General Art & Architecture of Interest

kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

When Art Goes Global, It Loses Something

Post by kmaherali »

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A couple months ago I realized I had written nearly 50 editions of this newsletter and began thinking about what, exactly, I was doing with all these words. The ensuing conversation with myself wasn’t particularly deep and never fringed on anything existential, but it did inspire me to buy a lot of books from famous newspaper columnists of the past.

I was particularly taken by the work of Mike Royko, the Chicago newspaper columnist. During a 33-year run for three papers, Royko created a language deeply rooted in local familiarity and peppered with dialect from all the city’s ethnic enclaves. In his early work, Royko presented his fellow Chicagoans in sketches: Here were the wiseguys, the truckers, the police and the hypocritical politicians, in about 800 words or less. This efficiency came from his confidence that the reader could follow along with the references to State Street department stores, the “Puerto Rican neighborhood” and the way Chicagoans walk in the cold.

It’s hard to find such familiar writing these days. Newspapers have been gutted and most media is crafted to generate clicks from across the globe. This newsletter, for example, is written in my basement in California under the banner of a New York newspaper and reaches readers in India, Australia and South Korea — really, anywhere there is internet service.

This range of readers requires quite a bit of exposition on my part — nearly everything and everyone needs to be introduced. These conditions make it difficult to replicate a tone like Royko’s. If I have any general critique of myself and many of my colleagues who write opinion pieces for a living, it would be that the form tends to be a bit pedantic these days. This, I believe, comes from the fact that we don’t really know our audience in the same way Royko knew his. And so, we are constantly explaining ourselves to you.

I am not arguing that we need a return to local sensibilities or even that they have disappeared from society at large. I am only concerned here with style and how concurrent shifts in other mediums from mostly local to national or global are changing what we read, hear and watch.

Here’s an example: Just a short bike ride from where I live in Berkeley there is a squat red brick building with narrow slit windows and a flat, beige roof. I have no idea who designed this thing, but it looks like an overly imaginative child began building a model for a prison and then lost interest after the first floor. In the 1980s and ’90s, this spot at 924 Gilman Street became a venue for East Bay punk bands like Operation Ivy, Rancid and, most famously, Green Day. The building, which was once in an industrial row, is now in the process of being swallowed up by an outgrowth of national chains like Whole Foods, REI, and Office Depot. Bands still play there, but it’s harder to find these spaces where kids who grew up together, played in the same school orchestra or even skated at the same park end up in a band.

The people who will make the art of the next generation now find one another online and can collaborate from their bedrooms, which can make for better, or at the very least, more finely curated work. If, for example, you have only five kids in your high school who play the drums and each one is bad in his own way, chances are your band is going to have a bad rhythm section.

This isn’t a problem online — you will either find a suitable drummer or you will just use a drum machine. Your music may sound better and you might find a larger audience, but you’ve also replaced the community of the place where you live — with all its boredom and angst — with the community of what you like. The latter will always have an abstract quality because it’s not rooted in the particulars of a place.

Scenes like the ’80s California punk scene still exist, but they’re largely organized by specific aesthetic sensibilities. During the pandemic, my daughter and I got into magic tricks. At bedtime, we spend a lot of time watching videos of old magicians and read various message boards about them. The language in these spaces is all shorthand and referential. If you don’t know who Dai Vernon was or if you’re unfamiliar with how to deal from the bottom of a deck of cards, you will have no real way of following along. These types of online communities have existed for years, but they now have become so ubiquitous that they have replaced much of the ways in which people identify themselves, especially socially.

In journalism, the one space that receives sustained, local-style coverage is Twitter. If you think of Twitter as a place with its own myopic concerns, dialect and set of infamous characters that only matter there and nowhere else, it fulfills most of the characteristics of a small town. The coverage of what happens on Twitter, which, at times, feels like it makes up about a quarter of the words in every magazine, website or newspaper, generally skips over the long, explainer-y way we tend to write about pretty much everything else.

This situation also bleeds over into other aspects of the industry. I know many more colleagues “from Twitter” than I do from, say, a local journalist hangout for the very simple fact that I, like many reporters under 50 years old, never worked for a local newspaper.

Here’s where I’m supposed to say that all this is fine and just the way things are done now. But I hope you’ll allow me a little bit of crankiness because I do think that there has been something lost in the transfer between Royko’s localism and the parochialism of Twitter, just as music has suffered from the diffusion and then reorganizing of scenes from physical places to online.

For years when I was a teenager, my hometown, Chapel Hill, N.C., was supposed to become “the next Seattle.” Bands like Superchunk, Polvo and the Archers of Loaf all played a venue called the Cat’s Cradle and evinced a sound that felt like it represented a type of slacker Southern intellectualism and counterculture that was rooted in everything from the local barbecue to the anarchist bookstore downtown. This slacker spirit is still in me; my identification with Chapel Hill is grounded in this music, which I didn’t even particularly like at the time but understood was part of where I was from.

Art is simply better when it comes out of these lived contexts. It matters, for example, that Mavis Staples, Lou Rawls and Sam Cooke all went to the same elementary school in the South Side of Chicago and that many of their classmates came from families who carried Southern musical traditions up north during the Great Migration. It also matters that they grew up in the shadow of Mahalia Jackson, who they could see perform in a nearby church.

