The Art Market Demystified in Four Short Documentaries

in Art, Economics, Psychology | May 27th, 2016

Spend an hour or two at MoMA, Tate Mod­ern, or some oth­er world class muse­um and inevitably you’’ll over­hear some vari­a­tion of “my sev­en-year-old could paint that.”

May­haps, Madam, but how much would it fetch at auc­tion?

As a new doc­u­men­tary series, the Art Mar­ket (in Four Parts), makes clear, the mon­e­tary val­ue of art is tricky to assign.

There are excep­tions, of course, such as in the irre­sistible Picas­so anec­dote cit­ed in the trail­er, above.

Usu­al­ly how­ev­er, even the experts must resort to an edu­cat­ed guess, based on a num­ber of fac­tors, none of which can tell the whole sto­ry.

As jour­nal­ist and for­mer direc­tor of New York’s White Columns gallery, Josh Baer, points out in the series’ first episode below, even art mar­ket indices are an unre­li­able tool for assess­ing worth. A por­trait of actress Eliz­a­beth Tay­lor by Andy Warhol failed to attract a sin­gle bid at auc­tion, though art­net Price Data­base report­ed sales of between $27 mil­lion and $31.5 mil­lion for oth­er “Liz” paint­ings by the same artist.

I’d have thought a sig­na­ture as famous as Warhol’s would con­fer the same sort of ins­ta-worth Picas­so claimed his John Han­cock did.

The unpre­dictabil­i­ty of final sales fig­ures has led auc­tion hous­es to issue guar­an­tees in return for a split of the prof­its, a prac­tice Sotheby’s North and South Amer­i­ca chair­man, Lisa Den­ni­son, likens to an insur­ance pol­i­cy for the sell­er.

With the excep­tion of the ill-fat­ed Warhol’s great big goose egg, the num­bers bat­ted around by the series’ influ­en­tial talk­ing heads are pret­ty stag­ger­ing. Snap­py edit­ing also lends a sense of art world glam­our, though gal­lerist Michele Mac­carone betrays a cer­tain weari­ness that may come clos­er to the true ener­gy at the epi­cen­ter of the scene.

As for me, I couldn’t help think­ing back to my days as a recep­tion­ist in a com­mer­cial gallery on Chicago’s tourist friend­ly Mag­nif­i­cent Mile. I was con­temp­tu­ous of most of the stuff on our walls, which ran heav­i­ly to pas­tel gar­den par­ties and har­le­quins posed in front of rec­og­niz­able land­marks. One day, a cou­ple who’d wan­dered in on impulse dropped a ridicu­lous sum on a florid beach scene, com­plete with shim­mer­ing rain­bows. Rich they may have been, but their utter lack of taste was appalling, at least until the wife excit­ed­ly con­fid­ed that the paint­ing’s set­ting remind­ed them of their long ago Hawai­ian hon­ey­moon. That clar­i­fied a lot for me as to art’s true val­ue. I hope that the cou­ple is still alive and enjoy­ing the most for their money’s worth, every sin­gle day.

The Art Market’s oth­er three parts, “Gal­leries,” “Patrons,” and “Art Fairs,” will be released week­ly through mid-June. And we’ll try to add them to this post, as they roll out.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Warhol: The Bell­wether of the Art Mar­ket

Braque in Bulk: Cost­co Gets Back into the Fine Art Mar­ket

1933 Arti­cle on Fri­da Kahlo: “Wife of the Mas­ter Mur­al Painter Glee­ful­ly Dab­bles in Works of Art”

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine. She wrote about her brief stint as a gallery recep­tion­ist in her third book, Job Hop­per: The Check­ered Career of a Down-Mar­ket Dilet­tante. Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Behold the Kinetic, 39-Ton Statue of Franz Kafka’s Head, Erected in Prague

in Art, Literature | May 25th, 2016

What does Kaf­ka mean to you? To me he has always rep­re­sent­ed the tri­umph of small­ness, which is no slight; the exem­plary fig­ure of what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guat­tari called “a minor lit­er­a­ture.” Kaf­ka made minu­ti­ae and triv­i­al­i­ty com­pelling, invest­ed the pet­ty strug­gles of every­day life with a dra­mat­ic inten­si­ty and meta­phys­i­cal aura that linger for days after read­ing him. Kafka’s let­ters show him caught in the grip of a crip­pling, yet deeply fun­ny, intel­lec­tu­al ambiva­lence; his sto­ries and nov­els equal­ly trade in absur­dist humor and philo­soph­i­cal seri­ous­ness. Kaf­ka haunts the small domes­tic spaces and tedi­um of office life, imbu­ing sec­u­lar moder­ni­ty with a tragi­com­ic strange­ness. He trem­bles at the con­tin­ued pow­er of a dethroned reli­gious author­i­ty, per­plexed by its empti­ness, rewrit­ing the inward­ness and self-nega­tion of reli­gious asceti­cism in para­bles absent of any god.

