Sunday 12 December 2021
card catalogue
catagories: ๐ฌ, ๐ญ, ๐ด๓ ง๓ ข๓ ณ๓ ฃ๓ ด๓ ฟ, ๐ฆธ, libraries and museums
Sunday 7 November 2021
facce di bronzo
Via the always superb Everlasting Blรถrt, we are not only introduced to the sensational discovery of the so-called Riace bronzes in the early 1970s but how the Italian mayor of the namesake town is planning a museum and further excavations on the fiftieth anniversary of their recovery from the waves off the Calabrian coast to see if there are more Greek warrior statues yet to be uncovered. Made in the fifth century BCE using the lost wax casting technique are among the few surviving examples of Greek artistry, most being melted down, and were found by accident by a snooping chemist called Stefano Mariottini in 1972 and are conjectured to be either anonymous Delphic soldiers as part of an ensemble monument to the Battle of Marathon or possibly as depictions of Erechtheus, foster son of Athena and legendary king of Athens, and Eumolpus, son of Poseidon and inventor of viticulture.
Tuesday 2 November 2021
in the stacks
Prising important insights into the professions of curation, conservation and circulation, a storage facility in Rotterdam is opening its doors to visitors to allow them to peruse the museum’s entire collection, the ninety percent of the art and artefacts that their formerly public-facing galleries could not accommodate, we discover via a thematic round-up from Messy Nessy Chic. We really liked this idea to invite guests behind the scenes and hope that this sort of programme expands.
catagories: ๐ณ๐ฑ, libraries and museums
Tuesday 26 October 2021
7x7
in the stacks: museum curators uncover what may be the oldest depiction of a ghost on an ancient Mesopotamian tablet
1928 porter: a look at the 1965 short-lived sitcom (see also) My Mother the Car this climate does not exist: visualisations of one’s neighbourhood under the climate crisis from Nag on the Lakeev: more outstandingly odd electric vehicles from the on-line market Alibaba—via Things Magazine
reasonable person: “a moron in a hurry” is codified in Anglophone legal statute—via the New Shelton wet/dry
graphics processing unit: glitch art in medical imaging—via Waxy
don’t go wasting your emotion: the ABBA classic, as performed by a vampire—via Everlasting Blรถrt
Thursday 7 October 2021
cyrus charter
Though in possession of the British Museum, the ancient clay cylinder bearing the declaration of king Cyrus the Great, outlining his genealogy and conquest of Babylonia as favourite of the god Marduk and documentation of the end of exile of the Jewish people and allowing them to resettle within the empire was loaned to Tehran on this day in 1971 for a period of sixteen days for the gala celebration of the two-thousand-five-hundredth anniversary of the founding of Persia—see previously, beginning mid-month ten days later. The artefact recovered in 1829 (in Mesopotamia, in modern day Iraq) is considered by many historians as the pioneering attempt to administer and multicultural state with universal human rights and was made the official symbol of Iran in absentia.
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ง, ✡️, ๐บ, 1971, libraries and museums, Middle East
Sunday 19 September 2021
make it another old-fashioned please
Thursday 16 September 2021
ivy league
Alumnus of the University of Cambridge and serving as an English minister of Colonial America John Harvard (*1607) made his deathbed bequest on this day in 1638 that his estate go to the “schoale or Colledge founded two years past by the Massachusetts Bay Colony” with the institution so gracious in receiving it, it was so ordered that “the Colledge agreed upon formerly to bee built at Cambridg shallbee called Harvard Colledge.” The clergyman left the university a personal library of around four hundred volumes (since grown into one of the largest academic library systems in the world) and seven hundred seventy-nine pounds sterling—now an endowment in the tens of billions. The school’s corporate charter was to train a literate Puritan ministry but offered a classic, core curriculum based on the English model.
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐บ๐ธ, ๐, libraries and museums
Monday 6 September 2021
ฤlea iacta est
Via the ever excellent Everlasting Blรถrt, we are directed to this pair of Roman anthropomorphic dice, silver squatting figurines weighted (equitably presumably) to fall in one of six (tesserae, though usually in games in the Empire tossed in threes) positions.
The above phrase attributed to Julius Caesar by the historian Suetonius when the general brought his provincial army into the capital is like other quotations a likely translation from the Greek borrowing from the humorist Menander, «แผฮฝฮตฯฯฮฏฯฮธฯ ฮบฯฮฒฮฟฯ», let a die be cast in either form the phrase meaning metaphorically reaching a point of no return from whose juncture the decisions are irreversible.
