Gustav Klimt’s Iconic Painting The Kiss: An Introduction to Austrian Painter’s Golden, Erotic Masterpiece (1908)

in Art | October 6th, 2021

Not long ago I stayed in a hotel by the train sta­tion of a small Kore­an city. In the room hung a repro­duc­tion of Gus­tav Klimt’s Die Umar­mung, or The Embrace. This at first struck me as just anoth­er piece of cul­tur­al­ly incon­gru­ous décor — a phe­nom­e­non hard­ly unknown in this coun­try — but then I real­ized that its sen­si­bil­i­ty was­n’t entire­ly inap­pro­pri­ate. For the room was in what belonged, broad­ly speak­ing, to the cat­e­go­ry of South Kore­a’s “love hotels,” and Klimt, as Great Art Explained cre­ator James Payne puts it, “placed sex­u­al­i­ty at the fore­front of his work.” The artist had that in com­mon with Sig­mund Freud, his fel­low denizen of fin de siè­cle Vien­na.

With paint­ings like Die Umar­mung, Klimt pushed the bound­aries of what Freud called “the mis­un­der­stood and much-maligned erot­ic.” Payne cites those very words in his new video on Klimt’s much bet­ter-known work Der Kuss, or The Kiss.

Com­plet­ed in 1908, the paint­ing shows both the artist’s pen­chant for “alle­go­ry and sym­bol­ism” car­ried over from his younger days, as well as his mature abil­i­ty to trans­form alle­go­ry and sym­bol­ism “into a new lan­guage that was more overt­ly sex­u­al and more dis­turb­ing.” For these and oth­er rea­sons — its near­ly life-size dimen­sions, its lib­er­al use of actu­al gold — The Kiss has for more than a cen­tu­ry been an un-ignor­able work of art, even “an icon for the post-reli­gious age.”

As in his oth­er fif­teen-minute videos, Payne man­ages to dis­cuss both tech­nique and con­text. Here the “delib­er­ate con­trast between the real­is­ti­cal­ly ren­dered flesh and the two-dimen­sion­al abstract orna­men­ta­tion cre­ates an effect almost like pho­to mon­tage.” The fig­ures’ clothes offer “a visu­al metaphor for the emo­tion­al and phys­i­cal expres­sion of erot­ic love,” and their close fram­ing echoes Japan­ese wood­block prints, from which Payne notes that Klimt (like Van Gogh) drew great inspi­ra­tion. He also traces the aes­thet­ic roots of The Kiss through Edvard’s Munch’s epony­mous paint­ing, and Auguste Rod­in’s even ear­li­er sculp­ture. “Once con­sid­ered porno­graph­ic and deviant,” Klimt’s was lat­er “put on dis­play in one of the impe­r­i­al palaces” — and even today, on the oth­er side of the world and in a much hum­bler con­text, it retains its roman­tic pow­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Gus­tav Klimt’s Haunt­ing Paint­ings Get Re-Cre­at­ed in Pho­tographs, Fea­tur­ing Live Mod­els, Ornate Props & Real Gold

Art His­to­ry School: Learn About the Art & Lives of Toulouse-Lautrec, Gus­tav Klimt, Frances Bacon, Edvard Munch & Many More

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

New Dig­i­tal Archive Will Fea­ture the Com­plete Works of Egon Schiele: Start with 419 Paint­ings, Draw­ings & Sculp­tures

Explore 7,600 Works of Art by Edvard Munch: They’re Now Dig­i­tized and Free Online

The Sto­ry Behind Rodin’s The Kiss

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Albert Camus on the Responsibility of the Artist: To “Create Dangerously” (1957)

in Art, Literature, Writing | October 6th, 2021

Lit­er­ary state­ments about the nature and pur­pose of art con­sti­tute a genre unto them­selves, the ars poet­i­ca, an antique form going back at least as far as Roman poet Horace. The 19th cen­tu­ry poles of the debate are some­times rep­re­sent­ed by the duel­ing notions of Per­cy Shel­ley — who claimed that poets are the “unac­knowl­edged leg­is­la­tors of the world” — and Oscar Wilde, who famous­ly pro­claimed, “all art is quite use­less.” These two state­ments con­ve­nient­ly describe a con­flict between art that involves itself in the strug­gles of the world, and art that is involved only with itself.