Seek­ing the source of author­i­ty, Kafka’s heroes find instead unsolv­able rid­dles and mys­te­ri­ous vacan­cies. Which is why it seems odd to me that Kaf­ka should him­self be memo­ri­al­ized as a gigan­tic head in statuary—an 11 meter, 45 ton stain­less steel head, with 42 motor­ized lay­ers that move inde­pen­dent­ly, rear­rang­ing and “meta­mor­phos­ing” the author’s face.

Called “K on Sun” and cre­at­ed by Czech artist David Černý, the shim­mer­ing, mon­u­men­tal work, installed in 2014, sits near the office build­ing where Kaf­ka worked as a clerk at an insur­ance com­pa­ny and across from the Prague City Hall. The “enor­mous mir­rored bust” writes Christo­pher Job­son at This is Colos­sal, “bril­liant­ly reveals Kafka’s tor­tured per­son­al­i­ty and unre­lent­ing self-doubt.” Per­haps. Jacob Sham­sian at Busi­ness Insid­er has anoth­er inter­pre­ta­tion: “It’s meant to dis­tract peo­ple from the frus­tra­tions of deal­ing with gov­ern­ment employ­ees.”

Maybe the key to under­stand­ing “K on Sun” is by com­par­i­son with an ear­li­er piece by Černý called Metal­mor­pho­sis, which as you can see above, uses the same mon­u­men­tal, stain­less steel design to cre­ate an enor­mous, gleam­ing, con­stant­ly rear­rang­ing head. This one sits at the White­hall Tech­nol­o­gy Park in Char­lotte, North Car­oli­na, the kind of bland, homog­e­nized cor­po­rate office cam­pus that might have dri­ven Kaf­ka mad. “Černý,” writes Atlas Obscu­ra, “notes the Metal­mor­pho­sis as some­thing of a self-por­trait of his own psy­che,” say­ing “This is how I feel; it is a men­tal self-por­trait.” Can we regard “Kaf­ka in Sun” as also some­thing of a por­trait of Černý as well, imag­in­ing him­self as Kaf­ka? Per­haps.

The artist is a trick­ster char­ac­ter, known for frus­trat­ing and infu­ri­at­ing patrons and audi­ences, “a rebel­lious mix of Antony Gorm­ley and Damien Hirst,” The Guardian opines, “as con­tro­ver­sial as he is amus­ing.” One work, “Piss,” fea­tures just that, “two gyrat­ing, mechan­i­cal men uri­nat­ing on a map of the Czech Repub­lic.” Their urine spells out famous say­ings from Prague res­i­dents. Locat­ed right next to the Franz Kaf­ka muse­um, the sculp­ture mocks the idea of art as a cul­tur­al enter­prise devot­ed to the nation­al inter­est. “Kaf­ka in Sun” presents us with a much more impos­ing­ly seri­ous piece than so many of Černý’s oth­er, more whim­si­cal, works. But it’s hard to imag­ine the satir­i­cal artist had a more seri­ous, straight­for­ward inten­tion. In imag­in­ing Kaf­ka as a huge, shiny sun­lit head, he inverts the author’s small, pri­vate, self-con­tained world, turn­ing Kaf­ka into a strange­ly loom­ing, pub­lic, author­i­ta­tive pres­ence resem­bling an enor­mous met­al god.

via This is Colos­sal

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Franz Kafka’s Kafkaesque Love Let­ters

Metrop­o­lis II: Dis­cov­er the Amaz­ing, Fritz Lang-Inspired Kinet­ic Sculp­ture by Chris Bur­den