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ท, ๐ฎ๐น, ๐ฒ, ๐, libraries and museums
6x6
circumhorizon arc: a rare Fire Rainbow photographed—via TYWKIWDBI
mars & beyond: Walt Disney’s robot pal Garco takes us on a speculative journey in search of extraterrestrial liferip: legendary NBC weather man Willard Scott has passed away, aged eighty-seven
escape artist: immersive exhibits speak to our communal sensory experience
valley of the dolls: Peerless Playthings pretend pills
cloudspotting: the World Meteorological Organisation added aspertias as a supplementary feature in 2017 Cloud Atlas—see also
Tuesday 17 August 2021
7x7
lowering the bar: a trial lawyer’s endorsement in a whiskey ad illustrates by-gone regulatory period in the US
blotter art: an LSD museum in San Francisco
spraycation: Banksy works appear at UK seaside towns Great Yarmouth and Lowestoft
middle-age spread: comprehensive study finds metabolism stable throughout life and crashes after sixty—via the New Shelton Wet / Dry
bureau of land management: a celebration of the striking landscape photography of Bob Wick
o’zbekiston line: a tour of Tashkent’s underground galleries—see also
kriegswaffenkontrollgesetz: gentleman outside of Kiel fined for unregistered Panzer
Thursday 12 August 2021
the matter of facts
Via the always brilliant Nag on the Lake, we are directed to installation above the reception area of the Tokyo National Art Centre of ephemera curated by an architectural studio consisting of fliers, brochures and other promotional material of events, art exhibits, trade shows, concerts, conventions, that were cancelled or delayed due to the pandemic over the past eighteen months that aims to commemorate the city and its many venues by making it a part of collective memory and the shared experience. More to explore at the links above.
catagories: ⚕️, ๐ฏ๐ต, libraries and museums
Tuesday 10 August 2021
journรฉe du 10 aoรปt
Symbolically, a year to the day after storming of the Tuileries Palace during which the Nation Guard of the Paris commune and confederates from Marseille and Brittany overpowered a detachment of Swiss Guards and took Louis XVI and the royal family into custody, the pivotal event that eventually led to the declaration of a republic, the adjacent Musรฉe du Louvre was officially opened in 1793. Fortified in the late twelfth century to rebuff attacks from on the western side of the city by English Normandy, the name of the palace may be derived from an ancient wolf hunting lodge (lupus, lupara) originally on that site. In 1846, the US Congress charters the Smithsonian Institution (previously), after its benefactor and namesake English mineralogist James Smithson of the Royal Society, dying without an heir, bequeaths an endowment of half a million dollars. By dint of another coincidence, another grand institution of Europe, the Natural History Museum of Vienna (as das k. u. k.—kaiserlich und kรถniglich—Hof-Naturalienkabinette) held its official opening ceremony on this day as well in 1865, sourced from the personally acquisitions of the Double Monarchy, by Emperor Franz Joseph I.
Wednesday 4 August 2021
dama de elche
Discovered just south of the eponymous private estate on this day in 1897, the intricate limestone bust known as the Lady of Elx is a fourth or fifth century BC Punic-Iberian artefact depicting the Carthage goddess Tanit, the equivalent of Astarte—Romanised as Juno Caelestis. Possibly used as a funerary urn, the originally sculpture would have been polychromed and the coils of her elaborate headdress are called rodetes and once featured on the one peseta bank note.
catagories: ⚰️, ๐ช๐ธ, ๐บ, libraries and museums
Monday 26 July 2021
alternative work site
In a rollicking, wide-ranging look at the precedents for the creator economy in correspondence course—notably of our scribe stenographer Sir Isaac Pitman—and the move that originally tethered us to office space, sourced to in the Uffizi in Florence, where bureaucracy and administration were centralised in 1560 as a cadet branch of the Renaissance and Enlightenment, now a world-class gallery gifted to the city after the Medici line died out.
