| |
World: Openculture.com: [ Geolocation ] (Laatste update: woensdag 11 oktober 2023 01:41:13)
|
An Introduction to René Magritte, and How the Belgian Artist Used an Ordinary Style to Create Extraordinarily Surreal Paintings
With his dark suit, neat haircut, and bowler hat, René Magritte embodied early-twentieth-century Belgian normality. Yet the feelings his work stirred in their viewers were very much the opposite of normal. He had various ways of accomplishing this. One was “to combine two familiar objects and make a new one,” says gallerist-Youtuber James Payne in […]
Tue, 10 Oct 2023 09:00:42 +0000
|
The Fantastic Women Of Surrealism: An Introduction
When André Breton, a leader of the Surrealist movement and author of its first manifesto, wrote that “the problem of woman is the most marvelous and disturbing problem in all the world,” he was not alluding to the unfair lack of recognition experienced by his female peers. Marquee name Surrealists like Breton, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray, René Magritte, […]
Tue, 10 Oct 2023 08:00:54 +0000
|
When the US Government Commissioned 7,497 Watercolor Paintings of Every Known Fruit in the World (1886)
A picture is worth 1000 words, especially when you are a late-19th or early-20th century horticulturist eager to protect intellectual property rights to newly cultivated varieties of fruit. Or an artistically gifted woman of the same era, looking for a steady, respectable source of income. In 1886, long before color photography was a viable option, […]
Mon, 09 Oct 2023 09:00:37 +0000
|
Why Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Rococo Masterpiece, The Swing, Is Less Innocent Than It First Appears
If you were to see Jean-Honoré Fragonard‘s L’Escarpolette, or The Swing, at the Wallace Collection, you might not think particularly hard about it. Though all the subtle light effects that make the young woman in pink pop out of the lush garden that surrounds her are impressive, granted and they’ve become even more so […]
Fri, 06 Oct 2023 09:00:43 +0000
|
The Physics of Playing a Guitar Visualized: Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” Seen from the Inside of a Guitar
Give it a chance, you won’t be disappointed. While the first 30 seconds of the video above may resemble an amateur iPhone prank, it soon becomes something unexpectedly enchanting a visualization of the physics of music in real-time. The Youtuber places his phone inside an acoustic guitar, then plays Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters” against a backdrop […]
Fri, 06 Oct 2023 08:00:34 +0000
|
How to Read Five Books Per Month & Become a Serious Reader: Tips from Deep Work Author Cal Newport
If those who have read Cal Newport’s Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World and even more so, those who’ve been meaning to read it share any one desire, it’s surely the desire to read more books. And for those who have reading habits similar to Newport’s, it wouldn’t actually […]
Thu, 05 Oct 2023 09:00:45 +0000
|
Carl Jung on the Power of Tarot Cards: They Provide Doorways to the Unconscious & Perhaps a Way to Predict the Future
It is generally accepted that the standard deck of playing cards we use for everything from three-card monte to high-stakes Vegas poker evolved from the Tarot. “Like our modern cards,” writes Sallie Nichols, “the Tarot deck has four suits with ten ‘pip’ or numbered cards in each…. In the Tarot deck, each suit has four […]
Thu, 05 Oct 2023 08:00:55 +0000
|
Coffee Can Make Concrete 30% Stronger, a New Study Finds
The Romans fashioned their buildings with concrete that has endured for 2,000 years. Their secret? Some researchers think it’s how the Romans heated lime. Others think it’s how they used pozzolanic material such as volcanic ash. Nowhere does coffee figure into the equation. Too bad. Happily, researchers at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) […]
Wed, 04 Oct 2023 09:00:56 +0000
|
A BBC Science Show Introduces the Moog Synthesizer in 1969
In the fall of 1969, there were still a great many people who’d never heard a synthesizer. And even among those who had, few would have known how its unfamiliar sounds were actually made. Hence the importance of the segment from the BBC program Tomorrow’s World above, which introduced the Moog synthesizer (originally created by Robert […]
Wed, 04 Oct 2023 08:00:11 +0000
|
Venice Explained: Its Architecture, Its Streets, Its Canals, and How Best to Experience Them All
“If you’re in Venice, you might not enjoy it so much if you follow a tour-guide route that gets you to the main attractions.” So says Youtuber Manuel Bravo whom we’ve previously featured here on Open Culture for his videos on Pompeii, the Duomo di Firenze, and the Great Pyramids of Giza in […]
Tue, 03 Oct 2023 09:00:24 +0000
|
Leonardo da Vinci’s Handwritten Resume (Circa 1482)
We know that Michelangelo wrote grocery lists; now we have evidence that Leonardo wrote resumes. “Before he was famous, before he painted the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, before he invented the helicopter, before he drew the most famous image of man, before he was all of these things, Leonardo da Vinci was an […]
Tue, 03 Oct 2023 08:30:08 +0000
|
What Makes Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square (1915) Not Just Art, But Important Art
Who created the first work of abstract art has long been a fraught question indeed. Better, perhaps, to ask who first said of a work of art that a kid could have made it. A strong contender in that division is the Russian artist Véra Pestel, whom history remembers as having reacted to Kazimir Malevich‘s […]
Mon, 02 Oct 2023 09:00:44 +0000
|
Why Henry VIII’s Codpiece Is So Monumental in Holbein’s Famous, Lost Portrait
During the 15th and 16th centuries, fashionable men sported a codpiece. Originally a garment designed to protect and support the proverbial “Willy” (especially when men wore tights), the codpiece morphed into something else–a sign of virility, “a bulging and absurd representation of masculinity itself.” The codpiece featured prominently in paintings by masters such as Titian, […]
Mon, 02 Oct 2023 09:00:30 +0000
|
How Japanese Kintsugi Masters Restore Pottery by Beautifying the Cracks
A few years ago, we featured here on Open Culture the Japanese art of kintsugi, whose practitioners repair broken pottery with gold in a manner that emphasizes rather than hides the cracks. Since then, the idea seems to have captured the Western imagination, inspiring no few online investigations but also books with titles like Kintsugi […]
Fri, 29 Sep 2023 09:00:36 +0000
|
When a Young Sofia Coppola & Zoe Cassavetes Made Their Own TV Show: Revisit Hi-Octane (1994)
It makes sense that Sofia Coppola and Zoe Cassavetes would be friends. Not only are they both respected filmmakers of Generation X, they’re both daughters of maverick American auteurs, a condition with its advantages as well as its disadvantages. The advantages, in Coppola’s case, have included the ability to get Zoetrope, her father Francis Ford […]
Fri, 29 Sep 2023 08:00:55 +0000
|
