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markfrankel18

Tuning Out Digital Buzz, for an Intimate Communion With Art - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...timate-communion-with-art.html

TOK arts

shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • A recent scientific study published in the journal Acta Psychologica suggests that people enjoy art more and remember it longer when they see it “live” in museums, as opposed to online.Continue reading the main story We don’t need science to tell us why this might be. Museums, like churches and libraries, are designed to enhance specific activities — praying, reading, looking — through the manipulation of architecture, lighting, object placement and ritualized behavior. Very different designs — from the processional layout of the Metropolitan Museum to the labyrinthine tangle of the new Fondation Louis Vuitton art center in Paris — can be equally effective. And some don’t work.
  • Cellphone snapshots, the souvenir postcards of the present, are fine, and that they can be widely, even endlessly sent and shared is great. The digital presence of entire museum collections online is a tremendous thing, a gift of pleasure and knowledge to museumgoers, scholars and artists alike.But a snapshot is frozen in time. An archive of reproductions isn’t alive. And the further we distance ourselves from art itself, from being in front of it with all filters gone, life is what we lose — art’s and ours.
markfrankel18

Britain's view of its history 'dangerous', says former museum director | Culture | The ... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...us-says-former-museum-director

TOK history

shared by markfrankel18 on 09 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • Neil MacGregor, the former director of the British Museum, has bemoaned Britain’s narrow view of its own history, calling it “dangerous and regrettable” for focusing almost exclusively on the “sunny side”. Speaking before the Berlin opening of his highly popular exhibition Germany – Memories of a Nation, MacGregor expressed his admiration for Germany’s rigorous appraisal of its history which he said could not be more different to that of Britain. “In Britain we use our history in order to comfort us to make us feel stronger, to remind ourselves that we were always, always deep down, good people,” he said. “Maybe we mention a little bit of slave trade here and there, a few wars here and there, but the chapters we insist on are the sunny ones,” he said.
markfrankel18

Poland vs. History by Timothy Snyder | NYR Daily | The New York Review of Books - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...oland-vs-history-museum-gdansk

TOK history bias

shared by markfrankel18 on 04 May 16 - No Cached
  • Most seriously of all, the effects of suppressing national memory could be of critical importance to Poles in coming decades, and to a global audience that has yet to fully absorb the complicated lessons of World War II. In some measure at least, how rising generations of Poles see themselves, democracy, and Europe will depend on whether they can have ready access to their country’s complicated experience in World War II. The collapse of democracy, the museum’s first theme, could hardly be more salient than it is right now. And the presentation of the conflict as a global tragedy could hardly be more instructive. The preemptive liquidation of the museum is nothing less than a violent blow to the world’s cultural heritage.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC Radio 4 - The Reith Lectures, Grayson Perry: Playing to the Gallery: 2013, Democrac... - 0 views

www.bbc.co.uk/b03969vt

TOK arts judgment

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 20 Oct 13 - No Cached
  • Lawrence Hrubes on 20 Oct 13
     
    "In the first of four lectures, recorded in front of an audience at Tate Modern in London, the artist Grayson Perry reflects on the idea of quality and examines who and what defines what we see and value as art. He argues that there is no empirical way to judge quality in art. Instead the validation of quality rests in the hands of a tightknit group of people at the heart of the art world including curators, dealers, collectors and critics who decide in the end what ends up in galleries and museums."
Lawrence Hrubes

Ai Weiwei Survey Lands at the Brooklyn Museum - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ds-at-the-brooklyn-museum.html

arts TOK China politics sculpture

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 25 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • Mr. Ai is a complex, troublesome figure: an artistic provocateur who works in several mediums, an activist and thorn in the side of the Chinese powers that be and an impresario able to marshal scores of variously adept Chinese artisans to make ambitious pieces that he barely touches. He’s also a designer and part-time architect who collaborated with the Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron on the emblematic “Bird’s Nest” National Stadium in Beijing for the 2008 Olympics. And he was the darling of the Chinese power structure, until he began jumping in where he wasn’t invited.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Stalin wiped from Soviet Gulag prison museum - 9 views

