Pink Floyd is helping you get through the coronavirus by streaming free concert films on YouTube. First came Pulse, a 22-song set from the 1994 Division Bell tour. Now comes Pink Floyd: Live at Pompeii, a 1972 concert film featuring the band performing within the ancient Roman amphitheatre at Pompeii. It’s a classic. Watch it above. And learn more about the film in our prior post here.
Note: The film is only streaming free on YouTube for 24 hours. So watch it while you can. Once the film goes dark, you can watch outtakes here.
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
At the age of twelve, he followed his own line of reasoning to find a proof of the Pythagorean Theorem. At thirteen he read Kant, just for the fun of it. And before he was fifteen he had taught himself differential and integral calculus.
But while the young Einstein was engrossed in intellectual pursuits, he didn’t much care for school. He hated rote learning and despised authoritarian schoolmasters. His sense of intellectual superiority was resented by his teachers.
At the Gymnasium a teacher once said to him that he, the teacher, would be much happier if the boy were not in his class. Einstein replied that he had done nothing wrong. The teacher answered, “Yes, that is true. But you sit there in the back row and smile, and that violates the feeling of respect that a teacher needs from his class.”
The same teacher famously said that Einstein “would never get anywhere in life.”
What bothered Einstein most about the Luitpold was its oppressive atmosphere. His sister Maja would later write:
“The military tone of the school, the systematic training in the worship of authority that was supposed to accustom pupils at an early age to military discipline, was also particularly unpleasant for the boy. He contemplated with dread that not-too-distant moment when he will have to don a soldier’s uniform in order to fulfill his military obligations.”
When he was sixteen, Einstein’s parents moved to Italy to pursue a business venture. They told him to stay behind and finish school. But Einstein was desperate to join them in Italy before his seventeenth birthday. “According to the German citizenship laws,” Maja explained, “a male citizen must not emigrate after his completed sixteenth year; otherwise, if he fails to report for military service, he is declared a deserter.”
So Einstein found a way to get a doctor’s permission to withdraw from the school on the pretext of “mental exhaustion,” and fled to Italy without a diploma. Years later, in 1944, during the final days of World War II, the Luitpold Gymnasium was obliterated by Allied bombing. So we don’t have a record of Einstein’s grades there. But there is record of a principal at the school looking up Einstein’s grades in 1929 to fact check a press report that Einstein had been a very bad student. Walter Sullivan writes about it in a 1984 piece in The New York Times:
With 1 as the highest grade and 6 the lowest, the principal reported, Einstein’s marks in Greek, Latin and mathematics oscillated between 1 and 2 until, toward the end, he invariably scored 1 in math.
After he dropped out, Einstein’s family enlisted a well-connected friend to persuade the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, or ETH, to let him take the entrance exam, even though he was only sixteen years old and had not graduated from high school. He scored brilliantly in physics and math, but poorly in other areas. The director of the ETH suggested he finish preparatory school in the town of Aarau, in the Swiss canton of Aargau. A diploma from the cantonal school would guarantee Einstein admission to the ETH.
At Aarau, Einstein was pleasantly surprised to find a liberal atmosphere in which independent thought was encouraged. “When compared to six years’ schooling at a German authoritarian gymnasium,” he later said, “it made me clearly realize how much superior an education based on free action and personal responsibility is to one relying on outward authority.”
In Einstein’s first semester at Aarau, the school still used the old method of scoring from 1 to 6, with 1 as the highest grade. In the second semester the system was reversed, with 6 becoming the highest grade. Barry R. Parker talks about Einstein’s first-semester grades in his book, Einstein: The Passions of a Scientist:
His grades over the first few months were: German, 2–3; French, 3–4; history, 1–2; mathematics, 1; physics, 1–2; natural history, 2–3; chemistry, 2–3; drawing, 2–3; and violin, 1. (The range is 1 to 6, with 1 being the highest.) Although none of the grades, with the exception of French, were considered poor, some of them were only average.
