MetaFilter posts tagged with culture and arts

Portraits of luminaries of the arts - 1930s-'60s

madamjujujive — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 08:08:36 -0800

Extravagant Crowd - Carl Van Vechten’s Portraits of Women and Photos of African Americans. Previous post by ND¢: Creative Americans: Portraits by Carl Van Vechten 1932-1964. Also, public domain works from Wikimedia Commons. Van Vechten was an influential critic, novelist, photographer, and promoter of the arts. He was an early patron of the Harlem Renaissance - but sparked a huge controversy with his unfortunately titled novel, Nigger Heaven. Despite this controversy, his interest in and high regard for African American arts was not in dispute. The Index and Introduction to the Portraits of Women collection is quite good, but for those who may not want to wade through all 96 pages of his African American collection, here is a selection I particularly liked: Eartha Kitt, 1954 Billy Dee Williams, 1963 James Earl Jones, 1961 Dizzie Gillespie, 1955, 2 James Baldwin, 1955 Ralph Bunche, 1951 Harry Belafonte, 1954 Billie Holiday, 1949, another, and with Mister Pearl Bailey, 1946 Leontyne Price, 1951, and as Bess Ossie Davis, 1951 Joyce Bryant, 1953 Diahann Carroll, 1955

Wiring the Castle

Miko — Fri, 27 Feb 2009 21:09:16 -0800

Circuits are flipping on in the nation's attic. A couple of weeks ago, 31 "digerati" -- like Clay Shirky, Chris Anderson, and George Oates -- dropped in to the Smithsonian Institution for the invitation-only conference "Smithsonian 2.0: A Gathering to Re-imagine the Smithsonian in the Digital Age". Dan Cohen of the Center for History and New Media provides a great summary (and continues to pose provocative questions) on his own blog. Those whose invitations were somehow lost in the mail can play fly-on-the-wall by watching the keynotes, paging through the Flickr pool of envymaking glimpses of their behind-the-scenes lab and collections tours, reading the blog (where Bruce Wyman of the Denver Art Museum lays out a succinct road map for museums using social media), and poking around in the SI's website gallery. Want to cheer on the USA's favorite 163-year-old "Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge" without taking the trip to DC? Thanks to their recent efforts, you can now follow the SI on Twitter, listen to its podcasts, watch its YouTube channel, visit the Latino Virtual Museum in Second Life, or use the FaceBook gifts page to send your best friends their very own pair of Dorothy's ruby slippers, Hope diamond, Negro Leagues baseball, or coelocanth.

flacid

plexi — Mon, 06 Oct 2008 08:14:42 -0800

"There is powerful literature in all big cultures, but you can't get away from the fact that Europe still is the centre of the literary world... not the United States," he said. "The US is too isolated, too insular. They don't translate enough and don't really participate in the big dialogue of literature... That ignorance is restraining."

Nobel literature prize judge Horace Engdahl comes down hard against Don DeLillo, David Foster Wallace, and other crazy American shit that just can't cross the waters.

Y'a un «fuck» qui s'ennuie en maudit..

zenzizi — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 08:12:57 -0800

Culture en péril - In these Canadian election times and in response to the recent Culture cuts from Conservatives - three of the best Quebec talents in music, theater and humor join forces and hit back hard (lol) with a highly satirical imagining of the replacement program (captioned).

The "Humans of Hokkaidō" formally recognized.

dawson — Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:15:58 -0800

Until 400 years ago, the Ainu controlled Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan's four main islands. Today they are a small minority group of Japan. They are a hunting and fishing people whose origins remain in dispute. Long before the people who would come to be known as "the Japanese" completed their migrations from the Asia mainland, the islands of Japan were already inhabited by a race of people known as the Ainu ("human"). On this northernmost island, (Hokkaido), in the "snow country," there still may be found remnants of this once proud and vigorous people who roamed the Japan islands long before the Japanese themselves arrived.

Grandmaster Gregory in da hizzouse

madamjujujive — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 00:33:15 -0800

The Pardoner's Tale - adapted to rap by Baba Brinkman, who has been rapping Chaucer tales for a few years now. He's also released The Rap Canterbury Tales, a book that presents raps side by side with Chaucer's original Middle English. Both video and book are illustrated graffiti-style by his brother Erik. Discussed in a previous post by fatllama on hip hop classics.

matteo — Mon, 13 Mar 2006 10:12:06 -0800

Jerry Lewis at 80 (more inside)

Hippocamp Ruins Sgt Pepper's

room — Sat, 10 Dec 2005 01:51:22 -0800

Hippocamp Ruins Sgt Pepper's A group of electronic artists have worked on a "ruined" version of the Beatles Sgt Pepper's classic. Designed to accompany and contrast with the ".... Ruins Pet Sounds" release from earlier in the year .... this ruined release exists to be compared and contrasted to the original album and its artistic competitor Pet Sounds. The original classic is recontextualised through the humour and vision of these artists whose approaches to the tracks aims to re-examine Pepper's through a filter of 2005 technology.

... to the MtaFlter...

fatllama — Fri, 05 Aug 2005 21:43:44 -0800

Found in translation: Much more than / Hip hop Chaucer, and it don't stop / Hip hop Aeschylus, and it don't stop / Hip hop Shakespeare, and it don't stop / Yeah [3.4MB .wmv], and it don't stop, and it don't quit.

Hornby on pop music

grumblebee — Wed, 26 May 2004 10:11:48 -0800

Nick Hornby discusses pop music in this NY Times essay: "Maybe this split is inevitable in any medium where there is real money to be made: it has certainly happened in film, for example, and even literature was a form of pop culture, once upon a time. It takes big business a couple of decades to work out how best to exploit a cultural form; once that has happened, 'that high-low fork in the road' is unavoidable, and the middle way begins to look impossibly daunting. It now requires more bravery than one would ever have thought necessary to try and march straight on, to choose neither the high road nor the low. Who has the nerve to pick up where Dickens or John Ford left off? In other words, who wants to make art that is committed and authentic and intelligent, but that sets out to include, rather than exclude? To do so would run the risk of seeming not only sincere and uncool - a stranger to all notions of postmodernism - but arrogant and vaultingly ambitious as well."

Browsing at the Art and Culture Automat

taz — Mon, 19 May 2003 03:20:33 -0800

Cyberlicious: the Art and Culture Network. In a lo-brow search for "bubblicious", I happened upon the hi-brow and highly browse-friendly, ACN. Why? Because "bubblicious" is one of its in-site "keyword" searches, describing that quality "shared by champagne, soap foam, hot air balloons, and gum... lighter than air, ephemeral, in a state of creative tension, colorful, beautiful, and amusing", and returning results for movements such as "Pop/Surrealism/Anti-Design", "Miniskirts", "The Digital Era", "Smarty Arty Pop" and "Glam Rock", along with artists such as Mary Quant, The Ramones, Mariko Mori, Gene Kelly, and Mouse on Mars. (more...)

blueshammer — Wed, 11 Sep 2002 09:27:35 -0800

NYT Arts story that conjectures critical (and popular) retro fixations are not only something new (or somehow newsworthy) but can be credibly associated with 9/11 sentiment. Oh, and freshly minted art isn't as good or noteworthy as the old stuff, even if that old stuff (Nevermind, Eastwood's Unforgiven) is from the early '90s. Pick apart, please.