Rob Bell from the Institution of Mechanical Engineers gives us an engineer’s take on these two paintings at the National Gallery. The Institution of Mechanical Engineers was founded in 1847 and has over 100,000 members around the world.
Tag Archives: Art
Arts Preview: ARTFORUM Magazine – March 2024
SALON STYLE
Hurvin Anderson imagines the barbershop
HURVIN ANDERSON’S “BARBERSHOP” series belongs to a long tradition of painterly fascination with the spaces of social interaction that reflect both the physical realities and ideological aspirations of society at large. Anderson’s exhibition “Salon Paintings” at England’s Hastings Contemporary, organized in collaboration with the Hepworth Wakefield, also in England, and Kistefos Museum in Jevnaker, Norway, brings together a body of work he produced between 2006 and 2023 that portrays, albeit in the loosest sense of the word, men’s hair salons.
“Time Travel: Italian Masters Through a Contemporary Lens”
Petzel Gallery | East 67th Street
“Time Travel: Italian Masters Through a Contemporary Lens,” a group exhibition that featured a selection of Renaissance paintings alongside works created by present-day artists, was a type of paragone, except that the debate was not whether painting or sculpture is the superior art form, but whether these historical pieces—executed at a time when grand themes and exquisite craft, among other criteria, determined their value—are better or worse than objects made by artists now, when such antiquated metrics seem well beside the point.
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – March 4, 2024
INSIDE NORTH KOREA’S FORCED-LABOR PROGRAM
Workers sent from the country to Chinese factories describe enduring beatings and sexual abuse, having their wages taken by the state, and being told that if they try to escape they will be “killed without a trace.”
What a Major Solar Storm Could Do to Our Planet
Disturbances on the sun may have the potential to devastate our power grid and communication systems. When the next big storm arrives, will we be prepared for it?
International Art: Apollo Magazine – March 2024
In the studio with… Manuel Mathieu
The Haitian-Canadian artist surrounds himself with unlikely objects to spark his imagination, books about drawing, and about 25 different types of tea
The clockwork marvels that tell a tale of two empires
These timepieces are fluttering, chiming embodiments of how Britain and China traded with each other in the 18th and 19th centuries
Reel life – how Zineb Sedira found herself through film
At the Whitechapel Gallery, the French-Algerian unspools personal and political histories through imitation sets and empty stages
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Feb 26, 2024
Legal Weed in New York Was Going to Be a Revolution. What Happened?
Lawsuits. Unlicensed dispensaries. Corporations pushing to get in. The messy rollout of a law that has tried to deliver social justice with marijuana.
Matt Gaetz’s Chaos Agenda
The Florida Republican is among the most brazen and controversial figures in Donald Trump’s G.O.P. He’s also among the most influential.
Representative Matt Gaetz arrived at the White House in the last days of 2020, amid a gathering national crisis. President Donald Trump had lost his bid for reëlection the previous month, and his allies were exploring strategies to keep him in office. Though only thirty-eight years old, Gaetz, the scion of a political family in Florida’s Panhandle, had become one of the Republican Party’s most prominent and divisive figures. His dark hair styled in a kind of bouffant, his lips often curled in a wry smile, Gaetz bore a resemblance to Elvis Presley, or, in the description of a Florida friend, “either Beavis or Butt-head.” He was quick-witted and sometimes very funny, and he loved to taunt his enemies, who were numerous, especially in his own party. “He’s the most unpopular member of Congress, with the possible exception of Marjorie Taylor Greene, and he doesn’t care,” a fellow-congressman told me.
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine – Feb 12 & 19, 2024
How Nikola Jokić Became the World’s Best Basketball Player
He doesn’t run very fast or jump very high, and seems to prefer the company of horses. But he has mastered the game’s new geometry like nobody else.
The Art World Before and After Thelma Golden
When Golden was a young curator in the nineties, her shows, centering Black artists, were unprecedented. Today, those artists are the stars of the art market.
Baruch Spinoza and the Art of Thinking in Dangerous Times
The philosopher was a champion of political and intellectual freedom, but he had no interest in being a martyr. Instead, he shows us how prudence and boldness can go hand in hand.
By Adam Kirsch
International Art: Apollo Magazine – February 2024
• Holidaying with the Habsburgs
• An interview with Julie Mehretu
• The crisis in Italian museums
• Howard Hodgkin’s Indian miniatures
Plus: Slim pickings for foodies on Valentine’s Day, Parma’s monumental museum complex, and – and reviews of Impressionists on paper, experimental art in the Eastern bloc, and Africa and Byzantium at the Met
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine- February 5, 2024
The Rural Ski Slope Caught Up in an International Scam
A federal program promised to bring foreign investment to remote parts of the country. It soon became rife with fraud.
As the general manager of the Jay Peak ski resort, Bill Stenger rose most days around 6 a.m. and arrived at the slopes before seven. He’d check in with his head snowmaker and the ski-patrol staff, visit the two hotels on the property, and chat with the maintenance workers, the lift operators, the food-and-beverage manager, and the ski-school instructors—a kind of management through constant motion. Stenger is seventy-five, with white hair, wire-rimmed reading glasses, and a sturdy physique that makes him look built for fuzzy sweaters.
The Perverse Policies That Fuel Wildfires
We thought we could master nature, but we were playing with fire.
Ukraine’s Democracy in Darkness
With elections postponed and no end to the war with Russia in sight, Volodymyr Zelensky and his political allies are becoming like the officials they once promised to root out: entrenched.
By Masha Gessen
Previews: The New Yorker Magazine- January 29, 2024
Rules for the Ruling Class
How to thrive in the power élite—while declaring it your enemy
By Evan Osnos
As a young man in the nineteen-eighties, Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson set out to claim his stake in the establishment. His access to money and influence started at home. His stepmother, Patricia, was an heir to the Swanson frozen-food fortune. His father, Dick, was a California TV anchor who became a Washington fixture after a stint in the Reagan Administration. For fortunate clans like the Carlsons, it was “A Wonderful Time,” to borrow the title of a volume of contemporaneous portraits of “the life of America’s elite,” which included “the Cabots sailing off Boston’s North Shore, and Barry Goldwater on the range in Arizona.”
Sofia Coppola’s Path to Filming Gilded Adolescence
There are few Hollywood families in which one famous director has spawned another. Coppola says, “It’s not easy for anyone in this business, even though it looks easy for me.”
By Rachel Syme
When Eleanor Coppola went into labor with her third child, on May 14, 1971, at a hospital in Manhattan, her husband, the director Francis Ford Coppola, was on location in Harlem, shooting a scene for “The Godfather.” Hearing the news, he grabbed a camcorder from the set and raced over to capture the moment. “When they say, ‘It’s a girl,’ my dad gasps and nearly drops the camera,” Sofia Coppola told me recently, of her birth video. “My mom is there, just trying to focus.” The footage—which has been screened by the family multiple times over the years, and as part of a feminist art installation designed by Eleanor—was the first of many instances in which Sofia would be seen through her father’s lens. When she was just a few months old, Francis cast her in her first official film role, as the infant in the dénouement of “The Godfather,” in which Michael Corleone, the ascendant boss of the Corleone crime family, anoints the head of his newborn nephew as his associates murder rival gangsters one by one.
Museum Tour: ‘European Paintings – 1300 To 1800’ At The Met In New York City
The reconfigured galleries highlight fresh narratives and dialogues among more than 700 works of art from the Museum’s world-famous holdings, which include recently acquired paintings and prestigious loans, as well as select sculptures and decorative art, showcase the interconnectedness of cultures, materials, and moments across The Met collection.
Boomers Daily 