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Consider attendance at several arts activities: classical music concerts, jazz concerts, musical theater, non-musical plays, art museums & galleries, craft & visual arts festivals, parks & historic sites, and reading of literature.
Do they seem masculine or feminine to you?
What about these arts activities: playing a classical music instrument, painting, pottery, sewing, photography, creative writing, singing in a choir or chorale, and buying art?
Are they masculine or feminine?
According to Section 26 of the just released Census Bureau’s 2010 Statistical Abstract of the U.S., in only one of those 16 categories is a greater percentage of men involved than women.
I guess it is no surprise that the arts are patronized more by women than men, but the male gap almost across the board, even for jazz concerts and playing classical instruments, is still an eye-opener.
Judith H. Dobrzynski
Real Clear Arts
The Parthenon in Athens: its facade is said to be circumscribed by golden rectangles, although some scholars argue this is a coincidence. Photograph: Katerina Mavrona/EPA
From Leonardo da Vinci to Le Corbusier, the golden ratio is believed to have guided artists and architects over the centuries.
Leonardo is thought to have used the golden ratio, a geometric proportion regarded as the key to creating aesthetically pleasing art, when painting the Mona Lisa. The Dutch painter Mondrian used it in his abstract compositions, as did Salvador Dali in his masterpiece The Sacrament of the Last Supper.
Now a US academic believes he has discovered the reason why it pleases the eye. According to Adrian Bejan, professor of mechanical engineering at Duke University, in Durham, North Carolina, the human eye is capable of interpreting an image featuring the golden ratio faster than any other.
Bejan argues that an animal’s world – whether you are a human being in an art gallery or an antelope on the savannah – is orientated on the horizontal. For the antelope scanning the horizon, danger primarily comes from the sides or from behind, not from below or above, so the scope of its vision evolved accordingly. As vision developed, he argues, animals got “smarter” and safer by seeing better and moving faster as a result.
“It is well known that the eyes take in information more efficiently when they scan side to side, as opposed to up and down. When you look at what so many people have been drawing and building, you see these proportions everywhere.”
Karen McVeigh
Guardian
Victoria and Albert Musuem
It is a space dedicated to the fruits of patronage. Against whitewashed walls and beneath a startling glass canopy, the Leonardos and Donatellos, the choir screens and sculptures, the tapestries and caskets speak to an age of extraordinary wealth and aesthetic ambition. But the newly opened medieval and renaissance galleries at the Victoria and Albert Museum also testify to the fact that our own epoch of remarkable cultural investment – like Florence after the Medici – is shuddering to a halt.
The fear is that a collapse in private philanthropy combined with a political arms race of expenditure cuts and quango-bashing could soon return our galleries and museums to the dark days of charges, closures and pandering to the familiar. Nothing less than the democratic capacity of British culture – the ability both to fund great art and open up life chances – is what is at stake.
It began a decade ago with the relaunch of the Royal Opera House following its £178m refit and has concluded with the re-engineered V&A and the equally stunning transformation of the Ashmolean in Oxford. Crumbling Victorian edifices have undergone architectural open-heart surgery and fusty old collections have been taken into the 21st century. Indeed, the Noughties marked a period of unprecedented postwar cultural prowess.
Tristram Hunt
Guardian
Renderings show how hundreds of New York taxis will become mobile public art next month when their rooftop ad boards display works by, from left, Shirin Neshat, Alex Katz and Yoko Ono. (Photo illustrations courtesy of Show Media and Art Production Fund)
Those moving advertisements atop taxis generally deliver not-so-subtle messages, like which airlines to fly or movies to see, who makes the sexiest blue jeans or the coolest sunglasses.
High art they most certainly are not.
But for the month of January, Show Media, a Las Vegas company that owns about half the cones adorning New York City’s taxis, has decided to give commerce a rest. Instead, roughly 500 cabs will display a different kind of message: artworks by Shirin Neshat, Alex Katz and Yoko Ono.
Carol Vogel
New York Times
Example: Madonna of Humility, ca. 1410, by Don Lorenzo Monaco
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art did a smart, simple thing for the Christmas season the other day — small but smart and good for art…the smaller idea was aimed at the media, which is always in search of good images. On Dec. 15 — enough time for planning — the PR department sent out an email with the subject line “Need Christmas Art?” and attaching a PDF listing of all the nativity scenes it holds in its collection for which it had high-res images: a dozen in all.
Judith H. Dobrzynski
Real Clear Arts
(Photo: BBC)
In Britain, the state, in the form either of local or central government, will tell you whether you can or cannot build on land that you own. And if it permits you to build, it will stipulate not only the purposes for which you may use the building, but also how it should look, and what materials should be used to construct it. Americans are used to building regulations that enforce utilitarian standards: insulation, smoke alarms, electrical safety, the size and situation of bathrooms, and so on. But they are not used to being told what aesthetic principles to follow, or what the neighborhood requires of materials and architectural details. I suspect that many Americans would regard such stipulations as a radical violation of property rights, and further evidence of the state’s illegitimate expansion.
This American attitude has something healthy about it, but it tends to go with two quite erroneous assumptions about beauty and the aesthetic. The first assumption is that beauty is an entirely subjective matter, about which there can be no reasoned argument and concerning which it is futile to search for a consensus. The second assumption, congenial to those who adopt the first, is that beauty doesn’t matter, that it is a value without economic reality, which cannot be allowed to place any independent constraint on the workings of the market.