When things are that specific and need little to no introduction, they feel alive and relevant in ways that transcend the local contexts in which they were created. I know nothing about Chicago’s neighborhoods, nor do I have much nostalgia for the 1970s and 1980s when Royko was working. But when I read his old columns, I feel an odd, and arguably misplaced, intimacy with both him, the writer and his city. I care because he cared enough not to try to cater and optimize every word toward the biggest audience possible.

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/25/opin ... nion-today
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Beethoven's 9th Symphony 4th Movement "Ode To Joy" With Lyrics & Translations, In Support of Ukraine

Post by kmaherali »

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Stzye7GnwiY

The Symphony No. 9 is a choral symphony, the last complete symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven, composed between 1822 and 1824. The Ninth is Beethoven's greatest work and one of the supreme achievements in the history of music.

The symphony was the first example of a major composer using voices in a symphony as opposed to only musical instruments. The words are sung during the final (4th) movement (section) of the symphony by four vocal soloists and a chorus. They were taken from the "Ode to Joy", a poem written by Friedrich Schiller in 1785 and revised in 1803, with text additions made by Beethoven.

Beethoven’s Ninth stands as a symbol of his achievements in bringing together people to extol the virtues of universal friendship. The poem speaks to people who yearn to be free from barriers, divisions, and oppression and has a strong message to all mankind: it is about living in peace and harmony together.

This performance is by the London Symphony Orchestra under the conductor Josef Krips. JollyGul is presenting this video with German lyrics and English translations.

Beethoven’s 9th Symphony is about 75 minutes long. We present here only the 4th Movement, the section that has the choral part. Our presentation is 24 minutes long.

JollyGul is a USA based independent not-for-profit organization with a mission to promote artists and spread the message of love, peace, tolerance and understanding through music of all genre to our global audience.

Our presentation is in solidarity and full support for the brave people of Ukraine as they face Russian aggression.

---------------------------

Beethoven's 9th Symphony
4th Movement
"Ode To Joy" Choral Finale

With German Lyrics & English Translations

Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven

Lyrics: Friedrich Schiller

Performed by:

London Symphony Orchestra

Conductor: Josef Krips
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

"Raag Yaman Sitar Recital" - Mahesh Pathmakumara with Peshala Manoj (Tabla)

Post by kmaherali »

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4uZ6P1RfcA

Composition in Teen Taal (16 Beats)

JollyGul.com is pleased to present "Raag Yaman Sitar Recital" by Mahesh Pathmakumara accompanied by Peshala Manoj (tabla). This is part of our Indian Classical Music & Dance Series to enhance the awareness and understanding of this tradition in our community and in our audience.

Raag Yaman is a popular raga. Taking its origin from Kalyan thaat, Raag Yaman demonstrates the various emotions or rasas such as happiness, devotion (bhakti) and peace (shaanti). Yaman is considered to be one of the grandest and most fundamental ragas in Hindustani music. It is one of the first ragas taught to students but it also has great scope for improvisation. Yaman is traditionally performed only during the early evening hours. It conveys a mood that is serene, calm and peaceful.
swamidada
Posts: 1436
Joined: Sun Aug 02, 2020 8:59 pm

Re: General Art & Architecture of Interest

Post by swamidada »

BBC
Coke Studio: The music show defeating hate in India and Pakistan
Zoya Mateen - BBC News, Delhi
Sat, May 28, 2022, 7:23 PM
Ali Sethi and Shae Gill
Coke Studio Pakistan's new song Pasoori is a big hit in India
"This song breaks barriers of language, religion, nationality and touches the heart. Love from India."

Welcome to the sweetest corner of the internet in the Indian subcontinent - the YouTube comment section of Coke Studio Pakistan.

Coke Studio - Pakistan's longest-running music show, produced by beverage giant Coca-Cola - features studio-recorded performances by some of the country's most famous artists. The music ranges from quirky pop and soul-stirring qawwali to rap - all of which draw heavily from folk traditions and classical poetry.

The series was a roaring success in Pakistan from the beginning but what took its creators by surprise was its enduring popularity in India. The two countries have long shared a hostile relationship which has often impeded cultural exchanges, despite their shared history.

"Even Coke Studio Pakistan never imagined that it would get this much love from India - so much so that it became more successful than India's own Coke Studio!" popular Indian composer Shantanu Moitra says. "I think that's incredible."

Screenshot of comments
Coke Studio's YouTube channel brims with heart-warming messages from Indians
Despite tense relations, Indians and Pakistanis have always shared a deep affinity for each other's art and culture.

Millions of Indians still hum along to legendary Pakistani singers such as Ghulam Ali and Abida Parveen. Generations of Pakistanis have grown up on a steady diet of Indian films, with Bollywood movies breaking box-office records there. Television soap operas from that country are hugely popular in India.

Until a few years ago, artists from the two countries often collaborated on music and film projects. But when political hostilities migrated to the cultural arena, Bollywood dropped Pakistani actors and Pakistan banned Indian movies.

But the love for Coke Studio endures.

Abida Parveen
Coke Studio features some of the most sub-continent's most famous singers such as Abida Parveen
The show was launched by Pakistani musician Rohail Hyatt, who produced nine of its 14 seasons.

As a young man in the 1980s, Hyatt says he was happiest jamming to songs by Pink Floyd and The Doors. For years, he says, he lived in this "westernised bubble", where listening to local music was considered unsophisticated or uncool.

But that belief was challenged when he began working as a producer with famous qawwali artists such as Rahat Fateh Ali Khan.

"I realised that there's so much depth to our music. It was a moment of grand awakening for me."

