~openculture | Bookmarks (27)

Claude Monet, 1915: We’ve all seen their works in fixed form, enshrined in museums and printed in books. But there’s something special about watching a great artist at work. Over the years, we’ve posted film clips of some of the greatest artists of the 20th century caught in the act of creation. Today we’ve gathered […]

If you know more than a few millennials, you probably know someone who reveres Calvin and Hobbes as a sacred work of art. That comic strip’s cultural impact is even more remarkable considering that it ran in newspapers for only a decade, from 1985 to 1995: barely an existence at all, by the standards of […]

Anyone can learn to draw the cast of Peanuts, but few can do it every day for nearly half a century. The latter, as far as we know, amounts to a group of one: Charles Schulz, who not only created that world-famous comic strip but drew it single-handed throughout its entire run. He was, as […]

I doubt I need to list for you the many titles of the 18th century German savant and polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, but allow me to add one or two that were new to me, at least: color theorist (or phenomenologist of color) and progenitor of abstract expressionism. As a fascinating Booktryst post informs […]

Founded in 1577, Kobaien remains Japan’s oldest manufacturer of sumi ink sticks. Made of soot and animal glue, the ink stick—when ground against an inkstone, with a little water added—produces a beautiful black ink used by Japanese calligraphers. And, often, a 200-gram ink stick from Kobaien can cost over $1,000. How can soot and animal […]

“We can say of Shakespeare,” wrote T.S. Eliot—in what may sound like the most backhanded of compliments from one writer to another—“that never has a man turned so little knowledge to such great account.” Eliot, it’s true, was not overawed by the Shakespearean canon; he pronounced Hamlet “most certainly an artistic failure,” though he did […]

Launched by The New York Academy of Medicine Library in 2016, Color Our Collections is “an annual coloring festival on social media during which libraries, museums, archives and other cultural institutions around the world share free coloring content featuring images from their collections.” In February, the project released its 2024 archive of coloring books, allowing […]

The Book of Colour Concepts will soon be published by Taschen in a multilingual edition, containing text in English, French, German, and Spanish. This choice makes its abundance of explanatory scholarship widely accessible at a stroke, but even those who read none of those four languages can enjoy the book. For it takes a deep […]

History remembers Henry Dunant (1828–1910) for two things–being the co-founder of the Red Cross movement and winning the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901. Less well known is his diagram of the Apocalypse. Between 1877 and 1890, notes the Red Cross Museum website, Henry Dunant “produced a series of diagrams reflecting his distinctive understanding of humanity’s past […]

The story of Vincent van Gogh’s life tends to be defined by his psychological condition and the not-unrelated manner of his death. (It does if we set aside the episode with the mutilated ear and the brothel, anyway.) The figure of the impoverished, neglected artist whose work would revolutionize his medium, and whose descent into […]

In 1957, Salvador Dalí created a tableware set consisting of 1) a four-tooth fork with a fish handle, 2) an elephant fork with three teeth, 3) a snail knife with tears, 4) a leaf knife, 5) a small artichoke spoon, and 6) an artichoke spoon. When the set went on auction in 2012, it sold […]

The US Postal Service will be classing up the joint, with the planned release of 16 stamps featuring the photography of Ansel Adams. They write: Ansel Adams made a career of crafting photographs in exquisitely sharp focus and nearly infinite tonality and detail. His ability to consistently visualize a subject — not how it looked […]

Atomic physicist Niels Bohr is famously quoted as saying, “Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future.” Yet despite years of getting things wrong, magazines love think pieces on where we’ll be in several decades, even centuries in time. It gives us comfort to think great things await us, even though we’re long […]

?si=aoRK422gthc62UZE If you attend the “Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise” exhibition at the Musée D’Orsay, in Paris, you can spend time with “Hello Vincent,” a generative Artificial Intelligence project that allows visitors to have “a unique, personalized encounter” with Vincent van Gogh. According to CBS Sunday Morning, whose report we’ve included above, “Hello Vincent” allows museum […]

Context may not count for everything in art. But as underscored by everyone from Marcel Duchamp (or Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven) to the journalists who occasionally convince virtuoso musicians to busk in dingy public spaces, it certainly counts for something. Whether or not you believe that works of art retain the same essential value no matter […]

When we think of Brian Eno’s work, we first think of his records. These include not just his own classics of “ambient music” — a term he popularized — like Discreet Music and Music for Airports, but also the albums he’s produced: Devo’s Q. Are We Not Men? A: We Are Devo!, Talking Heads’ Remain […]

A few years ago, we featured a $32,000 pair of bonsai scissors here on Open Culture. More recently, their maker Yasuhiro Hiraka appeared in the Business Insider video above, a detailed 80-minute introduction to ten of the most expensive arts and art supplies around the world. It will come as no surprise that things Japanese […]

Imagine a grand tour of European museums, and a fair few destinations come right to mind: the Rijksmuseum, the Prado, the Uffizi Gallery, the Louvre. These institutions alone could take years to experience fully, but it would be an incomplete journey that didn’t venture farther east — much farther east, in the view of Great […]

It’s difficult to imagine Iman and David Bowie inviting Vogue readers to join them on the above virtual tour of their mountaintop home near Woodstock, New York when the rock legend was alive. Granted, shortly after their 1992 wedding, he gave Architectural Digest a peek at their ultra-luxurious, Indonesian-style holiday digs on the Caribbean island […]

Westerners tend to think of Japan as a land of high-speed trains, expertly prepared sushi and ramen, auteur films, brilliant animation, elegant woodblock prints, glorious old hotels, sought-after jazz-records, cat islands, and ghost towns. The last of those has, of course, not been shown to harbor literal wraiths and spirits. But if that sort of […]

?si=RFbzFSzSNWzua3‑7 Could you use a mental escape? Maybe a trip to Mars will do the trick. Above, you can find high definition footage captured by NASA’s three Mars rovers–Spirit, Opportunity and Curiosity. The footage (also contributed by JPL-Caltech, MSSS, Cornell University and ASU) was stitched together by ElderFox Documentaries, creating what they call the most lifelike experience of being […]

The Codex Seraphinianus is not a medieval book; nor does it date from the Renaissance along with the codices of Leonardo. In fact, it was published only in 1981, but in the intervening decades it has gained recognition as “the strangest book ever published,” as we described it when we previously featured it here on […]

From the Triton Fountain in the Piazza Barberini to the Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona, sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s glorious public fountains have impressed visitors to Rome for centuries. Bernini angled for immorality when carving his Baroque masterpieces from marble. Image by Trdinfl, via Wikimedia Commons Eternity occupied artist James Grashow’s mind, […]

It can be challenging to parse the meaning of many non-narrative artworks. Sometimes the title will offer a clue, or the artist will shed some light in an interview. Is it a comment on the cultural, socio-economic or political context in which it was created? Or is the act of creating it the artist’s most […]