gracefully written love letter to urban life has inspired
countless tributes, but it's just the most accessible of Calvino's fascinating literary catalogue. Look inside for a closer look at his most remarkable works, links to English translations of his magical prose, and collections of artistic interpretations from around the web -- including
this treasure trove of essays, excerpts, articles, and recommended reading.
[more inside]
posted by Rhaomi
on Dec 30, 2012 -
26 comments
light AMPLIFICATION - Is the color of future of your future neon pink? Is the language Japanese? Are the city's an eternal nighttime of airbrushed martini glasses, glossy red lips and consumer electronics? Do you jam with the console cowboys in cyberspace? Then this is the tumblr for you. [via
mefi projects]
posted by Artw
on Dec 29, 2012 -
44 comments
Nimona is the shape-shifting, hell-raising sidekick to Ballister Blackheart, the biggest name in supervilliany.
[more inside]
posted by mokin
on Dec 27, 2012 -
25 comments
In 2011 a group of 40 women known as
The Materialistics exhibited a collection of their art work called "The Grand Tour" at the Customs House in South Shields, England.
"The Grand Tour" comprised
50 pieces of art work and it took The Materialistics a year to create them. What made this collection remarkable was the medium used to create these art works: they were not painted or sculpted, but knitted, crocheted, and embroidered. Through needlework, The Materialistics had recreated 50 well-known works of art in painstaking detail: Andy Warhol's
Marilyn Monroe, Edvard Munch's
The Scream, Vincent Van Gogh's
Sunflowers, Pablo Picasso's
Woman in Garden, Rembrandt's self-portrait, Dante Gabriel's
Rosetti's Daydream, Gustav Klimt's
The Kiss, and many more.
[more inside]
posted by orange swan
on Dec 26, 2012 -
12 comments
The fake intellectual invites you to conspire in his own self-deception, to join in creating a fantasy world. He is the teacher of genius, you the brilliant pupil. Faking is a social activity in which people act together to draw a veil over unwanted realities and encourage each other in the exercise of their illusory powers. The arrival of fake thought and fake scholarship in our universities should not therefore be attributed to any explicit desire to deceive. It has come about through the complicit opening of territory to the propagation of nonsense.
An essay by
Roger Scruton from
Aeon magazine.
posted by chavenet
on Dec 23, 2012 -
57 comments
To say that Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur L'Enfant-Jesus (Twenty Contemplations on the Infant Jesus) is a masterpiece is a gross understatement. Over sixty years after its composition, it has rightfully earned the recognition of being one of the most important piano works of the 20th century. ... [It] is one of the most personal and intimate pieces Messiaen ever wrote, and it gives the listener a close look at Messiaen the person. Messiaen was a deeply religious person, and although his faith influenced every single piece he wrote, the Vingt Regards is almost like his own personal spiritual diary. -
Keith Kerchoff [more inside]
posted by Egg Shen
on Dec 13, 2012 -
16 comments