Hyatt then began a dizzying musical journey, experimenting with fusion and eclecticism. He dug deeper into Pakistan's traditional sounds and created new ways of melding them into an electronic landscape.

"The idea was to share our traditional music with the world, but in a palatable sound scale," he explains.

In 2005, Coca-Cola came on board - Coke Studio was adapted from a promotional project the company did in Brazil.

There were challenges. Hyatt says he faced plenty of scepticism and was only allowed to do three-four songs as "an experiment" in the first season, which was released in 2008.

"But those songs ended up being the most popular," he says. "So by Season two, I went all out."

Rohail Hyatt
Rohail Hyatt, left, is credited for popularising folk music through Coke Studio
More than a decade later, Coke Studio Pakistan is going strong with millions of fans across countries. Both India and Bangladesh now have their own versions, but the original remains the most popular.

Fans say they can't get enough of the underground feel of the show, which eludes conventional categories, existing instead between genres.

"There's so much history and soul in every song," says an Indian fan who has followed the show for years. "But there's also the funk and groove that makes you want to just get up and dance."

Coke Studio took all of Pakistan's music - from pop to qawwali - and put it on a single platform, says Faisal Kapadia, the lead singer of Strings, a Pakistani pop band which produced four seasons of the show.

The show has also remained fresh because its producers keep reimagining it.

"Whenever a new producer took command, they put their own touch to the music. You got a different flavour every season," Kapadia says.

So while Hyatt intentionally added a psychedelic feel to the music to "take it to that zone", Kapadia drew heavily on the traditional poetry of Sufi saint Amir Khusro, along with the pop rock elements that were signature to his band and the classical film music he grew up listening to.

"It's a bit like James Bond movies. Every time the actor changes, the theme remains the same but the feel of the film changes," Kapadia says.

Coke Studio qawwali
Coke Studio Pakistan's qawwali renditions are hugely popular in India
For Hyatt, the goal was to reinvent the music without turning it into something facile.

"It was an exercise in how close we can be to the original, but also relatable to the west," he says.

Pakistani singer Zeb Bangash, who has often participated in the show, says this is one reason for its popularity in India.

"Indians are no strangers to fusion music. You look at songs composed by [Indian music director] RD Burman - he constantly brought jazz and Afro-funk beats, tunes and interludes and married them into traditional sounds," she says.

But Coke Studio also proudly adapted and showcased local, folksy, musical traditions like never before.

"This, along with the slick sound, captured imaginations across borders," Bangash adds.

STRINGS-band from Pakistan performing live -promotion at Ddamas and Zinda Fashion Show launch of glitterate collection, Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
Faisal Kapadia's band Strings has performed in India several times
Moitra adds that Coke Studio is also a refreshing change in India, where film music - especially Bollywood - acts as a "heavyweight".

"Bollywood is like a blotting table. It takes anything good and makes it its own, including alternative styles of music or lyrics," he says.

It's also a spectacle-driven industry, often showcasing actors singing maudlin love ballads and larger-than-life visuals.

"Coke Studio, on the other hand, puts the musicians at the centre stage. And I think that really makes all the difference," Moitra says.

Zeb Bangash
Zeb Bangash has often collaborated with Indian musicians
More than anything, the show's success is also a heartening reminder of the ability of musical cultures to thrive even in adverse political circumstances. As a friend jokingly said, it's like Rumi's proverbial field that exists beyond the ideas of "wrongdoing and rightdoing".

Moitra says it also offers hope of cultural ties reviving between India and Pakistan. "There are dark phases but there are also better phases and I think once that happens, artists will once again work together," he says.

The sentiment is shared by his counterparts across the border.

Bangash remembers the "beautiful and incredible" experience she had in 2011 while working with Moitra and other musicians who, she says, "were willing to not just be friends but build real connections".

Kapadia also can't wait to come back and perform in India.

"The love we got from Indian audiences is amazing. We were very lucky."

https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/co ... 38729.html
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Poetry: The healing power of words - CNN

Post by kmaherali »

This may be the most creative path to mental health you've never tried

Watch video at: https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/15/health/p ... index.html

Can health be inspired? 12:35

(CNN)One of the best pieces of breakup advice my friend Genna gave me during a tumultuous end to a long-term relationship was to write poetry.

Feeling desperate in my heartbreak, I was willing to try anything. As Emily Dickinson wisely advised:
Not knowing when the Dawn will come
I open every Door

I wrote more than two dozen poems in the following weeks. Artistically speaking, they were a very poor showing, but as a tool to process the big emotions of a difficult time, the poems were highly successful. Writing them was cathartic and at times revelatory.

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Poetry is experiencing a new golden age, with young writers of color taking the lead https://www.cnn.com/style/article/poetr ... index.html


Many years later -- and heart fully healed, I'm happy to report -- emerging scientific research into the wellness potential of poetry supports my personal experience.

Interested in the effectiveness that poetry has on combating loneliness, particularly during the early isolating period of the Covid-19 pandemic, David Haosen Xiang and Alisha Moon Yi wrote a 2020 article in the Journal of Medical Humanities https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7447694/ inspired by their experience leading poetry workshops.

Xiang and Yi, then students of Harvard Medical School and Harvard College, respectively, cited a number of studies (some with small sample sizes, admittedly) showing various health benefits from reading, writing and listening to poetry and creative nonfiction. They have been shown to combat stress and depression symptoms, as well as reduce pain, both chronic and following surgery, the authors pointed out. Poetry has also been shown to improve mood, memory and work performance.

