Imagine a grand tour of European museums, and a fair few destinations come right to mind: the Rijksmuseum, the Prado, the Uffizi Gallery, the Louvre. These institutions alone could take years to experience fully, but it would be an incomplete journey that didn’t venture farther east — much farther east, in the view of Great Art Explained creator James Payne. In his latest Great Art Cities video, he makes the case for Istanbul, adducing such both artistically and historically rich sites as the İstanbul Archaeological Museum, the Basilica Cistern, the Zeyrek Çinili Hamam, Istanbul Modern, and of course — as previously featured here on Open Culture — the unignorable Hagia Sophia.
Payne introduces Istanbul as having been “the capital of three great empires, Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman.” In the continent-straddling metropolis as it is today, “both ancient and modern art blend elements from Europe, Asia, and the Middle East, reflecting its geographical and historical positioning as a bridge between the East and the West.”
The works on display in the city constitute “a visual embodiment of its complex history,” from the Hellenistic to the Roman to the Islamic to the styles and media of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, with all of which “modern-day Turkey is now creating its own artistic legacy.”
That legacy is also deeply rooted in the past. Visit the Archaeological Museum and you can see the Alexander Sarcophagus from the fourth century BC, whose astonishingly detailed carvings include “the only existing depiction of Alexander the Great created during his lifetime.” The underground Basilica Cistern, built in the sixth century, counts as much as a large-scale work of Byzantine art as it does a large-scale work of Byzantine engineering. From there, it’s a short tram ride on the Galata Bridge across the Golden Horn to the brand-new, Renzo Piano-designed Istanbul Modern, which has paintings by Cihat Burak, Fahrelnissa Zeid, Bedri Baykam. You may not know those names now, but if you view their work in the unique cultural context of Istanbul — in which so many eras and civilizations are manifest — you’ll never forget them.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
It’s difficult to imagine Iman and David Bowie inviting Vogue readers to join them on the above virtual tour of their mountaintop home near Woodstock, New York when the rock legend was alive.
Granted, shortly after their 1992 wedding, he gave Architectural Digest a peek at their ultra-luxurious, Indonesian-style holiday digs on the Caribbean island of Mustique, but, as reporter Christopher Buckley noted, “role changes have always been part of David Bowie’s persona.”
By the time they bought property and started a family in New York, they had honed techniques for flying under the radar in public, allowing them to lead a fairly regular life in both Manhattan and Ulster County where the house they built on their 64-acre plot of Little Tonshi Mountain is located.
Even the most dedicated city slicker should be able to appreciate the beauty of their floor-to-ceiling Catskills views.
“It’s stark, and it has a Spartan quality about it,” Bowie said prior to breaking ground on the house:
The retreat atmosphere honed my thoughts. I’ve written in the mountains before, but never with such gravitas.
WPDH in Poughkeepsie reported that “the mountaintop retreat was kept “secret” from fans and paparazzi as much as anything can be hidden in the age of the Internet and TMZ:”
Locals, however, are well aware of Bowie’s mountaintop home. Although many knew of his address, the rock icon’s requests for privacy were mostly honored by his neighbors and fellow Ulster County residents. Bowie was spotted around town but rarely hassled by strangers.
By and large, his neighbors left him in peace to pick up Chinese take out, browse the indie bookshop, and celebrate his daughter’s birthday at a nearby water park.
Bowie recorded his final album, Black Star, on the mountain. Soon after, friends and family gathered to scatter his ashes there too.
Iman confides that she found it difficult to spend time at the house following his 2016 death, but spending time there during the most intense part of the pandemic helped her come to terms with grief, and rejoice in the many contents that remind her of him.
Some highlights:
Bowie’s 1980 painting, Mustique, one of many self-portraits he painted over the years.
I feel like when I look at his eyes and I move around the house, it’s like it’s following me.
Lynn Chadwick’s sculpture “Teddy Boy and Girl”
Art consultant Kate Chertavian recalls how Iman enlisted her to help her track it down in the summer of 1993 to mark the couple’s first wedding anniversary:
David had shared with her a small drawing of a sculpture by Lynn Chadwick… a version of his Teddy Boy and Girl that had won the International Sculpture Prize at the 1956 Venice Biennale. Although I didn’t yet know David, his interest in this sculpture, with its musical references and incredible energy, made perfect sense. Teddy Boy and Girl is one of Chadwick’s best-known bodies of sculpture that helped rocket the artist to international fame. The series eloquently embodies the emergent 1950s British Pop culture as they depict post-war music-mad teens in their Edwardian frock coats dancing with arms in the air.