The Muse­um of Mod­ern Art (MoMA) Puts Online 65,000 Works of Mod­ern Art

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 3 ) |

10 Digital Editions of Surrealist Journals from Argentina, Chile & Spain (1928–67)

in Art, Magazines | May 23rd, 2016

surrealist journals

Fans of mag­i­cal real­ism know that Latin Amer­i­can writ­ers seem to pos­sess a unique mas­tery of the tra­di­tion, and any­one who thinks of sur­re­al­ism in visu­al art will soon think of Sal­vador Dalí, who began and end­ed his dis­tinc­tive career in his native Spain. Why have Span­ish-speak­ing cul­tures proven so con­ducive to the kinds of cre­ativ­i­ty that bend real­i­ty just enough to make a deep and last­ing impact on their audi­ence? Those search­ing for answers would do well to look through the Autonomous Uni­ver­si­ty of Madrid’s dig­i­tal trove of Span­ish, Chilean, and Argen­tine sur­re­al­ist jour­nals from 1928–76.

Surrealism 2

They all appear as part of an inves­tiga­tive project whose name trans­lates to “Toward a Char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of His­pan­ic Sur­re­al­ism.” The archive includes, from Argenti­na:

From Chile:

And from Spain:

Surrealism 1

When you click on one of the mag­a­zines in the archive, the site will take you to a page with more infor­ma­tion describ­ing the mag­a­zine as well as plac­ing it in the prop­er his­tor­i­cal and cul­tur­al con­text of sur­re­al­is­m’s his­to­ry. (Non-Span­ish-speak­ers can get some trans­la­tion if they view the page with Google Chrome.) From there, you can click on an indi­vid­ual issue to read it.

Surrealism 3

As you flip through these records of an artis­ti­cal­ly fas­ci­nat­ing time in a series of places well suit­ed to it, you’ll get a sense of how much the dis­course var­ied even just with­in the realm of Span­ish-speak­ing sur­re­al­ists: some have a more play­ful tone while oth­ers have a more seri­ous one (though mix­ing the two did become some­thing of a sur­re­al­ist spe­cial­ty); some look out to the rest of the world while oth­ers look inward; and some come filled with strik­ing illus­tra­tions while oth­ers stick to the analy­sis of rel­e­vant ideas through text — and lots of it.

OC surrealist journals 3

Even though the most recent of these pub­li­ca­tions came off the press­es near­ly half a cen­tu­ry ago, any vis­i­tor to Spain, Argen­tine, or Chile, as well as oth­er coun­tries in the His­panophone world, will find they still have a cer­tain sur­re­al­is­tic sen­si­bil­i­ty to them. Long may they retain it.

via Mono­skop, an always inter­est­ing resource that you can fol­low on Twit­ter.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Exten­sive Archive of Avant-Garde & Mod­ernist Mag­a­zines (1890–1939) Now Avail­able Online

Restored Ver­sion of Un Chien Andalou: Luis Buñuel & Sal­vador Dalí’s Sur­re­al Film (1929)

David Lynch Presents the His­to­ry of Sur­re­al­ist Film (1987)

Sal­vador Dalí’s Avant-Garde Christ­mas Cards

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 2 ) |

Please Touch the Art: Watch a Blind Man Experience His Own Portrait for the First Time

in Art | May 18th, 2016

We all know the rules of art muse­ums: look, but don’t touch. This does­n’t both­er most of us most of the time, but for art-lovers who hap­pen to be blind and thus use feel­ing as a sub­sti­tute for see­ing, it presents a prob­lem indeed — but it also opens up an artis­tic oppor­tu­ni­ty. “Can­tor Fine Art, a just-launched gallery by father and son team Lar­ry and Sam Can­tor, offers a sto­ry of a dif­fer­ent kind of phys­i­cal inter­ac­tion with art in their project, Please Touch the Art,” writes The Cre­ator’s Pro­jec­t’s Gabrielle Bruney. “They part­nered with artist Andrew Myers to cre­ate a tac­tile paint­ing that is appre­cia­ble by both sight­ed and blind art lovers.”

In the five-minute video above, you can see — or if visu­al­ly impaired, hear — Myers dis­cussing the begin­nings of his “screw pieces,” images made by dri­ving count­less screws into a piece of wood, each one ulti­mate­ly act­ing as a kind of phys­i­cal, three-dimen­sion­al pix­el. Though Myers did­n’t begin these works with the blind in mind, one such gallery-goer’s vis­it to his show, and the “huge smile on his face” when he put his hand to the screw pieces, got him think­ing of the pos­si­bil­i­ties in that direc­tion. Thanks to his art, “there was a blind man who could almost see for a sec­ond.”

