Kurt Vonnegut on the Shapes of Stories and Good News vs. Bad News “The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.” This season has been ripe with Kurt Vonnegut releases, from the highly anticipated collection of his letters to his first and last works introduced by his daughter, shedding new light on the beloved author both as a complex character and a masterful storyteller. All the recent excitement reminded me of an old favorite, in which Vonnegut maps out the shapes of stories, with equal parts irreverence and perceptive insight, along the “G-I axis” of Good Fortune and Ill Fortune and the “B-E axis” of Beginning and Entropy. Though the video ends after Cinderella, in A Man Without a Country Vonnegut goes on to sketch out a fourth plot, that of a typical Kafka story: He then moves on to Hamlet, delivering his signature blend of literary brilliance and existential philosophy: The question is, does this system I’ve devised help us in the evaluation of literature?
Can You Hate the Artist but Love the Art? - NYTimes.com mptvimages.comMarlon Brando and Eva Marie Saint in “On the Waterfront.” The Issue Last Wednesday Budd Schulberg died at 95. The Argument The work stands alone. And yet. The contracts of big-time actors and athletes often include a morals clause, less an expression of principled concern for the virtue of the performer than economic concern for the psychology of the audience: many fans won’t pay to see a miscreant perform. Call it the Woody Allen Quandary. Allen has appeared in many of his movies, often as a character apparently based on himself, making it even harder to disassociate the artist and the art. Unless you were eager to date Woody Allen or pal around with Budd Schulberg, why would you care what they were like as people? It’s hard to be a good person; it’s hard to produce great work. Peter Shaffer poses a version of this perplexing question in his play and screenplay ‘‘Amadeus’’: can a bad man make great art? Maybe the evil that men do is interred with their bones.
Breve teoría del autorretrato en la era del “selfie” Hace unos días, Darth Vader publicó su primera selfie en Instagram. Este hecho, en apariencia sólo publicitario (la imagen inaugura la cuenta oficial de Star Wars en dicha red), nos hace pensar que las redes sociales nos están haciendo revisitar el pasado y reconfigurarlo de alguna forma: una foto de Paul McCartney de sí mismo ya no es un autorretrato, sino una selfie. Incluso la palabra selfie tiene implicaciones peculiares: se trata de la contracción de self-portrait, el retrato de sí mismo que los artistas han hecho durante siglos. El autorretrato era no sólo un género en pintura, sino una visión de cómo el artista se veía a sí mismo a través del filtro de su arte. No entraremos a discutir el aura benjamineana perdida o recuperada a través de las selfies (daría para un par de tesis doctorales); en cambio, sería buen momento para reflexionar acerca de un par de elementos que hacen de la selfie una expresión propia de nuestros días en el ecosistema web. -Así es como me veo a mí mism@.
‘Forrest Bess’ Gets Personal at the Neuberger Museum Photo PURCHASE, N.Y. — The small but potent paintings of Forrest Bess respond to the art world’s “either-ors” with a resounding “and.” Without resorting to big stretches of canvas or brash gestures, they merge inner and outer worlds, abstraction and representation, and ideas of masculinity and femininity. To a market still intent on labeling “insiders” and “outsiders,” they offer the conundrum of an artist who showed at the Betty Parsons Gallery in New York in the 1950s, alongside Rothko and Pollock, but made his living as a bait fisherman in Bay City, Tex. “Forrest Bess: Seeing Things Invisible,” at the Neuberger Museum of Art here, embraces his life and work in its sometimes messy totality. This holistic show comes to the Neuberger from the Menil Collection in Houston, where it was seen last spring and summer. It can be difficult to look closely at the art without getting sidetracked by the extraordinary details of Bess’s life. His color sense has a similar effect.
How Facebook Changed What it Means to 'Like' First Posted: Jan 28, 2014 11:42 PM EST The “like” is the predominant gesture on social media, whether you’re sticking to Facebook or shifting to Instagram. It may even be the most common gesture among humans nowadays. Like Us on Facebook By Vincent F. Depending on the context, a “like” may indicate sympathy, respect, encouragement, acknowledgement or recognition, all of which have a positive or at least neutral connotation. This is because many social networks don’t give an option for noting that you’ve registered something but don’t actually like it. In real life we have options. (Photo : Flickr.com/rutty) A “like” or an upvote may be a simple and efficient way to share content between users. To complicate things further, pages where users gather to celebrate misogynist humour, or an interest group united by their predilection for decapitations have had many “likes” or upvotes. When likes aggregate We can use this as a lesson in our online life. Vincent F.
