Both authors had a connection to Bath, a popular tourist destination since 43 CE, as evidenced by the ruins of the Roman thermal spa that give the city its name and UNESCO World Heritage Site status.
Bath has long mined its connection to Austen, but in embracing Shelley, it stands to diversify the sort of literary pilgrims it appeals to.
Visitors to the Jane Austen Centre can try on bonnets, exchange witty repartee with one of her characters, nibble scones with Dorset clotted cream in the tea room, and participate in an annual costume promenade.
Meanwhile, over at the House of Frankenstein, expect ominous, unsettling soundscapes, shocking special effects, ghoulish interpreters in blood-spattered aprons, “bespoke scents,” a “dank, foreboding basement experience” and an 8‑foot automaton of you-know-who.
(No, not Mary Shelley!)
Coming soon — Victor Frankenstein’s “miserable attic quarters” repackaged as an escape room “strewn with insane equations, strange artefacts, and miscellaneous body parts.”
Co-founder Chris Harris explains the creators’ immersive philosophy:
We are trying to play on people’s fears, but we’re not taking ourselves massively seriously. With Mary Shelley’s House of Frankenstein, we are creating an experience that, hopefully, people will really enjoy in a visceral way. We want them to come out feeling that the experience was unnerving, but also feeling happy. That’s the ultimate aim.
The BBC reports that the attraction also promises to explore Shelley’s “tragic personal life, literary career and the novel’s continuing relevance today in regards to popular culture, politics, and science.”
May not be suitable for children (or timorous Austen fans) as it contains “ominous and foreboding audio and visual effects, darkened environments and some scenes and depictions of a disturbing nature.”
Proudfoot casts a wide net in the telling, gathering stories of an unknown woman N.B.A. draftee, a would-be first Black astronaut who never got to fly, a man who could have been the “next Colonel Sanders,” and a former member of the Black Eyed Peas who quit before the band hit it big. Not all stories of loss in “Almost Famous” are equally tragic. Jocelyn Bell Burnell’s story, which she herself tells above, contains more than enough struggle, triumph, and crushing disappointment for a compelling tale.
An astronomer, Bell Burnell was instrumental in the discovery of pulsars — a discovery that changed the field forever. While her Ph.D. advisor Antony Hewish would be awarded the Nobel Prize for the discovery in 1974, Bell Burnell’s involvement was virtually ignored, or treated as a novelty. “When the press found out I was a woman,” she said in 2015, “we were bombarded with inquiries. My male supervisor was asked the astrophysical questions while I was the human interest. Photographers asked me to unbutton my blouse lower, whilst journalists wanted to know my vital statistics and whether I was taller than Princess Margaret.”
In the film, Burnell describes a lifelong struggle against a male-dominated establishment that marginalized her. She also tells a story of supportive Quaker parents who nurtured her will to follow her intellectual passions despite the obstacles. Growing up in Ireland, she says, “I knew I wanted to be an astronomer. But at that stage, there weren’t any women role models that I knew of.” She comments, with understandable anger, how many people congratulated her on her marriage and said “nothing about making a major astrophysical discovery.”
Many of us have stories to tell about being denied achievements or opportunities through circumstances not of our own making. We often hold those stories close, feeling a sense of failure and frustration, measuring ourselves against those who “made it” and believing we have come up short. We are not alone. There are many who made the effort, and a few who got there first but didn’t get the prize for one unjust reason or another. The lack of official recognition doesn’t invalidate their stories, or ours. Hearing those stories can inspire us to keep doing what we love and to keep pushing through the opposition. See more short “Almost Famous” documentaries in The New York Times series here.
It is called the Belle Époque, a phrase which brings to mind stylish graphic advertising posters, the baroque Art Nouveau style of Alphonse Mucha, the Beaux Arts architectural monuments of Paris, Chicago, and Newport. These images seem static, backward-looking. Despite their popularity on the poster market, they cannot capture (how could they?) the full expression of what cultural historians also call the fin de siècle. The term is French for “end of the century,” but it describes a period of radical change in global culture in ways that will be with us for another hundred years or more..
In other words, there was a lot happening in the 1890s. As one description of the period puts it, “change became the nature of things, and people believed that further improvement was not only possible but inevitable.” So much of this change manifested in the arts. In France, for example, Impressionism began receiving its due in art world circles, leading to two Impressionist works on display at the 1900 World’s Fair, which also saw the opening of the Eiffel Tower. In 1895, Paul Verlaine published Arthur Rimbaud’s complete works, posthumously, and Symbolist poetry broke Victorian literary traditions irrevocably.