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Poetry + football: It's not as strange as it sounds https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/07/us/footb ... index.html

Separately, a 2021 study published by the American Academy of Pediatrics https://publications.aap.org/hospitalpe ... redirected found that a group of 44 hospitalized children who were encouraged to read and write poetry saw reductions in fear, sadness, anger, worry and fatigue. Poetry was a welcome distraction from stress and an opportunity for self-reflection, the researchers concluded.

Spoken word poet Sekou Andrews demonstrated the power words can have in difficult times when you may feel broken, at the recent Life Itself conference, a health and wellness event presented in partnership with CNN. In a "poetic voice" presentation, he shared with the audience a story about his and his wife's infertility struggles and loss. As Andrews explained on stage:

All inspiration really is is a peephole into possibility.
There is a wall and then suddenly something shakes it, disrupts it,
And there's a crack that appears
And you can see something on the other side.
And there is a power to simply being able to say,
"I see it!"

"Whether it is coping with pain, dealing with stressful situations, or coming to terms with uncertainty, poetry can benefit a patient's well-being, confidence, emotional stability, and quality of life," Xiang and Yi wrote.

Why poetry is special

Poetry's ability to provide comfort and boost mood during periods of stress, trauma and grief may have a lot to do with framing and perspective.
As a creative device, poems slow our reaction to an experience and can alter our perception of it in ways that help us find new angles, go deeper. It can strengthen our sense of identity and connect us to the experiences of others to foster empathy.

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Amanda Gorman reminded America what poetry can do https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/22/opinions ... index.html

"I always say you don't hire the poet to hit the nail on the head for you," Andrews explained in an email. "You hire the poet to whisper in your ear, tap you on your shoulder, make you turn around and see a version of yourself that is unexpected, surprising and inspiring."

The medium also has a unique way of getting to the heart of the matter -- "Poetry is truth in its Sunday clothes," wrote the French poet Joseph Roux -- as metaphor and imagery are particularly well suited for tapping into and synthesizing emotions.

"And the abstract nature of poetry may make it easier to take a close look at painful experiences, which might feel too threatening to approach in a direct, literal manner," wrote Linda Wasmer Andrews in an article about the practice of poetry therapy in Psychology Today.

Poetry can also elicit peak emotional responses. In one study from 2017, researchers measured 27 people for their psychophysiological responses (such as chills or goosebumps) to hearing poetry read aloud. These physical responses are connected to the rewards-sensing area of the brain, the study explained.

In his poem "For the Interim Time," John O'Donohue describes this kind of cerebral alchemy:

What is being transfigured here in your mind,
And it is difficult and slow to become new.
The more faithfully you can endure here,
The more refined your heart will become
For your arrival in the new dawn.

Getting more poetry in your life

Read, write and listen. Those are the main options to infusing your life with more poetry.

To expose yourself to something new, visit open mic nights (real or in person), or try the daily (and short) poem podcast The Slowdown from American Public Media and the National Endowment for the Arts, or subscribe to its newsletter. There are other poetry podcasts https://podcastreview.org/list/best-poetry-podcasts/ as well.

And try an accessible collection. The actor John Lithgow compiled an introductory primer in the book "The Poets' Corner: The One-and-Only Poetry Book for the Whole Family." https://www.amazon.com/Poets-Corner-One ... 0446580023 I personally love Shel Silverstein, Mary Oliver, Maya Angelou, Sharon Olds and John O'Donohue if you want to go deeper with one poet and be perpetually entertained and enlightened.

And to write it, you need no formal training to get started. You may enjoy trying different styles (such as haiku) and experiments. The community-oriented website Read Poetry has an enticing guide to some creative exercises you may find inspiring.

"Just write. Just speak. Don't worry about it being good to you, you'll get there. First, just let it be good for you," Andrews said.

But no matter how you engage, just get in there and start feeling your way around for what you need. Or as poet Billy Collins wrote in "Introduction to Poetry":
...walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

Sign up for CNN's Stress, But Less newsletter. Our six-part mindfulness guide will inform and inspire you to reduce stress while learning how to harness it.

https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/15/health/p ... index.html
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

"Ganesh Vandana" - Kathak Dance By Ravindya Nishi

Post by kmaherali »

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=579tMg0Yc0E

Kathak Dance

JollyGul.com is pleased to present a beautifully choreographed "Ganesh Vandana" with Kathak dance performance by Ravindya Nishi, vocals by Palinda Udawela Arachchi and flute by Daminda Athauda. Mahesh Pathmakumara provides the sitar support and Peshala Manoj plays the tabla.

This presentation is part of JollyGul Indian Classical Music & Dance Series to enhance the awareness and understanding of this tradition in our community and in our audience.

In "Ganesh Vandana" (Praise Lord Ganesh), the dancer begins with an invocation to divinity. Vandana means prayer, a dance item which is performed as prayer. ‘Vandana’ is the first part that is done before the ‘Nritya’ part.

Ganesh is readily identified by his elephant head and is one of the best-known and most worshipped deities in Hinduism. Ganesh is widely revered as the remover of obstacles and thought to bring good luck, the patron of arts and sciences; and the deva of intellect and wisdom. As the god of beginnings, he is honored at the start of rites and ceremonies.

