Arts & Humanities

Laughing in the art museum

By Cynthia Freeland
Art museums are not churches, but sometimes it feels as if you should behave with equal decorum inside. They seem meant to inspire reverence with their cool interiors and marble staircases. The guards eye visitors like the suspicious librarians of my childhood who always hissed “Whisper!” to noisy school groups. I once was glared at by another visitor when I burst out laughing in the Tate Modern Museum at Andy Warhol’s silver Elvis with guns. The combination of the Southern crooner posing as a macho gun-slinging cowboy with Warhol’s glitzy treatment was just too funny. I wanted to tell that woman she was missing the joke.

Ghost hunting: Research memories of Tessa Verney Wheeler

By Lydia Carr
The path of the biographer is littered with terrors. Few, to be fair, match the risks listed on the fieldwork forms put out by various Institutes of Archaeology, those exhaustive documents intended to pinpoint every potential danger (and indemnify the sponsoring department against paying for more than a reasonable number of snakebite treatments). But as I’ve often said, biographic research, at least regarding twentieth-century subjects, resembles nothing as much as the first five minutes of a Doctor Who episode, or the last five pages of a M.R. James story.

Happy Birthday, Christian Lacroix

By Hollie Graham
On the May 16th, it will be French designer Christian Lacroix’s 61st birthday. Lacroix has been a leading fashion designer ever since he found fame with his collection for Patou in 1986. Heavily influenced by his interests in costume design and his childhood in the south of France, his signature style is bright, embellished and fantastical. It was this 1986 collection in which his star quality was realised, as Lacroix was awarded the Golden Thimble award for his outstanding and inspirational designs.

How did Rome last so long?

By Greg Woolf
Edward Gibbon, the English historian dedicated to the study of the Roman Empire, chose to entitle his seminal masterpiece The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire because for him, as for others at the end of the eighteenth century, it was decline and fall that was the real puzzle. Yet our question today is not ‘why did it fall?’ but ‘why did it last so long?’

Twelve Crucial Moments in Hip-Hop DJ History

By Mark Katz

I covered nearly forty years in the history of an art form — from its birth in the early 1970s to the latest technological developments — in my new book, Groove Music: The Art and Culture of the Hip-Hop DJ. I wanted to highlight some of the most important events in that rich history and for your to enjoy the accompanying sights and sounds.

Anti-psychiatry in A Clockwork Orange

By Edward Shorter and Susan Bélanger
In the fifty years since the publication of A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess’s dystopian fable remains by far the best-known of his more than 60 books. It also remains controversial and widely misunderstood: assailed for inciting adolescent violence (especially following Stanley Kubrick’s explicit 1971 film adaptation) or viewed as an anti-psychiatry treatise for presenting behavioural conditioning as an instrument of social control. But this aspect of the book needs to be seen within a broader context.

Clair de supermoon

By Jessica Barbour

May 12th, which falls exactly one week after last Saturday’s Supermoon, marks the 167th birthday of Gabriel Fauré (1845–1924), a composer whose best-known song was inspired by the moon. Fauré is known today as the paramount composer of the French mélodie, and his setting of the poem Clair de lune (“Moonlight”) by Paul Verlaine (1844–1896) demonstrates why his works are beloved by pianists and singers alike.

Happy Birthday, Irving Berlin

To commemorate the birthday of the great American songwriter, Irving Berlin, we spoke with Jeffrey Magee, author of Irving Berlin’s American Musical Theater.

How to make a transmedia documentary: three takeaways

By Patricia Aufderheide
What happens to documentary when media goes interactive? It’s not always a welcome question. Documentarians aren’t necessarily thrilled at the idea of someone poking at their precious work on a smartphone, rather than settling into a seat at a theater or on a couch. But they’re going to have to get used to it. Media users want to do more than just watch these days.

The Money Games

By David Potter
This past weekend Olympic superstar swimmer Janet Evans showed up in New York in the company of Olympic sponsor BMW. The London Olympics are unthinkable without their corporate sponsors, both for the site itself and for the teams that are going to compete. But what would a person connected with the ancient version of the Games think?

‘The Unholy Mrs Knight’ and the BBC

By Callum Brown
In 1955 Margaret Knight became the most hated woman in Britain. She was vilified and demonised in virtually every British newspaper, and thousands of letters attacking her were sent by ordinary Britons to the BBC, to the papers and to her personally. Parents wrote fearing for the safety of their children, bishops and priests criticised her impudence, whilst well-known authors like Dorothy L Sayers castigated her ignorance. Hounded by journalists and pursued by photographers, the smiling image of Mrs Knight in her ‘Sunday-best hat’ and coat appeared in most newspapers. She was the nation’s number one ‘folk devil’ of 1955.

Timeliness, timelessness, and the boy with no birthdays

By Geraldine McCaughrean

By Geraldine McCaughrean
As Captain Scott sat in his tent in the Antarctic in 1912, pinioned between the dead bodies of Birdie and Uncle Bill, he wrote countless valedictory notes to people he would never see again, in places half a world away.  One was to the godfather of his son, expressing his love and admiration for the man and asking him to look after the boy.  A hundred years ago that letter was lying unread in the death tent.  But eventually, of course, it was delivered – to J. M. Barrie, foremost playwright and author of his day.

The Beatles Get a Second Chance, 9 May 1962

By Gordon Thompson
On this spring morning fifty years ago, Brian Epstein climbed the front steps and passed through the simple entrance of the EMI Recording Studios in St. John’s Wood, London, placing him on the other side of the looking glass. As a retailer, he had sold recordings made in these studios by Sir Edward Elgar, Sir Thomas Beecham, and, more recently, Cliff Richard and the Shadows. The neophyte manager of the Beatles now eagerly anticipated the possibility of watching through the control room window as his “boys” joined that exclusive club.

Sisters in their finest moments

Carole Garibaldi Rogers
Oral histories of American Catholic women religious repeatedly reveal courageous steps out from traditional roles into ministries that serve the poor and marginalized. They also illuminate historical trends in both the church and society.

Martha Graham Redivivus

By Mark Franko
Martha Graham’s work was prominent in the New York dance world of the 1930s in the wake of her innovative Primitive Mysteries (1931). Yet, her reputation grew exponentially beyond the confines of dance and the New York art world after the premiere of American Document (1938) followed by its national tour in 1939. This is, paradoxically, a work that the Martha Graham Dance Company may be reluctant to perform today in a version close to the original. It was related to the political issues of the day, highly anti-fascist and popular front, and critical of the history of the United States. Graham’s national reputation took hold at this time, and she was noted not only for her choreography and dancing but also for her political stance in the pre-war moment.

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony premieres

This Day in World History
Back to the audience, facing the orchestra, the composer steadily marked the tempo with his hands. He was not conducting, though — he was deaf. Thus it was that, when the orchestra and chorus finished, he could not hear the applause and cheers of the Vienna audience. When a musician turned him around so he could see the joy on listeners’ faces, Ludwig von Beethoven bowed in gratitude — and wept.