…way before David and I met, this was one of his favorite books. And actually, he told me some of the lyrics from his song “Heroes” were actually inspired by this book. And then of course, finally, when we meet, we can’t believe that we both adore the same book, but that also the whole story happens from where I come from, Somalia.
A self-portrait by their then-fifteen-year-old daughter Alexandria Jones, in which she and her mother are depicted inclining gently towards each other:
It’s me and her and, of course, the black star. That’s David… she painted this in 2016, which was the first year without David.
Of perhaps less immediate interest to those unconnected to the world of high fashion is a pricey black crocodile Hermès Birkin bag, a souvenir of a Parisian holiday early in the couple’s romance. This item does come with an endearing sartorial surprise for Bowie fans, however:
…and he bought himself, you won’t believe it, sandals.
Westerners tend to think of Japan as a land of high-speed trains, expertly prepared sushi and ramen, auteur films, brilliant animation, elegant woodblock prints, glorious old hotels, sought-after jazz-records, cat islands, and ghost towns. The last of those has, of course, not been shown to harbor literal wraiths and spirits. But if that sort of thing happens to be what you’re looking for, Japan’s long history offers up a wealth of mythological chimeras whose form, behavior, and sheer numbers exceed any of our expectations. Welcome to the supernatural realm of the shapeshifting, good- and bad-luck-bringing, trick-playing yōkai.
“Translating to ‘strange apparition,’ the Japanese word yōkai refers to supernatural beings, mutant monsters, and spirits,” writes Colossal’s Grace Ebert. “Mischievous, generous, and sometimes vengeful, the creatures are rooted in folklore and experienced a boom during the Edo period when artists would ascribe inexplicable phenomena to the unearthly characters.”
Written by ethnologist Yumoto Koichi, a yōkai expert whose donations constitute most of the Miyoshi Mononoke Museum’s collection, the 500-page YOKAI offers “the rare experience of seeing the brushwork of Edo-era painters like Tsukioka Yoshitoshi,” whom we’ve featured here as Japan’s last great woodblock artist. Poised between the human and animal kingdoms, reflecting the ways of the past as well as the forces of nature, yōkai would seem to belong entirely to the tales of a bygone age. But in fact, many of them have joined the canon since Tsukioka’s time, having emerged from haunted-school rumors, the fertile imaginations of manga artists, and even video games. Whether to accept these “modern yōkai” has been a matter of some debate, but as Japanese popular culture has long shown us, every age needs its own monsters.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Could you use a mental escape? Maybe a trip to Mars will do the trick. Above, you can find high definition footage captured by NASA’s three Mars rovers–Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity. The footage (also contributed by JPL-Caltech, MSSS, Cornell University and ASU) was stitched together by ElderFox Documentaries, creating what they call the most lifelike experience of being on Mars. Adding more context, Elder Fox notes:
The footage, captured directly by NASA’s Mars rovers — Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity, and Perseverance — unveils the red planet’s intricate details. These rovers, acting as robotic geologists, have traversed varied terrains, from ancient lake beds to towering mountains, uncovering Mars’ complex geological history.
As viewers enjoy these images, they will notice informal place names assigned by NASA’s team, providing context to the Martian features observed. Each rover’s unique journey is highlighted, showcasing their contributions to Martian exploration.
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“The book is designed to be completely alien to anybody who picks it up,” says the narrator of the Curious Archive video at the top of the post. “Not only are the images utterly mind-bending, it’s written in a made-up and thoroughly untranslatable language. And yet, the more you read, the more you might find a strange sense of continuity among the images. That’s because Serafini intended this book to be an encyclopedia: an encyclopedia of a world that doesn’t exist.”
The experience of reading it — if “reading” be the word — “reminds me of being young and flipping through an encyclopedia, staring at pictures and not comprehending the words, but feeling a strange, untranslatable world hovering just outside my understanding.”
Serafini himself describes the Codex as “an attempt to describe the imaginary world in a systematic way” in the Great Big Story video above. To create it, he spent two and a half years in a state he likens to “going in a trance,” drawing all these “fish with eyes or double rhinoceroses and whatever.” These images came first, and they were all so strange that he “had to find a language to explain” them. The resulting experience lets us experience what it is “to read without knowing how to read” — an experience that has attracted the attention of thinkers from Douglas Hofstadter to Roland Barthes to Serafini’s countryman Italo Calvino, a man possessed of no scant interest in the strange, mythical, and inscrutable.
