Tennessee School Board Bans Maus, the Pulitzer-Prize Winning Graphic Novel on the Holocaust; the Book Becomes #1 Bestseller on Amazon
Last week, a Tennessee school board voted unanimously to ban Maus, the Pulitzer-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust, citing instances of profanity and nudity. Specifically, the McMinn County school board objected to utterances of the words “God damn” and a small, barely-perceptible breast. (Look closely, and you may eventually find it.) Rather uncomfortably, the banning came on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and it figures into a larger right-leaning effort to ban books countrywide.
Happily, bad decisions can have good unintended consequences. In recent days, Art Spiegelman’s Maus has soared to #1 on Amazon’s bestseller list. (Another edition of the book sits at #3 on the list.) Elsewhere, a college professor has created a free online course on Maus designed solely for students from McMinn County. And within Tennessee itself, bookstores are giving away free copies of Spiegelman’s classic, while a church has decided to convene conversations on the groundbreaking book.
Above, you can watch Spiegelman respond to the ban and wonder whether it’s “a harbinger of things to come,” a step in a larger effort to efface the memory of the Holocaust.
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Read More...A Brief Animated History of Martin Luther’s 95 Theses & the Reformation–Which Changed Europe and Later the World
Whatever our religious background, we all sooner or later have occasion to speak of nailing theses to a door. Most of us use the phrase as a metaphor, but seldom entirely without awareness of the historical events that inspired it. On October 31, 1517, a German priest and theologian named Martin Luther nailed to the door of Wittenberg’s All Saints’ Church his own theses, 95 of them, which collectively made an argument against the Roman Catholic Church’s practice of selling indulgences, or pardons for sins. Luther could not accept that the poor should “spend all their money buying their way out of punishment so they can go to heaven,” nor that it should be “easier for the rich to avoid a long time in purgatory.”
In other words, Luther believed that the Church in his time had become “way too much about money and too little about God,” according to the narration of the short film above. Created by Tumblehead Studios and showcased by National Geographic for the 500th anniversary of the original thesis-nailing, its five playfully animated minutes tell the story of the Reformation, which saw Protestantism split off from Catholicism as a result of Luther’s agitation. It also manages to include such events as Luther’s own translation of the New Testament, previously available only in Greek and Latin, into his native German, the publication of which created the basis of the modern German language as spoken and written today.
Luther’s translation gave ordinary people “the opportunity to read the Bible in their own language,” free from the interpretations of the priests and the Church. It also gave them, perhaps less intentionally, the ability to “use the words of the Bible as an argument for all sorts of things.” Luther’s thoughts were soon marshaled “in the power struggles of princes, in revolts, and in the struggle between kings, princes, and the Pope about who actually decides what.” Squabbles, battles, and full-scale wars ensued. The consequent institutional schisms changed the world in ways visible half a millennium later — but they first changed Europe, where traces of that transformation still reveal themselves most strikingly. Few travelers can be trusted to find and explain those traces more ably than public-television host Rick Steves.
In Luther and the Reformation, his 2017 special above, Steves visits all the important sites involved in the central figure’s life journey, a representation in microcosm of Europe’s grand shift from medievalism into modernity. In more than 40 years of professional travel, Steves has paid countless visits to the monuments of Catholic Europe. Appreciating them, he admitted in a recent New York Times Magazine profile, required him to “park my Protestant sword at the door.” His story-of-the-Reformation tour, however, lets him draw on his own Lutheran tradition with his characteristic enthusiasm. That enthusiasm, in part, that has made him a such a successful travel entrepreneur, though he presumably knows when to stop amassing wealth: after all, it’s easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. Or so the New Testament has it.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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.
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Read More...Watch a Human White Blood Cell Chase Bacteria Through a Field of Red Blood Cells
Watch above a classic movie made by David Rogers at Vanderbilt University in the 1950s. It shows “a neutrophil (a type of white blood cell) chasing a bacterium through a field of red blood cells in a blood smear. After pursuing the bacterium around several red blood cells, the neutrophil finally catches up to and engulfs its prey. In the human body, these cells are an important first line of defense against bacterial infection. The speed of rapid movements such as cell crawling can be most easily measured by the method of direct observation.” This comforting video comes courtesy of the estate of David Rogers, Vanderbilt University.
