Pigments, the common type of coloring found in almost everything around us, create color by absorbing certain wavelengths of light, or colors, and reflecting others; when the reflected ones bounce to our eyes, we perceive them as colors. Structural colors, like the ones you can see on a soap bubble, work entirely differently. – Nautilus
Category: visual
The V&A Discovers The Dangers Of Turn-Of-The-20th-Century Hats
The V&A’s collection of women’s hats from the time has a lot of feathers, and those feathers were preserved in arsenic salt. Yikes. – The Guardian (UK)
Hikers Recently Found The Skeleton Of An Artist Who Went On A Painting Walk Out From A WWII Japanese American Internment Camp
Giichi Matsumura died during a freak summer snowstorm when other members of his hiking group went on to fish in a lake, and he stayed back to paint. Though the family knew roughly where his grave was, the area is remote – and hikers stumbled across the cairn of stones atop the grave in October of 2019, bringing it to the attention of local authorities. – NBC (AP)
Does The Museum Model Work Anymore?
And really, did it ever? The problem (in the U.S., at least): “Though exhibitions might have a progressive point of view and artists themselves might be making radical statements, as institutions, museums often possess retrograde politics, beholden to traditional forms of influence and power.” Oof. Can they change? – Jezebel
The Art Of Moving 120 Pieces Of Monet’s Work
Says the chief registrar at the Denver Art Museum, “It’s a lot. … There are many, many spreadsheets.” – NPR
An Architect Says The Building Industry Pollutes The World, And Must Change
Stephanie Carlisle: “While architects are not fully responsible for steel manufacturing or concrete production per se, there is a direct line from the material specifications that architects write to the steel mills of China, the coal mines of Appalachia, the brick kilns of India, or clear-cut forests in the Pacific Northwest or the Amazon.” She says the design industry has to change, and quickly. – Fast Company
What’s Happening To Airports? They’re Becoming Theme Park Fantasies
Changi in Singapore, which has long striven to enthral and entertain its users, outdid itself with its new “Jewel” extension to its existing terminals, essentially a shopping mall and nature-based theme park. From a great oculus in its glass roof descends the “rain vortex”, a funnel of falling water described as the “world’s tallest indoor waterfall”. It has a “butterfly garden”. It has the Shiseido Forest Valley, a 900-tree, 60,000-shrub indoor landscape named after the Japanese-based personal care company Shiseido. The forest concept is, in marketing terms, a good fit with its corporate mission: “Beauty innovations for a better world.” – The Guardian
200 More Terracotta Warriors Found
The discovery, first announced by the country’s state-run news agency, came during a decade-long excavation of the first of four pits at the mausoleum, a 4,300-square-foot area where some 6,000 warriors were previously found. Archaeologists uncovered roughly 200 new warriors, 12 clay horses, and two chariots, as well as a number of bronze weapons, over the past 10 years. – Artnet
Governors Of St. Mark’s In Venice Want 6½-Foot Flood Wall In Square
A month after the disastrous flood of November 12, the president of the historic church’s governing body said that the building cannot withstand repeated exposure to salt water it has faced the past two years. He and his colleagues want “to surround the basilica on the side of the square with a two-metre-high Perspex wall and sheet piles sunk four metres deep into the ground.” – The Art Newspaper
How Yellow Lost Its Good Reputation
The most significant development was the increasing association of yellow with vice and evil – often with the deadly sin of envy (incidentally, though green may be the traditional colour of envy in high culture, in playgrounds of the 1960s, ‘yeller’ meant ‘jealous’, possibly because it was a close soundalike). – Literary Review