“Bulging white mounds rear up out of the ground in the middle of Helsinki, tapering to circular windows that point like cyclopean eyes around the square. Children scramble up the steep slopes while a skateboarder attempts to glide down one, past a couple posing for a selfie at the summit.” Oliver Wainwright visits the new Amos Rex museum in the Finnish capital.
Tag: 08.27.18
The Truly All-Purpose Protest Song (It Comes From, Of All Genres, Heavy Metal)
“‘We’re Not Gonna Take It,’ by the hair metal act Twisted Sister, was once named among the ‘Filthy 15’ songs singled out for offensive content and brought before Congress by concerned parents in the 1980s. It’s also an indelible hit, whose instantly recognizable hook practically invites the listener to shout along.” By now it’s been used by everyone from the striking schoolteachers of Oklahoma to the New York Yankees to Paul Ryan (?!?).
Van Gogh’s Drawing Of ‘Starry Night’, Looted In World War II, Is Still Being Held In Russia
Investigative reporter Martin Bailey: “Vincent had made the drawing in 1889 in the asylum of Saint-Paul-de-Mausole to send to Theo in Paris, to give his brother an idea of his painting … The drawing done for Theo had been donated to the Kunsthalle Bremen in 1918, but it was lost during the chaos of the Second World War. It was seized at a German castle by Victor Baldin, a Red Army officer who took it back to the Soviet Union on a tractor. For decades it remained hidden away and was recorded in the Van Gogh catalogue raisonné as ‘lost’. I can report that it is now almost certainly in a secret Russian government storage facility in Moscow.”
Contemporary Music Is Finally Like Contemporary Art – All Over The Place: Alex Ross
Ross looks at the zillion different directions new music has gone in since the eclipse of modernism. He also discusses what he calls the “Kandinsky Problem”: “In the art world, instinctive antagonism to the new, the weird, and the absurd is less common. People think nothing of queueing for hours in order to sit in a chair opposite Marina Abramović or to grope their way through a foggy tunnel designed by Olafur Eliasson. Indeed, composers can often find a more appreciative audience if they reclassify their music as an installation or as performance art.”