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Read More...The Marcel Duchamp Research Portal Opens, Making Available 18,000 Documents and 50,000 Images Related to the Revolutionary Artist
Marcel Duchamp made films, composed music, painted Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2, designed an art deco chess set, and of course — the first thing most of us learn about him, as well as the last thing many of us learn about him — he put a urinal in an art galley. But as you might expect of an artist who spent the early 20th century at the heart of the avant-garde, there’s more to him than that. This notion is backed up by the more than 18,000 documents and 50,000 images made available at the Duchamp Research Portal, a newly opened archive dedicated to the life and work of the revolutionary conceptual artist.
The fruit of a seven-year collaboration between the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Association Marcel Duchamp, and the Centre Pompidou, this formidable digital collection includes many artifacts related to the artist’s best-known work: the “large glass” of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even; the mustachioed Mona Lisa; the shocking attempts to commit physical motion to canvas; and that urinal, Fountain.
But its “most interesting items,” writes The Art Newspaper’s Daniel Cassady, “are often the most intimate and involve other major players in the evolution of 20th-century art. A 1950 letter — with enigmatic marginalia — from Breton. A 1933 postcard to Constantin Brâncuși. Many candid photographs by Duchamp’s friend and fellow giant of the era, Man Ray.”
These names will be familiar to readers of Open Culture, where we’ve previously featured Brâncuși on film and portraits of 1920s cultural icons by Man Ray — who, as we can see from the above snapshot of Duchamp at his Spanish home, didn’t always work so formally. But then, no artist can fully be understood through what makes it into the art-history textbooks alone. Browse the Duchamp Research Portal (or click “show me more” to change up the images on its front page) and you’ll see pieces of an artistic life fully lived: the floor plan of his West 67th Street studio; a 1940 telegram to American patron Walter Conrad Arensberg (“HOLDING SHIPMENT OF MASK AWAITING CONFIRMATION OF INSURANCE AND ADDRESS”); a 1954 French newspaper profile; and a series of images juxtaposing Duchamp with an unclothed Eve Babitz, the late Los Angeles “it-girl” — not just the famous one of them playing chess.
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What Made Marcel Duchamp’s Famous Urinal Art — and an Inventive Prank
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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.
Read More...Great Art Cities: Visit the Fascinating, Lesser-Known Museums of London & Paris
Gallerists James Payne and Joanne Shurvell understand that institutional big gorillas like the Louvre, the Musee d’Orsay, Tate Britain, and London’s National Gallery require no introduction. Their new art and travel series, Great Art Cities Explained, concentrates instead on the wonderful, smaller museums the biggies often overshadow.
First time visitors to London and Paris may be left scrambling to rearrange their itineraries.
The first two episodes have us persuaded that Sir John Soane’s Museum, Kenwood House, the Wallace Collection, Le Musée National Eugène Delacroix, Le Musée de Montmartre à Paris, and Atelier Brancusi are the true “don’t miss” attractions if time is tight.
Credit Payne, whose flair for dishy, far ranging, highly accessible narration made his other web series, Great Art Explained in Fifteen Minutes, an instant hit.
The three British institutions featured above were once grand private homes, whose owners decided to donate them and the magnificent art collections they contained to the public good.
Whatever motivated these wealthy men’s generosity — vanity, the quest for immortality, or, in one case, the desire to cut off a churlish and morally lax son whom Payne compares to the central figure in William Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress, a Sir John Soane’s Museum favorite — Payne holds them in higher regard than today’s investment-obsessed art collectors:
The world needs more men like (William) Murray, (Sir John) Soane, and (Sir Richard) Wallace, men who saw that art can transcend social class. They understood that art should enrich the soul, not the bank balance.