The first assumption, that beauty is subjective, owes much of its appeal to the fact that it is functional in a democratic culture. By making this assumption you avoid giving offense to the one whose taste differs from yours. He likes garden gnomes, illuminated Christmas displays, Bing Crosby singing “White Christmas,” and a thousand other things that send shudders down the educated spine. But that’s his taste, and he is entitled to it. Leave him to enjoy it and he will leave you to get on with listening to Beethoven quartets, collecting antiques, and designing your house in the style of Palladio. But sometimes the assumption becomes dysfunctional. Each year his illuminated Christmas display increases in size, gets more bright and obtrusive, and lasts longer. Eventually his house has an all-year round Christmas tree, with Santa protruding from the chimney and brightly shining reindeer on the lawn. To be honest, the sight is insufferable, and entirely spoils the view from your window. You retaliate by playing Wagner late at night, only to receive blasts of Bing Crosby in the early hours. Here is the democratic culture at work—on its way to mutual destruction.
Roger Scruton
The American
The remains of Renaissance artist Caravaggio have been retrieved by Italian scientists hoping to find out more about his death.
They had been housed in a special container called an ossuary in the town of Porto Ercole in Italy.
The bones have now been taken to the University of Bologna where they will compared with those of his descendents.
They will then go on show until January 24 in Rome’s Borghese gallery before being placed in another burial site.
The new resting place for Caravaggio has yet to be announced.
Mystery death
The project is being led by anthropology professor Georgio Grupponi, who also worked on the reconstruction of the face of the Middle Ages poet Dante Alighieri that was unveiled in 2007.
The cause of Caravaggio’s death has been something of a mystery – various theories have been advanced over the years.
Among the most common are that he was assassinated for religious reasons, and that he collapsed with malaria on a deserted beach.
One scholar believes he may have died from typhus in hospital in 1610.
BBC News
New research shows that people rate an activity as more fun when they were tricked into thinking time flew by during the task. Could this method even make chores like shoveling snow seem more fun? (Photo: Jonathan Kirn/Getty Images)
Everyone knows that “time flies when you’re having fun,” but a new study suggests that the reverse is also true.
When people are tricked into thinking that time has “flown by,” they react to their surprise at the passage of time by assuming that it means they must have been having fun, says Aaron Sackett, a psychology researcher at the University of St. Thomas in Minneapolis.
Sackett recently did some experiments to see whether people’s sense of having fun, or not, might be affected just by how fast time seemed to be going by.
After all, he knew that fun isn’t the only thing that can make time seem to speed up, Our sense of time can be influenced by things like drinking coffee, or being on an adrenaline rush. “Would people draw maybe false conclusions about how much they enjoyed an experience based on simply the perception that time had ‘flown by’ or ‘dragged by’ during it?” Sackett wondered.
He wanted to test this in the lab, but he knew he couldn’t change the actual speed of time itself. “What we had to do instead is focus on speeding up or slowing down the perceived, or felt, passage of time from an individual’s perspective,” he explains.
Nell Greenfieldboyce
NPR
The architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown on a 1968 field trip to Las Vegas. Their explorations led them to an important book and a rethinking of vernacular architecture. (Photo: VSBA Archives)
The architects Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown on a 1968 field trip to Las Vegas. Their explorations led them to an important book and a rethinking of vernacular architecture.
When Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown boarded a plane bound for Las Vegas in 1968 with a dozen of their Yale architecture students in tow, there were no multimillion-dollar water shows or pirate ships waiting for them. There were no van Goghs in the hotel galleries. Nor could residents of the city live in tilting condo towers designed by Helmut Jahn and shop in a mall by Daniel Libeskind. Whatever glamour Las Vegas had was all veneer.
Mr. Venturi and Ms. Scott Brown, who had just married and would soon be business partners, were on a search for a way out of the dead end of postwar Modernism, whose early hopes had by then deteriorated into a dreary functionalism. The book they produced four years later, “Learning From Las Vegas,” was one of the last of the big architectural manifestos and a heartfelt embrace of American popular culture that would be hard to imagine anyone attempting today.
“What We Learned: The Yale Las Vegas Studio and the Work of Venturi, Scott Brown & Associates,” which is on view at the Yale School of Architecture Gallery through Feb. 5, looks at the extensive research the architects did in Las Vegas, though it doesn’t place the results in a context that would allow you to reevaluate the impact the project had on a profession starved for a new way forward. Nor do you get a feel for the place Las Vegas held in the popular imagination four years after Tom Wolfe celebrated the city’s “incredible electric sign gauntlet” in Esquire in 1964.
Still, it is a must-see for those who want to recapture momentarily the euphoric sense of discovery that came out of those early trips, as well as get a refresher course on their conclusions, which still have things to teach us.
Nicolai Ouroussoff
New York Times
Carmen Herrera in her Manhattan loft, surrounded by her art. She sold her first work in 2004. (Photo: Todd Heisler/The New York Times)
After six decades of very private painting, Ms. [Caroline] Herrera sold her first artwork five years ago, at 89. Now, at a small ceremony in her honor, she was basking in the realization that her career had finally, undeniably, taken off. As cameras flashed, she extended long, Giacomettiesque fingers to accept an art foundation’s lifetime achievement award from the director of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.
Her good friend, the painter Tony Bechara, raised a glass. “We have a saying in Puerto Rico,” he said. “The bus — la guagua — always comes for those who wait.”
And the Cuban-born Ms. Herrera, laughing gustily, responded, “Well, Tony, I’ve been at the bus stop for 94 years!”
Deborah Sontag
New York Times