In the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, Albert Camus put the ques­tion some­what dif­fer­ent­ly in a 1957 speech enti­tled “Cre­ate Dan­ger­ous­ly.”

Of what could art speak, indeed? If it adapts itself to what the major­i­ty of our soci­ety wants, art will be a mean­ing­less recre­ation. If it blind­ly rejects that soci­ety, if the artist makes up his mind to take refuge in his dream, art will express noth­ing but a nega­tion.

And yet, grandiose ideas about the artist’s role seemed absurd in the mid-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, when the ques­tion becomes whether artists should exist at all. “Such amaz­ing opti­mism seems dead today,” writes Camus. “In most cas­es the artist is ashamed of him­self and his priv­i­leges, if he has any. He must first of all answer the ques­tion he has put to him­self: is art a decep­tive lux­u­ry?”

Women artists have also had to con­sid­er the ques­tion, of course. Brain Pick­ings’ Maria Popo­va quotes Audre Lorde’s call for artists to “uphold their respon­si­bil­i­ty toward ‘the trans­for­ma­tion of silence into lan­guage and action.” Ursu­la Le Guin believed that art expand­ed the imag­i­na­tion, and thus the pos­si­bil­i­ties for human free­dom. Both of these writ­ers were polit­i­cal­ly engaged artists, and so it’s lit­tle won­der that we find sim­i­lar sen­ti­ments in Camus’ speech from decades ear­li­er.

To make art, Camus writes, is to make choic­es. Artists are already involved, as Shel­ley declared, in shap­ing the world around them, whether they acknowl­edge it or not:

Real­i­ty can­not be repro­duced with­out exer­cis­ing a selec­tion… The only thing need­ed, then, is to find a prin­ci­ple of choice that will give shape to the world. And such a prin­ci­ple is found, not in the real­i­ty we know, but in the real­i­ty that will be — in short, the future. In order to repro­duce prop­er­ly what is, one must depict also what will be.

The most elo­quent, endur­ing expres­sions of future think­ing are that which we call art. Even art that seeks to depict the fleet­ing­ness of nature freezes itself for pos­ter­i­ty.

Art, in a sense, is a revolt against every­thing fleet­ing and unfin­ished in the world. Con­se­quent­ly, its only aim is to give anoth­er form to a real­i­ty that it is nev­er­the­less forced to pre­serve as the source of its emo­tion. In this regard, we are all real­is­tic and no one is. Art is nei­ther com­plete rejec­tion nor com­plete accep­tance of what is. It is simul­ta­ne­ous­ly rejec­tion and accep­tance, and this is why it must be a per­pet­u­al­ly renewed wrench­ing apart. 

To under­stand art as pur­pose­less­ly divorced from the world is to mis­un­der­stand it, Camus argues. This is the mis­un­der­stand­ing of “a fash­ion­able soci­ety in which all trou­bles [are] mon­ey trou­bles and all wor­ries [are] sen­ti­men­tal wor­ries” — the self-sat­is­fied bour­geois soci­ety “about which Oscar Wilde, think­ing of him­self before he knew prison, said that the great­est of all vices was super­fi­cial­i­ty.”

Art for art’s sake is the doc­trine of a “soci­ety of mer­chants… the arti­fi­cial art of a fac­ti­tious and self-absorbed soci­ety,” Camus declared. “The log­i­cal result of such a the­o­ry is the art of lit­tle cliques.” Or, to a degree Camus could not have imag­ined, we have the enter­tain­ment indus­tri­al com­plex of art for com­merce’s sake, which in the 21st cen­tu­ry can make it near­ly impos­si­ble for art to thrive. (As actor Stel­lan Skars­gård recent­ly said in pub­lic com­ments, the prob­lem with the film indus­try is “that we have for decades believed that the mar­ket should rule every­thing.”)

There­fore, the ques­tion before Camus, and no less before artists today, is how to “cre­ate dan­ger­ous­ly” in a soci­ety “that for­gives noth­ing.” The ques­tion of whether or not art serves a pur­pose is a false one, he sug­gests, since “every pub­li­ca­tion is a delib­er­ate act,” and there­fore pur­pose­ful. The real ques­tion, for Camus the philoso­pher, “is sim­ply to know — giv­en the strict con­trols of count­less ide­olo­gies (so many cults, such soli­tude!) — how the enig­mat­ic free­dom of cre­ation remains pos­si­ble.” If only arriv­ing at such knowl­edge were so sim­ple. Camus’ lec­ture has recent­ly been trans­lat­ed by San­dra Smith and pub­lished in the short vol­ume, Cre­ate Dan­ger­ous­ly: The Pow­er and Respon­si­bil­i­ty of the Artist. You can read a sec­tion of the lec­ture at Lithub.