In English, popular genre fiction exploded, as the Gothic novel reached its apotheosis in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and the rise of detective fiction began with Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories. These works paralleled a rising interest in the occult and the early stirrings of New Age spirituality. Meanwhile, Russian Modernism took shape in the radical work of Vladimir Mayakovsky; the Argentine Tango began to express its “worldview of conflicting national dislocations”; Meiji era Japan began rapidly industrializing and importing “jazz, cinema… automobiles, airplanes, and avant-gardes, from futurism to surrealism,” writes Christopher Bush, even as the West devoured all things Japanese; African art began to transform the work of painters like Picasso.…
The revolutions of fin de siècle Vienna were so world-changing as to warrant a major study of the period titled Fin-De-SiècleVienna. Even in the still quite-provincial U.S., where robber barons built Beaux Arts palaces, modernist revolutions gestated in the Arts & Crafts movement. The world was changing too quickly for some, not quickly enough for others. For millions more, life went on more or less as it had a half-century earlier. It would be decades before many people around the world experienced either the material improvements or the radical cultural dislocations of the era.
You can see the faces, smiling, scowling, going about their business, of a few thousand city-dwellers around the world from the period in a montage of film footage above. Most of the passersby captured on film could not have known they lived in a time of unprecedented change — the all-important fin de siècle of cultural history. How could they? But they did live in a time of unprecedented anxiety about change, a time in which many keenly felt “the discrepancy between material advance and spiritual dejection,” notes Harvard University Press. “For most people the period was far from elegant.”
Only time will tell what critical historians of the future make of our era. But even as we experience incredible levels of anxiety about change, perhaps few of us are truly aware of just how radical the changes of our time will turn out to be a century or so from now.
Mahatma Gandhi and Charlie Chaplin were both forged in the 19th century, and both went on to become icons of the 20th. History has remembered one as a tireless liberator and the other as a tireless entertainer; decades after their deaths, both continue to command the respect of many in the 21st century. It’s understandable then, that a meeting between Gandhi and Chaplin at the peak of their fame would cause something of a fuss. “East-Enders, in the thousands, turn out to greet the two famous little men,” announces the title card of the British Pathénewsreel clip above. Cries of “Good old Charlie!” and “Good old Gandhi!” were heard.
The occasion for this encounter was the Round Table Conferences, a series of meetings between the British government and political representatives of India held with an eye toward constitutional reform. “The buzz was that Mahatma Gandhi would be coming to Britain for the first time since he joined the Freedom movement,” writes blogger Vijayamadhav. The buzz proved correct, but more historic than the results of that particular conference session was what transpired thereafter. “Gandhi was preparing for his departure when a telegram reached him. A certain Charles Chaplin, who was in Britain at that time, had requested permission to be granted an audience with him.”
Gandhi, said to have seen only two films in his life (one of them in Hindi), “did not know who this gentleman was,” and so “replied that it would be hard for him to find time and asked his aides to send a reply declining the request.” But it seems that Gandhi’s circle contained Chaplin fans, or at least advisors aware of the political value of a photo opportunity with the most beloved Englishman alive, who prevailed upon him to take the meeting. And so, on September 22, 1931, “hundreds of people crowded around the house” — the characteristically humble lodgings off East India Dock Road — “to catch a glimpse of the famous visitors.” Some “even clambered over garden fences to look through the windows.”
Chaplin opened with a question to Gandhi about his “abhorrence of machinery.” Gandhi’s reply, as recorded in The Print: “Machinery in the past has made us dependent on England, and the only way we can rid ourselves of that dependency is to boycott all goods made by machinery,” especially those machines he saw as robbing Indians of their livelihoods. Chaplin later wrote of having received in this conversation “a lucid object lesson in tactical maneuvering in India’s fight for freedom, inspired, paradoxically, by a realistic, virile-minded visionary with a will of iron to carry it out.” He might also have got the idea for 1935’s Modern Times, a comedic critique of industrialized modernity that now ranks among Chaplin’s most acclaimed works. The abstemious Gandhi never saw it, of course, and whether it would have made him laugh is an open question. But apart, perhaps, from its glorification of drug use, he could hardly have disagreed with it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Before it set itself on fire, HBO’s Game of Thrones resonated deeply with contemporary morality, becoming the most meme-worthy of shows, for good or ill, online. Few scenes in the show’s run — perhaps not even the Red Wedding or the nauseating finale — elicited as much gut-level reaction as Cersei Lannister’s naked walk of shame in the Season 5 finale, a scene all the more resonant as it happened to be based on real events.