The school headmaster, Jost Winteler, who had welcomed Einstein into his home as a boarder and had become something of a surrogate father to him during his time at Aarau, was concerned that a young man as obviously brilliant as Albert was receiving average grades in so many courses. At Christmas in 1895, he mailed a report card to Einstein’s parents. Hermann Einstein replied with warm thanks, but said he was not too worried. As Parker writes, Einstein’s father said he was used to seeing a few “not-so-good grades along with very good ones.”
In the next semester Einstein’s grades improved, but were still mixed. As Toby Hendy of the Youtube channel Tibees shows in the video above, Einstein’s final grades were excellent in math and physics, but closer to average in other areas.
Einstein’s uneven academic performance continued at the ETH, as Hendy shows. By the third year his relationship with the head of the physics department, Heinrich Weber, began to deteriorate. Weber was offended by the young man’s arrogance. “You’re a clever boy, Einstein,” said Weber. “An extremely clever boy. But you have one great fault. You’ll never allow yourself to be told anything.” Einstein was particularly frustrated that Weber refused to teach the groundbreaking electromagnetic theory of James Clerk Maxwell. He began spending less time in the classroom and more time reading up on current physics at home and in the cafes of Zurich.
Einstein increasingly focused his attention on physics, and neglected mathematics. He came to regret this. “It was not clear to me as a student,” he later said, “that a more profound knowledge of the basic principles of physics was tied up with the most intricate mathematical methods.”
Einstein’s classmate Marcel Grossmann helped him by sharing his notes from the math lectures Einstein had skipped. When Einstein graduated, his conflict with Weber cost him the teaching job he had expected to receive. Grossmann eventually came to Einstein’s rescue again, urging his father to help him secure a well-paid job as a clerk in the Swiss patent office. Many years later, when Grossmann died, Einstein wrote a letter to his widow that conveyed not only his sadness at an old friend’s death, but also his bittersweet memories of life as a college student:
“Our days together come back to me. He a model student; I untidy and a daydreamer. He on excellent terms with the teachers and grasping everything easily; I aloof and discontented, not very popular. But we were good friends and our conversations over iced coffee at the Metropol every few weeks belong among my nicest memories.”
There are many roads through the coronavirus crisis. One is denial, which only makes things worse. Another is service and self-sacrifice, a choice we honor in the medical professionals putting their lives at risk every day. For most of us, however, the best course of action is non-action—staying home and isolating ourselves from others. Days bleed into weeks, weeks into months. It can seem like life has come to a complete halt. It hasn’t, of course. All sorts of things are happening inside us. We don’t know how long this will last; current courses of action don’t bode well. What do we do with the fear, anger, loneliness, grief, and buzzing, ever-present anxiety?
Maybe the first thing to do is to accept that we have those feelings and feel them, instead of stuffing them down, covering them up, or pushing them onto someone else. Then we can recognize we aren’t by any means alone. That’s easier said than done in quarantine, but psychologists and inspirational writers and speakers like Elizabeth Gilbert have come together under the auspices of the TED Connect series, hosted by the head of TED Chris Anderson, to help.
TED, known for showcasing “thinkers and doers [giving] the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less),” has wisely recognized the need to dig much deeper. Anderson and head of curation Helen Walters’ conversation with Gilbert, above, runs a little over an hour.
As for that ceaseless anxiety, Gilbert suggests we should all give ourselves “a measure of mercy and compassion.” We might feel like we need permission to do so in societies that demand we constantly justify our existence. But admitting vulnerability is the beginning of strength. Then we find constructive ways forward. The kind of resilience we can build in isolation is the kind that can outlast a crisis. Still, it is hard won. As Anderson says above, in addition to the external battle we must fight with the virus and our own governments, “there’s this other battle as well, that is probably equally as consequential. It’s a battle that’s going on right inside our minds.”
