Earlier this year we informed readers that thousands of works of art and entertainment would soon enter the public domain—to be followed every year by thousands more. That day is nigh upon us: Public Domain Day, January 1, 2019. At the stroke of midnight, such beloved classics as Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” and “Yes! We Have No Bananas” will become the common property of the people, to be quoted at length or in full anywhere when the copyright expires on work produced in 1923. Then, 1924 will expire in 2020, 1925 in 2021, and so on and so forth.
It means that “hundreds of thousands of books, musical compositions, paintings, poems, photographs and films” will become freely available to distribute, remix, and remake, as Glenn Fleishman writes at Smithsonian. “Any middle school can produce Theodore Pratt’s stage adaptation of The Picture of Dorian Gray, and any historian can publish Winston Churchill’s The World Crisis with her own extensive annotations… and any filmmaker can remake Cecil B. DeMille’s original The Ten Commandments.”
Those are just a few ideas. See more extensive lists of hits and obscurities from 1923 at our previous post and come up with your own creative adaptations. The possibilities are vast and possibly world changing, in ways both decidedly good and arguably quite bad. Teachers may photocopy thousands of pages without fear of prosecution; scholars may quote freely, artists may find deep wells of inspiration. And we may also see “Frost’s immortal ode to winter used in an ad for snow tires.”
Such crassness aside, this huge release from copyright heralds a cultural sea change—the first time such a thing has happened in 21 years due to a 20-year extension of the copyright term in 1998, in a bill sponsored by Sonny Bono at the urging of the Walt Disney company. The legislation, aimed at protecting Mickey Mouse, created a “bizarre 20-year hiatus between the release of works from 1922 and 1923.” It is fascinating to consider how a government-mandated marketing decision has affected our understanding of history and culture.
The novelist Willa Cather called 1922 the year “the world broke in two,” the start of a great literary, artistic and cultural upheaval. In 1922, Ulysses by James Joyce and T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” were published, and the Harlem Renaissance blossomed with the arrival of Claude McKay’s poetry in Harlem Shadows. For two decades those works have been in the public domain, enabling artists, critics and others to burnish that notable year to a high gloss in our historical memory. In comparison, 1923 can feel dull.
That year, however, marked the film debut of Marlene Dietrich, the publication of modernist landmarks like Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Jean Toomer’s Cane and far too many more influential works to name here. Find several more at Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain, Lifehacker, Indiewire, and The Atlanticand have a very happy Public Domain Day.
Public domain films and books will be added to ever-growing collections:
While life lasts, let us live it, not pass through as zombies, and let us find in art a glorious passageway to a deeper understanding of our essential humanity.
- Sister Wendy Beckett (1930–2018)
Sister Wendy, a cloistered nun whose passion for art led her to wander out into the world, where she became a star of global proportions, entertained the television masses with her frank humanist assessments.
Unfazed by nudity, carnality, and other sensual excesses, she initially came across as a funny-looking, grandma-aged virgin in an old-fashioned habit, lisping rhapsodically about appendages and entanglements we expect most Brides of Christ to shy away from.
Having beaten the jokers to the punch, she took her rapt audience along for the ride, barnstorming across the continent, eager to encounter works she knew only from the reproductions Church higher ups gave her permission to study in the 1980s.
She was grateful to the artists—1000s of them—for providing her such an excellent lens with which to contemplate God’s creations. Eroticism, greed, physical love, horrific violence—Sister Wendy never flinched.
“Great art offers more than pleasure; it offers the pain of spiritual growth, drawing us into areas of ourselves that we may not wish to encounter. It will not leave us in our mental or moral laziness,” she wrote in the foreword to Sister Wendy’s 1000 Masterpieces, her handpicked selection of the greatest paintings of Western art. (“A thousand sounded like so many until we got down to it and then began the anguish of choice,” she later opined.)
A lover of color and texture, she was unique in her ability to appreciate shades of grey, delving deeply into the psychological motivations of both the subjects and the artists themselves.
