Download 1,600+ Publications from the Metropolitan Museum of Art: Books, Guides, Magazines & More

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Many of us in these past few gen­er­a­tions first heard of the Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art while read­ing E. L. Konigs­burg’s nov­el From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweil­er. More than a few of us also fan­ta­sized about run­ning away to live in that vast cul­tur­al insti­tu­tion like the book’s young…

Watch The Cure Perform a Three-Hour Concert in London, Celebrating the Release of Their New Album

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Last Fri­day, The Cure cel­e­brat­ed the release of their new album, Songs of a Lost World, with a three-hour set at the Troxy in Lon­don. The band kicked off the show by per­form­ing all eight tracks from the album, before then play­ing anoth­er 23 songs, most­ly hits from their large cat­a­log of music. Orig­i­nal­ly…

Discover Paul Éluard and Max Ernst’s Still-Bizarre Proto-Surrealist Book Les Malheurs des immortels (1922)

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When the names of French poet Paul Élu­ard and Ger­man artist Max Ernst arise, one sub­ject always fol­lows: that of their years-long ménage à trois — or rather, “mar­riage à trois,” as a New York Times arti­cle by Annette Grant once put it. It start­ed in 1921, Grant writes, when the Sur­re­al­ist…

The Metropolitan Museum of Art Puts 490,000 High-Res Images Online & Makes Them Free to Use

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Update: The Met­ro­pol­i­tan Muse­um of Art has put online 492,000 high-res­o­lu­tion images of artis­tic works. Even bet­ter, the muse­um has placed the vast major­i­ty of these images into the pub­lic domain, mean­ing they can be down­loaded direct­ly from the museum’s web­site for non-com­mer­cial use. When you browse the Met col­lec­tion and find…

Umberto Eco’s List of the 14 Common Features of Fascism

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Cre­ative Com­mons image by Rob Bogaerts, via the Nation­al Archives in Hol­land

One of the key ques­tions fac­ing both jour­nal­ists and loy­al oppo­si­tions these days is how do we stay hon­est as euphemisms and triv­i­al­iza­tions take over the dis­course? Can we use words like “fas­cism,” for exam­ple, with fideli­ty to the mean­ing of that word in…