“Researchers attribute the unique climate of Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula as a leading factor in the preservation of a treasure trove of Russian icons and liturgical objects recently found in St Catherine’s Monastery.”
Tag: 08.01.11
The Art Of Humiliation (And Why We Like To Watch)
“If most people are mortified at the thought of being humiliated personally, why are they also so titillated by watching others embarrass themselves?”
Abstract Painter John Hoyland Dead At 76
“Hoyland himself disliked being labelled ‘abstract’. He was, he said, a painter full stop – one who expanded the scale and palette of English painters, who took the canvas off the easel, like Pollock, and used the floor as a base to make paintings measured in yards not feet.”
iPod Theatre On A London Night Bus
“In the wee small hours of the morning, London’s streets, artificially lit, empty bar the odd straggler or clump of smokers, easily accommodate fictions heard through headphones. You hone in on the appropriate elements: shivering women and urban lighting or armed police and arguments.”
Walking On The Best Artwork In Edinburgh
“The best art at this year’s Edinburgh festival is not in a gallery. It is under your feet. You walk up and down it and you may, if you like, look at it as a work of art; but no one is forcing you to experience it that way. … Martin Creed has created a work of art so perfectly integrated into the world that you feel a bit of a fool for making a fuss over it.”
Shakespeare Cusses So Much Better Than You And I Do
Rupert Christiansen: “The other day, in search of a quotation, I was leafing through Shakespeare’s Henry V. The character of choleric Ancient Pistol reminded me that the Elizabethans approached cussing much more imaginatively than we do, treating it as an opportunity for elaborate verbal invention rather than just taking potshots at the same flat monosyllables.”
Canada’s Shaw And Stratford Festivals Now Lead The Way
“In terms of quantity and quality, Canada’s two big festivals can look our own squarely in the eye and not flinch. In the quarter century since I last visited them, they have become more defiantly Canadian while achieving international standards. Isn’t it about time we recognised the fact?”
Resolved: Save One Copy Of Every Book
“Brewster Kahle, 50, founded the nonprofit Internet Archive in 1996 to save a copy of every Web page ever posted. Now the MIT-trained computer scientist and entrepreneur is expanding his effort to safeguard and share knowledge by trying to preserve a physical copy of every book ever published.”
Remembering The Art Lost In The World Trade Center
“Besides ending nearly 3,000 lives, destroying planes and reducing buildings to tons of rubble and ash, the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks destroyed tens of thousands of records, irreplaceable historical documents and art.”
The Arts As Cultural Diplomacy
“Of course it is extraordinarily difficult to quantify the impact of the arts. Ironically, its elusiveness is arguably what allows the arts to cross cultural boundaries that can often be otherwise impenetrable, but that same elusiveness is what makes the arts such an easy target for the bean counters.”