www.bbc.com/...world-europe-31711287

history memory bias

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 04 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • The director of a Russian museum at a Stalin-era prison camp says local officials have taken over the site and removed references to the Soviet dictator's crimes.
  • Millions of Soviet citizens were sent to labour camps in the notorious Gulag system, or shot, during Joseph Stalin's hardline communist rule. The worst repressions took place in the 1930s.
  • Portraits of Stalin - taboo after the scale of his crimes was revealed - have become more common since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Surveys indicate that many Russians now regard Stalin as a hero.
markfrankel18

Why I Changed My Mind About Confederate Monuments - The Atlantic - 1 views

www.theatlantic.com/...537396

TOK history

shared by markfrankel18 on 19 Aug 17 - No Cached
  • markfrankel18 on 19 Aug 17
     
    "That summer, I traveled for the first time to Prague, in the former Soviet-bloc country of Czechoslovakia. I noticed almost immediately the concrete foundations and empty pedestals where monuments to communist leaders once stood. Some statues had been relocated to museums, while others were destroyed; skate boarders and sunbathers had since claimed their spot. The experience forced me to reconsider my position on the markers back home. I imagined stepping back in time to convince the residents of Prague that the monuments helped them face their past, or gave teachers an important tool with which to engage their students. This proved to be a futile exercise. "
markfrankel18

Art All Over - The New Yorker - 2 views

www.newyorker.com/...art-all-over

TOK art

shared by markfrankel18 on 08 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • At what point does a widely shared yen for aesthetic engagement alter the character of that engagement? We’ve reached that point on many days at the Museum of Modern Art, where the crowds experience mainly crowdedness, and the Picassos and Pollocks take on the glazed miens of traumatized warriors. MOMA’s own planned expansion bodes an architecture keyed to crowd management, which explains the logic behind even the cruel demolition of the intimate former American Museum of Folk Art.
Lawrence Hrubes

The Spectacle of the Spectacles - The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...he-spectacle-of-the-spectacles

arts

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 05 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • Kevin Nguyen, sixteen, set his opened eyeglasses on the floor, neatly perpendicular to a nearby wall. He and T. J. Khayatan, seventeen, then stood back to watch what ensued: viewers observing the glasses with the curiosity and respect befitting a work of art—which, under the circumstances, they were.
  • But consider: an object manufactured to enhance seeing, presented as something to see. By being underfoot, the glasses were divorced from their function
  • Museums edit, for our convenience, the universe of existing things. What they let in and what they keep out shape culture.
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC - Culture - How the English language became such a mess - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...150605-your-language-is-sinful

language history

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 08 Jun 15 - No Cached
  • First, the greed: invasion and theft. The Romans invaded Britain in the 1st Century AD and brought their alphabet; in the 7th Century, the Angles and Saxons took over, along with their language. Starting in the 9th Century, Vikings occupied parts of England and brought some words (including they, displacing the Old English hie). Then the Norman French conquered in 1066 – and replaced much of the vocabulary with French, including words which over time became beef, pork, invade, tongue and person.
  • Once the English tossed out the French (but not their words) a few centuries later, they started to acquire territories around the world – America, Australia, Africa, India. With each new colony, Britain acquired words: hickory, budgerigar, zebra, bungalow. The British also did business with everyone else and took words as they went – something we call “borrowing,” even though the words were kept. Our language is a museum of conquests.
  • Sometimes sounds just change capriciously. The most significant instance of this in English was the Great Vowel Shift. From the 1400s to about 1700, for reasons that remain unclear, our long vowels all shifted in our mouths like cream swirling slowly in a cup of tea. Before it, see rhymed with "eh"; boot was said like “boat”; and out sounded like “oot.” But when the sounds shifted, the spelling stayed behind.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • One more layer of snobbery has added further complications across the Atlantic over the last couple of centuries: national pride. The (relatively few) American simplifications of spelling – color for colour, center for centre – largely owe their existence to Noah Webster’s desire to create a distinctive American English. Canadian preference for keeping many British spellings, on the other hand, has the same nationalistic origins… just in reverse.And now? Now we don’t even want to spell things as they sound. How do spellings like hed, hart, lafter, dotter, and det look to you? Uneducated, perhaps? Annoyingly simplistic? Exactly. We enjoy our discomforts – and we really enjoy arbitrary practices that allow us to tell who are and aren’t the “right sort”. We’ve taken a useful tool and turned it into a social filter.
Lawrence Hrubes