In 1483, one of King Edward IV’s many mistresses, Jane Shore, was marched through London’s streets by his brother Richard III, “while crowds of people watched, yelling and shaming her. She wasn’t totally naked,” notes Mental Floss, “but by the standards of the day, she might as well have been,” wearing nothing but a kirtle, a “thin shift of linen meant to be worn only as an undergarment.”
What are the standards of our day? And what is the punishment for violating them? Sarah Brand seemed to be asking these questions when she posted “Red Dress,” a music video showcasing her less than stellar singing talents inside Oxford’s North Gate Church. In less than a month, the video has garnered well over half a million views, “impressive for a musician with hardly any social media footprint or fan base,” Kate Fowler writes at Newsweek.
“It takes only a few seconds,” Fowler generously remarks, “to realize that Brand may not have the voice of an angel.” Or, as one clever commenter put it, “She is actually hitting all the notes… only of other songs. And at random.” Is she ludicrously un-self-aware, an heiress with delusions of grandeur, a sad casualty of celebrity culture, forcing herself into a role that doesn’t fit? Or does she know exactly what she’s doing…
The judgments of medieval mobs have nothing on the internet, Brand suggests. “Red Dress” presents what she calls “a cinematic, holistic portrayal of judgment,” one that includes internet shaming in its calculations. Given the amount of online rancor and ridicule her video provoked, it “did what it set out to do,” she tells the BBC. And given that Brand is currently completing a master’s degree in sociology at Oxford University, many wonder if the project is a sociological experiment for credit. She isn’t saying.
Jane Shore’s walk ended with years locked in prison. Brand offered herself up for the scorn and hatred of the mobs. No one is pointing a pike at her back. She paid for the privilege of having people laugh at her, and she’s especially enjoying “some very, very witty comments” (like those above). She’s also very much aware that she is “no professional singer.”
The style in which I sing the song was important because it reflected the story. The vocals don’t seem to quite fit, they seem out of place and they make people uncomfortable… and the video is this outsider doing things differently and causing discomfort and eliciting all this judgement.
All of this is voluntary performance art, in a sense, though Brand has shown previous aspirations on social media to become a singer, and perhaps faced similar ridicule involuntarily. “Part of what this project deals with,” she says, is judgment “overall as a central theme.” She credits herself as the director, producer, choreographer, and editor and made every creative decision, to the bemusement of the actors, crew, and studio musicians. Yet choosing to endure the gauntlet does not make the gauntlet less real, she suggests.
The shame rained down on Shore was part misogyny, part pent-up rage over injustice directed at a hated better. When anyone can pretend (or pretend to pretend) to be a celebrity with a few hundred bucks for cinematography and audio production, the boundaries between our “betters” and ourselves get fuzzy. When young women are expected to become brands, to live up to celebrity levels of online polish for social recognition, self-expression, or employment, the lines between choice and compulsion blur. With whom do we identify in scenes of public shaming?
Brand is coy in her summation. “Judgmental behavior does hurt the world,” she says, “and that is what I’m trying to bring to light with this project.” Judge for yourself in the video above and the … interesting… lyrics to “Red Dress” below.
Came to church to praise all love Sitting, coming for someone else It didn’t stew well for me But I said it was a lover’s deed
Didn’t trust my own feels Let someone else behind my wheel Said it was love driving me But the only one who should steer is me
Cuz what they saw
They see me in a red dress Hopping on the devil fest Thinking of lust As they judge in disgust What are you doing here?
They see me in a red dress Hopping on the devil fest Thinking of lust As I judge in disgust What am I doing here?
Lettin’ someone else steer
I saw a love, precious and fine Thought I should do anything for time Time to change the hearts and minds Of people not like me in break or stride
Shouldn’t be me, trying to change Thought I’d be something if I remained It just ain’t me singing of sins Watching exclusion getting its wins
Cuz what they saw
They see me in a red dress Hopping on the devil fest Thinking of lust As they judge in disgust What are you doing here?