We also meet the blind wood­work­er George Wurtzel, cur­rent­ly at work on “con­vert­ing an old grape crush­ing barn into a Tac­tile Art Cen­ter” which com­bines a wood­work­ing shop with a “tac­tile gallery space where the visu­al­ly impaired can expe­ri­ence and sell art­work.” Dis­cov­er­ing their shared pas­sion for tac­tile art, Myers decides to make a sur­prise for Wurtzel, “the first por­trait of him­self he can actu­al­ly feel,” the first new piece for his tac­tile art gallery. The video cap­tures the big reveal, which con­verts Wurtzel from his skep­ti­cism about the screw-piece form. Still, even as he runs his fin­gers over his own metal­li­cized fea­tures, he has his objec­tions: “My nose is not that big. I’m sor­ry. I like the beard, though. The beard is good. The beard is real­ly good.”

You can read more about the project at Can­tor Fine Art’s web site. “The one thing I wish,” Myers adds, “is that George could see the piece the way I see it, but at the same time, I would like to look at things the way he sees the world.” You can get more a sense of art as seen, as Bil­ly Joel once sang, by the eyes of the blind in our pre­vi­ous posts on the Prado’s 3D-print­ed exhi­bi­tion for the visu­al­ly impaired and the expe­ri­ence of the col­or­blind see­ing art in col­or for the first time. It seems we’ve found our­selves at the dawn of a new gold­en age for art that does­n’t require sight. If a gallery boom fol­lows, will they serve cof­fee roast­ed by the Unseen Bean?

via The Cre­ator’s Project

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Pra­do Muse­um Cre­ates the First Art Exhi­bi­tion for the Visu­al­ly Impaired, Using 3D Print­ing

What It’s Like to Be Col­or Blind and See Art in Col­or for the First Time

Jorge Luis Borges, After Going Blind, Draws a Self-Por­trait

Wake Up and Smell the Cof­fee with Blind Mas­ter Roast­er Ger­ry Leary

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( None ) |

Visit 2+ Million Free Works of Art from 20 World-Class Museums Free Online

in Art | May 13th, 2016

Rosetta Stone

Since the first stir­rings of the inter­net, artists and cura­tors have puz­zled over what the flu­id­i­ty of online space would do to the expe­ri­ence of view­ing works of art. At a con­fer­ence on the sub­ject in 2001, Susan Haz­an of the Israel Muse­um won­dered whether there is “space for enchant­ment in a tech­no­log­i­cal world?” She referred to Wal­ter Benjamin’s rumi­na­tions on the “poten­tial­ly lib­er­at­ing phe­nom­e­non” of tech­no­log­i­cal­ly repro­duced art, yet also not­ed that “what was for­feit­ed in this process were the ‘aura’ and the author­i­ty of the object con­tain­ing with­in it the val­ues of cul­tur­al her­itage and tra­di­tion.” Eval­u­at­ing a num­ber of online gal­leries of the time, Haz­an found that “the speed with which we are able to access remote muse­ums and pull them up side by side on the screen is alarm­ing­ly imme­di­ate.” Per­haps the “accel­er­at­ed mobil­i­ty” of the inter­net, she wor­ried, “caus­es objects to become dis­pos­able and to decline in sig­nif­i­cance.”

VG-Self-Portrait-1887

Fif­teen years after her essay, the num­ber of muse­ums that have made their col­lec­tions avail­able online whole, or in part, has grown expo­nen­tial­ly and shows no signs of slow­ing. We may not need to fear los­ing muse­ums and libraries—important spaces that Michel Fou­cault called “het­ero­topias,” where lin­ear, mun­dane time is inter­rupt­ed. These spaces will like­ly always exist. Yet increas­ing­ly we need nev­er vis­it them in per­son to view most of their con­tents. Stu­dents and aca­d­e­mics can con­duct near­ly all of their research through the inter­net, nev­er hav­ing to trav­el to the Bodleian, the Bei­necke, or the British Library. And lovers of art must no longer shell out for plane tick­ets and hotels to see the pre­cious con­tents of the Get­ty, the Guggen­heim, or the Rijksmu­se­um. For all that may be lost, online gal­leries have long been “mak­ing works of art wide­ly avail­able, intro­duc­ing new forms of per­cep­tion in film and pho­tog­ra­phy and allow­ing art to move from pri­vate to pub­lic, from the elite to the mass­es.”