Here, he shows the pope, father of the Catholic Church, both enthroned and imprisoned by his position. Bacon’s relationship with his own father was a very stormy one, and perhaps he has used some of that fear and hatred to conjure up this ghostly vision of a screaming pope, his face frozen in a rictus of anguish.
On Henri De Toulouse-Lautrec’s The Clown Chau-u-Kao (1895):
Toulouse-Lautrec, as the last descendant of an ancient French family, must have been bitterly conscious of his own physical deformities and to many people he, too, was a figure of fun…He shows us Chau-U-Kao preparing for her act with dignity and serenity, the great swirl of her frill seems to bracket the clown so that we can truly look at her, see the pathos of that blowzy and sagging flesh, and move on to the nobility of the nose and the intense eyes. This is a degradation, but one that has been chosen by the performer and redeemed by intelligence and will power.
On Nicolas Lancret’s The Four Times of the Day: Morning (1739):
Morning is filled with witty observation — a delightful young woman (who is clearly no better than she should be) is entertaining a young cleric, seemingly unaware of the temptation offered by that casually exposed bosom. He holds out his cup, but his eyes are fied, alas, on that region of the feminine anatomy that his profession forbids him.
On François Clouet’s Diane De Poitiers (c. 1571)
The implication would seem to be that this shameless beauty with her prominent nipples and overflowing bowl of ripe fruit, is a woman of dubious morals. Yet one cannot but feel that the artist admires the natural freedom of his subject. Her children and her grinning wet-nurse are at her side, and, in the background, the maid prepares hot water. /surely this domestic scene is no more than a simple and endearing vignette.
Her generous takes on these and other artworks are irresistible. How wonderful it would be to approach every piece of art with such thought and compassion.
Fortunately, Sister Wendy, who passed away last week at the age of 88, left behind a how-to of sorts in the form of her 2005 essay, “The Art of Looking at Art,” from which we have extracted the following 10 rules.
Sister Wendy Beckett’s 10 Rules for Engaging with Art
Visit museums
They are the prime locus where the uniqueness of an artist’s work can be encountered.
Prioritize quality time over quantity of works viewed
Sociologists, lurking inconspicuously with stopwatches, have discovered the average time museum visitors spend looking at a work of art: it is roughly two seconds. We walk all too casually through museums, passing objects that will yield up their meaning and exert their power only if they are seriously contemplated in solitude.
Fly solo
If Sister Wendy could spend over four decades sequestered in a small mobile home on the grounds of Carmelite monastery in Norfolk, surely you can go alone. Do not complicate your contemplation by tethering yourself to a friend who cannot wait to exit through the gift shop.
Buy a postcard
…take it home for prolonged and (more or less) distractionless contemplation. If we do not have access to a museum, we can still experience reproductions—books, postcards, posters, television, film—in solitude, though the work lacks immediacy. We must, therefore, make an imaginative leap (visualizing texture and dimension) if reproduction is our only possible access to art. Whatever the way in which we come into contact with art, the crux, as in all serious matters, is how much we want the experience. The encounter with art is precious, and so it costs us in terms of time, effort, and focus.
Pull up a chair, whenever possible
It has been well said that the basic condition for art appreciation is a chair.
Don’t hate on yourself for being a philistine.
However inviolate our self-esteem, most of us have felt a sinking of the spirit before a work of art that, while highly praised by critics, to us seems meaningless. It is all too easy to conclude, perhaps subconsciously, that others have a necessary knowledge or acumen that we lack.
Take responsibility for educating yourself…
Art is created by specific artists living in and fashioned by a specific culture, and it helps to understand this culture if we are to understand and appreciate the totality of the work. This involves some preparation. Whether we choose to “see” a totem pole, a ceramic bowl, a painting, or a mask, we should come to it with an understanding of its iconography. We should know, for example, that a bat in Chinese art is a symbol for happiness and a jaguar in Mesoamerican art is an image of the supernatural. If need be, we should have read the artist’s biography: the ready response to the painting of Vincent van Gogh or Rembrandt, or of Caravaggio or Michelangelo, comes partly from viewers’ sympathy with the conditions, both historical and temperamental, from which these paintings came.