They see me in a red dress Hopping on the devil fest Thinking of lust As I judge in disgust What am I doing here?
Lettin’ someone else steer
Came to church To praise love Coming for Someone else
But all the eyes Judging in disguise They don’t see me Just the lies
They see me in a red dress No different from the rest Starting to trust As they join in a rush What are we doing here?
They see me in a red dress No different from the rest Starting to trust As I lose my disgust What am I doing here?
After 101 episodes and a bit over two years, OpenCulture’s first podcast offering is moving into a new phase. Here your hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian hirt reflect on what we’ve learned and set a course for the future.
Our overarching concern with this podcast has been how and why we consume. We may not have learned a great deal about this issue in a general sense, but we’ve certainly been shown the appeal of many forms that we might not have considered before, and we’ve theorized about why people like drama or horror, or what makes for compelling sci-fi or gaming, etc.
We’ve stretched over these episodes into some unexpected areas for a pop culture podcast, like the philosophy of photography and why people obsess over conspiracy theories. The current discussion takes this on through a re-consideration of what pop culture is. Of course, the title of the podcast has “pretty much” in it, which allows a certain amount of leeway, but the source of that ambiguity is not just that I want the freedom to bring in any topic that interests me, but because of two points covered in this episode:
Functionally, individuals entertain themselves with a variety of things; they are our cultural food, and can include many obsessions that have nothing to do with manufactured media at all. If such fascinations are also used by multiple people to bond over, then that’s culture, and insofar as bonding over that object is common, then it’s pop culture.
There’s a continuum between creation and spectating. Creators are first of all consumers and create largely through imitating and tweaking past works. Though this podcast focuses largely on the consumer side of the equation, some of audience appreciation is a matter of respect for the craft, which increases through understanding and (at least vicarious) participation in the activity. Though it’s not always the case that we get enjoyment through sympathy with the artistic choices a creator makes (sometimes we just marvel uncomprehendingly), this is a significant dynamic in fandom. Viewers who liked Game of Thrones had many ideas about how it should have ended even if they had no opportunity or even talent to really provide an alternative.
It all comes down to the dimensions of mimesis, which means reflection. We enjoy storytelling largely because it reflects us, either how we are, how we might like to be, or how we fear we could be. We get some of our ideas about who we are from these media reflections. Marketers guess at who they think we are (again, in part based on media) and create products to market at us. Artists create works reflected from other works which attempt to reflect us (or distort us based on knowledge of a reflection). Who we are as a culture may be very much storytelling all the way down. So political myths are an essential part of this, as are sexual mores, ideas about what leisure activities (and jobs, for that matter) are respectable, manners taken more generally, how we deal with our legacies of racism and sexism, what we find funny and how that changes over time, and much much more.
Thanks, all, for listening. We’ll be back in a few weeks.
In the late 1960s, a counterculture-minded media professional could surely have imagined more appealing places to work than the Los Angeles Times. Widely derided as the official organ of the Southern California Babbitt, the paper also put out a bland Sunday supplement called West magazine. But West had the potential to evolve into something more vital — or so seemed to think its editor, Jim Bellows. The creator of “the original New York magazine in the early 1960s,” writes Design Observer’s Steven Heller, Bellows convinced a young adman named Mike Salisbury, “who worked for Carson Roberts Advertising in L.A. (where Ed Ruscha and Terry Gilliam worked), to accept the job as art director.”
Salisbury injected West “with such an abundance of pop culture visual richness that it was more like a miniature museum than weekly gazette.” Its weekly issues “covered a wide range of themes — mostly reflecting Salisbury’s insatiable curiosities — from a feature on basketball that illustrated the tremendous size of center forwards by showing a life-size photograph of Wilt Chamberlin’s Converse sneaker, to a pictorial history of movie star pinups with a bevy of gorgeous silhouettes fanning on the page, to an array of souped-up VW Beetles in all shapes and sizes.”
On any given Sunday, subscribers might find themselves treated to “the history of Mickey Mouse, Coca-Cola art (the first time it was published as ‘art’), the visual history of Levis, Hollywood garden apartments, Raymond Chandler locations, and Kustom Kars.”