Kandinsky-Composition-II

Even more so than when Haz­an wrote those words, the online world offers pos­si­bil­i­ties for “the emer­gence of new cul­tur­al phe­nom­e­na, the vir­tu­al aura.” Over the years we have fea­tured dozens of data­bas­es, archives, and online gal­leries through which you might vir­tu­al­ly expe­ri­ence art the world over, an expe­ri­ence once sole­ly reserved for only the very wealthy. And as artists and cura­tors adapt to a dig­i­tal envi­ron­ment, they find new ways to make vir­tu­al gal­leries enchant­i­ng. The vast col­lec­tions in the vir­tu­al gal­leries list­ed below await your vis­it, with close to 2,000,000 paint­ings, sculp­tures, pho­tographs, books, and more. See the Roset­ta Stone at the British Muse­um (top), cour­tesy of the Google Cul­tur­al Insti­tute. See Van Gogh’s many self-por­traits and vivid, swirling land­scapes at The Van Gogh Muse­um. Vis­it the Asian art col­lec­tion at the Smith­so­ni­an’s Freer and Sack­ler Gal­leries. Or see Vass­i­ly Kandin­sky’s daz­zling abstract com­po­si­tions at the Guggen­heim.

And below the list of gal­leries, find links to online col­lec­tions of sev­er­al hun­dred art books to read online or down­load. Con­tin­ue to watch this space: We’ll add to both of these lists as more and more col­lec­tions come online.

Art Images from Muse­ums & Libraries

Art Books

Relat­ed Con­tents:

Down­load 448 Free Art Books from The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art

The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art Puts 400,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

Free: The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art and the Guggen­heim Offer 474 Free Art Books Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 9 ) |

Download 144 Beautiful Books of Russian Futurism: Mayakovsky, Malevich, Khlebnikov & More (1910–30)

in Art, Literature, Poetry | May 11th, 2016

94897ff9f58401b40984b972a33c082bac6836e4

In the years after World War II, the CIA made use of jazz musi­cians, abstract expres­sion­ist painters, and exper­i­men­tal writ­ers to pro­mote avant-garde Amer­i­can cul­ture as a Cold War weapon. At the time, down­ward cul­tur­al com­par­isons with Sovi­et art were high­ly cred­i­ble.

Many years of repres­sive Stal­in­ism and what Isa­iah Berlin called “the new ortho­doxy” had reduced so much Russ­ian art and lit­er­a­ture to didac­tic, homog­e­nized social real­ism. But in the years fol­low­ing the first World War and the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion, it would not have been pos­si­ble to accuse the Sovi­ets of cul­tur­al back­ward­ness.

67611bd78ff583b023d3a65a74ad3d5ffc86c3fa

The first three decades of the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry pro­duced some of the most inno­v­a­tive art, film, dance, dra­ma, and poet­ry in Russ­ian his­to­ry, much of it under the ban­ner of Futur­ism, the move­ment begun in Italy in 1909 by F.T. Marinet­ti. Like the Ital­ian Futur­ists, these avant-garde Russ­ian artists and poets were, writes Poets.org, “pre­oc­cu­pied with urban imagery, eccen­tric words, neol­o­gisms, and exper­i­men­tal rhymes.” One of the movement’s most inven­tive mem­bers, Velimir Khleb­nikov, wrote poet­ry that ranged from “dense and pri­vate neol­o­gisms to exot­ic verse­forms writ­ten in palin­dromes.” Most of his poet­ry “was too impen­e­tra­ble to reach a pop­u­lar audi­ence,” and his work includ­ed not only exper­i­ments with lan­guage on the page, but also avant-garde indus­tri­al sound record­ing.

891beccb2c3dd100b5583cdbbdfc1a57b1ea8de7

Khlebnikov’s exper­i­ments in lin­guis­tic sound and form became known as “Zaum,” a word that can be trans­lat­ed as “tran­srea­son,” or “beyond sense.” He pio­neered his tech­niques with anoth­er major Futur­ist poet, Alek­sei Kruchenykh, who may have been, writes Mono­skop, “the most rad­i­cal poet of Russ­ian Futur­ism.” The most famous name to emerge from the move­ment, Vladimir Mayakovsky, embod­ied Futur­is­m’s con­fi­dent indi­vid­u­al­ism, his poet­ics “a mix­ture of extrav­a­gant exag­ger­a­tions and self-cen­tered and ardu­ous imagery.” Mayakovsky made a name for him­self as an actor, painter, poet, film­mak­er, and play­wright. Even Stal­in, who would soon pre­side over the sup­pres­sion of the Russ­ian avant-garde, called Mayakovsky after his death in 1930 “the best and most tal­ent­ed poet of the Sovi­et epoch.”