The music in this presentation is based on Raag Bhupali. Enjoy our presentation supported with text and English translations!
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Sitar Orchestra - Raag Hansadhwani

Post by kmaherali »

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WRmLlE6HwBw

Sitar Orchestra - Raag Hansadhwani
Ek Taal (12 beats) and Teen Taal (16 beats)

JollyGul.com is pleased to present a sitar orchestral performance of Raag Hamsadhwani. Although the sitar is often performed solo, it can also be performed as a duet or in an orchestra. An orchestral performance in Raag Hamsadhwani is presented here by composer Mahesh Pathmakuma along with his disciples.

This presentation is part of JollyGul Indian Classical Music & Dance Series to enhance the awareness and understanding of this tradition in our community and in our audience.

The sitar is a plucked stringed instrument originating from the Indian subcontinent and is a leading music instrument in North Indian classical music. The instrument was invented in medieval India, flourished in the 18th century, and arrived at its present form in 19th-century India. Khusrau Khan, an 18th century figure of Mughal India has been identified by modern scholars as the originator of the sitar. According to most historians he developed sitar from setar, an Iranian instrument of Abbasid or Safavid origin. Some Indians, however, claim that he developed it from Tri-tantri veena. The history of the sitar is disputed, with Western scholars favoring West Asian origins, and Indian scholars favoring local Indian origins.

The sitar became popularly known in the wider world through the works of Ravi Shankar, beginning in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Raag Hansadhwani ("the melody of the swan”) is a soothing night raga which came from the Carnatic or South Indian system of music. Its flow is that of a simple pentatonic raga (Notes - Sa, Re, Ga, Pa, Ni). A pentatonic scale is a musical scale with five notes per octave, in contrast to the heptatonic scale, which has seven notes per octave. Pentatonic scales were developed independently by many ancient civilizations and are still used in various musical styles to this day.

Mahesh Pathmakumara's first sitar teacher was Dr. Nirmala Kumari, who studied sitar under Ustad Ilyas Khan and Professor Gangarade from Lucknow and Varanasi. Mahesh then trained extensively in the sitar under Pandit Birendra Nath Mishra in Varanasi.

Mahesh attended workshops conducted by Ustad Shahid Parvez Khan and learned more about the sitar with great dedication. Mahesh Pathmakumara recently completed his PhD from Banaras Hindu University - we take this opportunity to heartily congratulate him for this wonderful achievement.
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

"SHINE" - KYx Kajiiko - Namuwongo, Kampala

Post by kmaherali »

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XfawiOUiCcc

KYx Kajiiko presents his original song "SHINE" with a spirited dance performance by Namuwongo Kids and Matteka Dancers from Kampala, Uganda.

KYx Kajiiko is an artist, songwriter, dancer and performer from Uganda and is the producer of this wonderful video.

The song is in English with some lines in Swahili (spoken extensively in East Africa) and also Luganda (language of the Baganda people) widely spoken in Uganda.

JollyGul is a USA based independent not-for-profit organization with a mission to promote artists and spread the message of love, peace, tolerance and understanding through music of all genre to our global audience.
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

"Ajeeb Dastan Hai Yeh" (Cover) - Pranjali Birari-Newaskar

Post by kmaherali »

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tn6-aX4DBls

Ajeeb Dastan Hai Yeh
It is a strange story

Pranjali Birari-Newaskar presents a wonderful rendition of "Ajeeb Dastan Hai Yeh" a very popular song by late Lata Mangeshkar from the 1960 movie "Dil Apna Aur Preet Parai". The lyrics were written by Shailendra and music direction was done by Shankar Jaikishan. The movie was directed by Kishore Sahu and starred Meena Kumari and Raj Kumar.

Pranjali has done Visharad and M.A. in Music as well as M.Com in Business. She is a graded artist by Akashwani (All India Radio) and was nominated by Mirchi Music Award as upcoming female vocalist for the year 2015 amongst 1000 songs and 200 films.

Pranjali has been doing playback singing for Marathi films and her recent song from movie "Karmachakra" was released by Zee Music. She has won many awards and recognitions. Pranjali has played a lead acting role in Marathi film "Ek Ti" directed by Amar Parkhe.
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

"Kisi Ki Muskurahaton Pe Ho Nisar" (Cover) - Pranjali Birari-Newaskar

Post by kmaherali »

Image

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krGsVzJ2k0U

Kisi Ki Muskurahaton Pe Ho Nisar
Offer yourself to bring a smile to someone

Pranjali Birari-Newaskar presents a wonderful rendition of "Kisi Ki Muskurahaton Pe Ho Nisar" a very popular song by the late Mukesh from the 1959 Bollywood comedy film "Anari". The lyrics were written by Shailendra and music direction was done by Shankar Jaikishan. The movie was directed by Hrishikesh Mukherjee and starred Raj Kapoor, Nutan, Motilal and Lalita Pawar.

Pranjali has done Visharad and M.A. in Music as well as M.Com in Business. She is a graded artist by Akashwani (All India Radio) and was nominated by Mirchi Music Award as upcoming female vocalist for the year 2015 amongst 1000 songs and 200 films.

Pranjali has been doing playback singing for Marathi films and her recent song from movie "Karmachakra" was released by Zee Music. She has won many awards and recognitions. Pranjali has played a lead acting role in Marathi film "Ek Ti" directed by Amar Parkhe.
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

"Fly Me To The Moon" (Instrumental) - Jakub Niewiadomski & Team

Post by kmaherali »

Image

Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=835X5hslCkw

Fly Me To The Moon
Instrumental

"Fly Me to the Moon" is a song written in 1954 by Bart Howard. Kaye Ballard made the first recording of the song the year it was written. Frank Sinatra's 1964 version was closely associated with the Apollo mission to the Moon. In 1999, the Songwriters Hall of Fame honored "Fly Me to the Moon" by inducting it as a "Towering Song".