…but don’t be a prisoner to facts and expert opinions
A paradox: we need to do some research, and then we need to forget it…We have delimited a work if we judge it in advance. Faced with the work, we must try to dispel all the busy suggestions of the mind and simply contemplate the object in front of us. The mind and its facts come in later, but the first, though prepared, experience should be as undefended, as innocent, and as humble as we can make it.
Celebrate our common humanity
Art is our legacy, our means of sharing in the spiritual greatness of other men and women—those who are known, as with most of the great European painters and sculptors, and those who are unknown, as with many of the great carvers, potters, sculptors, and painters from Africa, Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America. Art represents a continuum of human experience across all parts of the world and all periods of history.
Listen to others but see with your own eyes
We should listen to the appreciations of others, but then we should put them aside and advance toward a work of art in the loneliness of our own truth.
Sister Wendy’s television shows can be found on PBS, the BBC, and as DVDs. Her books are well represented in libraries and from booksellerslike Amazon. (We have learned so much in the year her dictionary-sized 1000 Paintings has been parked next to our commode…)
Not to diminish the nightmare of mortars and shrapnel, but as evidenced by Crow’s Eye Productions’ period accurate dressing video above, one of the greatest horrors of WWI was wet wool.
Decades before the invention of Gore-Tex, Polar Fleece and other high performance, all weather gear, British soldiers relied on their woolies from head to toe.
An army of female knitters sent gloves, scarves, balaclavas and other such “comforts” to the front, in addition to seamless socks designed to last their boys three whole marching days inside their ankle high leather boots.
Alas, no amount of waxing and oiling could keep the trenches’ freezing cold puddles from seeping through those boots.
Nothing’s worse than the scent of three layers of wet wool when you’re catching your death in sodden puttees.
Prevented from joining the combat on the frontlines, British women helped out where they could, achieving a more comfortable level of dress than they’d known before the war.
Many of the upper class women swelling the volunteer nursing ranks were unaccustomed to dressing in such utilitarian fashion—cotton dresses, black flat rubber-soled shoes, aprons and sleeve protectors.
Their figures found comparative liberation, while their vanity found humbler outlets in dusting powder and the flattering army-style professional nursing veils they preferred to The Handmaid’s Tale-ish Sister Dora caps.
The greater physical freedom of the nurses’ uniforms extended to ordinary young women as well. Their underwear—a midriff baring chemise, knickers and petticoat—allowed for easier movement, as shorter skirts led to glamorous stockings and—gasp!—shaved legs!
Trendy cardigans, jumpers and waistcoats weren’t just cute, they helped make up for the lost warmth of those oh-so-restrictive corsets.
One might assume from a modern viewpoint that the hairstyles worn by monks arose to deal with male pattern baldness anxiety. As in the school uniform approach, you can’t single out one person’s baldness when everyone is bald. But this, again, would be a modern view, full of the vanity the tonsured—those with religiously shaven heads—ostensibly vowed to renounce. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the tonsure (from the Latin verb for “to shear”) began as a “badge of slavery” among Greeks and Romans. It was adopted “on this very account” by early monastic orders, to mark the total surrender of the will.
Would it surprise you, then, to learn that there were tonsure wars? Probably not if you know anything about church history. Every article of clothing and of faith has sparked some major controversy at one time or another. So too with the tonsure, of which—we learn in the Vox video above—there were three styles. The first, the coronal (or Roman or Petrine) tonsure, is the one we see in countless Medieval and Renaissance paintings: a bald pate at the crown surrounded by a fringe of hair, possibly meant to evoke the crown of thorns. Next is the Pauline, a fully shaved head, seen much less in Western art since it was “used more commonly in Eastern Orthodoxy.”
