Every way possible. In this video, the folks at Wired dig into research and find out things like “why the prefrontal cortex shuts down during improvisation. ‘It’s not just something that happens in clubs and jazz bars. … It’s actually maybe the most fundamental form of what it means to be human.'”- Wired
Tag: 03.16.18
The Egyptian Artist Who Was Really An Israeli Spying For Mossad
“In the early 1950s, a Mossad agent named Shlomo Cohen-Abravanel was sent to Egypt, under the cover-story that he was a French abstract painter named Charduval. Abravanel’s fake artist persona was so successful that he scored a small solo exhibition at Cairo’s Museum of Modern Art, while the actual Abravanel went on to design the Mossad’s official emblem.”
Research: Successful Bands Do Better With Married Members
It looks like we owe Yoko an apology. New research finds rock bands have more critical and commercial success if they contain a mix of married and single musicians.
Dutch Poets And Stonemasons Are Carving A Never-Ending Poem Into A City Street
“Called De Letters van Utrecht, the ‘social sculpture’ is constantly evolving and continues to expand every Saturday afternoon when one of 22 stone carvers from a local guild chisels a single letter into the stone. As the weeks, months, and years pass by, the poem evolves, continuing indefinitely so long as the city and community members support it.”
Are All Artists Liberal? So Where Are The Conservatives?
When we in the arts champion “diversity, equity and inclusion,” do we mean everyone? Do we mean conservatives? Religiously, culturally or otherwise? Are conservative artists not identifying as artists because the arts are a predominantly liberal sector?
Meep Meep! Where The Road Runner, Fred Flintstone’s Car, And Other Classic Cartoons’ Sounds Came From
“In this episode of Watch Smarter, Slate‘s video series about hidden tropes in pop culture and beyond, we trace the surprising history of cartoon sounds we all know but have never quite understood. Our story begins with live orchestras in the 1920s and ends, more or less, inside a coke bottle.”
2,000-Year-Old Mosaics Turn Up Under Lawn Of Florida Museum
No, they’re not previously unknown Native American art, we’re afraid. They’re first- and second-century Greco-Roman works from Antioch, and five of them were among the first pieces acquired by the Museum of Fine Arts, St. Petersburg. “One was embedded in a fountain in the sculpture garden. One went on display in the Membership Garden. One was stowed under the stage of the Marly Room. Someone – it’s unclear who – buried the remaining two in the lawn outside the gates of the sculpture garden sometime in 1989.” It seems no one knows why.
Royal Shakespeare Co. Revives Forgotten Female Playwright From 300 Years Ago
Mary Pix was born in 1666 (the year of the Great Fire of London), had her first big London successes in 1696, and went on to write an estimated 13 plays (both tragedies and comedies) and one novel, despite the opposition of what we might as well call the patriarchy. A retitled production of her 1700 script The Beau Defeated opens this month at Stratford-upon-Avon.
The Ingenious Distribution System Cubans Use To Replace The Internet They Can’t Access
“Cuba has one of the lowest rates of internet usage in the Western Hemisphere, and access to media is strictly restricted – but that doesn’t stop Cubans from watching Game of Thrones. Their secret is El Paquete Semanal (‘The Weekly Packet’), a clandestine in-person file-sharing network that distributes hard drives and flash drives full of media.”
Court Gives Verdict In Suit Against Facebook For Censoring Courbet’s ‘Origin Of The World’
“French schoolteacher Frédéric Durand-Baïssas … says the social media giant closed his account in 2011 because he posted L’Origine du monde (The Origin of the World, 1866), [the history-making] explicit full-frontal female nude.” The French judge did rule that French users could sue Facebook in France rather than California, but was less than sympathetic to Durand-Baïssas’s claims for damages.