“I was the writer on the Coca-Cola ‘art’ piece as well as the first ‘programmatic’ architecture article to see print,” says a commenter under the Design Observer retrospective named Larry Dietz. He also claims to have written the feature on Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles; much later, he adds, Chinatown screenwriter “Robert Towne said that he was inspired to learn about L.A. history from that piece, but that the writing was crappy.” But then, the main impact of Salisbury’s West was never meant to be textual. Heller quotes Salisbury as saying that “design was not my sole objective: cinema-graphic information is a better definition.” Of all the covers he designed, he remembers the one just above, promoting an exposé on heroin, as having been the most controversial: “Don’t give me too much reality over Sunday breakfast,” he heard readers grumbling.
Other memorable West covers include the magazine’s tribute to the just-canceled Ed Sullivan show in 1971, as well as contributions by artists and designers like Victor Moscoso, Gahan Wilson, John Van Hamersveld, and Milton Glaser, all figures who did a great deal to craft the American zeitgeist of the 1960s and 70s. The magazine as a whole consolidated the Southern Californian pop-cultural aesthetic of its period, as distinct from what Salisbury calls the “quasi-Victorian” look and feel of San Francisco to the north and the “Rococo or Baroque” New York to the east. Los Angeles, to his mind, was “streamline,” emblematized by the culture and industry of motorcycle customization and its “belief in Futurism.”
West was a product of the Los Angeles Times under Otis Chandler, publisher from 1960 to 1980, who dedicated his career to expanding the scope and ambition of the newspaper his great-grandfather had once run. His labors paid off in retrospect, especially from readers as astute as Joan Didion, who praised Chandler’s Times to the skies. But by 1972, West seemed to have become too much of an extravagance even for him. After the magazine’s cancellation, Salisbury moved on to Rolling Stone, then in the process of converting from a newspaper to a magazine format. No small part of that magazine’s pop-cultural power in the 70s must have owed to his art direction.
Later in the decade, both Salisbury and Glaser would bring their talents to the just-launched New West magazine. It had no direct connection with West or the Los Angeles Times, but was conceived as the sister publication of New York Magazine, which itself had been re-invented by Glaser and publisher Clay Felker in the mid-1960s. Its debut cover, just above, featured Glaser’s artwork; three years later, in 1979, Salisbury designed a cover on California’s water crisis that the American Institute of Graphic Arts’ Steven Brower calls “prescient.” At that same time, he notes, Salisbury “worked with Francis Ford Coppola on the set design for Apocalypse Now; he designed Michael Jackson’s breakthrough album, Off theWall,” and he even collaborated with George Harrison on his eponymous album.” But when “veteran magazine art directors” get together and “reminisce about the glory years,” writes Heller, it’s West they inevitably talk about.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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.
Actor and musician Steven Van Zandt — known to Springsteen fans as E Street Band guitarist Little Steven — played the steady voice of reason Silvio Dante on The Sopranos. Without his guiding hand and sense of style, Tony would not have made it as far as he did. How much of Steven Van Zandt was in Silvio? Maybe a lot. As Van Zandt told Vice in a 2019 interview, he invented the character and gave it to David Chase, who turned his vision of “big bands, chorus girls, Jewish Catskills comics” into the Bada Bing, a “strip club for the family.”
It’s not hard to imagine Silvio in his shiny suits getting onstage with the Boss, but he would never have played Van Zandt’s role as an anti-racist activist. After leaving the E Street Band in 1984, Van Zandt started organizing musicians against apartheid for what would become an unprecedented action against Sun City, “a ritzy, whites only resort in South Africa,” Josh Haskell writes at ABC News, “that Van Zandt and his group Artists United Against Apartheid decided to boycott.”
Van Zandt and legendary hip hop producer Arthur Baker brought together what rock critic Dave Marsh calls “the most diverse line up of popular musicians ever assembled for a single session” to record “Sun City,” a song that “raised awareness about apartheid,” says Haskell, “during a time in the 1980s when many Americans weren’t aware of what was happening.” It wasn’t difficult to bury the news pre-internet. Since the South African government received tacit support from U.S. corporations and the Reagan administration, there was hardly a rush to characterize the country too negatively in the media.