Camus’ speech was pre­sent­ed on Decem­ber 14, 1957 at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Upp­sala in Swe­den, short­ly after he won the Nobel Prize.

via Brain Pick­ings

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Hear Albert Camus Deliv­er His Nobel Prize Accep­tance Speech (1957)

See Albert Camus’ His­toric Lec­ture, “The Human Cri­sis,” Per­formed by Actor Vig­go Mortensen

Albert Camus: The Mad­ness of Sin­cer­i­ty — 1997 Doc­u­men­tary Revis­its the Philosopher’s Life & Work

Albert Camus Explains Why Hap­pi­ness Is Like Com­mit­ting a Crime—”You Should Nev­er Admit to it” (1959)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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The Beach Boys’ Lost Concert: Watch the Band Perform Their Classics at Their Zenith (1964)

in Music | October 5th, 2021

In ear­ly 1964, there could hard­ly have been an Amer­i­can teenag­er igno­rant of the Beach Boys. Singing in immac­u­late har­monies about surf­ing, hot rods, girls, and root beer — as well as var­i­ous com­bi­na­tions and per­mu­ta­tions there­of — they soon found them­selves rid­ing an unprece­dent­ed­ly high wave, so to speak, of post­war teen cul­ture. On the oth­er side of the pond, the Bea­t­les had been hard at work play­ing to demo­graph­i­cal­ly sim­i­lar, also-enrap­tured audi­ences. In Feb­ru­ary of 1964 the Fab Four arrived in Amer­i­ca, and their per­for­mance on The Ed Sul­li­van Show alone put them on at least an equal foot­ing there with the Beach Boys.

“The next oppor­tu­ni­ty for your aver­age Amer­i­can Beat­le­ma­ni­ac to see the Bea­t­les per­form would have been at the movie the­ater watch­ing the Bea­t­les’ Wash­ing­ton D.C. con­cert at the Col­i­se­um on a closed cir­cuit broad­cast on March 14 or 15, 1964,” says the blog Meet the Bea­t­les for Real. “This was the first time in his­to­ry that the closed-cir­cuit was used for a con­cert. Pre­vi­ous­ly, it had only been used to show box­ing match­es.”

The direct-to-the­aters broad­cast also includ­ed short­er open­ing acts Les­ley Gore and the Beach Boys, the lat­ter of whose per­for­mance was thought lost until its redis­cov­ery in 1998. In the video above, you can see its entire 22 min­utes at an audio­vi­su­al qual­i­ty well exceed­ing most con­cert films of its era.

Begin­ning with “Fun, Fun, Fun,” the Beach Boys play a vari­ety of ear­ly num­bers that would turn out to rank among their most beloved songs, also includ­ing “Lit­tle Deuce Coupe,” “Surfer Girl,” “Surfin’ U.S.A.,” and “Shut Down.” (“Long Tall Tex­an” would only be prop­er­ly record­ed 32 years lat­er, with the late coun­try singer Doug Super­naw.) The set even fea­tures “In My Room,” whose melan­cholic break from the surf­ing-cars-girls spec­trum offered a sign of things to come from the group’s musi­cal mas­ter­mind Bri­an Wil­son. Unsuit­ed to the stress of star­dom, he would recuse him­self from live per­for­mance the fol­low­ing year. This show thus marks the onstage zenith of the Beach Boys’ clas­sic line­up of the Wil­son broth­ers Bri­an, Carl, and Den­nis with Al Jar­dine and Mike Love. But as mak­ers of clas­sic albums — and clas­sic albums pushed to heights of ambi­tion by com­pe­ti­tion with the Bea­t­les — they’d only just begun.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Beach Boys Cre­at­ed Their Pop Mas­ter­pieces: “Good Vibra­tions,” Pet Sounds, and More

The Mag­ic of the Beach Boys’ Har­monies: Hear Iso­lat­ed Vocals from “Sloop John B.,” “God Only Knows,” “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” & Oth­er Pet Sounds Clas­sics

