In 1957, Salvador Dalí created a tableware set consisting of 1) a four-tooth fork with a fish handle, 2) an elephant fork with three teeth, 3) a snail knife with tears, 4) a leaf knife, 5) a small artichoke spoon, and 6) an artichoke spoon. When the set went on auction in 2012, it sold for $28,125.
Information on the cutlery set remains hard to find, but we suspect that it sprang from Dalí’s desire to blur the lines between art and everyday life. It’s perhaps the same logic that led him to design a surrealist cookbook—Les Diners de Gala—16 years later. It’s not hard to imagine the utensils above going to work on his oddball recipes, like “Bush of Crawfish in Viking Herbs,” “Thousand-Year-Old Eggs,” and “Veal Cutlets Stuffed with Snails.” If you happen to know more about Dalí’s creation, please add any thoughts to the comments below.
Seventeenth-century Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn may have more name recognition than nearly any other European artist, his popularity due in large part to what art historian Alison McQueen identifies in her book of the same name as “the rise of the cult of Rembrandt.” Popular Rembrandt veneration brought us in the 20th century such corporate appropriations of the painter’s legacy as Rembrandt toothpaste and money market firm Rembrandt Funds (particularly ironic, “given the notoriety of Rembrandt’s bankruptcy in 1656”). “In contemporary popular culture,” writes McQueen, “Rembrandt’s name has such resonance that the headline of an article in the New York Times Magazine in 1995 referred to the trendy barber Franky Avila as ‘the Rembrandt of Barbers.’”
By invoking Rembrandt’s name, the author knew his readers would understand that this connection implies that Avila’s skill with a razor equals that of Rembrandt’s with his paintbrush or etching needle… even if a reader has never actually seen any work by Rembrandt.
Indeed, though any person on the street will likely know the artist’s name, most would be hard-pressed to name any of his paintings, except perhaps his well-known self-portraits, which have adorned t‑shirts, posters, and iPhone cases. I might not have known much more about Rembrandt than those self-portraits either had I not lived in Washington, DC, where I had free access to many of his paintings at the National Gallery of Art. The Dutch master was astonishingly prolific, painting, drawing, and etching hundreds of portraits of himself and his patrons, as well as hundreds of still lifes, landscapes, scenes from mythology, and many, many Biblical subjects.
Nowadays, you can see Rembrandt’s paintings for free online, whether from the National Gallery of Art’s collection, that of the National Gallery in London, or of the Dutch Rijksmuseum. And for another side of his genius, you can now go to the site of New York’s Morgan Library and Museum, who have digitized “almost 500 images from the Morgan’s exceptional collection of Rembrandt etchings,” celebrating his “unsurpassed skill and inventiveness as a master storyteller.” There are, of course, plenty of self-portraits, like the 1630 “Self Portrait in a Cap, Open-Mouthed” at the top of the post, and there are portraits of others, like that of the artist’s mother, above, from 1633. There are religious scenes like the 1655 “Abraham’s Sacrifice” below, and landscapes like “The Three Trees,” further down, from 1643.
These are the four main categories that the Morgan uses to organize this impressive collection, but you’ll also find there more humble, domestic subjects, like the 1640 “Sleeping Puppy,” below. Writes Hyperallergic, “The Morgan holds in its collection most of the roughly 300 known etchings by Rembrandt, including rare, multiple versions (hence the discrepancy in number of etchings versus number of images.)” Like his highly accomplished paintings, Rembrandt’s etchings “are famous for their dramatic intensity, penetrating psychology, and touching humanity,” as well as, of course, for the extraordinary skill with which the artist made these works of art. Thanks to the “cult of Rembrandt,” we all know the artist’s name and reputation; now, thanks to digital collections from National Galleries, the Rijksmuseum, and now the Morgan, we can become experts in his work as well. Enter the Morgan collection of sketches here.
Note: Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
The US Postal Service will be classing up the joint, with the planned release of 16 stamps featuring the photography of Ansel Adams. They write:
Ansel Adams made a career of crafting photographs in exquisitely sharp focus and nearly infinite tonality and detail. His ability to consistently visualize a subject — not how it looked in reality but how it felt to him emotionally — led to some of the most famous images of America’s natural treasures including Half Dome in California’s Yosemite Valley, the Grand Tetons in Wyoming, and Denali in Alaska, the highest peak in the United States.
Due to be unveiled on May 15th, the stamps will feature iconic US landscapes, including Half Dome in Yosemite National Park, Monument Valley in Arizona, the Grand Tetons, the Snake River and more. Find more information on the stamps here.
