≡ Category: Art, Media | ≅ Comments
No one tells a better story than This American Life, the award-winning radio program coming out of Chicago. And no one is better positioned to explain the art of great story telling than the show’s host, Ira Glass. Above, Glass gives you his thoughts. And this clip comes in 4 acts. For more, get Act [...]
≡ Category: Art, History | ≅ Comments
The Bayeux Tapestry famously offers a pictorial interpretation of the Norman Conquest of England (1066), a pivotal moment in medieval history, and the events leading to the invasion itself. Currently residing in France, the tapestry measures 20 inches by 230 feet, and you can now see an animated version of the story it narrates. The [...]
≡ Category: Art, Science | ≅ Comments
This year, Nikon held a contest and selected the best “photomicrographs,” essentially pictures taken through the microscope. 20 finalists were selected in total, and you can view them on Nikon’s web site, or even more easily on Wired’s web site. Among the finalists, you’ll find the picture above. Nope, it isn’t a Van Gogh. It’s [...]
Taryn Simon photographs the hidden and unfamiliar in America (see book here). Above, her 18 minute presentation takes you inside the America not often seen, providing glimpses of the CIA’s abstract art collection, the federal government’s marijuana grow room, a Braille edition of Playboy produced by the Library of Congress (just the articles, not the [...]
The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) just wrapped up an exhibition exploring the relationship between Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams, two important American artists of the past century. Even though the exhibition is now closed, the SFMOMA web site still hosts a series of videos featuring Ansel Adams discussing his work. Here, Adams [...]
Straight from Metafilter. Seemed worth passing along to our readers:
The Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam invites you to compare Caravaggio and Rembrandt. For an overview of Rembrandt’s work here are Rembrandt van Rijn: Life and Work and A Web Catalogue of Rembrandt Paintings. For Caravaggio there’s caravaggio.com which makes use of the Italian website Tutta l’opera del [...]
≡ Category: Art, iPhone | ≅ Comments
This caught my attention today:
“The National Gallery is the first ever gallery to make its paintings accessible through a downloadable iPhone application, making it possible to take a mini tour of the Gallery anywhere in the world.
The Gallery, in partnership with Antenna Audio and Apple Inc., has designed a new application for iPhones and iTouch [...]
“Masterpieces of Western Art” has been a degree requirement at Columbia University since 1947. The long-established course is not your traditional historical survey. Rather, it focuses on a select number of artists and monuments, with the larger goal of helping students think critically about art. Over on iTunes, you can find some videos from the course. [...]
Curious piece in the Telegraph. It starts:
He is known as the tortured genius who cut off his own ear as he struggled with mental illness after the breakdown of his friendship with a fellow artist. But a new study claims Vincent Van Gogh may have made up the story to protect painter Paul Gauguin who actually [...]
≡ Category: Art, Books, History, Media | ≅ Comments
Another big digital archive went live this week. Backed by the United Nations, the World Digital Library wants to centralize cultural treasures from around the world. Manuscripts, maps, rare books, musical scores, recordings, films, prints, photographs, and architectural drawings — they will all be absorbed into this growing online collection, and users will be able to [...]
This week, ArtBabble, a new video website for the museum & art world, opened its virtual doors. Created by the Indianapolis Museum of Art, ArtBabble brings together videos from various arts institutions (MoMA, SFMOMA, PBS, the New Public Library, etc) and presents them to users in a clean, organized way. The footage, often produced in high definition, features interviews [...]
This really caught my eye…
If you didn’t make it to the Mark Rothko exhibition at the Tate Modern (and chances are you didn’t), then you can still see it virtually. As you’ll see, the Tate Modern has created a fantastic web site that lets you take a panoramic tour of the Rothko collection. Once you [...]
Let me bring this to your attention. Erwan Bomstein-Erb, the founder and director of Canal Educatif in Paris, has released a documentary (in English) about The Gates of Hell, a monumental project that Auguste Rodin worked on, not necessarily consistently, for 37 years. On its own, this video is worth your time. But you [...]
Let me bring this to your attention. Erwan Bomstein-Erb, the founder and director of Canal Educatif in Paris, has released a documentary (in English) about The Gates of Hell, a monumental project that Auguste Rodin worked on, not necessarily consistently, for 37 years. On its own, this video is worth your time. But you should also know that this [...]