Watch Lost Stu­dio Footage of Bri­an Wil­son Con­duct­ing “Good Vibra­tions,” The Beach Boys’ Bril­liant “Pock­et Sym­pho­ny”

Enter Bri­an Wilson’s Cre­ative Process While Mak­ing The Beach Boys’ Pet Sounds 50 Years Ago: A Fly-on-the Wall View

Paul McCart­ney vs. Bri­an Wil­son: A Rival­ry That Inspired Pet Sounds, Sgt. Pep­per, and Oth­er Clas­sic Albums

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Medieval Tennis: A Short History and Demonstration

in Design, History, Sports | October 5th, 2021

British You Tuber Niko­las “Lindy­biege” Lloyd is a man of many, many inter­ests.

Wing Chun style kung fu…

Children’s tele­vi­sion pro­duced in the UK between 1965 and 1975…

Ancient weapon­ry, chain­mail, and his­tor­i­cal­ly accu­rate WWII mod­el minia­tures…

Actress Celia John­son, star of the 1945 roman­tic dra­ma Brief Encounter…

Evo­lu­tion­ary psy­chol­o­gy…

…and it would appear, ten­nis.

But not the sort you’ll find played on the grass courts of Wim­ble­don, or for that mat­ter, the hard courts of the US Open.

Lloyd is one of a select few who grav­i­tate toward the ver­sion of the game that was known as the sport of kings.

It was, accord­ing to a 1553 guide, cre­at­ed, “to keep our bod­ies healthy, to make our young men stronger and more robust, chas­ing idle­ness, virtue’s mor­tal ene­my, far from them and thus mak­ing them of a stronger and more excel­lent nature.”

Hen­ry VIII was a tal­ent­ed and enthu­si­as­tic play­er in his youth, caus­ing the Venet­ian Ambas­sador to rhap­sodize, “it was the pret­ti­est thing in the world to see him play; his fair skin glow­ing through a shirt of the finest tex­ture.”

Henry’s sec­ond wife, the ill-fat­ed Anne Boleyn, was also a fan of the sport, with mon­ey rid­ing on the match she was watch­ing when she was sum­moned to the Privy Coun­cil “by order of the King,” the first stop on her very swift jour­ney to the Tow­er of Lon­don.

The sport’s roots reach all the way to the 11th and 12th cen­turies when monks and vil­lagers in south­ern France were mad for jeu de paume, a ten­nis-like game pre­dat­ing the use of rac­quets, whose pop­u­lar­i­ty even­tu­al­ly spread to the roy­als and aris­to­crats of Paris.

The game Lloyd tries his hand at above is now known as Real Ten­nis, a term invent­ed in the 19th-cen­tu­ry to dis­tin­guish it from the then-new craze for lawn ten­nis.

Men­tion “the sport of kings” these days and most folks will assume you’re refer­ring to fox hunt­ing or horse-rac­ing.

Mind you, real ten­nis is just as rar­i­fied. You won’t find it being played on any old (which is to say new) indoor court. It requires four irreg­u­lar­ly sized walls, an asym­met­ri­cal lay­out, and a slop­ing pent­house roof. Behold the lay­out of a Real Ten­nis court by Ateth­nekos, com­pli­ments of  Eng­lish Wikipedia:

Com­pared to that, the Ten­nis Depart­ment’s dia­gram of the famil­iar mod­ern set up seems like child’s play:

Oth­er cog­ni­tive chal­lenges for those whose ver­sion of ten­nis does­n’t extend back to medieval days:  a slack net; lop­sided, tight­ly strung, small raque­ts; and a gallery of waist-high screened “haz­ards,” that are spir­i­tu­al­ly akin to pin­ball tar­gets, espe­cial­ly the one with the bell.

The hand­made balls may look sim­i­lar to your aver­age mass-pro­duced Penn or Wil­son, but expect that each will be “unique in its par­tic­u­lar quirks”:

They are not per­fect­ly spher­i­cal and these seams stick out a lit­tle bit more here and there, which means that the bounce can be rather unpre­dictable. Because these are heav­ier and hard­er, they don’t swerve when you spin them in the air very much, but when they hit a wall and get a decent grip, the swerve can send them zing­ing off along the wall to great effect.