The third style of tonsure caused all the trouble. Or rather, it was this style that served as a visible sign of religious differences between the Roman Catholic Church and the churches in Britain and Ireland. “Celtic Catholicism was ‘out of sync’ with the Roman Catholic Church,” notes Vox. “Roman Catholics would use the differences between them to portray Celtic Catholicism as pagan, or even as an offshoot, celebrating the power-hungry magician, Simon Magus.” The Celtic tonsure fell under a cloud, but how exactly did it differ from the others? Since it disappeared in the early Middle Ages and few images seem to have survived, no one seems sure.
Daniel McCarthy, fellow emeritus at Trinity College, Dublin set out to solve the mystery. He speculates the Celtic tonsure, as you’ll see on a computer-simulated monk’s head, was a triangular shape, with the apex at the front. When the Roman Catholics took over Ireland, all of the vestments, dates, and haircuts were slowly brought into line with the dominant view. The practice of tonsure officially ended in 1972, and fell out of favor in English-speaking countries centuries earlier, according to the Catholic Encyclopedia. But in any case, McCarthy sees the tonsure not as a spurning of fashion, but as a cult-like devotion to style. In that sense, we can see people who adopt similar haircuts around the world as still visually signaling their membership in some kind of order, religious or otherwise.
Just a little over fifty years ago, we didn’t know what Earth looked like from space. Or rather, we had a decent idea what it looked like, but no clear color images of the sight existed. 2001: A Space Odyssey presented a particularly striking vision of Earth from space in the spring of 1968, but it used visual effects and imagination (both to a still-impressive degree) to do so. Only on Christmas Eve of that year would Earth be genuinely photographed from that kind of distance, captured with a Hasselblad by Bill Anders, lunar module pilot of NASA’s Apollo 8 mission.
“Two days later, the film was processed,” writes The Washington Post’s Christian Davenport, “and NASA released photo number 68-H-1401 to the public with a news release that said: “This view of the rising earth greeted the Apollo 8 astronauts as they came from behind the moon after the lunar orbit insertion burn.”
The image, called Earthrise, went “as viral as anything could in 1968, a time that saw all sorts of photographs leave their mark on the national consciousness, most of them scars.” Life magazine ran it with lines from U.S. poet laureate James Dickey: “Behold/ The blue planet steeped in its dream/ Of reality.”
It’s often said of iconic photographs that they make their viewers see their subjects in a new way, an effect Earthrise must exemplify more clearly than any other picture. “The vast loneliness is awe-inspiring,” said Apollo 8 command module pilot Jim Lovell at the time, “and it makes you realize just what you have back there on Earth.” At the recent celebration of the mission’s 50th anniversary at the Washington National Cathedral, Anders remembered, “As I looked down at the Earth, which is about the size of your fist at arm’s length, I’m thinking this is not a very big place. Why can’t we get along?”
You can download Earthrise from NASA’s web site and learn more about the taking of the photo from the video above, made for its 45th anniversary. Using all available data on the mission, including audio recordings of the astronauts themselves, the video precisely re-creates the circumstances under which Anders shot Earthrise, forever preserving a view made possible by a roll of the spacecraft executed by Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman. To what extent their photographic achievement has convinced us all to get along remains debatable, but has humanity, since the day after Christmas 1968, ever thought about its blue planet in quite the same way as before?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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 talk about country club prison sentences, we tend to imagine a marginal amount of time spent on the inside, though the phrase sounds like an extended vacation. Napoleon Bonaparte—exiled to the island of St. Helena for his crimes against Europe—got the full treatment, what some might even call a sweetheart deal. As the Public Domain Review notes, “the British had agreed to provide Le Petit Caporal with plentiful wine, meat, and musical instruments.” He was given his own comfortable lodgings, a spacious country house, though it’s said to have been draughty and full of rats.