Van Zandt himself remembered being “shocked to find really slavery going on and this very brilliant but evil strategy called apartheid,” he said in 2013. “At the time, it was quite courageous for the artists to be on this record. We crossed a line from social concerns to political concerns.” The list of famous artists involved in the recording sessions and video is too long to reproduce, but it notably included hip-hop and rock royalty like Bruce Springsteen, DJ Kool Herc, Bob Dylan, Pat Benatar, Ringo Starr, Lou Reed, Run D.M.C., Peter Gabriel, Kurtis Blow, Bono, Keith Richards, Bonnie Raitt, Joey Ramone, Gil Scott-Heron, and Bob Geldof.
As with other occasional supergroups assembled at the time (by Geldof) to raise funds and/or awareness for global causes, there’s a too-many-cooks feel to the results, but the music is secondary to the message. Even so, “Sun City” turned out to be a pioneering crossover track: “too black for white radio and too white for black radio,” says Van Zandt. Instead, it hit its stride on television in the early days of MTV and BET: “They really embraced it and played it a lot. Congressmen and senators’ children were coming up to them and telling them about apartheid and what they saw happening in South Africa. That put us over the edge.”
When pop, punk, rock, and hip-hop artists linked arms, it “re-energized the whole anti-apartheid movement, says Van Zandt, which had kind of hit a wall at that point and was not getting much traction.” Unlike other supergroup protest songs, “Sun City” also gave its listeners an incisive political education, summing up the situation in the lyrics. You can see a 1985 documentary on the making of the song just above. “The refrain of ‘I ain’t gonna play Sun City’ is a simple one,” notes the Zinn Education Project, “but the issues raised in the song and film are not.” See the lyrics (along with the artists who sang the lines) here, and learn more about the history of South African apartheid at the Zinn Ed Project.
The question is why more civilians don’t head for the men’s room armed with black paint pens (or alternatively, die-cut stickers) to enhance every urinal they encounter with the signature of the non-existent “R. Mutt.”
The art world bias that was being tested in 1917, when the signed urinal was unsuccessfully submitted to an unjuried exhibition at the Society of Independent Artists, has not vanished entirely, but as curator Sarah Urist Green explains in the above episode of The Art Assignment, the past hundred years has witnessed a lot of conceptual art afforded space in even the most staid institutions.
Fountain was a premeditated piece, but sometimes, these artworks, or pranks, if you prefer — Green favors letting each viewer reach their own conclusions — are more spontaneous in nature.
She references the case of two teenaged boys who, underwhelmed by a Mike Kelley stuffed animal installation at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, positioned a pair of eyeglasses in such a way that other visitors assumed they, too, were part of an exhibit.
One of the boys told The New York Times that “when art is more abstract, it is more difficult to interpret,” causing him to lose interest.
“We had a good laugh about it,” the other added.
And that, for us, gets to the heart of Fountain’s enduring power.
Plenty of art world stunts, whether their intention was to shock, critique, or screw with the gatekeepers have been lost to the ages.
Fountain, at heart, is a particularly memorable kind of funny…
Like a white snail the toilet slides into the living room, demanding to be loved. It is impossible, and we tender our sincerest regrets.In the book of the heart there is no mention made of plumbing.
And though we have spent our intimacy many times with you, you belong to a rather unfortunate reference, which we would rather not embrace…
The toilet slides out of the living room like a white snail, flushing with grief…
More recent art world controversies — Chris Ofili’s “The Holy Virgin Mary” and Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ — arose from the juxtaposition of serious religious subject matter with bodily fluids.
By contrast, Fountain took the piss out of a secular high church — the established art world.
And it did so with a factory-fresh urinal, no more gross than a porcelain dinner plate.
No wonder people couldn’t stop talking about it!
That performance, titled “Two artists piss on Duchamp’s Urinal” was “intended to make people re-evaluate what constituted art itself and how an act could be art.”
Their action might have made a more elegant — and funnier — statement had the Fountain replica not been displayed inside a vitrine.
Still, drawing attention to their inability to hit the target might, as Green suggests, highlight how museum culture “fetishizes and protects the objects” it, or history, deems worthy.
First things first: the plural of octopus is not “octopi,” it’s octopuses.
Now, drop everything and watch the video above. It’s an extremely rare sighting of a glass octopus, “a nearly transparent species, whose only visible features are its optic nerve, eyeballs and digestive tract” notes the Schmidt Ocean Institute. “Before this expedition, there has been limited live footage of the glass octopus, forcing scientists to learn about the animal by studying specimens found in the gut contents of predators.”
