Where Children Sleep by James Mollison
Lamine, 12, lives in Senegal. He is a pupil at the village Koranic school, where no girls are allowed. He shares a room with several other boys. The beds are basic, some supported by bricks for legs. At six every morning, the boys begin work on the school farm where they learn how to dig, harvest maize, and plow the fields using donkeys. In the afternoon, they study the Koran. In his free time, Lamine likes to play football with his friends.
Jamie, nine, lives with his parents and younger twin brother and sister in a penthouse on 5th Avenue, New York. Jamie goes to a prestigious school and is a good student. In his spare time, he takes judo and goes swimming. He loves to study finance. When he grows up, he wants to become a lawyer like his father.
What would you take with you if your house was on fire? It’s a classic question but have you really thought through the answer?
This is the exact premise of Robert Holden’s intriguing project, titled The Burning House. “It’s a conflict between what’s practical, valuable, and sentimental,” he says. “What you would take reflects your interests, background and priorities. Think of it as an interview condensed into one question.”
David Coggins, New York, Writer
Great Gatsby (1st Ed.), 2 good pens, bottle opener, watch, cigar holder, flask, favorite English suit, cleverley brogues, olch tie, antique casino chip, plastic cowboy, Smythson calendar, calling card.
Artcyclopedia’s tilt-focus photo manipulations of famous Vincent Van Gogh paintings — an effect which they achieved by playing around with both the light in the scene and which areas were in focus. The end result is visually stunning, turning familiar works into miniature worlds filled with tiny, Impressionist-style prisoners, wheat fields, and starry nights. Even with works that we’ve seen thousands of times before (ahem, Starry Night), the details that stand out are different thanks to a slight change in perspective.
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The line is a reference to The Smiths’ song ‘Cemetry Gates’, from their seminal 1986 album ‘The Queen Is Dead’, where Morrissey sings: “Keats and Yeats are on your side/While Wilde is on mine.”
You can tell a lot about a person by looking at his stuff, so, when you ask a group of people born in the ’80s to arrange their possessions into a giant sculpture and pose for a photo in front of it, the result is bound to be revealing. Swedish photographer Sannah Kvist has done just that in All I Own, a small series of images that provides unusual insight into a generation. As a whole, All I Own serves as a reminder of how few things even apparently middle-class 20-somethings actually have.
Dissections of Famous Artists
What makes a brilliant visual artist? Is it something internal, that’s related to a person’s biological makeup? If we were to take someone like Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, or Vincent Van Gogh, slice him down the middle and peer inside, would we able to see something in there that points to his incredible talent?
This ad campaign that DDB Brazil dreamed up for the MASP Art School in São Paulo over on Trendland brings up these questions and more. Each of the aforementioned artists lies dissected on a table, with their appendages pinned down and organs rendered in a way that reflects their signature style.
Is Holden Caulfield Obnoxious?
You already know where you stand on Holden Caulfield. Either you found him a kindred spirit in your youth and continue to sympathize with him—less blindly, more wistfully—as you age; or else you found him a whiner then and you find him a whiner now.
According to the New York Times, the second faction is gaining ground. In an oddly statistics-free trend piece, the paper reported in 2009 that The Catcher in the Rye has lost favor among teens: “what once seemed like courageous truth-telling now strikes many as ‘weird,’ ‘whiny’ and ‘immature.’” (No word on whether any wiseass added “phony.”)
Four Reasons Why it’s a Bad Idea to Date an Artist by Meggin Sanez
Artistic couple gone-wrong example #1: Oscar Wilde and Lord Alfred Douglas.The biggest cause of divorce in the United States today is financial incompatibility. One prime example of financial incompatibility was the relationship between British author and poet, Lord Alfred Douglas, and the writer, Oscar Wilde. The intimate friends and lovers suffered a rocky relationship largely based on the fact that Oscar was making 100 times more than Lord Alfred and spoiled him throughout their time together.
Starry Night (interactive animation) by Petros Vrellis
Yet each man kills the thing he loves
By each let this be heard.
Some do it with a bitter look,
Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss,
The brave man with a sword!
Some kill their love when they are young,
And some when they are old;
Some strangle with the hands of Lust,
Some with the hands of Gold:
The kindest use a knife, because
The dead so soon grow cold.
Some love too little, some too long,
Some sell, and others buy;
Some do the deed with many tears,
And some without a sigh:
For each man kills the thing he loves,
Yet each man does not die.
— Oscar Wilde- The Ballad of Reading Gaol
The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault.
Those who find beautiful meanings in beautiful things are the cultivated. For these there is hope. They are the elect to whom beautiful things mean only beauty.
There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.
The nineteenth century dislike of realism is the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in a glass.
The nineteenth century dislike of romanticism is the rage of Caliban not seeing his own face in a glass. The moral life of man forms part of the subject-matter of the artist, but the morality of art consists in the perfect use of an imperfect medium. No artist desires to prove anything. Even things that are true can be proved. No artist has ethical sympathies. An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style. No artist is ever morbid. The artist can express everything. Thought and language are to the artist instruments of an art. Vice and virtue are to the artist materials for an art. From the point of view of form, the type of all the arts is the art of the musician. From the point of view of feeling, the actor’s craft is the type. All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril. It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself. We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
All art is quite useless."
— Oscar Wilde (Preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray)