His peeks into their circumstances are every bit as fascinating as the tidbits he drops about the artists whose work he includes.
Rather than giving a sweeping overview of each collection, he focuses on a few key works, sharing his curatorial perspective on their history, acquisition, subject matter, creation, and reception:
Rembrandt’s Self Portrait with Two Circles (1669)
Vermeer’s The Guitar Player (1672)
Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress (1732)
Canaletto’s Venice: the Bacino di San Marco from San Giorgio Maggiore and Venice: the Bacino di San Marco from the Canale della Giudecca (c. 1735 — 1744)
Fragonard’s The Swing (1767)
Frans Hal’s Laughing Cavalier (1624)
Payne’s rollicking approach means each episode is crammed with plenty of artwork residing outside of the featured museums, too, as he compares, contrasts, and contextualizes.
One of his most interesting tales in the London episode concerns an 18th-century portrait of William Murray’s great-nieces, Dido Belle and Elizabeth Murray, raised by their abolitionist great-uncle at Kenwood House:
Dido Belle was the illegitimate daughter of a Black slave and William Murray’s nephew and was raised by Murray as part of the aristocracy. By all accounts, Dido and her cousin were raised as equals and this portrait of the two was seen as an image of sisterhood, reflecting their equal status. But looking at it with modern eyes, we can see it more in the vein of traditional servant and master portraits of the time. Belle’s exotic clothing is designed to differentiate her from her cousin and the painting reflects the conservative views of the time.
Artist David Martin places the cousins on a bench outside the Hampstead Heath mansion, with St. Paul’s Cathedral in the background. For years, it was the only known portrait of Belle.
It hangs, not in Kenwood House, but in Scone Palace’s Ambassador’s Room.
Meanwhile, one of Kenwood House’s latest acquisitions is a 2021 portrait of Belle by young Jamaican artist Mikéla Henry-Lowe, on display in the library.
Next up on Great Art Cities Explained: New York. Look for it on this playlist on Great Art Explained’s YouTube channel.
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Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...Watch the Renaissance Painting, The Battle of San Romano, Get Brought Beautifully to Life in a Hand-Painted Animation
Before the advent of the motion picture, humanity had the theater — but we also had paintings. Though physically still by definition, paint on canvas could, in the hands of a sufficiently imaginative master, seem actually to move. Arguably this could even be pulled off with ochre and charcoal on the wall of a cave, if you credit the theory that paleolithic paintings constitute the earliest form of cinema. More famously, and much more recently, Rembrandt imbued his masterpiece The Night Watch with the illusion of movement. But over in Italy another painter, also working on a large scale, pulled it off differently two centuries earlier. The artist was Paolo Uccello, and the painting is The Battle of San Romano.
“The set of three paintings depicts the harrowing details of an epic confrontation between Florentine and Sienese armies in 1432,” writes Meghan Oretsky at Vimeo, which selected Swiss filmmaker Georges Schwizgebel’s short animated adaptation of the triptych as a Staff Pick Premiere. Completed in 2017, the film’s beginnings go back to 1962, when Schwizgebel was a gallery-touring art student in Italy.
“Even though I wasn’t normally moved by old paintings, this one made a strong impression on me and still does today,” he tells Vimeo. “I was also inspired by the use of cycles, or loops, which suited a moving version of this image perfectly.” Schwizgebel executed the animation itself over the course of six months, foregoing computer technology and painting each frame with acrylic on glass.
Scored by composer Judith Gruber-Stitzer, Schwizgebel’s “The Battle of San Romano” constitutes a kind of shape-shifting tour of the painting that first captivated him half a century ago. But what he would have seen at the Uffizi Gallery is only one third of Uccello’s composition, albeit the third that art historians consider central. The other two reside at the Louvre and the National Gallery, and you can see the latter’s piece discussed by Director of Collections and Research Caroline Campbell in the video above. Schwizgebel is hardly the first to react boldly to The Battle of San Romano; in the 15th century, Lorenzo de’ Medici was sufficiently moved to buy one part, then have the other two stolen and brought to his palace. If that’s the kind of act it has the power to inspire, perhaps it’s for the best that the triptych’s union didn’t last.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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.