Limited sightings did not stop the poet Marianne Moore from seeing something like this wondrous creature in her mind’s eye:
it lies “in grandeur and in mass” beneath a sea of shifting snow-dunes; dots of cyclamen-red and maroon on its clearly defined pseudo-podia made of glass that will bend‑a much needed invention- comprising twenty-eight ice-fields from fifty to five hundred feet thick, of unimagined delicacy.
Glass octopuses have green dots and do not live under “snow-dunes” but in the warm Pacific waters beneath the Phoenix Islands Protected Area (PIPA) near Samoa, and elsewhere Schmidt Ocean Institute scientists captured rare footage and “identified new marine organisms,” writes Colossal, while recording “the sought-after whale shark swimming through the Pacific Ocean.”
We must admit, Moore got the sense of awe just right….
Marine scientists from around the world embarked on the 34-day expedition on the ship Falkor. Using “high-resolution mapping tools,” Ocean Conservancy writes, they surveyed “more than 11,500 square miles of sea floor” and observed “not one but two glass octopuses,” with a remote operated vehicle (ROV) called SuBastian.
See several views of the glass octopuses — the stars of the show — and dozens more rare and beautiful creatures (such as perennial internet favorite the Dumbo octopus, below, from a 2020 expedition) at the Schmidt Ocean Institute’s Instagram. “We’re at the beginning of the UN Decade of Ocean Science for Sustainable Development,” remarked chief scientist of the Falkor expedition Dr. Randi Rotjan of Boston University. “[N]ow is the time to think about conservation broadly across all oceanscapes, and the maps, footage, and data we have collected will hopefully help to inform policy and management in decision making around new high seas protected areas.” Learn more at the Schmidt Ocean Institute here.
Westerners today entertain nothing but grim, dystopian visions of the future. This in stark contrast to the postwar decades when, as everyone knows, all was optimism. “In the year 2000, I think I’ll probably be in a spaceship to the moon, dictating to robots,” says an English schoolboy in the 1966 footage above. “Or else I may be in charge of a robot court, judging some robots, or I may be at the funeral of a computer. Or if something’s gone wrong with the nuclear bombs, I may be back from hunting, in a cave.” Granted, this was the middle of the Cold War, when humanity felt itself perpetually at the brink of self-destruction. How did other children imagine the turn of the millennium? “I don’t like the idea of getting up and finding you’ve got a cabbage pill to eat for breakfast.”
Interviewed for the BBC television series Tomorrow’s World, these adolescents paint a series of bleak pictures of the year 2000, some more vivid than others. “All these atomic bombs will be dropping around the place,” predicts another boy. One will get near the center, because it will make a huge, great big crater, and the whole world will just melt.”
One girl sounds more resigned: “There’s nothing you can do to stop it. The more people get bombs — somebody’s going to use it one day.” But not all these kids envision a nuclear holocaust: “I don’t think there is going to be atomic warfare,” says one boy, “but I think there is going to be all this automation. People are going to be out of work, and a great population, and I think something has to be done about it.”
The idea that “computers are taking over” now has great currency among pundits, but it seems schoolgirls were making the same point more than half a century ago. “In the year 2000, there just won’t be enough jobs to go around,” says one of them. “The only jobs there will be, will be for people with high IQ who can work computers and such things.” Another contributing factor, as other kids see it, is an overpopulation so extreme that “either everyone will be living in big domes in the Sahara, or they’ll be undersea.” And there’ll be plenty of sea to live under, as one boy figures it, when it rises to cover everything but “the highlands in Scotland, and some of the big hills in England and Wales.” Less dramatically but more chillingly, some of these young students fear a terminal boredom at the end of history: “Everything will be the same. People will be the same; things will be the same.”
Not all of them foresee a wholly dehumanized future. “Black people won’t be separate, they’ll be all mixed in with the white people,” says one girl. “There will be poor and rich, but they won’t look down on each other.” Her prediction may not quite have come to pass even in 2021, but nor have most of her cohort’s more harrowing fantasies. If anything has collapsed since then, it’s standards of adolescent articulacy. As Roger Ebert wrote of Michael Apted’s Up series, which documents the same generation of English children, these clips make one ponder “the inarticulate murkiness, self-help clichés, sports metaphors, and management truisms that clutter American speech,” a condition that now afflicts even the English. But then, not even the most imaginative child could have known that the dystopia to come would be linguistic.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletterBooks 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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