Once Lloyd has ori­ent­ed view­ers and him­self to the court and equip­ment, Real Ten­nis pro Zak Eadle walks him through serv­ing, scor­ing, and strat­e­gy in the form of chas­es.

Quoth Shake­speare’s Hen­ry V:

His present, and your pains, we thank you for:
When we have match’d our rack­ets to these balls,
We will, in France, by God’s grace play a set,
Shall strike his father’s crown into the Haz­ard:
Tell him, he made a match with such a wran­gler, 
That all the Courts of France will be disturb’d with chas­es.

Even non-ath­let­ic types could find them­selves fas­ci­nat­ed by the his­tor­i­cal con­text Lindy­beige pro­vides.

If you’re moved to take rac­quet in hand, there are a hand­ful of Real Ten­nis courts in the USA, UK, Aus­tralia, and France where you might be able to try your luck.

The sport could use you. Esti­mates indi­cate that the num­ber of play­ers has dwin­dled to a mere 10,000. Sure­ly some­one is des­per­ate for a part­ner.

Delve fur­ther into the world of Real Ten­nis on the Inter­na­tion­al Real Ten­nis Pro­fes­sion­als Association’s web­site.

Check out some of Lindybeige’s oth­er inter­ests on his YouTube chan­nel.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Watch Accu­rate Recre­ations of Medieval Ital­ian Longsword Fight­ing Tech­niques, All Based on a Man­u­script from 1404

What It’s Like to Actu­al­ly Fight in Medieval Armor

The Rules of 100 Sports Clear­ly Explained in Short Videos: Base­ball, Foot­ball, Jai Alai, Sumo Wrestling, Crick­et, Pétanque & Much More

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday

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Footage of the Last Known Tasmanian Tiger Restored in Color (1933)

in Nature, Science | October 5th, 2021

Last month, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Ser­vice announced that near­ly two dozen wildlife species would be removed from the endan­gered species list, as CNN report­ed, includ­ing the ivory-billed wood­peck­er, “the Bachman’s war­bler, two species of fresh­wa­ter fish­es, eight species of South­east­ern fresh­wa­ter mus­sels and 11 species from Hawaii and the Pacif­ic Islands.” This is not good news. The ani­mals have been delist­ed because they’ve been added to a list of extinct crea­tures, one that grows longer each year.

Most of us have seen few, if any, of these ani­mals and can­not grasp the scope of their loss. What does it mean to say there are no more Bachman’s war­blers left on Earth? Species wiped out by cli­mate change, over­farm­ing, over­fish­ing, or the encroach­ment of humans and inva­sive species can feel far away from us, their loss a dis­tant tragedy; or extinc­tion can seem inevitable, like that of the Dodo or Sicil­ian wolf, crea­tures that seem too fan­tas­tic for the world we now inhab­it. So too, the dog-like mar­su­pi­al Tas­man­ian tiger — or thy­lacine — an ani­mal that lived as recent­ly as 1936 when the last rep­re­sen­ta­tive of its species, named Ben­jamin, died in cap­tiv­i­ty in Aus­tralia.

The thy­lacine looks like an evo­lu­tion­ary odd­i­ty, too weird to sur­vive. But this judg­ment is a mis­ap­pli­ca­tion of Dar­win­ism as egre­gious as the idea that only the “fittest,” i.e. those who can take good beat­ing, sur­vive. The day Ben­jamin died, Sep­tem­ber 7, has been com­mem­o­rat­ed in Aus­tralia as Nation­al Threat­ened Species Day, which rais­es aware­ness about the hun­dreds of plant and ani­mal species close to extinc­tion. The day also cel­e­brates the hun­dreds of species found nowhere else in the world, ani­mals that could come to seem to us in the near future as strange and exot­ic as the thy­lacine — a fas­ci­nat­ing exam­ple of con­ver­gent evo­lu­tion: a mar­su­pi­al canid that evolved com­plete­ly inde­pen­dent­ly of wolves, dogs, and oth­er canine species with which it had no con­tact what­so­ev­er until the British arrived.

Found only on the island of Tas­ma­nia by the time of Euro­pean set­tle­ment, thy­lacine pop­u­la­tions were destroyed by dis­ease, dogs, and, pri­mar­i­ly, human hunters. Before the final mem­ber of the species died, they were kept in zoos and cap­tured on silent film by nat­u­ral­ists like David Fleay, who shot the black-and-white footage just above of Ben­jamin at Beau­maris Zoo in Hobart, Tas­ma­nia. In the video at the top, we can see the same footage in vivid col­or — and full dig­i­tal restora­tion — thanks to Samuel François-Steininger and his Paris-based com­pa­ny Com­pos­ite Films.