Read More...Watch a Joyful Video Where 52 Renowned Choreographers Link Together to Create a Dance Chain Letter
Dance videos are having a moment, fueled in large part by TikTok.
Professionals and amateurs alike use the platform to showcase their work, and while the vast majority of performers seem to be in or barely out of their teens, a few dancing grandmas have become viral stars. (One such notable brushes off the attention, saying she’s just “an elderly lady making a fool of herself.”)
You’ll find a handful of dancers happy to make similar sport of themselves among the 52 celebrated, mostly middle-aged and older choreographers performing in And So Say All of Us, Mitchell Rose’s chain letter style dance film, above. Witness:
John Heginbotham’s spritely bowling alley turn, complete with refreshment stand nachos (4:10)…
Doug Varone’s determination to cram a bit of breakfast in before wafting out of a diner booth (5:15)…
And the responses David Dorfman, who both opens and closes the film, elicits aboard the 2 train and waiting on the platform at Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue stop … conveniently situated near commissioning body BAM (Brooklyn Academy of Music).
In the summer of 2017 — the same year TikTok launched in the international market — BAM asked filmmaker and former choreographer Rose to create a short film that would feature a number of choreographers whom outgoing Executive Producer Joseph V. Melillo had nurtured over the course of his 35-year tenure.
The result takes the form of an Exquisite Corpse, in which each performer picks up where the performer immediately before left off . Quite a feat when one considers that the contributors were spread all over the globe, and Rose had barely a year to ready the film for its premiere at a gala honoring Melillo.
To get an idea of the degree of coordination and precision editing this entailed, check out Rose’s detailed instructions for Globe Trot, a crowd-sourced “hyper match cut” work in which 50 filmmakers in 23 countries each contributed 2 second clips of non-dancers performing a piece choreographed by Bebe Miller (who appears fourth in And So Say All of Us).
A great pleasure of And So Say All of Us — and it’s a surprising one given how accustomed we’ve grown to peering in on work recorded in artists’ private spaces – is seeing the locations. Terraces and interior spaces still fascinate, though the lack of masks in populous public settings identify this as a decidedly pre-pandemic work.
Other highlights:
The comparative stillness of Eiko and Koma, the only performers to be filmed together (2:19)
Meredith Monk singing creekside in an excerpt of Cellular Songs, a nature-based piece that would also premiere at BAM in 2018 (5:51)
Mark Morris’ glorious reveal (6:59)
As with any Exquisite Corpse, the whole is greater than the sum of its (excellent) individual parts. Rose ties them together with a red through line, and an original score by Robert Een.
Participating choreographers in order of appearance:
David Dorfman
Reggie Wilson
Trey McIntyre
Bebe Miller
Kate Weare
Sean Curran
Faye Driscoll
David Rousseve
Gideon Obarzanek
Jodi Melnick
Jawole Willa Jo Zollar
Rodrigo Pederneiras
Eiko Otake
Koma Otake
Angelin Preljocaj
Brenda Way
Lin Hwai-min
Brian Brooks
Sasha Waltz
Donald Byrd
Stephen Petronio
William Forsythe
Nora Chipaumire
Karole Armitage
John Heginbotham
Miguel Gutierrez
Elizabeth Streb
Zvi Gotheiner
Ron K. Brown
Larry Keigwin
Annie‑B Parson
Doug Varone
Bill T. Jones
Rennie Harris
Ralph Lemon
Meredith Monk
Lucinda Childs
Meryl Tankard
Ohad Naharin
Daniele Finzi Pasca
Ivy Baldwin
Mark Morris
Susan Marshall
John Jasperse
Solo Badolo
Abdel Salaam
Martin Zimmermann
Aurélien Bory
Benjamin Millepied
Brenda Angiel
James Thierrée
Kenneth Kvarnström
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Ayun Halliday is the Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine and author, most recently, of Creative, Not Famous: The Small Potato Manifesto. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Read More...How Bob Dylan Created a Musical & Literary World All His Own: Four Video Essays
More than two decades ago, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross published a piece on Bob Dylan in what many would then have considered his “late” period. “In the verbal jungle of rock criticism, Dylan is seldom talked about in musical terms,” Ross writes. “His work is analyzed instead as poetry, punditry, or mystification.” Despite having long possessed exalted cultural status, and been subject to the attendant intensity of scrutiny and exegesis that comes along with it, “Dylan himself declines the highbrow treatment — though you get the sense that he wouldn’t mind picking up a Nobel Prize.” As it happened, he picked one up seventeen years later, in a clear institutional affirmation of his work’s being, indeed, literature. But what (as many have asked about the work itself) does that mean?