Rather than killing time waiting fitfully for some acceptable form of normal to return, we can build what psychologist Susan David calls “emotional courage.” In conversation with TED’s Whitney Pennington Rogers, above, David reveals that she herself has good reason to fear: her husband is a physician. She also understands the consequences of a collective denial of suffering and death. “The circumstance that we are in now is not something that we asked for, but life is calling on every single one of us to move into the place of wisdom in ourselves… into the space of wisdom and fortitude, solidarity, community, courage.” We move into that space by recognizing that “life’s beauty is inseparable from its fragility.”
Themes of courage and connection come up again and again in other TED Connects interviews, such as that above with Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks and below with author Priya Parker. Elsewhere on the internet, you’ll find similar kinds of advice.
Stoicism has gathered a particularly rich store of wisdom about how to live in crisis. In his own meditation on isolation, Michel de Montaigne drew on the Stoics in advising readers to “reserve a backshop, wholly our own and entirely free, wherein to settle our true liberty, our principle solitude and retreat…. We have a mind pliable in itself, that will be company; that has wherewithal to attack and to defend, to receive and to give: let us not then fear in this solitude to languish under an uncomfortable vacuity.” In other words, the road through isolation, though fraught with painful emotions and uncertainties, can be, if we choose, one of significant personal and collective growth.
For a few months, David Hockney was the most expensive artist in the world, after his masterwork Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)sold at auction for $90 million in November 2018. (He was outsold last May by Jeff Koons, who set the previous record in 2013.) The sale says all kinds of things about the state of the art market, but Hockney has always been driven by a need to make things, not to profit, a compulsion as relentless as that of one of his heroes, Vincent van Gogh.
A Portrait of an Artist’s creation, told in the 1974 film A Bigger Splash, is the story of a labor of love. Hockney painted and repainted and repainted, giving up once then starting over again, working with a very van Gogh-like intensity. Otherwise the influence may not be obvious from his most famous, and most expensive, canvas. After his “L.A. swimming pool period,” however, Hockney moved on to other subjects and other media.
In the late 90s, he returned to the Yorkshire of his boyhood when his mother became ill. He took up plein air landscapes painting in oils and watercolors. Hockney describes this transition in a March 2019 interview above from the Van Gogh Museum. In part, he says, he wanted to answer a challenge. “I knew landscape was seen as something you couldn’t do today,” he says. “And I thought, ‘why?’ Because the landscape’s become so boring? It’s not the landscape that’s become boring, it’s the depictions of it that have become boring. You can’t be bored of nature, can you?”
You also cannot become bored of van Gogh. He knew, Hockney says, how to “really look. He saw very clearly. I mean, very, very clearly.” Van Gogh expressed the clarity of his vision in lucid, lyrical prose. Hockney begins the short interview above with a quote from a December 1882 van Gogh letter: “Sometimes I long so much to do landscape, just as one would go for a long walk to refresh oneself, and in all of nature, in trees for instance, I see expression and a soul.” The passage gets a knowing nod from Hockney, who has had much more to say on this theme lately.
Both van Gogh and Hockney describe their experiences with landscape painting as a kind of intensive art therapy. Hockney, now sequestered in Normandy while France is in lockdown, has suggested that others should do the same during this time, as a way of relieving stress and appreciating their place in nature. People should put away their cameras (and, by definition, their phones). “I would suggest people could draw at this time,” he says, “Question everything and do not think about photography. I would suggest they really look hard at something and think about what they are really seeing.”
Hockney has come away from his time painting nature with some particularly intriguing insights. “In a way,” he says above, “nature doesn’t really have perspective. I’ve noticed trees don’t follow the rules of perspective…. Perspective is a strangling, I think. It’s not really making space, it’s strangling space.” It’s an observation we can apply to rigid ways of seeing at reality, none of which seem to make much sense anymore. We won’t all be as visionary or as driven as van Gogh or David Hockney, but time spent learning to “really look” might be time well spent indeed.
Though the coronavirus pandemic has put a stop to many formerly normal activities around the world, it’s hardly put a stop to global communication. In fact, it’s almost certainly intensified global communication, what with all the attention the struggle against COVID-19 commands from 24-hour media professionals — and all the time and energy the rest of us have put into social media as a substitute for socialization. But how would we have communicated amid a pandemic of this kind in an age before the internet? Assuming postal services remained in good working order, we would, of course, have written letters to each other.