Sent an HDR (High Dynam­ic Range) scan of the film by the Nation­al Film and Sound Archive of Aus­tralia (NFSA), François-Steininger had to make a lot of inter­pre­tive choic­es. Next to “orig­i­nal skins pre­served in muse­ums,” the NFSA notes, his team “had to rely on sketch­es and paint­ings because of the lack of orig­i­nal col­or pic­tures or footage that could be used for research.” While there are 9 short film clips of the ani­mals from the Lon­don and Hobart zoos, these are all, of course, in black and white. “Writ­ten descrip­tions of the thy­lacine’s coat gave them a gen­er­al idea of the tints and shades present in the fur, infor­ma­tion they sup­ple­ment­ed with sci­en­tif­ic draw­ings and recent 3D col­or ren­der­ings of the ani­mal.” The results are incred­i­bly nat­ur­al-look­ing and star­tling­ly imme­di­ate.

Are the thy­lacine, Bach­man’s war­bler, and oth­er extinct species vic­tims of the Anthro­pocene? Will our chil­dren’s chil­dren chil­dren watch films of polar bears and koalas and won­der how our plan­et could have con­tained such won­ders? Geo­log­i­cal epochs deal with “mile-thick pack­ages of rock stacked up over tens of mil­lions of years,” Peter Bran­nen writes at The Atlantic, and thus it over­states the case to call the last four cen­turies of cli­mate change and mass extinc­tion an “Anthro­pocene.” The word names “a thought exper­i­ment” rather than a span of deep time in Earth’s his­to­ry. But from the per­spec­tive of crit­i­cal­ly endan­gered species — maybe to include, even­tu­al­ly, humans them­selves — the trans­for­ma­tions of the present seem square­ly focused on our reck­less behav­ior and its effects on habi­tats we nev­er see.

We are far less impor­tant to geo­log­i­cal time than we think, Bran­nen argues, but it does, indeed, seem up to us at the moment whether there is a future on Earth filled with plant, ani­mal, and yes, human, life:

We haven’t earned an Anthro­pocene epoch yet. If some­day in the dis­tant future we have, it will be an astound­ing tes­ta­ment to a species that, after a col­icky, globe-threat­en­ing infan­cy, learned that it was not sep­a­rate from Earth his­to­ry, but a con­tigu­ous part of the sys­tems that have kept this mirac­u­lous mar­ble world hab­it­able for bil­lions of years.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Two Mil­lion Won­drous Nature Illus­tra­tions Put Online by The Bio­di­ver­si­ty Her­itage Library

Are You Ready for the Return of Lost Species?: Stew­art Brand on the Dawn of De-Extinc­tion

The Pra­do Muse­um Dig­i­tal­ly Alters Four Mas­ter­pieces to Strik­ing­ly Illus­trate the Impact of Cli­mate Change

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Facebook Whistleblower Offers an Unprecedented Look at How the Company “Chooses Profits Over Safety”

in Technology | October 5th, 2021

On Sun­day night, Frances Hau­gen, a for­mer Face­book data sci­en­tist, appeared on 60 Min­utes and revealed that she left the com­pa­ny with a trove of pri­vate Face­book research–research which shows, she con­tends, that the com­pa­ny know­ing­ly ampli­fies hate, mis­in­for­ma­tion and polit­i­cal unrest, all to keep peo­ple engaged and out­raged, and thus their adver­tis­ing mon­ey machine rolling. And that’s just the tip of the ice­berg.

Ini­tial­ly, she gave the com­pa­ny’s leaked doc­u­ments to the Wall Street Jour­nal, and they became the basis of the pod­cast series The Face­book Files. Accord­ing to the Jour­nal, “Time and again, the doc­u­ments show, Facebook’s researchers have iden­ti­fied the platform’s ill effects. Time and again, despite con­gres­sion­al hear­ings, its own pledges and numer­ous media exposés, the com­pa­ny didn’t fix them. The doc­u­ments offer per­haps the clear­est pic­ture thus far of how broad­ly Facebook’s prob­lems are known inside the com­pa­ny, up to the chief exec­u­tive him­self.”