JollyGul is releasing this song rendition at a time when NASA is about to launch the Artemis 1 mission to the Moon 50 years after humans last went there. The Artemis multi-year program is much more ambitious than the Apollo mission 50 years back. Artemis 1 will be unmanned with the objective to test the new rocket system and spacecraft. Future missions will carry a crew with the eventual goal to land the first woman and a person of color on the Moon by 2025 as well as to have an ability to stay there longer and carry out scientific experiments on the lunar surface.

Jakub Niewiadomski & his team present a beautiful and soothing instrumental version of "Fly Me to the Moon". We have the wonderful lyrics displayed.

Natalia Burnagiel plays the violin, Michalina Jastrzębska is the cellist, Dominik Maciąg is at the bass and Maciej Erbel provides the rhythm and beat to the performance with his drums. Jakub Niewiadomski plays the piano.

Let's go to the moon!
kmaherali
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Artemis - Let's Go To The Moon!

Post by kmaherali »

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Artemis is NASA’s new lunar exploration program, which includes sending the first woman and first person of color on the Moon. Through the Artemis missions, NASA will use new technology to study the Moon in new and better ways, and prepare for human missions to Mars.

Why is this program called Artemis?

The first missions to take astronauts to the Moon were called the Apollo Program. In 1961, President John F. Kennedy challenged his country to land astronauts on the Moon by the end of the decade. NASA met that challenge with the Apollo program, landing the first man on the Moon on July 20, 1969. That program was named after a god of Greek mythology, Apollo.

Artemis was Apollo’s twin sister and the goddess of the Moon in Greek mythology. When they land, Artemis astronauts will stand where no human has ever stood: the Moon’s South Pole.

Artemis 1 (scheduled now for late 2022) will be a test flight of the most powerful Space Launch Sysytem (SLS) rocket developed to date with the Orion spacecraft with no crew. Artemis 2 (2023) will fly SLS and Orion with a crew past the Moon, then circle it and return to Earth. This trip will be the farthest any human has gone into space. Artemis 3 (2025) will send a crew with the first woman and the next man to land on the Moon.

The Artemis landing will be over 50 years since the last time humans walked on the moon. The Artemis program is far more ambitious in terms of scientific objectives, duration of stay and longer term goals than the Apollo program.

JollyGul will be following with keen interest the wonderful technical choreography that the men and women at NASA will be performing over the next few years on the Artemis program. We look forward to sharing their historic achievements with our audience through our platform.

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kmaherali
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"Paree Hoon Main" (Cover) - Larissa Almeida

Post by kmaherali »

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Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3v5LkSNEI0

Paree Hoon Main
I'm a fairy

Larissa Almeida presents a wonderful rendition of "Paree Hoon Main" a very popular song by Suneeta Rao, an Indian pop singer, playback singer, dancer and stage actress from her album Dhuan (1991).

Larissa Almeida has done Sangeet Visharad in 2020 and recently completed her Master's degree in Music from Mumbai University She has learnt Indian classical music from Dr. Chetana Banavat and Dr. Sampada Potdar, light music from Pt. Achyut Thakur and Carnatic music from Vignesh Murthy.

Recently Larissa was part of a singing reality show 'Mi Honar Superstar' on Star Pravah where she reached in the top 8 positions. She has also done playback singing for Hindi and Marathi movies, serials, albums and advertisement jingles. Larissa did playback singing for movies like "Dark Light", "Tarqeeb" and "Shaktimaan".

Larissa sung the title song of Hindi daily soap "Sabka Sai" and "Chulbuli Chachi" and has also sung for music labels like Tips Music, Zee Music and Eros.

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Paree Hoon Main
I'm a fairy
kmaherali
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"Ranjha" (Cover) - Anuja Deore

Post by kmaherali »

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Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nMAWfSPrGg8

Ranjha
Beloved

Anuja Deore presents a wonderful rendition of "Ranjha" originally sung by Rupesh Kumar Ram in "Queen" - a 2013 Indian Hindi-language drama film directed by Vikas Bahl. The song narrates the tale of Heer and Ranjha, a popular tragic romance story from Punjab.

Anuja Sanjay Deore has been learning Indian classical music over the last 7 years. She has learnt Indian classical music from Smt. Jayashree Sonare and is currently a student of Mr. Sagar Kulkarni. Anuja has sung many Marathi and Hindi songs as well as commercials and jingles for Sapat and Parivar Tea.

Anuja has participated in many district and state level competitions and has won many prizes. She has also been working as a theatre actress over the last couple of years.

Anuja is currently pursuing her BTech in Electronics and Telecommunications Engineering.
kmaherali
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"Shonge Cholo" (Bengali Song) - H Ahmed

Post by kmaherali »

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Video:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62CVAQffZoQ

Shonge Cholo
Walk along with me

H Ahmed presents a wonderful and soothing original Bengali song about rain and how it helps to wash away all sadness. And how the sound of raindrops falling brings a certain calmness in the mind. Saif Siraj has written the lyrics.

H Ahmed is the composer and producer of this song video and also does the singing. Music is done by Chalindu Sankalpa.