66c44403bc94acb286fdfda77ba70895de33c184

Mono­skop points us toward a siz­able online archive of 144 dig­i­tal­ly scanned Futur­ist pub­li­ca­tions, includ­ing major works by Khleb­nikov, Kruchenykh, Mayakovsky, and oth­er Futur­ist poets, writ­ers, and artists. There’s even a crit­i­cal essay by the impos­ing Russ­ian painter and founder of the aus­tere school of Supre­ma­tism, Kaz­imir Male­vich. All of the texts are in Russ­ian, as is the site that hosts them—the State Pub­lic His­tor­i­cal Library of Rus­sia—though if you load it in Google Chrome, you can trans­late the titles and the accom­pa­ny­ing bib­li­o­graph­ic infor­ma­tion.

You can also down­load full pages in high-res­o­lu­tion. Many of the texts include strong visu­al ele­ments, such as the cov­er at the top from a mul­ti-author col­lec­tion titled Radio, fea­tur­ing Mayakovsky, whose own books include pho­to mon­tages like the two fur­ther up. Just above, see the cov­er of Khleb­nikov and Kruchenykh’s Vin­tage Love, which includes many more such sketch­es. And below, the cov­er of a 1926 book by Kruchenykh called On the Fight Against Hooli­gan­ism in Lit­er­a­ture.

01b4758b3ffb34ffa3d9879e182c2f3a225489ea

Although “state con­trol was absolute through­out” Sovi­et his­to­ry, these artists flour­ished before Trotsky’s fall in 1928, wrote Isa­iah Berlin in his 1945 pro­file of Russ­ian art; there was “a vast fer­ment in Sovi­et thought, which dur­ing those ear­ly years was gen­uine­ly ani­mat­ed by the spir­it of revolt against, and chal­lenge to, the arts of the West.” The Par­ty came to view this peri­od as “the last des­per­ate strug­gle of cap­i­tal­ism” and the Futur­ists would soon be over­thrown, “by the strong, young, mate­ri­al­ist, earth­bound, pro­le­tar­i­an culture”—a cul­ture imposed from above in the mid-30s by the Writ­ers’ Union and the Cen­tral Com­mit­tee.

Thus began the regret­table per­se­cu­tions and purges of artists and dis­si­dents of all kinds, and the move­ment toward the Stal­in­ist per­son­al­i­ty cult and “col­lec­tive work on Sovi­et themes by squads of pro­le­tar­i­an writ­ers.” But dur­ing the first quar­ter of the cen­tu­ry, “a time of storm and stress,” Russ­ian lit­er­a­ture and art, Berlin adjudged, “attained its great­est height since its clas­si­cal age of Pushkin, Ler­mon­tov, and Gogol.”

via Mono­skop

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Hear Russ­ian Futur­ist Vladimir Mayakovsky Read His Strange & Vis­cer­al Poet­ry

Hear the Exper­i­men­tal Music of the Dada Move­ment: Avant-Garde Sounds from a Cen­tu­ry Ago

Exten­sive Archive of Avant-Garde & Mod­ernist Mag­a­zines (1890–1939) Now Avail­able Online

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 13 ) |

Learn Calligraphy from Lloyd Reynolds, the Teacher of Steve Jobs’ Own Famously Inspiring Calligraphy Teacher

in Art, How to Learn for Free, Television | May 9th, 2016

The sto­ry has, over time, solid­i­fied into one of the columns of Steve Jobs lore: in the ear­ly 1970s, the man who would found Apple left for Reed Col­lege. But before long, not want­i­ng to spend any more of his par­ents’ mon­ey on tuition (and per­haps not tem­pera­men­tal­ly com­pat­i­ble with the struc­ture of high­er edu­ca­tion any­way), he offi­cial­ly dropped out, couch-surfed through friends’ pads, lived on free meals ladled out by Hare Krish­nas, con­tin­ued to audit a vari­ety of class­es, and gen­er­al­ly lived the pro­to­type tech­no-neo-hip­pie lifestyle Sil­i­con Val­ley has con­tin­ued relent­less­ly to refine.