Watch the 60 Min­utes inter­view above. Then stream the Face­book Files on WSJ’s site, Spo­ti­fy and/or Apple. The episodes all appear below:

Episode 1

Episode 2

Episode 3

Episode 4

Episode 5

Episode 6

Relat­ed Con­tent 

Sacha Baron Cohen Links the Decline of Democ­ra­cy to the Rise of Social Media, “the Great­est Pro­pa­gan­da Machine in His­to­ry”

The Prob­lem with Face­book: “It’s Keep­ing Things From You”

The Case for Delet­ing Your Social Media Accounts & Doing Valu­able “Deep Work” Instead, Accord­ing to Prof. Cal New­port

New Ani­ma­tion Explains Sher­ry Turkle’s The­o­ries on Why Social Media Makes Us Lone­ly

Lyn­da Bar­ry on How the Smart­phone Is Endan­ger­ing Three Ingre­di­ents of Cre­ativ­i­ty: Lone­li­ness, Uncer­tain­ty & Bore­dom

 

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The Medieval Ban Against the “Devil’s Tritone”: Debunking a Great Myth in Music Theory

in Music | October 4th, 2021

Music lives deep with­in us, in the mar­row of our evo­lu­tion­ary bones, tap­ping into “this very prim­i­tive sys­tem,” says British musi­col­o­gist John Deathridge, “which iden­ti­fies emo­tion on the basis of a vio­la­tion of expectan­cy.” In oth­er words, our brains are pre­dis­posed to hear cer­tain com­bi­na­tions of sounds as sooth­ing and oth­ers as dis­turb­ing. When we plot those sounds on a staff, we find one of the most dis­so­nant, yet intrigu­ing, com­bi­na­tions, what can be called an aug­ment­ed 4th or dimin­ished 5th but isn’t quite either one. But it’s much bet­ter known by its medieval nick­name, “the devil’s tri­tone” (or “devil’s inter­val”), a sequence of notes so sin­is­ter, they were once banned in the belief that they might con­jure Lucifer him­self…. Or so the sto­ry goes.

The truth is less sen­sa­tion­al. “To the cha­grin of many a musi­cian want­i­ng to tap into a badass rebel streak in music’s DNA,” James Ben­nett writes at WQXR, “there aren’t any records to sug­gest any rogue medieval com­posers took a hike to Perdi­tion after using this spooky, dev­il­ish inter­val.” In oth­er words, no one seems to have been tor­tured, impris­oned, or excom­mu­ni­cat­ed for a musi­cal arrange­ment, all inter­net asser­tions to the con­trary notwith­stand­ing. But the asso­ci­a­tion with the dev­il is his­tor­i­cal. In the 18th cen­tu­ry, the tri­tone acquired the name dia­bo­lus in musi­ca, or “the dev­il in music,” part of a mnemon­ic: “Mi con­tra fa est dia­bo­lus in musi­ca” or “mi against fa is the dev­il in music.”

If you’re already versed in music the­o­ry, you’ll find this tech­ni­cal expla­na­tion of the “devil’s inter­val” by musi­cian Jer­ry Tachoir help­ful. In the video above, bass play­er Adam Neely debunks the myth of the dev­il’s tri­tone as an actu­al curse. But his expla­na­tion is more than “one long, ‘Um, Actu­al­ly,’ ” he says. Instead, he tells us why the tri­tone is a musi­cal bless­ing, and was thought of as such a thou­sand years ago. His expla­na­tion also gets a lit­tle tech­ni­cal, but his visu­al and musi­cal demon­stra­tions make it fair­ly easy to fol­low, and if you don’t absorb the the­o­ry, you’ll pick up the true his­to­ry of the “dev­il’s tri­tone,” begin­ning with the Greek thinker Aris­tox­enus of Tar­en­tum, one of the first to write about the uncom­fort­able dis­so­nance of a note sit­ting between two oth­ers.