Does Great Literature Make Us Better People? The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless. You agree with me, I expect, that exposure to challenging works of literary fiction is good for us. That’s one reason we deplore the dumbing-down of the school curriculum and the rise of the Internet and its hyperlink culture. Perhaps we don’t all read very much that we would count as great literature, but we’re apt to feel guilty about not doing so, seeing it as one of the ways we fall short of excellence. If someone now asks you for evidence for this view, I expect you will have one or both of the following reactions. What sort of evidence could we present? There is scant evidence that reading great literature morally improves us. I hope no one is going to push this line very hard. We are poor at knowing why we make the choices we do, and we fail to recognize the tiny changes in circumstances that can shift us from one choice to another. Tucker Nichols
Este podría ser el rostro del ser humano dentro de 100 mil años El rostro humano en la actualidad. Show captions Showing image 1 of 4 La evolución no es tal sin adaptación, o al menos esa fue la gran premisa revolucionaria con que Darwin sorprendió al mundo. Esto se cumple en todas las especies, según la teoría de la selección natural, y el ser humano no ha sido la excepción. Dicha pregunta también se la planteó el investigador y artista Nickolay Lamm, quien en colaboración con Alan Kwan, genetista computacional, quiso responder cómo será el rostro del ser humano dentro de 20 mil, 60 mil y 100 mil años. Como se ve, Lamm aventura que la transformación más notable ocurrirá en los ojos. De acuerdo con Kwan, la frente del ser humano también ganará en tamaño, siguiendo la tendencia observada ya al comparar cráneos actuales con los de personas de los siglos XIV y XVI: facciones menores pero frentes más amplias que dan cabida a un cerebro de dimensiones mayores. [Yahoo]
How visualising data has changed life… and saved lives Big data, infographics, visualisations – the pop words of a modern phenomenon. But while information accumulation has become a 21st-century obsession, our generation is not the first to discover that a picture is worth a thousand words, as a new British Library exhibition will reveal. Revelling in the power of illustrations, tables and figures, Beautiful Science charts the course of data dissemination across the centuries, from the grim ledgers of death recorded by John Graunt in the 17th-century "bills of mortality" to the digital evolutionary tree dreamt up by an Imperial College researcher, complete with a mind-boggling zoomable function. "You can use almost fractal-like patterns to explore all of life on Earth," says Dr Johanna Kieniewicz, lead exhibition curator. But diagrams can also be agents of change. And other vivid illustrations are also on show. From scientists to consumers, there's no escaping the onward march of big data.
¿Una ciencia ficción capaz de crear el futuro? Uno de los autores de ciencia ficción más reconocidos de los últimos tiempos, Neal Stephenson, ha hecho un reciente llamado a generar una ciencia ficción más optimista, que vaya más allá de los recurrentes escenarios apocalípticos y las distopias deletéreas que dominan el género, para imaginar las futuras grandes empresas del hombre y dilucidar posibles soluciones al predicamento existencial. Stephenson incluso ha creado el proyecto Hieroglyph cuyo fin es estimular la creación de obras de sci-fi que avancen en esta vertiente, con la esperanza de ver nuevos Julio Verne. La propuesta de Stephenson puede resultar un tanto ingenua desde el punto de vista del gran arte, el cual supuestamente no acepta ninguna limitante o constricción además de su propia naturaleza e inquietud –y si estos escenarios decadentes y cataclísmicos permean es porque esto es lo que atañe al intelecto actualmente, esto es lo que transmite el mundo para ser reproducido en el gran espejo de la mente.
Why Conflict Makes For Better Design | Co.Design | business + innovation + design “The most important ability that a designer can bring to his work," Victor Papanek wrote in his seminal book, Design for the Real World, "is the ability to recognize, isolate, define, and solve problems." The seventh edition of the Design Triennial, happening now in Flanders, takes a cue from Papanek and features the work of designers-as-problem solvers with the exhibition “Conflict and Design." It includes over 60 design concepts, projects, and processes that investigate how good design can make the world a better place. The work is “not innovation for the sake of innovation," according to curator Kurt Vanbelleghem, "but rather design with a clear social-societal objective: creating a better living, social, and working climate.” “The objective was to use a design intervention to promote simple but meaningful encounters with people who live close to each other,” designer Anna van Oppen said in her artist statement.
Las frecuencias cerebrales y los estados de conciencia que las caracterizan El autoconocimiento podría ser la más lúcida herramienta existencial a nuestra disposición. El famoso adagio de Sócrates, “Conócete a ti mismo”, bien podría sintetizar la respuesta a cualquier pregunta posible que surja a lo largo de nuestras vidas. Es por eso que entre más familiarizado estás contigo mismo y con lo que sucede en tu interior dentro de los incontables planos que te conforman, probablemente estarás más cerca de alcanzar tu fin ‘máximo’ –generalmente asociado a la felicidad, la plenitud, o la paz interior. Y en este sentido, si aún no lo has hecho, tal vez sea buen momento de encontrarte con las frecuencias que oscilan en tu cerebro. Las frecuencias cerebrales se refieren a los patrones de oscilaciones neurales que se registran dentro del sistema nervioso central. Beta (12-30Hz) Es la frecuencia más común en el cerebro de un adulto promedio mientras está despierto. Alpha (7.5-12Hz) Theta (4-7.5Hz) Delta (0.5-4Hz) Conociendo las frecuencias
Is this the Jurassic Park of the art world or a protected gene-pool for the future? Analysis United Kingdom Traditional figurative art still rules in many Eastern European art academies, but talent still shines through By Simon Hewitt. The great hall of the St Petersburg Repin art academy Nothing ever surprises me in Russia. The St Petersburg academy, founded in 1757, occupies a grandiose, appealingly musty Neo-Classical palace by the Neva River. The academy’s ebullient rector, Semyon Mikhailovsky, seldom without a cigarette in his mouth or a witticism up his sleeve, believes “we are required to pass down the skills our ancestors taught us” as “today’s generation is too concerned with concepts and means of expression”. As a former consultant to the Solomon R. Mikhailovsky was elected rector of the academy he calls “my home” in 2010. Not everyone in St Petersburg shares Mikhailovsky’s enthusiasm. The Repin’s sister establishment in Moscow was only founded in 1939, and given its current name in 1948. Traditional art also continues to thrive down in the Balkans. Email* Name*
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