Per­haps the least like­ly of those class­es was one on cal­lig­ra­phy, taught by Trap­pist monk and cal­lig­ra­ph­er Robert Pal­ladi­no. More than thir­ty years lat­er, deliv­er­ing a now-famous Stan­ford com­mence­ment speech, Jobs recalled his time in the cal­lig­ra­phy class: “None of this had even a hope of any prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion in my life. But 10 years lat­er, when we were design­ing the first Mac­in­tosh com­put­er, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first com­put­er with beau­ti­ful typog­ra­phy.”

And what of the cal­lig­ra­phy teacher who made that pos­si­ble? “Pal­ladi­no, who died in late Feb­ru­ary at 83, joined the Trap­pist order of monks in New Mex­i­co in 1950, accord­ing to a 2003 pro­file in Reed Mag­a­zine,” writes the Wash­ing­ton Post’s Niraj Chok­shi. “Just 17 at the time, his hand­writ­ing attract­ed the atten­tion of the monastery scribe, who worked with him on his art. Five years lat­er, Pal­ladi­no moved to Lafayette, Ore., where local artists brought news of a skilled ama­teur to Lloyd Reynolds, an icon in the field and the cre­ator of Reed’s cal­lig­ra­phy pro­gram.”

Now you, too, can receive instruc­tion from Reynolds, who in 1968 starred in a series on the Ore­gon Edu­ca­tion Tele­vi­sion Ser­vice’s pro­gram Men Who Teach, shoot­ing twen­ty half-hour broad­casts on ital­ic cal­lig­ra­phy and hand­writ­ing. Eight years lat­er — about the time Jobs co-found­ed Apple with Steve Woz­ni­ak — he re-shot the series in col­or, and you can watch that ver­sion almost in its entire­ty with the playlist at the top of the post. (Reed has also made some relat­ed instruc­tion­al mate­ri­als avail­able.) You may feel the temp­ta­tion to turn all of Reynolds’ lessons on the art of writ­ing toward your goal of becom­ing the next Steve Jobs. But try to resist that impulse and appre­ci­ate it for its own nature, which Jobs him­self described as “beau­ti­ful, his­tor­i­cal, artis­ti­cal­ly sub­tle in a way that sci­ence can’t cap­ture.”

We’ll add these vin­tage lessons to our col­lec­tion, 1,700 Free Online Cours­es from Top Uni­ver­si­ties.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Steve Jobs on Life: “Stay Hun­gry, Stay Fool­ish”

Steve Jobs Nar­rates the First “Think Dif­fer­ent” Ad (Nev­er Aired)

Steve Jobs Mus­es on What’s Wrong with Amer­i­can Edu­ca­tion, 1995

The Art of Hand­writ­ing as Prac­ticed by Famous Artists: Geor­gia O’Keeffe, Jack­son Pol­lock, Mar­cel Duchamp, Willem de Koon­ing & More

Font Based on Sig­mund Freud’s Hand­writ­ing Com­ing Cour­tesy of Suc­cess­ful Kick­starter Cam­paign

One of World’s Old­est Books Print­ed in Mul­ti-Col­or Now Opened & Dig­i­tized for the First Time

Dis­cov­er What Shakespeare’s Hand­writ­ing Looked Like, and How It Solved a Mys­tery of Author­ship

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 11 ) |

What Happens When a Japanese Woodblock Artist Depicts Life in London in 1866, Despite Never Having Set Foot There

in Art, History | May 4th, 2016

Life in London Woodblock

The affini­ties between Eng­land and Japan go far beyond the fact that both are tea-lov­ing nations with a devo­tion to gar­dens; far beyond the fact that both dri­ve on the left, are the world’s lead­ing over­seas investors, and are rainy islands stud­ded with green vil­lages. They go even beyond the fact that both have an astrin­gent sense of hier­ar­chy, sub­scribe to a code of social ret­i­cence, and are, in some respects, proud, iso­lat­ed monar­chies with more than a touch of xeno­pho­bia. The very qual­i­ties that seem so for­eign, even men­ac­ing, to many Amer­i­cans in Japan — the fact that peo­ple do not invari­ably mean what they say, that uncer­tain dis­tances sep­a­rate polite­ness from true feel­ings, and that every­thing is couched in a kind of code in which nuances are every­thing — will hard­ly seem strange to a cer­tain kind of Eng­lish­man.

