First you set out to smash all institutions, but then you find the institutions have enshrined you. Isn’t that always the way? It certainly seems to have turned out that way for punk rock, in any case, which vowed in the seventies to tear it all up and start over again.

Burly Chinese artist and dissident Ai Weiwei has never lost his sense of humor, even when facing harsh repression from his government. But while the idea of 55-year old Ai recording a heavy metal record might seem like a stunt, the source material for his first single, “Dumbass” (above), is anything but funny.

I grew up with the music of Joni Mitchell often playing in the background of my home life. For me she blended with the voices of Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Carole King, and other sixties folkies; my mother—who played instruments like dulcimers and autoharps and could not sing or keep time—loved these women. I will confess, I did not.

The camera, Henri Cartier-Bresson once said, is an instrument of intuition and spontaneity — “the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously.” Like a Zen archer, Cartier-Bresson viewed his métier as a way of being in the world.

Yesterday we featured the National Gallery of Art’s site NGA Images, where you can download 25,000 high-quality digital images of that museum’s works of art.

No surprise that in “Masterworks for One and All,” an article about how museums have begun to offer free, high-quality downloadable images of works from their collections, the New York Times’ Nina Siegal brings up Walter Benjamin.

Just yesterday, The New York Times ran a piece declaring that vinyl is back. Once a casualty of the CD, vinyl records are now selling at a steady clip, and not just to nostalgic sexagenarians. Younger music fans are embracing old-school records, frankly because they deliver a better sound than compressed MP3s.

Maurice Sendak (1928-2012), the great writer and illustrator of children’s books, would have turned 85 today.

It’s 1969. Psychedelia gets weirder, the Age of Aquarius dawns, Grace Slick falls down the rabbit hole at Woodstock. Unrest and revolution break out all over the topsy-turvy world.

How could David Byrne never have given a commencement address before? As an experienced public speaker, a well-known creator who has carved out his own cultural niche, an advocate of things (such as cycling) beloved among world-changing young people, the founder of a band with a surprising multi-generational appeal, and a man with no small command