In a 1982 essay, Calvino writes of Serafini’s “very clear italics,” which “we always feel we are just an inch away from being able to read and yet which elude us in every word and letter. The anguish that this Other Universe conveys to us does not stem so much from its difference to our world as from its similarity.” Clearly, “Serafini’s universe is inhabited by freaks. But even in the world of monsters there is a logic whose outlines we seem to see emerging and vanishing, like the meanings of those words of his that are diligently copied out by his pen-nib.” It all brings to mind a joke I once heard that likens humanity, with its invincible instinct to ask what everything means, to a race of space aliens with enormous trunks. When these aliens visit Earth, they respond to everything we try to tell them with the same question: “Yes, but what does that have to do with trunks?”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Eternity occupied artist James Grashow’s mind, too, throughout four years of toil on his Corrugated Fountain, a masterpiece of planned obsolescence.
“All artists talk about process”, he ruminates in an outtake from Olympia Stone’s documentary, The Cardboard Bernini, “but the process that they talk about is always from beginning to finish:
Nobody really talks about full term process to the end, to the destruction, to the dissolution of a piece. Everything dissolves in an eternity. I’d like to speak to that.
He picked the right medium for such a meditation — corrugated cardboard, sourced from the Danbury Square Box Company. (The founders chose its name in 1906 to alert the local hatting industry that they did not traffic in round hat boxes.)
Grashow challenged himself to make something with cardboard and hot glue that would “outshine” Bernini before it was sacrificed to the elements:
Water and cardboard cannot exist together.The idea of a paper fountain is impossible, an oxymoron that speaks to the human dilemma. I wanted to make something heroic in its concept and execution with full awareness of its poetic absurdity. I wanted to try to make something eternal out of cardboard… the Fountain was an irresistible project for me.
The documentary catches a mix of emotions as his meticulously constructed Baroque figures — nymphs, horses, dolphins, Poseidon — are positioned for destruction on the grounds of the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum.
A young boy at the exhibition’s opening is untroubled by the sculpture’s impending fate:
I think it’s cool, coz it’s made out of trees and it’s returning to mush…or whatever you want to call it.
His buddy finds it hard to share his enthusiasm, gesturing helplessly toward the monumental work, his voice trailing off as he remarks, “I don’t see why you would want that to…”
An adult visitor unashamedly reveals that she had been actively rooting for rain.
When a storm does reduce the sculpture to an Ozymandian tableau a short while later, Grashow suspects the project was ultimately a self portrait, “full of bluster and bravado, hollow and melancholy at its core, doomed from the start, and searching for beauty in all of the sadness.”
Then he and a helper cart what’s left off to a waiting dumpster.
His daughter, Rabbi Zoë Klein, likens the Corrugated Fountain’s impermanence to the sand mandalas Tibetan monks spend months creating, then sweep away with little fanfare:
…the art is about just the gift of creation, that we have this ability to create, that we celebrate that, not that we can conquer time, but rather we can make the most of the time we have by making it beautiful and meaningful, living up to our potential..
Grashow speaks tenderly of the ephemeral material he uses frequently in his work:
It’s so grateful for the opportunity to become something, because it knows it’s going to be trash.
Artist Jim Sanborn’s massive sculpture Kryptos may inspire various reactions in its viewers, but there’s definitely a single correct interpretation.
But 78-year-old Sanborn isn’t saying what…
He wants someone else to identify it.
Kryptos’ main mystery — more like “a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma” to quote Winston Churchill — was hand cut into an S‑shaped copper screen using jigsaws.
Image courtesy of the CIA
Professional cryptanalysts, hobbyists, and students have been attempting to crack the code of its 865 letters and 4 question marks since 1990, when it was installed on the grounds of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
The hands-on part fell well within Sanborn’s purview. But a Masters in sculpture from Pratt Institute does not automatically confer cryptography bonafides, so Sanborn enlisted Edward Scheidt, the retired chairman of the CIA’s Cryptographic Center, for a crash course in late 20th-century coding systems.
Sanborn sampled various coding methods for the finished piece, wanting the act of deciphering to feel like “peeling layers off an onion.”
Gillogly arrived at his solution in 1999, using a Pentium II.
Stein reached the same conclusion a year earlier, after chipping away at it for some 400 hours with pencil and paper, though the CIA kept his achievement on the down low until Gillogly went public with his.
The following year the National Security Agency claimed that four of their employees, working collaboratively, had reached an identical solution in 1992, a fact corroborated by documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act.
This still leaves the 97-character phrase from the final panel up for grabs. Cracking it will be the penultimate step in solving Kryptos’ puzzle. As Sanborn told NPR in 2020, “that phrase is in itself a riddle:”
It’s mysterious. It’s going to lead to something else. It’s not going to be finished when it’s decoded.
The public is welcome to continue making educated guesses.
Sanborn has leaked three clues over the years, all words that can be found in the final passage of decrypted text.