Behind the Scenes at 'Pterosaurs: Flight in the Age of Dinosaurs' - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...t-in-the-age-of-dinosaurs.html

science arts TOK paleontology dinosaurs museum models

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 01 Apr 14 - No Cached
  • “Most of the questions that we actually get from artists, the answer is, ‘I don’t know,’ ” Dr. Kellner said. But the more research that’s done, the closer their guess can be on an animal that’s been extinct for 66 million years.
  • “Occasionally,” said Dr. Kellner, “once you have it done, everything is fine, everyone is happy. But then a year later someone makes a new discovery.
  • Most people, he said, think art and science are two different worlds. “I used to think they were very separate, but they’re actually very similar. You have to be creative and you have to be observant.”
Lawrence Hrubes

BBC News - Lives of the First World War 'digital memorial' goes live - 1 views

www.bbc.com/uk-27369169

history war memorial memory TOK sources

shared by Lawrence Hrubes on 12 May 14 - No Cached
sleggettisp liked it
  • Documents such as medal and grave records, census information, family photographs and battalion diary entries record their lives, but the IWM says it is still seeking more details about them. The project, which is free to use, is being supported by DC Thomson Family History, which runs several online ancestry websites. Each person in the archive will have their own web page, where the public can upload photographs, write stories and recollections or add links to other records. The IWM says the centenary of WW1 will see many families showing a renewed interest in documents, diaries, letters or photographs handed down by relatives or picked up from museums, libraries and archives.
markfrankel18

Stunted: The White Flags on the Brooklyn Bridge - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...stunted

TOK arts classification

shared by markfrankel18 on 27 Aug 14 - No Cached
  • Illegal public art is in the news. The most notorious instance this summer was the switch of flags on the Brooklyn Bridge, by two German artists, from the Stars and Stripes to all-white versions of the same. Others include a Canadian artist’s scrawls, partly in blood, on a wall in the Jeff Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum and, in Moscow, the painting of a star ornament atop a Stalin-era tower, in Ukrainian national colors. Internationally, the British midnight muralist Banksy continues his waggish depredations, rivalled of late by a female upstart called Bambi, who likewise stencils images, only with a sexy-feminist spin. The over-all phenomenon could use a name—I propose Stunt art—and some analysis, starting with distinctions.
  • As a category of volunteer art, Stunt art borders the genres of spray-can graffiti and spectacular illegal sport, such as scaling or parachuting from tall buildings.
  • Stuntism is to art as weeds are to horticulture: plants in the wrong place. Authorities, social or botanical, define the wrongness, which becomes more arbitrary the more you think about it. Some weeds are as lovely as tulips. A superb gardener I know welcomes the sceptered majesty of common mullein (distinct from the mannerly hybrid varieties) wherever it opts to sprout. So may it be with Stunt art, in a time given to fanatical constraints on human-natural cussedness.
markfrankel18

With Naming Rights, 'Perpetuity' Doesn't Always Mean Forever - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...oesnt-always-mean-forever.html

TOK language

shared by markfrankel18 on 28 Nov 14 - No Cached
  • “I asked him, How long is ‘in perpetuity’?”“For you, 50 years,” Mr. de Montebello, the museum director, replied.
  • “Perpetuity is usually a matter of negotiation now,” said William D. Zabel, a lawyer representing the Fisher family, who had threatened to sue on their behalf 12 years ago when Lincoln Center considered changing the name at that time without its permission.“It’s like in ‘Alice in Wonderland’: ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less,’ ” he said.
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