Archives for November 2009
In case you missed it, Maira Kalman’s latest.
101 year old Oscar Niemeyer has returned to work just weeks after surgery for gallstones and an intestinal tumour. What is your excuse?
Significant Objects had its 100th and final auction. Now they’ve posted a list of all the objects, what they cost and what they sold for. And the stuff from the famous writers didn’t always go for the highest bids. As Sarah Weinman points out, it “emphasizes the randomness that is publishing and reader taste, which is actually kind of cool.”
Holiday shopping? Don’t forget the Tomorrow Museum gift store is open 24 hours!
Jonah Lehrer on the Picasso quote “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up”: “From the perspective of the brain, Picasso is on to something, as the frontal lobes (and the DPLFC in particular) are the last brain areas to fully develop. And so the super-ego settles in, and we become too self-conscious to create. Obviously, we need the frontal lobes to function – just look at the tragic life of SB – but every talent comes with a tradeoff. When we repress our urge to confabulate we also repress the urge to create. To quote Picasso once again: ‘Art is a lie that makes us realize truth.’ But it’s still a lie.” Related: Ken Robinson’s TED talk on how education is restraining the creativity of children.
Reviewing Ed and Nancy Kienholz’s recreation of Amsterdam’s red-light district, The Hoerengracht “at least two men writing about the piece have felt the need to share personal stories of interactions with the Amsterdam red-light district, or with prostitutes. Richard Dorment opened his Telegraph review with a paragraph on his schoolboy adventures in Amsterdam (supervised by a Jesuit; what a shame I went to a Church of England school). It is ‘not irrelevant to the exhibition’, he adds. Then Tom Lubbock in the Independent tells us ‘I have never paid for sex. But off the top of my head I can think of three male friends who have, and perhaps still do.’ Too much information. WAY too much. What next, a link to their Facebook pages?” (via.)
“Giving Christo the bulk of the credit — or failing to give Jeanne-Claude her due — misunderstands the enduring significance of their work. While Christo worked primarily on the drawings and models that made their enterprise possible, Jeanne-Claude focused on the fairly enormous behind-the scenes tasks that lend their work its post-Marxist heft.” – Kriston Capps
“History is in trouble, David McCullough suggests, because most academic historians have forgotten how to tell a story. “That’s what history is,” he says, “a story.”" Washington Post on the problem with history academics “Instead of writing this kind of narrative history, most academic historians, especially at the beginning of their careers, write what might be described as analytic history, specialized and often narrowly focused monographs usually based on their PhD dissertations.”
“Rather than some authentic, uncomplicated, unplanned response to ordinary people’s desires, London’s suburbia was the product of both planning and speculation, heavily mediated, and marketed using an impressive degree of subterfuge.” – Owen Hatherley visits the “Suburbia” exhibition at the London Transport Museum… “The exhibition alludes to the fact that London’s private transport companies were the sponsors and often the creators of suburbia, extending their lines into open country, promoting the glories of the countryside, and then developing it out of existence.”
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