BERLIN, at positions 64 — 69 (2010)
CLOCK, at positions 70 — 74 (2014)
NORTHEAST, at position 26 — 34
Have you solved it, yet?
No?
Don’t feel bad…
Sanborn has been fielding incorrect answers daily for decades, though a rising tide of aggressive and racist messages led him to charge 50 bucks per submission, to which he responds via e‑mail, with absolutely no hope of hints.
Kryptos’ most dedicated fans, like game developer /cryptologist Elonka Dunin, seen plying Sanborn with copious quantities of sushi above in Great Big Story’s video, find value in working together and, sometimes, in person.
Their dream is that Sanborn might inadvertently let slip a valuable tidbit in their presence, though that seems like a long shot.
The artist claims to have gotten very skilled at maintaining a poker face.
(Wait, does that suggest his interlocutors have been getting warmer?)
Dunin has relinquished all fantasies of solving Kryptos solo, and now works to help someone — anyone — solve it.
Sanford has put a contingency plan in place in case no one ever manages to get to the bottom of the Kryptos (ancient Greek for “hidden”) conundrum.
He, or representatives of his estate, will auction off the solution. He is content with letting the winning bidder decide whether or not to share what’s been revealed to them.
“I do realize that the value of Kryptos is unknown and that perhaps this concept will bear little fruit,” he told the New York Times, though if one takes the masses of people desperate to learn the solution and factors in Sanford’s intention to donate all proceeds to climate research, it may well bear quite a healthy amount of fruit.
Join Elonka Dunin’s online community of Kryptos enthusiasts here.
To give you a taste of what you’re in for, here are the first two panels, followed by their solutions, with the artist’s intentional misspellings intact.
1. Encrypted Text
EMUFPHZLRFAXYUSDJKZLDKRNSHGNFIVJ
YQTQUXQBQVYUVLLTREVJYQTMKYRDMFD
Decrypted Text
Between subtle shading and the absence of light lies the nuance of iqlusion.
Decrypted Text
It was totally invisible Hows that possible? They used the Earths magnetic field X
The information was gathered and transmitted undergruund to an unknown location X
Does Langley know about this? They should Its buried out there somewhere X
Who knows the exact location? Only WW This was his last message X
Thirty eight degrees fifty seven minutes six point five seconds north
Seventy seven degrees eight minutes forty four seconds west ID by rows
View step by step solutions for the first three of Kryptos’ encrypted panels here.
The celebrity graffiti artist Keith Haring died in 1990, at the age of 31, no doubt having completed only a fraction of the artwork he would have produced in a life a few decades longer. Upon first seeing his Unfinished Painting of 1989, one might assume that his early death is what stopped him from finishing it. In fact, painting only about a quarter of the canvas was his deliberate choice, intended to make a visual commentary on the AIDS epidemic that had claimed so many lives, and, not long thereafter, would claim his own. Presumably, it never occurred to anyone to “finish” Unfinished Painting — not before the age of artificial intelligence, anyway.
“Last summer, artist Brooke Peachley … posted a photo of the work on X” — the social media platform formerly known as Twitter — “alongside a prompt asking others to respond with a visual art piece ‘that never fails to destroy [them] every time they see it,’ ” write Elaine Velie and Rhea Nayyar at Hyperallergic. “Over six months later, another user responded to the original post with a generative AI image that ‘completed’ Haring’s purposely half-painted work, writing, ‘now using AI we can complete what he couldn’t finish!’ ”
One might, perhaps, sense a joking tone in that post, though the many incensed commenters it continues to draw seem not to take it that way. “The post swiftly caught the ire of the X community, with users describing the action as ‘disrespectful,’ ‘disgusting,’ and a ‘desecration,’ ” says Artnet News. “Some praised the powers of A.I. for ‘showing us a world without AIDS,’ while others deemed the tweet excellent ‘bait’ on an Elon Musk-led online platform that newly rewards outrage with engagement.” As often these days — and very often when it comes to applications of artificial intelligence in popular culture — the reactions to the thing are more compelling than the thing itself.
“The A.I.-generated image doesn’t appear to be faithful to Haring’s style, which often included images of human figures,” writes Julia Binswanger at Smithsonian.com. “These kinds of figures are visible in Haring’s original piece, but the image generator wasn’t able to replicate them.” The algorithmically filled-in Unfinished Painting may be without aesthetic or intellectual interest in itself, but consider how many viewers have only learned of the original work because of it. Nevertheless, stunts like this (or like zooming out the Mona Lisa) ultimately amount to distractions from whatever artistic potential these technologies may actually hold. A.I. will come into its own not by generating images that Haring or any other artist could have created, but images that no human being has yet imagined.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks on Cities, the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
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