Atomic physicist Niels Bohr is famously quoted as saying, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” Yet despite years of getting things wrong, magazines love think pieces on where we’ll be in several decades, even centuries in time. It gives us comfort to think great things await us, even though we’re long overdue for the personal jetpack and moon colonies.
And yet it’s Asimov who apparently owned the only set of postcards of En L’An 2000, a set of 87 (or so) collectible artist cards that first appeared as inserts in cigar boxes in 1899, right in time for the 1900 World Exhibition in Paris. Translated as “France in the 21st Century,” the cards feature Jean-Marc Côté and other illustrators’ interpretations of the way we’d be living…well, 23 years ago.
The history of the card’s production is very convoluted, with the original commissioning company going out of business before they could be distributed, and whether that company was a toy manufacturer or a cigarette company, nobody seems to know. And were the ideas given to the artists, or did they come up with them on their own? We don’t know.
One of the first things that stands out scanning through these prints, now hosted at The Public Domain Review, is a complete absence of space travel, despite Jules Verne having written From the Earth to the Moon in 1865 (which would influence Georges Méliès’ A Voyage to the Moon in 1902). However, the underwater world spawned many a flight of fancy, including a whale-drawn bus, a croquet party at the bottom of the ocean, and large fish being raced like thoroughbred horses.
There are a few inventions we can say came true. The “Advance Sentinel in a Helicopter” has been documenting traffic and car chases for decades now, fed right into our televisions. A lot of farm work is now automated. And “Electric Scrubbing” is now called a Roomba.
For a card-by-card examination of these future visions, one should hunt out Isaac Asimov’s 1986 Futuredays: A Nineteenth Century Vision of the Year 2000, which can be found on Amazon right now. (Or see the nice gallery of images at The Public Domain Review.) And who knows? Maybe next year, your order will come to your door by drone. Just a prediction.
Note: Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2015.
Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.
If you attend the “Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise” exhibition at the Musée D’Orsay, in Paris, you can spend time with “Hello Vincent,” a generative Artificial Intelligence project that allows visitors to have “a unique, personalized encounter” with Vincent van Gogh. According to CBS Sunday Morning, whose report we’ve included above, “Hello Vincent” allows museum visitors to converse with Van Gogh and ask him questions. His responses draw on a corpus of 900 letters where Van Gogh talks about his life and work. And apparently “the more questions you ask, the more the AI learns and improves.”
The “Hello Vincent” project was developed by Jumbo Mana, a startup specializing in generative AI that brings characters to life.
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Context may not count for everything in art. But as underscored by everyone from Marcel Duchamp (or Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven) to the journalists who occasionally convince virtuoso musicians to busk in dingy public spaces, it certainly counts for something. Whether or not you believe that works of art retain the same essential value no matter where they’re beheld, some environments are surely more conducive to appreciation than others. The question of just which design elements make the difference has occupied museum architects for centuries, and in New York City alone, you can directly experience more than 200 years of bold exercises and experiments in the form.
In the Architectural Digest video above, architect Michael Wyetzner (previously featured here on Open Culture for his exegeses of New York’s apartments, bridges, and subway stations, as well as Central Park and the Chrysler Building) uses his expert knowledge to reveal the design choices that have gone into the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Frick Collection. No two of these famous art institutions were conceived in quite the same period, none look or feel quite the same as the others, and we can be reasonably sure that no single piece of art would look quite the same if it were moved between any of them.
Occupying five blocks of Central Park, MoMA is less a building than a collection of buildings — each added at a different time, in a style of that time — and indeed, less a collection of buildings than “a city unto itself,” as Wyetzner puts it. (No wonder Claudia and Jamie Kincaid could run away from home and go unnoticed living in it.) The comparatively modest MoMA has also grown addition-by-addition, beginning with a “stripped-down form of modernism” that stood well out on the West 53rd street of the late thirties. It opened as the first of the many “clean white boxes” that would appear across the country — and later the world — to show the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
The original MoMA building remains striking today, but it’s now flanked by expansions from the hands of Philip Johnson, Cesar Pelli, Yoshio Taniguchi, and Jean Nouvel. Much less likely to have anything attached to it is the Guggenheim, with its instantly recognizable spiral design by Frank Lloyd Wright. Based on an idea by Le Corbusier, its narrow atrium-wrapping galleries do present certain difficulties for the proper display of large-scale artworks. Wyetzner also mentions the oft-heard criticism of Wright’s having “created a monument to himself — but it’s one hell of a monument.”