On the other hand, Napoleon had to foreswear “what he most craved—family, power, Europe,” for a condition of extreme isolation. The loss weighed heavily. After spending six years 1200 miles from shore, he died, some say of poisoning, but others say of boredom. Of his few amusements, conversing with Count Emmanuel de Las Cases—“historian and loyal supporter who had been allowed to voyage with him to Saint Helena”—proved most stimulating. Prevented from receiving newspapers in French, he longed to read the few he found in English.
Las Cases endeavored to teach Napoleon the language of his jailers, and the former Emperor struggled mightily to learn it. After three months on the island, he spent the following three studying every day, eventually producing translations from his French like that below:
When will you be wise
Never as long as j should be in this isle
But j shall become wise after having passed the line
When j shall land in France j shall be very content…
My wife shall come near to me, my son shall be great and strong if he will be able to trink a bottle of wine at dinner j shall [toast] with him… / The women believe they [are] ever prety / The time has not wings / When you shall come, you shall see that j have ever loved you.
Eight pages in Napoleon’s own hand remain from his time as a student of English on St. Helena in the first few months of 1816. They are “some of the most evocative documents we have from Napoleon’s time” on the island, the Fondation Napoleon writes, bearing “poignant witness to the frustration Napoleon felt in exile…. It is tempting to read a refusal of exile in these sheets, both in the sentences themselves, and in Napoleon’s insistent use of ‘j’ (as in the French ‘je’) rather than the English ‘I.’”
In one letter that survives from March 7, 1816 (see it scanned above), written for Las Cases to correct the following day, Napoleon takes stock of his progress, or lack thereof.
Count lascases — Since sixt week j learn the Englich and j do not any progress. Six week do fourty and two day. If might have learn fivity word four day I could know it two thusands and two hundred. It is in the dictionary more of fourty thousand; even he could must twinty bout much of tems for know it our hundred and twenty week, which do more two yars. After this you shall agrée that to study one tongue is a great labour who it must do into the young aged.
Las Cases reports that his student “had an extraordinary intelligence but a very bad memory.” Grammar came much more easily than vocabulary. His frustration over being “imprisoned in the middle of this language” is recorded in Las Cases’ Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène, a record of his fifteen months on the island with Napoleon. The book became “a publishing sensation” and would “do much,” the Public Domain Review writes, “to turn the perception of Napoleon from a dictator into a liberator.”
If you’ve heard of Buckminster Fuller, you’ve almost certainly heard the word “Dymaxion.” Despite its strong pre-Space Age redolence, the term has somehow remained compelling into the 21st century. But what does it mean? When Fuller, a self-described “comprehensive, anticipatory design scientist,” first invented a house meant practically to reinvent domestic living, Chicago’s Marshall Field and Company department store put a model on display. The company “wanted a catchy label, so it hired a consultant, who fashioned ‘dymaxion’ out of bits of ‘dynamic,’ ‘maximum,’ and ‘ion,’ ” writes TheNew Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert in a piece on Fuller’s legacy. “Fuller was so taken with the word, which had no known meaning, that he adopted it as a sort of brand name.” After the Dymaxion House came the Dymaxion Vehicle, the Dymaxion Map, and even the two-hour-a-day Dymaxion Sleep Plan.
“As a child, Fuller had assembled scrapbooks of letters and newspaper articles on subjects that interested him,” Kolbert writes. “When, later, he decided to keep a more systematic record of his life, including everything from his correspondence to his dry-cleaning bills, it became the Dymaxion Chronofile.” The Dymaxion Chronofile now resides in the R. Buckminster Fuller Collection at Stanford University, a place that has merited the attention of no less a guide to the fascinating corners of the world than Atlas Obscura.
“The files go back to when he was four-years-old, but he only seriously started the archive in 1917,” writes that site’s Allison C. Meier. “From then until his death in 1983 he collected everything from each day, with ingoing and outgoing correspondence, newspaper clippings, drawings, blueprints, models, and even the mundane ephemera like dry cleaning bills.” Fuller added to the Dymaxion Chronofile not just every day but, from the year 1920 until his death in 1983, every fifteen minutes.
