Reviews and News:
Michelangelo’s statue of the risen Christ to go on display in London: “It might seem odd that a nearly seven-foot-tall statue of Christ by Michelangelo — and a nude one at that — would go unnoticed for centuries. But that’s what happened to Risen Christ, a monumental figure that was transferred to a country church about 35 miles from Rome in the 17th century and that fell into oblivion until 1997, when scholars attributed it to the Renaissance master.”
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A history of gin: “The first thing we might begin to recognise as gin – a combination of juniper and alcohol – was invented in the 11th century, in the Benedictine monastery of Salerno in southern Italy; it was prescribed as a medicine, and to be used in strictly controlled amounts.”
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David Gelernter’s 20 ideas: “2. Beauty is objective. Take any civilization, ask for its artistic masterpieces; today, they are almost guaranteed to be valuable all over the world. There’s almost nothing less subjective than the sense of beauty…8. Artificial Intelligence is going nowhere until we have mastered Artificial Emotion.”
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Turner’s port paintings: “The three ‘contemporary’ ports of the 1820s were painted at a time of mass industrialization, when European seasides were bustling with new steamships and manufacturing hubs. However, Turner’s people and sleepy sail-powered ships seem to come from a pre-steam past. ‘He represented them at a point just before disappearing’…”
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World’s first ridable hoverbike.
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Yorick on stage: For Hamlet’s earliest audiences, “seeing real human remains on stage would have been a shock. The diary of theatre manager Philip Henslowe (1550-1616), who ran the Rose on Bankside, lists any number of exotic props – among them a ‘snake’, a ‘tree of golden apples’ and two ‘lion’s heads’ – but a human skull is not among them. And as far as it’s possible to tell, no 16th-century play before Hamlet called for one.”
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Can neuroscience help us understand art history? “John Onians is one of Europe’s most innovative and wide-ranging art historians. A classicist by training and an expert on the theory and practice of Renaissance architecture, he became the pioneer of the teaching of World Art in British universities. In European Art: A Neurorthistory, his latest, expertly illustrated work, Onians has applied his ideas about how the workings of the brain relate to artistic expression to the entire spectrum of European art—from the very earliest cave paintings to Malevitch and Le Corbusier.”
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Mr. Rembrandt: “Thomas Kaplan, a New York entrepreneur, now owns nearly a third of the Rembrandt paintings in private hands. Since 2005, he has bought 11 Rembrandts out of the 35 or so that belong to collectors around the world.”
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Essay of the Day:
In Aeon, Marc Levinson argues that the period of rapid economic growth between 1948 and 1973 might never happen again:
“The second half of the 20th century divides neatly in two. The divide did not come with the rise of Ronald Reagan or the fall of the Berlin Wall. It is not discernible in a particular event, but rather in a shift in the world economy, and the change continues to shape politics and society in much of the world today.
“The shift came at the end of 1973. The quarter-century before then, starting around 1948, saw the most remarkable period of economic growth in human history. In the Golden Age between the end of the Second World War and 1973, people in what was then known as the ‘industrialised world’ – Western Europe, North America, and Japan – saw their living standards improve year after year. They looked forward to even greater prosperity for their children. Culturally, the first half of the Golden Age was a time of conformity, dominated by hard work to recover from the disaster of the war. The second half of the age was culturally very different, marked by protest and artistic and political experimentation. Behind that fermentation lay the confidence of people raised in a white-hot economy: if their adventures turned out badly, they knew, they could still find a job.
“The year 1973 changed everything. High unemployment and a deep recession made experimentation and protest much riskier, effectively putting an end to much of it.”
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“The historic move of rural peoples to the cities, around the world, could not be repeated. Once masses of peasant farmers and sharecroppers had shifted into more productive work in the cities, it was done. The great flow of previously unemployed women into the labour force was over. In the 1960s, building thousands of miles of superhighways brought massive economic benefits. But once those roads were open to traffic, adding lanes or exit ramps was far less consequential. In rich countries, literacy had risen to almost universal levels. After that historic jump, the effects of additional small increases in average education were comparatively slight. If higher productivity growth were to be regained, it would have to come from developing technological innovations and new approaches to business, and putting them to use in ways that allowed the business sector to operate more effectively.”
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Photo: Langenbruck
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Poem: Clive James, “The Rest Is Silence”
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