The bi-annual Ramsay Art Prize, worth $100,000 Aus. and based in Adelaide, went to Sydney-based artist Sarah Contos for a giant quilt called The Long Kiss Goodbye. Michael Cogger looks at the new award, its winner, and several of the finalists.
Tag: 05.25.17
Technological Change Quickly Makes The Present Obsolete. So What’s A Novelist To Do?
“We live in a world where occupations that once seemed reliably perennial, like clerking in a retail store, are suddenly teetering on the brink of extinction. For novelists, whose work typically takes at least a year (and often much longer) to produce, delivering an up-to-date depiction of contemporary life must be a maddeningly elusive goal.”
What’s Not Okay To Ask A Dancer To Do?
“When your instruments are human beings, is there a limit to how far you should go? Five choreographers open up about where” – and when and why – “they draw the line.” (Elizabeth Streb’s answer is, of course, that she doesn’t.)
The Pleasures Of Relentlessly Pessimistic Literature
“Here there is no question of a certain person making certain mistakes in certain circumstances. Here we have an across-the-board dismissal of the very idea of progress or improvement, or engineered happiness. So why do we, or some of us, read such material, and read it with appetite?” Tim Parks has an answer.
Why Male Nudes In Ancient Greek Art Are Meagerly Endowed
Actually, not all such depictions sported miniature manhoods. But most of the surviving ones do – and that was a deliberate choice, based on both aesthetic and philosophical ideals. Kerry Sullivan explains. (And no, the likenesses weren’t necessarily meant to be realistic.)
Renzo Piano Talks About Architecture Expressing A City
If you’re an architect in the right place and time, you don’t change the world but you do get to build something that reflects the changes that are happening.
When Dreams Guide Civilizations (And Nations)
“Many societies throughout human history have taken dreams as important, worldly documents. The history of human dreaming shows time and again how dreamers have come to a new understanding about themselves and their world through the processing of their nighttime minds. Dreams have proven to be mental activities through which humans have come to a novel idea, a much-needed methodology, and a revolutionary way of perception.”
How We’re Creating Games That Change People’s Minds, And Even Their Real-Life Actions
Lindsay Grace: “In American University’s Game Lab and Studio, which I direct, we’re creating a wide range of persuasive games to test various strategies of persuasion and to gauge players’ responses. We have developed games to highlight the problems with using delivery drones, encourage cultural understanding and assess understanding of mathematics. And we’re expanding the realm beyond education and health.”
You’re Sadly Mistaken If You Think Libraries Are Just For Storing Books
“If a library is just where a society keeps its books, then it’s easy to see why many people no longer perceive libraries as relevant. In the days of yore, a building full of books was a clear metaphor for collective knowledge. But today, knowledge is no longer bound to the printed page, and electronic and non-textual forms of media proliferate. Our cultural knowledge is no longer represented primarily as text within books. Moreover, with the internet, we can access our multimedia cultural knowledge from virtually anywhere.”
What Shakespeare Can Teach Us About Language And Cognition
“A cognitive scientist looking at [scholar Stephen] Booth’s explanation of Shakespearean effects would spot many concepts from her own discipline. Those include priming – when, after hearing a word, we tend more readily to recognize words that are related to it; expectation – the influence of higher-level reasoning on word recognition; and depth of processing – how varying levels of attention affect the extent of our engagement with a statement. (Shallow processing explains our predisposition to miss the problem of whether a man should be allowed to marry his widow’s sister.)”