In Soul Food: Why cooking isn’t art, William Deresiewicz suggests that while some argue that there is a narrative behind a meal, food is only a medium, one without an inherent story-telling property. His modernist stance begs us not to assign meaning to nonlinear substance but also affirms a trustworthy spring of art and narrative.
Grant Rosenberg gives you a look behind the scenes of Cy Twombly’s “33 meters of immortality in one of the world’s most prized edifices,” his ceiling painting at the Louvre’s Salle des Bronzes gallery, in the American Scholar’s “A Twombly Ceiling.”
Above, Professor Barbara Crawford testing color and light. Photo courtesy of Southern Virginia University.
Red Pens & Rothko
Did you know…
According to tests performed by California State University, subjects using a red pen completed word stem exercises with more words pertaining to failure or poor performance, marked more errors in essays, and assigned lower overall grades to essays as opposed to those who used blue pens.
This is just one of the interesting effects of the color red, as explored by Robert J. Bliwise in “Seeing Red,” in the pursuit to understand the work of abstract artist Rothko.
This beautiful mural representing Kenya was created with help from the Art Miles Mural Project, with the goal of generating miles and miles of murals for peace. So far, the project has coordinated over 4,000 murals created by over half a million from more than 100 countries. It’s artists? An international bunch, ranging from tribes in remote areas to victims in war-torn areas to survivors of natural disasters. Find out how you can help.
Whether in music or architecture, literature, painting, or sculpture, are opens our eyes, ears, and feelings to something beyond ourselves, something we cannot experience without the artist’s vision and the genius of his craft. The placing of Greek temples, like the Temple of Poseidon on the promontory at Sunion, outlined against the piercing blue of the Aegean Sea, Poseidon’s home; the majesty of Michelangelo’s sculptured figures in stone; Shakespeare’s command of language and knowledge of the human soul; the intricate order of Bach, the enchantment of Mozart; the purity of Chinese monochrome pottery with its lovely names—celadon, oxblood, peach blossom, clair de lune; the exuberance of Tiepolo’s ceilings where, without picture frames to limit movement, a whole in exquisitely beautiful colors lives and moves in the sky; the prose and poetry of all the writers from Homer to Cervantes to Jane Austen and John Keats to Dostoevski and Chekov—who made all these things? We—our species—did. The range is too vast and various to do justice to it in this space, but the random samples I have mentioned, and all the rest they suggest, are sufficient reason to honor mankind.
Barbara W. Tuchman, “Mankind’s Better Moments,” The American Scholar, Autumn 1980
Source: theamericanscholar.org
This Panamanian Golden Frog is one of the endangered species available for purchase through the Endangered Species Print Project, where the artists print animal images in quantities equaling the estimated number of individuals of that species in the wild. The profits are then donated to organizations dedicated to saving the species.
It isn’t that the artist needs softer beds or more food, and as for publicity, in these days of radio and tabloids he probably gets too much of it! It is a spiritual thing that he needs – an assurance that what he is doing is not futile, a sense that it profits him to produce what will demand of him the labor of years, a while lifetime of the most honest devotion, rather than something quickly turned out to please the fickle vanity of Fascist playboys whose toys are not only the machine gun and the rope but pretty propaganda.
Sinclair Lewis,
“The Artist, the Scientist and the Peace” The American Scholar 1945