An FYI for art and poetry lovers: “Each month, TATE ETC. publishes new poetry by leading poets such as John Burnside, Moniza Alvi, Adam Thorpe, Alice Oswald and David Harsent who respond to works from the Tate Collection. (Subscribe to the Poem of the Month RSS feed.) This March Roger McGough presents his poem, Cadeau, based on Man Ray’s work [...]
Now there’s a nice alternative to the traditional, expensive art history textbook. The folks at smARThistory have created a free multi-media web-book that offers a dynamic survey of art history. The online resource combines traditional images with audio and videos, and the beauty is that you don’t have to read this web-book in a linear fashion. Rather, you [...]
≡ Category: Art, Current Affairs | ≅ Comments
The story behind the artwork that defined the Obama campaign is a fascinating one. Shepard Fairey’s posters achieved prominence much in the same way that Obama did. They rose from the ground up. Everyday people supported and promoted his imaginative posters on the web, until they became something of a public phenomenon. And they [...]
≡ Category: Art, Google, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Comments
Thankfully, it’s not all bad news here in Silicon Valley. Yesterday, Google and the Prado (the major art museum in Madrid) announced that you can launch Google Earth from wherever you live, travel virtually to Spain, and then take a close look at fourteen of the museum’s finest paintings. And, by “close,” I mean close. [...]
Almost exactly a year ago, I caught up with Jori Finkel, a journalist who covers the Los Angeles arts scene, and we talked about an art-world controversy that she first wrote about in The New York Times. The controversy focused on museums seeking funding from art galleries, which can be a direct conflict of interests, [...]
A good days for fans of open culture: Google is bringing the massive LIFE photo archive online. 2 million photos are already uploaded, and another 8 million will be coming online soon. The current archive moves from The American Civil War to present, and it includes a large number of photos never seen before. Here’s one [...]
≡ Category: Art, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Comments
You’ll get the concept of this pretty quickly. And if you’re a fan, see these other clips (Women in Art & Women in Film). These creative videos by Philip Scott Johnson all reside in this larger YouTube collection, which has now made it on to our our growing list: Intelligent Life at YouTube: 80 Educational Video Collections.
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≡ Category: Art, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Comments
Here’s a rather amazing video (added to our YouTube playlist) that shows what happens when an artist, who happens to be autistic, takes a 45 minute helicopter flight over Rome and then works to artistically reproduce all that he sees. The human brain never ceases to amaze:
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≡ Category: Art, Books | ≅ Comments
Thanks to a heads up from one of our loyal readers (thanks Bob!) you can see a new artistic trend that’s turning books back into trees. Good stuff.
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≡ Category: Art, Comedy, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Comments
Anyone remember Father Guido Sarducci from Saturday Night Live’s better days? Below, we find him celebrating the virtues of art school. The clip is funny. But it’s even funnier when you consider that this was apparently a real TV commercial made for the San Francisco Art Institute in the early 1980s. The clip has been [...]
“Color film was non-existent in 1909 Russia, yet in that year a photographer named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii embarked on a photographic survey of his homeland and captured hundreds of photos in full, vivid color. His photographic plates were black and white, but he had developed an ingenious photographic technique which allowed him to use them [...]
≡ Category: Art, Literature, Music, Video - Arts & Culture, YouTube | ≅ Comments
One of our British readers turned us on to this post by the Guardian, noting that they took a page from our general playbook. The post features 50 of the best YouTube clips from across the arts, some of which we’ve featured here in the past. Among the videos, you’ll find vintage performances by John [...]
Finnish photographer Kari Kuukka has posted a panoramic view of Beijing’s Olympics Stadium, capturing the mood about 30 minutes before the men’s 100m final, when Usain Bolt blew away the field. Give the page a few seconds to load and the picture will go in motion. Hat tip to Metafilter, and adieu to Beijing.
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≡ Category: Art, Random, Video - Arts & Culture | ≅ Comments
When completed in Dubai, this “dynamic building” designed by David Fisher will be in constant motion, always changing its shape, and also generate its own electric energy. You can reserve your apartment today, or wait for similar buildings to get erected in Moscow and New York. The whole concept feels a bit Las Vegas-esque. But [...]
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