Afforded the opportunity to work remotely and knowing arguments for compelling staff to return are specious at best—synergy and presence packaged as the benefits we are missing out on away from colleagues I think are the opaque justifications for accountability and the passkeys of those supervisors who like to play house at the office because they’re denied it at home, the informing past is an interesting and advisable lens to re-evaluate custom and workplace culture as crisis and contingency hopefully begin to ebb. Technological advance can be regressive in its demands and requirements to fill the time. Much more to explore and contemplate at Tedium at the link up top.
catagories: ๐, ๐ก, labour, libraries and museums
Saturday 24 July 2021
you know it when you see it
An internet smut purveyor, we are informed by Web Curios and Hyperallergic, has gone quite highbrow to highlight the classical stashes of the world’s museums, because while not all pornography is to be considered art, some works of art can definitely be considered as porn.
catagories: ๐, ๐จ, libraries and museums
Wednesday 21 July 2021
ns savannah
Though following the first civil application of nuclear-power for civil maritime purposes after the atomic-fueled ice-breaker Lenin (see also), the first cargo and passenger liner, a flagship for the US president’s “Atoms for Peace” initiative (see previously), was launched on this day in 1959 by First Lady Mamie Eisenhower. With several educational ports of call in US coastal cities, the vessel was a demonstration project on the safe and responsible harnessing of nuclear energy, including exhibits on the preservation of food through irradiation, x-rays and other medical diagnostics and other emerging technologies—like the microwave oven, and had the state rooms and galley and the other amenities of a regular cruise ship with swimming pool, promenade deck and lounge all decked out with Atomic Age styling.
In 1964, the ship crossed the Atlantic for the first time, stopping in Southampton, Dublin, Bremerhaven, Hamburg and Rotterdam on an international good will tour. Ultimately decommissioned in 1971, the Savannah is now a museum ship moored at Pier 13 in Baltimore, Maryland and can be visited by the public.
catagories: ⚛️, ๐ข, libraries and museums
Tuesday 6 July 2021
a bird, a young lark—lifting the sky as it took flight
Via It’s Nice That, we discover a retrospective exhibit at the Tate aims to correct a curatorial and conversational miscarriage in art history that left the contributions and influence of Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp (previously) to the Dada and Modernism movements by showing her due recognition. Much more on the artist’s media, works and career at the links above.
catagories: ๐จ๐ญ, ๐จ, ๐งถ, libraries and museums
Monday 28 June 2021
heavy-line geometric abugida
catagories: ๐ฃ, ๐, libraries and museums
Sunday 27 June 2021
8x8
into the bantaverse: a bot ghost-writes a Star Wars story—see also
green guerrillas: the role that radical gardeners play in fostering community out of urban blight
earth, wind and fire: combine basic elements and create new substancesas an alchemist—via Waxy fourth world: celebrating the life and career of trumpeter and electronic music pioneer Jon Hassell (*1937)in frame: see the untrimmed, original version of Rembrandt’s Night Watch (previously) thanks to the help of a curating algorithm
homo longi: recently discovered ‘dragon man’ skull may be a transitional species from Neanderthal to modern humans
ine bay: hidden, historic boathouses (ไผๆ นใฎ่ๅฑ, funaya) in Kyoto—via Nag on the Lake’s always excellent Sunday Links
the skeleton crew: our friendly artificial intelligencer (previously) trains a neural network to write a horror story
Tuesday 15 June 2021
journal de bord
Our fellow peripatetic internet caretaker Messy Nessy Chic turns us on to a mysterious notebook of outsider art (Art Brรปt, see previously here and here) that is the only artefact of the creator and contains all that is known (see also) about Jean Fick (*1876) with a decontexualised autobiography and unclear vocation whether he is the Ambassador of or to God. There’s no indication of what the brilliant colours and patterns might symbolise. Though with no more provenance attached to where or how it was found, the notebook rose to prominence after being featured in a special exhibition by the American Folk Art Museum in 2018.
« FICK JEAN NEE 23.11.1876 — HOPITAL — SOLDAT. 13.10.1898 — 13.9.1900 — RM 57 — WESE GUERRE 9.14 — 4.8.1.4.1917.7. SANTE BLESSE – INVALIDE FICK J MARIAGE DELESSE MARI. MODES 29.4.1902 HOPITAL NEE 8.9.1874. FICK ALISE 24.2.1903. MARIE. A. 1.2.1904. JEAN. K. 22.05. MAGU. 11.6.10 ». Sur la couverture : « Jean Fick ambassadeur mondieu N.23 ».“FICK JEAN BORN 23.11.1876 – HOSPITAL – SOLDIER. 13.10.1898 – 13.9.1900 – RM 57 – WESE WAR 9.14 – 4.8.1.4.1917.7. HEALTH INJURED – INVALID FICK J MARRIAGE ABANDONED HUSBAND . MODES 29.4.1902 HOSPITAL BORN 8.9.1874. FICK ALISE 24.2.1903. MARRIED. A. 1.2.1904. JEAN. K. 22.05. MAGU. 11.6.10”. On the cover: “Jean Fick my God/world [mondieu] ambassador N. 23.”
catagories: ๐ซ๐ท, ๐จ, libraries and museums