We can still write letters to each other in the 21st century, but now we can also read them to each other, wherever in the world we may be. This is the basis for the #ReadALetter campaign, which actor Benedict Cumberbatch introduces in the video at the top of the post. “I really hope this letter finds you in good spirits as we navigate our way through this truly surreal crisis, where upheaval and uncertainty are daily realities,” he says, reading aloud a missive composed at his home and meant for the world at large.
“But so, thankfully, is the totally inspiring self-sacrifice, togetherness, courage, generosity, and camaraderie the people are exhibiting.” It is those honorable qualities, Cumberbatch continues, that “we at Letters Live are looking for a way to celebrate through our favorite medium of the letter.”
You may remember Letters Live, a series of events inspired by Letters of Note, from when we’ve previously featured Cumberbatch’s appearances there interpreting correspondence by the likes of Kurt Vonnegut, Albert Camus, and Alan Turing. The stars of Letters Live have heretofore been historically important letter-writers and the skilled professional performers who read their words. But now, Cumberbatch says, “we want to hear you read letters. They can be letters to the heroes on the front line. They could be letters to relatives in need. They could be letters to strangers who have stepped up and made a difference. They could be letters to neighboring families or streets or towns or countries.” To participate, you need only use a camera phone to record yourself reading a letter aloud, then post that video on Twitter or Instagram and send it to re**@le*********.com
.
What you read on camera (or off it, if you prefer) could be “an important letter you have always wanted to send, or a cherished letter you once received. It could be a favorite letter of yours that offers hope in our current crisis or a prescient warning too important to be ignored.” Here we’ve included the #ReadALetter videos so far contributed by other notables including Margaret Atwood, Stephen Fry, and Griffin Dunne, who reads a letter his father Dominick Dunne wrote when he put himself into isolation for creative purposes in 1980. Other participants from all walks of life include a rabbi, a college student, an emergency department doctor, and even a couple of nonagenarians. If you need more inspiration to #ReadALetter yourself, revisit Cumberbatch’s Letters of Live performance of Sol Lewitt’s 1965 letter to Eva Hesse, the one in which he delivers invaluable words of advice: “Stop It and Just DO.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
The state of virtual and augmented reality technology has reached the threshold of a time in which VR meetings will be the norm. Apart from other applications, this may soon allow consumers to stroll through virtual aisles rather than clicking boxes on a screen, picking up products and viewing them from every angle. Still, designers recognize that an essence of the human experience is lost without the sense of touch. There may even be a future in which we wear clothes with haptic feedback systems embedded in them, to feel the pages of a virtual book beneath our fingers…
Yet our slow transition from the physical to the virtual world leaves out intangibles. Something is lost from both. Big box stores still devote significant floor space to books and records, for example. But I submit that a glossiness prevails in print design, perhaps a consequence of competing with screens. There’s a wabi-sabi quality to browsing a used bookstore or record shop in person, thumbing through an old collection of vintage paperbacks and LPs, that cannot be simulated or enhanced in any way. On the internet, however, where video is king, it can be made the subject of some hypnotic video art.
As the sensible majority of us are hopefully staying put for the long haul (if we can), we may find ourselves curiously edified by the video art of Henning M. Lederer. We’ve previously featured Lederer’s animations of mid-century minimalist book covers and vintage psychology and philosophy books. He turns the abstract geometric patterns beloved by book and record company designers of the latter half of the 20th century into moving images that hint at how proper cover design can set the imagination whirring (even if it’s a cover design for Basic Accounting).
If Lederer’s mesmerizing videos simulate anything, it’s the experience of wandering into a used bookstore next to a liberal arts college—full of professors’ fascinatingly outdated hand-me-downs—after having ingested a small quantity of LSD. Maybe you’ll have a slightly different association. But the point is that Lederer’s art suggests a scenario rather than attempting to recreate one. His studies of modernist cover designs also recall Marcel Duchamp’s Rotoreliefs, conceptual art pieces intended for popular use as optical illusions.