In 1962 Fuller described the Dymaxion Chronofile as what would happen “if somebody kept a very accurate record of a human being, going through the era from the Gay ’90s, from a very different kind of world through the turn of the century — as far into the twentieth century as you might live.” Using himself as the case subject for the project (as he did for many projects, which led him to nickname himself “Guinea Pig B”) meant that “I could not be judge of what was valid to put in or not. I must put everything in, so I started a very rigorous record.” Open Culture’s own Ted Mills has written elsewhere about the rigors of storing and maintaining that record in archive form over the decades since Fuller’s death, and now, as with so much Fuller did, the Dymaxion Chronofile stands as both a compelling oddity and proof of real, if askew, prescience. After all, how many of us have taken to documenting our own lives online with nearly equal intensity — and how many of us do it even more often than every fifteen minutes?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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.
As we know from conversations in subway tunnels or singing in the shower, different kinds of spaces and building materials alter the quality of a sound. It’s a subject near and dear to architects, musicians, and composers. The relationship between space and sound also centrally occupies the field of “Acoustic Archeology.” But here, an unusual problem presents itself. How can we know how music, voice, and environmental sound behaves in spaces that no longer exist?
More specifically, writes EurekAltert!, the question that faced researchers at the University of Seville was “how did words or the rain sound inside the Mosque of Cordoba in the time of Abd al-Rahman I?” The founder of an Iberian Muslim dynasty began construction on the Mosque of Cordoba in the 780s. In the hundreds of years since, it underwent several expansions and, later, major renovations after it became the Cathedral of Cordoba in the 13th century.
The architecture of the 8th century building is lost to history, and so, it would seem, is its careful sound design. “Unlike fragments of tools or shards of pottery,” Atlas Obscura’s Jessica Leigh Hester notes, “sounds don’t lodge themselves in the soil.” Archeo-acousticians do not have recourse to the material artifacts archeologists rely on in their reconstructions of the past. But, given the technological developments in reverb simulation and audio software, these scientists can nonetheless approximate the sounds of ancient spaces.
In this case, University of Seville’s Rafael Suárez and his collaborators in the research group “Architecture, Heritage and Sustainability” collected impulse responses—recordings of reverberation—from the current cathedral. “From there, they used software to reconstruct the internal architecture of the mosque during four different phases of construction and renovation.… Next, they produced auralizations, or sound files replicating what worshippers would have heard.”
To hear what late-8th century Spanish Muslims would have, “researchers used software to model how the architecture would change the same snippet of a recorded salat, or daily prayer. In the first configuration, the prayer sounds full-bodied and sonorous; in the model that reflects the mosque’s last renovation, the same prayer echoes as though it was recited deep inside a cave.” All of those renovations, in other words, destroyed the sonic engineering of the mosque.
As the authors write in a paper recently published in Applied Acoustics, “the enlargement interventions failed to take the functional aspect of the mosque and gave the highest priority to mainly the aesthetic aspect.” In the simulation of the mosque as it sounded in the 780s, sound was intelligible all over the building. Later construction added what the researchers call “acoustic shadow zones” where little can be heard but echo.
Unlike Hagia Sofia, the Byzantine cathedral-turned-mosque, which retained its basic design over the course of almost 1500 years, and thus its basic sound design, the Mosque-Cathedral of Cordoba was so altered architecturally that a “significant deterioration of the acoustic conditions” resulted, the authors claim. The mosque’s many remaining visual elements would be familiar to 8th century attendees, writes Hester, including “gilt calligraphy and intricate tiles… and hundreds of columns—made from jasper, onyx, marble, and other stones salvaged from Roman ruins.” But the “acoustic landscape” of the space would be unrecognizable.
The specific sounds of a space are essential to making “a place feel like itself.” Something to consider the next time you’re planning a major home renovation.
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