Enjoy as you get "soaked" by the melody of the song!
kmaherali
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Why the Music of Rich Mullins Endures, 25 Years After His Death

Post by kmaherali »

By Tish Harrison Warren

Opinion Writer

Few outside the world of evangelicalism and contemporary Christian music have heard of Rich Mullins. But inside that world, he’s a legend — a singer-songwriter, poet, prophet and teacher whose legacy endures 25 years after his death in a car crash at age 41. Amy Grant described him as “the uneasy conscience of Christian music.”

Mullins’s life and art defy the dichotomies and assumptions that many of us bring to faith. In the conservative, buttoned up evangelical culture of the 1980s and ’90s, he was unflinchingly honest about struggles with temptation, loneliness, and discouragement. Yet these struggles did not lead him to abandon his faith. If anything, they seemed to make Jesus grow more luminous to him. Amid growing wealth and fame, he took up voluntary poverty and eschewed celebrity because of his convictions about the call of scripture. In front of white, conservative crowds, he sang songs about injustices done to Native Americans and criticized the materialism and insularity of evangelical leaders of his time.

Yet he never deconstructed his faith and, till his dying day, loved the church and Christian orthodoxy. (On one of his last tours, he even encouraged his tour mates to read G.K. Chesterton’s “Orthodoxy,” a defense of Christian faith that was one of his favorite books.) His life continues to offer a model for how one can acknowledge both the reality of darkness and also the goodness of God, how one can be both honest and faithful, and how one can admit and grieve the failings in the church yet remain committed to it.

Mullins’s music has a mix of folk, Americana, gospel, Appalachian and Celtic influences. What makes it stand out most is his lyrics. Christian music has been accused of being shallow — infused with a saccharine “Yay, Jesus!” corniness. Mullins, in contrast, was authentic and raw.

My favorite Mullins song, and in my opinion possibly the best contemporary Christian song of all time, was recorded nine days before his death. It’s called “Hard to Get,” and its lyrics address the sense of God’s absence and the profound arduousness of belief in Jesus. It ends: “I can’t see how you’re leading me unless you’ve led me here / Where I’m lost enough to let myself be led / And so you’ve been here all along, I guess / It’s just your ways and you are just plain hard to get.”

The Nashville songwriter Jeremy Casella told me that Mullins’s “lyrics reflected the reality of the Christian life instead of the more glossed-over and plastic representation of Christian faith that was so prevalent in the American Christian subculture of the ’80s and ’90s.”

Mullins, he said, was an “Appalachian poet who wrote songs that were saturated in the Scriptures themselves,” and he was “a singer-songwriter in the truest sense.”

James Bryan Smith, who wrote a book in 2000 called “Rich Mullins: A Devotional Biography: An Arrow Pointing to Heaven,” which will be rereleased in February, told me that Mullins is “kind of like the Bob Dylan of Christian music. I mean, where else do you find this kind of devotion to someone and love for his lyrics?”

Friends University in Wichita, where Mullins was a student, is hosting a celebration of his life on his birthday, Oct. 21, when it will open a new Rich Mullins archive room containing his hammer dulcimer, notes and other personal items. Last month, tribute concerts were also held in Nashville and Chicago to honor Mullins. In November, “Bellsburg: The Songs of Rich Mullins,” a tribute album, will be released, featuring Amy Grant, Kevin Max, Audrey Assad, Sarah Groves and other artists.

Andrew Peterson, a musician and writer who participated in the tribute album and the Nashville concert, calls Mullins “a once-in-a-generation poet, thinker and artist.”

“When I encountered Rich’s music, I was 18 and utterly directionless,” Peterson told me. “I believed in God only vaguely, and thought of him as a supreme being who was supremely disappointed in me.”

Then, he said, late one night he learned Mullins’s 1988 song “If I Stand,” whose chorus offers a prayer: “If I stand, let me stand on the promise that you will pull me through / And if I can’t, let me fall on the grace that first brought me to you / And if I sing, let me sing for the joy that has born in me these songs / And if I weep, let it be as a man who is longing for his home.”

Peterson said: “In some ways, my life is cleanly divided into two halves at that moment. Rich’s honest, beautiful and true songwriting was like a portal for me, on the other side of which was the person of Jesus.”

What draws many, including me, to Mullins is not only his songwriting but his remarkable life and countercultural devotion to God. At the height of his career Mullins left Nashville, first to move to Wichita, Kan., where he earned a B.A. in music education. In Wichita, Mullins moved in with James Bryan Smith and his wife and child, who was around 1 at the time. Smith would say to his friend: “Rich, you could buy our house twice. You could live anywhere you want in the city.” But Mullins would respond: “This is real life. I want real life and real people.”

Then, in 1995, Mullins moved with his friend and fellow musician Mitch McVicker to a Navajo reservation in New Mexico, where he lived in a small hogan and taught music to children.

The songwriter Rebecca Sparks, whose band toured with Mullins in 1991, said: “I learned through Rich that living simply was OK. We didn’t have to follow the Nashville system to be musicians.”

Mullins had all his royalties and wages go directly to his accountant, whom he asked to issue him an allowance equal to the average working-class salary at the time. The rest of his earnings were given away, mostly to charity. Smith tells me that Mullins “was scared for his own soul.” It wasn’t that he wasn’t tempted by money and fame. It’s that he knew he was tempted, so he ran from it.

Later, Mullins also befriended Shane Claiborne, who is now a well-known activist, author and leader in the New Monasticism movement. Mullins, Claiborne said, “had an authenticity about him that is regrettably rare in the church.” Mullins, he recalls, “was honest about his doubts, his struggles, his loneliness.”