Duchamp’s spinning disks became features of early Surrealist cinema, iconic symbols of dreams on film. There is a mysterious opacity to his physical objects onscreen, just as Lederer’s book and record covers seem to have a weight of their own, a use of digital technology to highlight the strange uniqueness of physical objects, rather than their endless reproducibility.
A few years ago we featured the Japanese art of chindōgu, or the invention of amusingly “useless” inventions. The chindōgu canon includes such simultaneously sensible and nonsensical objects as miniature toecap umbrellas (to keep one’s shoes dry in the rain) and chopsticks fitted with miniature fans (to cool down ramen noodles before consumption). Today we present a Japanese invention that may at first glance look chindōgu-like, but would never qualify due to its simplicity and sheer usefulness: an anti-virus face shield that anyone can make in three easy steps. After you’ve downloaded the template, all you need is a printer, paper, scissors, and some kind of clear plastic sheet.
“Healthcare workers around the world are putting their lives on the line to fight COVID-19 but their battle continues to be fought uphill as a shortage of medical supplies threatens to disrupt an already overwhelmed system,” writes Spoon & Tamago’s Johnny Waldman. We’ve all read of the lack of necessities like face masks and ventilators in some of the most afflicted countries, and in such places having access to face shields could make a real difference in the number of lives saved.
“Face shields are typically made with multiple parts and would be difficult to create and assemble at home,” Waldman notes. “But Tokujin Yoshioka’s brilliant idea simplifies the design greatly, allowing it to be held in place with ordinary eyewear.” Best known as an artist and designer, Yoshioka has made his name creating striking sculptures, installations, works of architecture, and many other objects besides.
Yoshioka even designed the torch for the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, shaped like a Japanese cherry blossom and made with the same aluminum extrusion technology used to manufacture the country’s equally iconic bullet trains. Clearly the coronavirus-caused postponement of the games hasn’t got Yoshioka too down to continue pursuing his calling. “I am grateful to the brave and dedicated healthcare workers for fighting the contagious disease,” he writes in the note accompanying the video at the top of the post that shows you how to make and wear his face shield. As you can see, it’s made to be worn with glasses, so the non-bespectacled will need to stick with other forms of protection against the virus — or take the opportunity to order some fashionable frames of the kind that all the best designers seem to be wearing these days.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include 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, on Facebook, or on Instagram.
In 1913, Germany, flush with a new nation’s patriotic zeal, looked like it might become the dominant nation of Europe and a real rival to that global superpower Great Britain. Then it hit the buzzsaw of World War I. After the German government collapsed in 1918 from the economic and emotional toll of a half-decade of senseless carnage, the Allies forced it to accept draconian terms for surrender. The entire German culture was sent reeling, searching for answers to what happened and why.
German Expressionism came about to articulate these lacerating questions roiling in the nation’s collective unconscious. The first such film was The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari(1920), about a malevolent traveling magician who has his servant do his murderous bidding in the dark of the night. The storyline is all about the Freudian terror of hidden subconscious drives, but what really makes the movie memorable is its completely unhinged look. Marked by stylized acting, deep shadows painted onto the walls, and sets filled with twisted architectural impossibilities — there might not be a single right angle in the film – Caligari’s look perfectly meshes with the narrator’s demented state of mind.
Subsequent German Expressionist movies retreated from the extreme aesthetics of Caligari but were still filled with a mood of violence, frustration and unease. F. W. Murnau’s brilliantly depressing The Last Laugh (1924) is about a proud doorman at a high-end hotel who is unceremoniously stripped of his position and demoted to a lowly bathroom attendant. When he hands over his uniform, his posture collapses as if the jacket were his exoskeleton. You don’t need to be a semiologist to figure out that the doorman’s loss of status parallels Germany’s. Fritz Lang’s M (1931), a landmark of early sound film, is the first serial killer movie ever made. But what starts out as a police procedural turns into something even more unsettling when a gang of distinctly Nazi-like criminals decide to mete out some justice of their own.