Last comes “the original building for the Whitney Museum of American Art, which later became the Met Breuer, which now has become the Frick. Who knows what it’ll become next.” The second of its names refers to its architect, the Bauhaus-trained Marcel Breuer (he of the Wassily chair), whose muscular design “slices off” the museum from the brownstone neighborhood that surrounds it. With its “open, loft-like spaces,” it provides a context meant for the art of its time, much as the Met, MoMA, and the Guggenheim do for the art of theirs. But all these institutions have succeeded just as much by carving out contexts of their own in the open-air museum of architecture and urbanism that is New York City.
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.
When we think of Brian Eno’s work, we first think of his records. These include not just his own classics of “ambient music” — a term he popularized — like Discreet Music and Music for Airports, but also the albums he’s produced: Devo’s Q. Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, U2’s The Joshua Tree, David Bowie’s Outside. Yet even before he got into music, Eno was painting, and in some sense, he’s never stopped. He was describing his work with sound as the creation of “imaginary landscapes” even in the nineteen-eighties; in this century, he’s continued to put out records while creating ever-more-high-profile works of a more visual nature, from installations to apps.
A few years ago, Eno even got into the business of functional sculpture, designing a turntable that emanates LED light of various, gradually shifting colors while it plays records. “The light from it was tangible as if caught in a cloud of vapor,” said Eno about his early experience with the finished product, quoted at designboom upon the announcement of its limited production run in 2021.
“We sat watching for ages, transfixed by this totally new experience of light as a physical presence.” Now comes the sequel, Eno’s Turntable II, which will be produced in equally restricted numbers. “Those who can afford one of the 150 limited units also receive the musician’s signature and edition number engraved on the side of the neon turntable’s base,” says designboom.
Eno’s turntable design recently drew attention as the inspiration for U2’s stage set during their residency at Las Vegas’ brazen new venue The Sphere. In the home, it serves multiple functions: “When it doesn’t have to do anything in particular, like play a record, it is a sculpture,” Eno says, “and when it’s in action, it’s a generative artwork. Several overlapping light cycles will keep producing different color balances and blends — and different shadow formations that slowly evolve and never exactly repeat.” Die-hard fans who know how long Eno has been following this artistic and intellectual thread may consider Turntable II’s £20,000 (or more than $25,000 USD) price tag almost reasonable. And next to the $60,000 Linn Sondek LP12 Jony Ive redesigned last year, it’s practically a bargain.
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.
A few years ago, we featured a $32,000 pair of bonsai scissors here on Open Culture. More recently, their maker Yasuhiro Hiraka appeared in the Business Insider video above, a detailed 80-minute introduction to ten of the most expensive arts and art supplies around the world. It will come as no surprise that things Japanese figure in it prominently and more than once. In fact, the video begins in Nara Prefecture, “where for over 450 years, the company Kobaien, has been making some of the world’s most sought-after calligraphy ink” — the sumi you may know from the classical Japanese art form sumi‑e.
But even the most painstakingly produced and expensively acquired ink in the world is no use without brushes. In search of the finest examples of those, the video’s next segment takes us to another part of Japan, Hiroshima Prefecture, where an artisan named Yoshiyuki Hata runs a workshop dedicated to the “no-compromise craftsmanship” of calligraphy brushes. One of his top-of-the-line models, made with rigorously hand-selected goat hair, could cost the equivalent of $27,000 — but for an equally uncompromising master calligrapher, money seems to be no object.
However dedicated its craftsmen and practitioners, by no means does the Land of the Rising Sun have a monopoly on expensive art supplies. This video also includes Tyrian purple dye made in Tunisia the old-fashioned way — indeed, the ancient way — by extracting the glands of murex snails; the sơn mài lacquer painting unique to Vietnam that requires toxic tree resin; long-lasting ultra-high-quality oil paints rich with rare pigments like cobalt blue; and Kolinsky’s Series 7 sable watercolor brush, which is made from hairs from the tails of Siberian weasels, and whose process of production has remained the same since it was first created for Queen Victoria in 1866.
This world tour also comes around to non-traditional art forms and tools. One operation in Ohio turns the muck of industrial pollution — “acid mine drainage,” to get technical — into pigments that can make vivid paints. The stratospheric prices commanded by certain works of “modern art,” broadly considered, have long inspired satire, but here we get a closer examination of the connection between the nature of the work and the cost of purchasing it. “What looks simple can be the culmination of a lifetime’s work,” one example of which is Kazmir Malevich’s Black Square, “the result of twenty years of simplification and development.” If you don’t know anything about that painting, it will seem to have no value; by the same token, if you don’t know anything about those $32,000 bonsai scissors, you’ll probably use them to open Amazon boxes.
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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