In the video essay at the top of the post, Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, examines Dylan’s literary powers through the microcosm of one song. “All Along the Watchtower” first appeared on the austere 1967 album John Wesley Harding, a seeming repudiation of both the increasingly psychedelic pop-cultural zeitgeist and his own persona as a prophetic folk singer-turned-rocker. “Dylan spent much of his early career fighting off the label of prophet,” says Puschak, “but here he seems to accept the role, laying down an apprehensive, apocalyptic scenario, as if to say, ‘You want a prophecy? Okay, I’ll give you a prophecy, but it comes at a price: the price is mystery and entrapment, a prophecy the meaning of which is forever out of reach.”
A short folk ballad, “All Along the Watchtower” is told “as a conversation that aims to convey a message. But the fingerprints of the blues are everywhere on this song: namely, of one of Dylan’s heroes, Robert Johnson, who, the legend has it, sold his sold to the Devil for musical genius.” In addition to dealing with longer musical traditions, the song also finds Dylan employing timeless archetypes like the joker and the thief, drawing as well from the Bible (to which John Wesley Harding contains some 70 references) as he tells their story. These sound like the qualities of a literary enterprise, but as PBS Idea Channel host Mike Rugnetta argues in the video above, “When we label something literature, we’re not making a simple factual statement about the characteristics of a work of art. We’re communicating about what we consider worthwhile.”
In considering whether Dylan’s work is “really literature,” Rugnetta cites literary theorist Terry Eagleton’s essay “What Is Literature?” In it Eagleton writes that “literature transforms and intensifies ordinary language, deviates systematically from everyday speech” — but also that “one can think of literature less as some inherent quality or set of qualities displayed by certain kinds of writing, all the way from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf, than as a number of ways in which people relate themselves to writing.” Participated in by critics, academics, and amateurs, the ever-growing industry of “Dylanology” attests to a particularly intimate and long-lasting relationship between Dylan’s music and its listeners. The adjective literary, here, seems to imply the existence of ambition, complexity, ambiguity, and extended cultural centrality.
Nothing evidences cultural centrality like parody, and as the Polyphonic video above shows, Dylan has inspired more than a few astute send-ups over the decades. “With so much conversation around him and such a distinct style,” says its narrator, “it’s perhaps unsurprising that he’s been a frequent target of satire.” That includes songs by other famous and well-regarded musicians. In “A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara’d into Submission),” Paul Simon “mocks Dylan’s lyrical habits and proclivity for referencing historical and fictional figures in his music.” In addition to its “nasal folk-rock style,” Stealers Wheel’s “Stuck in the Middle with You” uses “the archetypal figures of the clown and the joker,” much like “All Along the Watchtower.” (To say nothing of Weird Al’s palindromic “Bob.”)
Like many a literary master, Dylan has dished it out as well as taken it. But his best-known acts of mockery seem to have been directed not toward his peers but the press, whose ravenousness in the 20th century of ever-more-mass media did so much to both build him up and cramp his style. “In his early days, Dylan used the media as a tool for self-mythmaking,” says Polyphonic’s narrator in the video above. But “soon enough, be became the icon for a growing counterculture,” and the title of “voice of a generation” began to weigh heavily. Throwing it off required getting adversarial, not least through songs like “Ballad of a Thin Man,” a j’accuse against an unspecified “Mr. Jones,” representative — so it’s been proposed — of the legions of badgering squares sent by newspapers, television, and so on.