German Expressionism ended in 1933 when the Nazis came to power. They weren’t interested in asking uncomfortable questions and viewed such dark tales of cinematic angst as unpatriotic. Instead, they preferred bright, cheerful tales of Aryan youths climbing mountains. By that time, the movement’s most talented directors — Fritz Lang and F.W. Murnau — had fled to America. And it was in America where German Expressionism found its biggest impact. Its stark lighting, grotesque shadows and bleak worldview would go on on to profoundly influence film noir in the late 1940s after another horrific, disillusioning war. See our collection of Free Noir Films here.
You watch can 10 German Expressionist movies – including Caligari, Last Laugh and M — for free below.
Nosferatu — Free — German Expressionist horror film directed by F. W. Murnau. An unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. (1922)
The Student of Prague — Free — A classic of German expressionist film. German writer Hanns Heinz Ewers and Danish director Stellan Rye bring to life a 19th-century horror story. Some call it the first indie film. (1913)
Nerves — Free — Directed by Robert Reinert, Nerves tells of “the political disputes of an ultraconservative factory owner Herr Roloff and Teacher John, who feels a compulsive but secret love for Roloff’s sister, a left-wing radical.” (1919)
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — Free — This silent film directed by Robert Wiene is considered one of the most influential German Expressionist films and perhaps one of the greatest horror movies of all time. (1920)
Metropolis — Free — Fritz Lang’s fable of good and evil fighting it out in a futuristic urban dystopia. An important classic. An alternate version can be found here. (1927)
The Golem: How He Came Into the World — Free — A follow-up to Paul Wegener’s earlier film, “The Golem,” about a monstrous creature brought to life by a learned rabbi to protect the Jews from persecution in medieval Prague. Based on the classic folk tale, and co-directed by Carl Boese. (1920)
The Golem: How He Came Into the World — Free — The same film as the one listed immediately above, but this one has a score created by Pixies frontman Black Francis. (2008)
The Last Laugh - Free — F.W. Murnau’s classic chamber drama about a hotel doorman who falls on hard times. A masterpiece of the silent era, the story is told almost entirely in pictures. (1924)
Faust — Free- German expressionist filmmaker F.W. Murnau directs a film version of Goethe’s classic tale. This was Murnau’s last German movie. (1926)
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans — Free — Made by the German expressionist director F.W. Murnau. Voted in 2012, the 5th greatest film of all time. (1927)
M — Free — Classic film directed by Fritz Lang, with Peter Lorre. About the search for a child murderer in Berlin. (1931)
If you would like to support the mission of Open Culture, consider making a donation to our site. It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal, Patreon, and Venmo (@openculture). Thanks!
Jonathan Crow is a Los Angeles-based writer and filmmaker whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hollywood Reporter, and other publications. You can follow him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veeptopus, featuring lots of pictures of badgers and even more pictures of vice presidents with octopuses on their heads. The Veeptopus store is here.
These stories are all heavily watched, which means they’re entertaining: The 2019 film Bombshell (about the predations of Roger Ailes), Apple TV’s The Morning Show (about a disgraced anchor), and Netflix’s Unbelievable (about reporting rape) and 13 Reasons Why (about teen suicide resulting from sexual assault). But what’s “entertaining” about sexual assault and harassment? What makes for a sensitive as opposed to a sensationalized portrayal?
Erica, Mark, and Brian consider which stories work and why. How much divergence from true events is allowable in Bombshell or Confirmation (about Anita Hill)? By having characters interpret their situations (Erica gives an example from the show Sex Education), are writers essentially telling audiences how to feel about their own experiences? Should certain depictions be ruled out as potentially triggering, or is it good to “bring to light” whatever terrible things actually happen in the world? Should shows delve into the psychology of the perpetrator (maybe even treating him as a protagonist), or must the message be wholly and unambiguously about the victim?
