Cinema in the early years of the 21st Century has experienced something of an existential crisis. Terms such as ‘TV-like’ or ‘television-esque’ were once intended as insults; now, in a period most commentators consider a new ‘golden age of television’ – a Don Draper here, a Walter White there – that is no longer the […]
On 21 February, the George Sturges house in Brentwood, California, was put on the block at Los Angeles Modern Auctions (LAMA). It is the only example of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Usonian style in a city that boasts four of his earlier, textile block-style houses. Built in 1939, around the time ofFallingwater, it was owned in […]
The Beatles’ Revolver was released on 5 August 1966. As the album turns 50,Greg Kot argues that it is the Fab Four’s crowning achievement. The best Beatles album? The rock historians often point to Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band as the moment, in 1967, when rock magically grew up and became a legitimate art […]
Synesthesia is a fascinating condition experienced by 2% to 4% of the population, wherein a stimulus of one sense (taste, say) is processed and perceived within the framework of another sense (hearing, say). A person with the condition might say “That spaghetti tastes loud,” or “That song is purple.” Some minor crossing of wires that […]
[vsw id=”02tkp6eeh40″ source=”youtube” width=”465″ height=”384″ autoplay=”no”] Even those of us who only took half a music appreciation course in college know about the impact of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, the orchestral ballet that nearly caused a brawl at its debut. Ah, but how times have changed in the exactly one hundred years since […]
The New Hollywood wave may be the most significant film movement in the history of American cinema. The classic era of Hollywood was built on vertical integration, meaning that the film studios controlled the production, distribution and exhibition of every movie they made, until the United States v Paramount Pictures Case forced the studios to […]
Paul Klee led an artistic life that spanned the 19th and 20th centuries, but he kept his aesthetic sensibility tuned to the future. Because of that, much of the Swiss-German Bauhaus-associated painter’s work, which at its most distinctive defines its own category of abstraction, still exudes a vitality today. And he left behind not just those 9,000 pieces of art […]
“Rough incursions, which in many places convert historical landscapes into elementary ones, hide subtle changes but of the more aggressive kind.” – Ernst Jünger, At the Wall of Time The contradictory processes of de-mythologization and re-mythologization are not unknown to ancient civilizations, in which the old myths are sometimes destroyed (demythologization) and replaced with new […]