Dylan could also have intended Mr. Jones to stand more broadly for “people out of touch with him and his movement, people who pestered him for his beliefs without truly understanding where they came from,” members of “old society, trying to pass blanket moralistic judgments on his culture and lifestyle.” Like a character out of F. Scott Fitzgerald, “inauthentic on all levels,” Mr. Jones is “faking his way through intellectual circles while fetishizing the counterculture.” 57 years after “Ballad of a Thin Man,” the now-octogenarian Dylan continues to record and perform, and to engage with the media when and how he sees fit. He’s somehow avoided joining the establishment, let alone becoming a Mr. Jones; he remains the joker who, asked in a 1960s press conference whether he considered himself a songwriter or a poet, replied, “Oh, I consider myself more of a song and dance man.”
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Bob Dylan’s Famous Televised Press Conference After He Went Electric (1965)
Kurt Vonnegut on Bob Dylan: He “Is the Worst Poet Alive”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities 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.
Read More...An 8‑Minute Animated Flight Over Ancient Rome
“At roof-top level, Rome may seem a city of spires and steeples and towers that reach up towards eternal truths,” said Anthony Burgess of the great city in which he lived in the mid-70s. “But this city is not built in the sky. It is built on dirt, earth, dung, copulation, death, humanity.” For all the city’s ancient grandeur, the real Rome is to be found in its brothels, bathhouses, and catacombs, a sentiment widely shared by writers in Rome since Lucilius, often credited as Rome’s first satirist, a genre invented to bring the lofty down to earth.
“The Romans … proudly declared that satire was ‘totally ours,’ ” writes Robert Cowan, senior lecturer in classics at the University of Sydney. “Instead of heroes, noble deeds, and city-foundations recounted in elevated language,” ancient Romans constructed their literature from “a hodgepodge of scumbags, orgies, and the breakdown of urban society, spat out in words as filthy as the vices they describe.” Little wonder, perhaps, that the author of A Clockwork Orange found Rome so much to his liking. For all the Christianity overlaid atop the ruins, “the Romans are not a holy people; they are pagans.”
In the video above, see an 8‑minute rooftop-level flight above the ancient imperial city, “the most extensive, detailed and accurate virtual 3D reconstruction of Ancient Rome,” its creators, History in 3D, write. They are about halfway through the project, which currently includes such areas as the Forum, the Colosseum, Imperial Forums, “famous baths, theaters, temples and palaces” and the Trastevere, where Burgess made his home millennia after the period represented in the CGI reconstruction above and where, he wrote in the 1970s, antiquity had been preserved: “Trasteverini… regard themselves as the true Romans.”
The language of this Rome, like that of Juvenal, the ancient city’s greatest satirist, offers “a ground-level view of a Rome we could barely guess at from the heroism of the Aeneid,” writes Cowan. “The language of the Trasteverini is rough,” writes Burgess, “scurrilous, blasphemous, obscene, the tongue of the gutter. Many of them are leaders of intensity, rebels agains the government. They have had two thousand years of bad government and they must look forward to two thousand more.”
As we drift over the city’s rooftops in the impressively rendered animation above, we might imagine its streets below teeming with profane, disgruntled Romans of all kinds. It may be impossible to recreate Ancient Rome at street level, with all of its many sights, smells, and sounds. But if we’ve been to Rome, or ever get the chance to visit, we may marvel, along with Burgess, at its “continuity of culture.… Probably Rome has changed less in two thousand years than Manhattan has in twenty years.” The Empire may have been fated to collapse under its own weight, but Rome, the Eternal City, may indeed endure forever.
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Josh Jones is a writer based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness
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Open Culture editor Dan Colman scours the web for the best educational media. He finds the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & movies you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
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