Art is about risk-taking and capturing difficult ambiguities; this doesn’t sound much like a public service message. So what responsibility to do show creators have to consult professionals about how to present difficult topics like this?
We drew on some articles to help us look at these questions:
Not only did Andy Warhol miss out on the internet, but the internet missed out on Andy Warhol. Surely, these days he would be prolifically posting to his Instagram and YouTube from home, indulging multiple celebrity and pop culture obsessions. Warhol’s Polaroid aesthetic and pioneering of the self-as-brand helped create 21st century online culture. Maybe he was the original “influencer,” though Warhol was more of an instigator. But he’s become too familiar for us to appreciate his uniqueness, suggest Gregor Muir and Fiontán Moran, curators of an extensive Tate Modern Warhol exhibit featuring 100 works, which is now only accessible via the 7‑minute video tour above.
“Everyone owns Warhol” (though few own a Warhol), argue Muir and Moran. “He is one of those rare artists who transcends the art world, having become widely known as one of America’s most famous artists, if not one of America’s most famous Americans.
Over time, Warhol became—and still is—a big brand, which is just how he wanted it.” Warhol showed how individual artists could circumvent the star-making system, create their own branding, and commandeer the culture with manufactured fame. He “helped shape a century’s worth of pop culture,” writes Luke Abrahams at Harper’s Bazaar, “and helped launch the cult of celebrity.”
Whether that legacy deserves more praise or blame I leave to you to decide. In either case, our posthumous judgments cannot diminish Warhol’s singular achievements in graphic art or his radical approaches to film, photography, and—through his promotion of the Velvet Underground—music. Behind the aloof, eccentric persona is a personal story the Tate exhibit explores as well, through Warhol’s immigrant and queer identity and his concerns with death and religion. Architectural Digest reports on the additional resources the online exhibit offers:
For visitors looking to dive deeper into the exhibition and the artist during the lockdown, there’s also the room-by-room exhibition guide; articles about Warhol, from an investigation into his relationship with his mother to a personal tale written by his friend Bob Colachello; a podcast about personas; and even how-to videos demonstrating Warhol’s printmaking process.
Tate digital director Hilary Knight knows there’s no substitute for the original, which is maybe an ironic idea when it comes to Warhol. “We are not trying to replicate a museum visit,” Knight says, but “we can still offer a rich, deep, and inspiring experience of Tate online.” Though abbreviated and virtual, this deeper dive into Warhol’s life and work does that indeed. Find more detailed on the exhibition, and each room, here.
Perhaps they’d barricade themselves into separate rooms, hunched over their individual screens, cursing their roommates for slowing down their livestreams, but we prefer to think they’d busy themselves with projects such as Dzama’s short film, “Dance Floor Dracula, Prelude in C‑Sharp Minor.”
Much of the content seems germane to the world we find ourselves in now, when the creative playing field feels remarkably open to our participation, thanks to crowdsourced projects like the ongoing photo challenge wherein ordinary citizens are using their phones and household objects to recreate famous artworks at home.
Painter Tala Madani takes viewers through her sketchbook and talks about its value as a method of capturing ideas and as the “most immediate record of the thinking process.” The cartoonish quality of her sketches may help those who’d let a lack of confidence in their artistic ability stop them from attempting to document their observations of our changed reality visually. A sketchbook is also a great place for the seeds of future projects to germinate.
The preparations for Oakland’s Creative Growth Art Center’s annual fashion show, Beyond Trend, could send you scuttling to your closet or recycling bin, inspired by William Scott’s papier-mâché Frankenstein mask—a five day effort—or the patches Christine Szeto embroiders with titles of favorite Taylor Swift songs, then sews to her jeans in orderly columns.
This sort of wearable art doesn’t require advanced needle skills or knowledge of how garments are put together, making it perfectly tailored to those open to exploring new sides of themselves in isolation.
That said, we are sure the featured designers are anxiously awaiting the reopening of Creative Growth, which serves artists with developmental, mental, and physical disabilities.
Community and creativity are showing themselves to be equally essential to our wellbeing.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
