Can great art be explained? Isn’t it a lit­tle like explain­ing a joke? Yet this can be worth­while when the joke is in a for­eign lan­guage or an unfa­mil­iar idiom, a long-for­got­ten dialect or an alien idi­olect. Con­sid­er, for exam­ple, the most com­mon response to Mark Rothko’s mono­chro­mat­ic rec­tan­gles: “I don’t get it.”

Will per­plexed view­ers bet­ter under­stand Rothko’s Sea­gram murals when they learn that “he was found in a pool of blood six by eight feet wide, rough­ly the size of one of his paint­ings,” as James Payne writes, hours after he sent the nine can­vass­es to the Tate Mod­ern gallery in Lon­don in 1970? “His sui­cide would change every­thing and shape the way we respond to his work,” adding a dark­er edge to com­ments of his like “I’m inter­est­ed only in express­ing basic human emo­tions, tragedy, ecsta­sy, doom and so on.”

Last sum­mer, Payne launched his series Great Art Explained in Fif­teen Min­utes, “a bril­liant new addi­tion to YouTube art his­to­ry chan­nels,” Forbes enthused — “enter­tain­ing and infor­ma­tive short films [that] present a fresh look at famil­iar art­works.” There’s much more to Rothko than his trag­ic death at 66. We learn of his love for Mozart, a com­pos­er who was “always smil­ing through his tears,” the painter said.

An artist who seems to embody the oppo­site of Rothko’s trou­bled pas­sion, Andy Warhol gets an explain­er, above, in which Payne takes on the artist’s Mar­i­lyn Dip­tych. He opens with 30 sec­onds of audio from an inter­view with Warhol, who gives char­ac­ter­is­ti­cal­ly dis­in­ter­est­ed yes or no respons­es: “Andy, do you think that Pop Art has reached the point where it’s becom­ing rep­e­ti­tious now?” “Uh, yes.”

Pop Art’s rep­e­ti­tions were the point. Warhol ele­vat­ed the unre­mark­able mass prod­uct to the lev­el of high art, becom­ing the biggest-sell­ing artist in the world. Payne draws a par­al­lel between Mar­i­lyn Monroe’s trans­for­ma­tion from “abused fos­ter child from the rur­al mid­west” to Hol­ly­wood roy­al­ty, and Warhol’s move from a shy, sick­ly child of immi­grants to an inter­na­tion­al art star.

Even if Payne is explain­ing things you already knew about famous art­works like Monet’s Water Lilies, you’ll still enjoy his pre­sen­ta­tion, with its clever edit­ing and com­pelling nar­ra­tion. “I want to present art in a jar­gon free, enter­tain­ing, clear and con­cise way,” he writes. Each video cov­ers one famous art­work, not all of them mod­ern. (We recent­ly fea­tured Payne’s take on Hierony­mus Bosch’s Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights.)

Payne’s work as an art con­sul­tant, guide, “and art and film writer,” Forbes writes, “make him the ide­al pre­sen­ter of this excel­lent new art his­to­ry series.” Crav­ing some con­text on your lunch break? Head over the Great Art Explained in Fif­teen Min­utes and catch a few excel­lent mini-art his­to­ry lec­tures, each one 15 min­utes or less, for free.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

60-Sec­ond Intro­duc­tions to 12 Ground­break­ing Artists: Matisse, Dalí, Duchamp, Hop­per, Pol­lock, Rothko & More

An Intro­duc­tion to 100 Impor­tant Paint­ings with Videos Cre­at­ed by Smarthis­to­ry

Free Course: An Intro­duc­tion to the Art of the Ital­ian Renais­sance

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

Today we can appre­ci­ate Japan­ese wood­block prints from siz­able online archives when­ev­er we like, and even down­load them for our­selves. Before the inter­net, how many chances would we have had even to encounter such works of art in the course of life? Very few of us, cer­tain­ly, would ever have beheld a Japan­ese print­mak­er at work, but here in the age of stream­ing video, we all can. In the Smith­son­ian video above, print­mak­er Kei­ji Shi­no­hara demon­strates a suite of tra­di­tion­al tech­niques (and more spe­cial­ized ones in a fol­low-up below) for cre­at­ing ukiyo‑e, the “pic­tures of the float­ing world” whose style orig­i­nal­ly devel­oped to cap­ture Japan­ese life and land­scapes of the 17th, 18th, and 19th cen­turies.

“So uh,” asks one com­menter below this video of Shi­no­hara at work, “any­one else come from unin­ten­tion­al ASMR?” That abbre­vi­a­tion, which stands for “autonomous sen­so­ry merid­i­an response,” labels a genre of Youtube video that explod­ed in pop­u­lar­i­ty in recent years.

Attempts have been made to define the under­ly­ing phe­nom­e­non sci­en­tif­i­cal­ly, but suf­fice it to say that ASMR involves a set of dis­tinc­tive­ly plea­sur­able sounds that hap­pens to coin­cide with those made by the tools of print­mak­ers and oth­er high­ly ana­log crafts­men. When ASMR enthu­si­asts dis­cov­ered Youtube art con­ser­va­tor Julian Baum­gart­ner, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, he cre­at­ed spe­cial son­i­cal­ly enhanced ver­sions of his videos just for them.

In the case of Shi­no­hara, the Best Unin­ten­tion­al ASMR chan­nel has done it for him. Its ver­sion of his videos great­ly empha­size the sounds of brush­es rubbed against paper, inks spread onto wood, and droplets of water falling into the rins­ing bowl. Of course, the orig­i­nal king of unin­ten­tion­al ASMR in art is uni­ver­sal­ly acknowl­edged to be Bob Ross, host of The Joy of Paint­ing, whose soft-spo­ken indus­tri­ous­ness seems now to inhab­it the per­son of David Bull, an Eng­lish-Cana­di­an ukiyo‑e print­mak­er liv­ing in Tokyo. In a sense, Bull is the West­ern coun­ter­part to the Osa­ka-born Shi­no­hara, who after a decade’s appren­tice­ship in Kyoto crossed the Pacif­ic Ocean in the oth­er direc­tion to make his home in the Unit­ed States. But how­ev­er tra­di­tion­al their art, they both belong, now to the float­ing world of the inter­net. You can lis­ten to non-ASMR ver­sions of the videos above here and here.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Enter a Dig­i­tal Archive of 213,000+ Beau­ti­ful Japan­ese Wood­block Prints

Down­load 2,500 Beau­ti­ful Wood­block Prints and Draw­ings by Japan­ese Mas­ters (1600–1915)

Watch the Mak­ing of Japan­ese Wood­block Prints, from Start to Fin­ish, by a Long­time Tokyo Print­mak­er

Watch a Japan­ese Crafts­man Lov­ing­ly Bring a Tat­tered Old Book Back to Near Mint Con­di­tion

Watch an Art Con­ser­va­tor Bring Clas­sic Paint­ings Back to Life in Intrigu­ing­ly Nar­rat­ed Videos

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.