The tri­tone is what musi­col­o­gist Carl E. Gard­ner called a “depen­dent” chord, one char­ac­ter­is­tic of ten­sion. We may not reg­is­ter it con­scious­ly, but it primes our brains with anx­ious expec­ta­tion. “The rea­son it’s unset­tling is that it’s ambigu­ous, unre­solved,” says Ger­ald Moshell, Pro­fes­sor of Music at Trin­i­ty Col­lege in Hart­ford, Conn. “It wants to go some­where. It wants to set­tle here, or [there]. You don’t know where it’ll go, but it can’t stop where it is.” We hear this irres­o­lu­tion, this “dev­il” of musi­cal doubt in com­po­si­tions rang­ing from The Simp­sons theme to the cho­rus of Pearl Jam’s “Even­flow” to Camille Saint-Saëns’ “Danse macabre,” a piece of music that may not actu­al­ly con­jure evil, but sure sounds like it could if it want­ed to.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

How to Lis­ten to Music: A Free Course from Yale Uni­ver­si­ty

John Coltrane Draws a Pic­ture Illus­trat­ing the Math­e­mat­ics of Music

How Ornette Cole­man Freed Jazz with His The­o­ry of Har­molod­ics

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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Monet’s Water Lilies: How World War I Inspired Monet to Paint His Final Masterpieces & Create “the World’s First Art Installation”

in Art, History | October 4th, 2021

When one con­sid­ers which artists most pow­er­ful­ly evoke the hor­rors of trench war­fare, Claude Mon­et is hard­ly the first name to come to mind. And yet, once viewed that way, his final Water Lilies paint­ings — belong­ing to a series that, in repro­duc­tion, speaks to many of no more har­row­ing a set­ting than a doc­tor’s wait­ing room — can hard­ly be viewed in any oth­er. These eight large-scale can­vass­es con­sti­tute “a war memo­r­i­al to the mil­lions of lives trag­i­cal­ly lost in the First World War,” argues Great Art Explained cre­ator James Payne. Mon­et declined to include a hori­zon line in any of them, leav­ing view­ers in “a vast field of unfath­omable noth­ing­ness, of light, air, and water,” at once peace­ful and rem­i­nis­cent of “the bat­tle-rav­aged land­scape along the west­ern front.”

Those bat­tle­fields “had no begin­ning or end, and no hori­zons. Time and space was for­got­ten, as sol­diers were enveloped in a sea of mud, sur­round­ed by water­logged and sur­re­al land­scapes, which cov­ered their field of vision.” The Great War, as it was then known, still raged on when the sep­tu­a­ge­nar­i­an Mon­et began these works.  (“He could hear the sound of gun­fire from 50 kilo­me­ters away from his house in Giverny as he paint­ed,” notes Payne.)

By the time he fin­ished them, in the last year of his life, the fight­ing had been over for eight years. In a sense, these paint­ings may have kept him alive: “He was con­stant­ly ‘rework­ing’ them and seemed inca­pable of fin­ish­ing,” even though, by his own admis­sion, “he could no longer see the details or make out col­ors.”

When these Water Lilies were revealed to the pub­lic, mount­ed in their own spe­cial­ly designed gallery in Paris’ Musée de l’O­r­angerie (arranged by close per­son­al friend Georges Clemenceau), Mon­et was dead — which may, in part, explain the crit­ics’ will­ing­ness to deride them as the work of an artist who had lost his pow­ers. “Mon­et, reject­ed by crit­ics in the 19th cen­tu­ry for being too rad­i­cal, was now being crit­i­cized in the 20th cen­tu­ry for not being rad­i­cal enough.” It would take a lat­er gen­er­a­tion of artists — includ­ing Amer­i­can painters like Mark Rothko and Jack­son Pol­lock  — to see his last works as “a log­i­cal jump­ing-off point for abstrac­tion,” and the space that hous­es them as “the Sis­tine Chapel of impres­sion­ism.” World War I has passed out of liv­ing mem­o­ry, but “the world’s first art instal­la­tion” it inspired Mon­et to cre­ate has lost none of its pow­er.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How to Paint Water Lilies Like Mon­et in 14 Min­utes

Rare 1915 Film Shows Claude Mon­et at Work in His Famous Gar­den at Giverny

1923 Pho­to of Claude Mon­et Col­orized: See the Painter in the Same Col­or as His Paint­ings

1,540 Mon­et Paint­ings in a Two Hour Video

A Gallery of 1,800 Gigapix­el Images of Clas­sic Paint­ings: See Vermeer’s Girl with the Pearl Ear­ring, Van Gogh’s Star­ry Night & Oth­er Mas­ter­pieces in Close Detail

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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