That astute com­par­i­son comes from an essay called “For Japan, See Oscar Wilde” by Pico Iyer, a writer unique­ly well-placed to sense this sort of thing by virtue of his child­hood in Eng­land and long­time res­i­dence as an adult in Japan. His Indi­an her­itage and pen­chant for world trav­el have also equipped him to write with clar­i­ty about the ways — some­times grotesque, some­times delu­sion­al, some­times aspi­ra­tional, some­times fan­tas­ti­cal — in which one coun­try can per­ceive anoth­er.

In the case of the some­how sep­a­rat­ed-at-birth nations of Eng­land and Japan, we have some direct doc­u­men­ta­tion of the for­mer as dreamed of by the lat­ter in Uta­gawa Yoshitora’s 1866 trip­tych Igirisukoku Ron­don no zu.

LeftLondon.jpg.CROP.original-original

“Togeth­er, the three images depict a street scene near the Riv­er Thames, com­plete with throng­ing Eng­lish pedes­tri­ans, two sail­ing ships, hors­es, oxen, and car­riages,” writes Slate’s Rebec­ca Onion: “The images would have sold fair­ly cheap­ly, in the thriv­ing mar­ket in wood­block (ukiyo‑e) prints in 19th-cen­tu­ry Japan. Uta­gawa, a rel­a­tive­ly minor artist from an exten­sive lin­eage of wood­block print­ers, also pro­duced por­traits of Kabu­ki actors, trip­tychs of his­tor­i­cal bat­tle scenes, and images of for­eign­ers in Yokohama—one of the only places in Japan where they were allowed to trade at the time. (Here’s an 1861 print titled ‘Two Amer­i­cans.’) Uta­gawa prob­a­bly did not vis­it Lon­don, and was instead work­ing from sec­ond­hand reports.”

RightLondon.jpg.CROP.original-original

That would make him a per­fect sub­ject for Iyer, who has tend­ed to spe­cial­ize in writ­ing not just about the places of the world but the places of the mind. While the peo­ple of Uta­gawa’s Lon­don of the mind dis­play a sim­pli­fied typ­i­cal Eng­lish style of dress, and do so before a proud domed build­ing and a mighty-look­ing, elab­o­rate­ly rigged sail­ing ship, their com­po­si­tion remains some­how quin­tes­sen­tial­ly Japan­ese. But then, how much sep­a­rates the quin­tes­sen­tial­ly Japan­ese from the quin­tes­sen­tial­ly Eng­lish? “The actu­al peo­ple who live in Japan,” said Oscar Wilde as quot­ed in Iyer’s essay, “are not unlike the gen­er­al run of Eng­lish peo­ple.”

MiddleLondon.jpg.CROP.original-original

And the affin­i­ty goes both ways. When Prince Fushi­mi Sada­naru made a state vis­it to Eng­land forty years after Uta­gawa made his prints, he hoped to catch a per­for­mance of The Mika­do, Gilbert and Sul­li­van’s hit com­ic opera set very much in the Japan of the Eng­lish mind (and one that faces accu­sa­tions of cul­tur­al impe­ri­al­ism to this day). Alas, the British gov­ern­ment had pre­emp­tive­ly can­celed all per­for­mances dur­ing the Prince’s stay for fear of offend­ing him. This prompt­ed a Japan­ese jour­nal­ist in Lon­don to lat­er see the show him­self. He went on to write of his dis­ap­point­ment: he’d gone in expect­ing “real insults” to his home­land, only to find “bright music and much fun.”

via Slate’s The Vault/Two Nerdy His­to­ry Girls

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Lon­don Mashed Up: Footage of the City from 1924 Lay­ered Onto Footage from 2013

2,000 Years of London’s His­tor­i­cal Devel­op­ment, Ani­mat­ed in 7 Min­utes

Prize-Win­ning Ani­ma­tion Lets You Fly Through 17th Cen­tu­ry Lon­don

1927 Lon­don Shown in Mov­ing Col­or

Down­load Hun­dreds of 19th-Cen­tu­ry Japan­ese Wood­block Prints by Mas­ters of the Tra­di­tion

The Best Writ­ing Advice Pico Iyer Ever Received

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

by | Permalink | Make a Comment ( 1 ) |

« Go Back — More in this category... »
Quantcast