Every person I’ve ever spoken with about Mullins mentioned his honesty and vulnerability. Carolyn Arends, a songwriter and author who toured with Mullins, said: “I was raised in a church culture bubble, and when I first met Rich I was more than a little taken aback by his rough edges — he could curse with the best of them. He smoked.”

She continued: “I started to see that he gave very little energy to image management, and was after something deeper and more profoundly good than a clean-cut image. Famously, he always signed his autograph ‘Be God’s,’ rather than ‘Be good,’ and I think that’s because he thought that sorting out where your allegiances lie is a much bigger deal than perfunctorily good behavior.”

Smith tells a story about how soon after they became friends, Mullins said he was going to tell him “everything”: “I want to be friends and you need to know the worst,” Mullins said. Smith said that conversation, the details of which he will never share, was immensely difficult. Smith told me that Mullins “tried to numb the pain” of childhood trauma, loneliness and a distant father through “dark seasons of sin.”

This same honesty and vulnerability fueled Mullins’s passionate quest for God and drew people to him. Mullins was “a really broken guy and capable of bad behavior,” Smith said. “And yet I saw the power of God in his life like nobody I’ve ever seen.”

Mullins was not naïve about the dysfunction of the contemporary American church. He criticized evangelical leaders of his day for hypocrisy, materialism and self-righteousness. Yet despite Mullins’s increasing frustrations with evangelical culture, he never walked away from the Christian faith or the church.

When I asked Smith what we can learn from Mullins’s legacy today, he paused for a long time. Then said, “How much he loved the church.” Arends told me that when she met Mullins, she was “kind of jaded about the Bible and about church.” But, she said, “This guy who didn’t fit any of my preconceptions about what a Christian was supposed to act like was actually deeply passionate about both the Bible and Church.” She continued: “He genuinely loved church. He said it was the only place you could go and hear grown men singing out of tune.”

“Rich Mullins is one of the most interesting people I’ve ever known,” Claiborne told me, “Interesting because he was honest — not perfect. He is one of the most important people in the history of modern evangelicalism, a ragamuffin that our children and our grandchildren need to know about.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/02/opin ... 778d3e6de3

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Relates articles:

Can We Separate the Art From the Artist?

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/03/opin ... pe=Article

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The International African American Museum

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In Charleston, a Museum Honors a Journey of Grief and Grace

The International African American Museum, in a former slave port, is about more than slavery. It’s about survival and resilience.

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The International African American Museum in Charleston, S.C., is set on the site of the former Gadsden’s Wharf, overlooking Charleston Harbor, where tens of thousands of enslaved Africans first entered the United States. It conjures the image of a boat in dry dock.Credit...Leslie Ryann McKellar for The New York Times

In Charleston Harbor, where the initiating shots of the Civil War were fired — Fort Sumter is distantly visible — I’m on the site of a former shipping pier known as Gadsden’s Wharf. Here, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, ships carrying tens of thousands of enslaved Africans deposited their human cargo, a population that would, through unthinkable adversity and creative perseverance, utterly transform what “America” meant, and means.

On this spot now, looking a bit like a ship itself, stands the eagerly awaited and long-delayed new International African American Museum. After an almost quarter-century journey hampered by political squalls, economic doldrums, sometimes mutinous crews, and last-minute fogs, this cultural vessel has securely, and handsomely, come to berth here, opening to the public on Tuesday.

The new museum is very much what this place is about: the original forced infusion of Black cultural energy into America, and the consequences of that for the present. It’s the first major new museum of African American history in the country to bring the whole Afro-Atlantic world, including Africa itself, fully into the picture.

The museum’s architecture, designed by Henry N. Cobb (1926-2020) with Curt Moody of Moody Nolan, is responsive to the institution’s complex global-local agenda. A long horizontal block of sand-beige brick raised high on stout pilings, it conjures the image of a boat in dry dock. But it also suggests a kind of Afro-futurist spacecraft, hovering, set for liftoff.

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A view of the water and boats at Gadsden’s Wharf from inside the museum. A table by the window contains information about historical places of interest that are visible from the window, such as Sullivan’s Island and Fort Sumter.Credit...Leslie Ryann McKellar for The New York Times

Beneath and around it is a public park that the museum has named the African Ancestors Memorial Garden. It’s clearly conceived as a tribute to victims of the torturous Atlantic Ocean crossing known as the Middle Passage, and specifically to those who arrived, dead or alive, at this very spot. Ghostly images — life-size silhouettes of bodies packed together, shoulder to shoulder, as if in a ship’s hold — appear to be carved into the garden’s pavement. Yet surrounding, and softening, this sepulchral frieze are signs of new life and growth in the form of plantings, designed by the landscape artist Walter J. Hood, of lush vegetation: palm trees native to Africa, sweet grass native to South Carolina.

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An area alongside the museum marks the original boundary of Gadsden’s Wharf. Water ebbs and flows over recessed human figures made of local sea-bottom shells.Credit...Leslie Ryann McKellar for The New York Times

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At the African Ancestors Memorial Garden, the names of ports used by slave ships are carved around the rim of a frieze-like sculpture there.Credit...Leslie Ryann McKellar for The New York Times

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The silhouetted figures represent enslaved people imprisoned in a ship’s hold, an image derived from a 1787 diagrammatic drawing of the infamous “Brookes” slave ship.Credit...Leslie Ryann McKellar for The New York Times

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In the African Ancestors Memorial Garden by Hood Design Studio, a boardwalk is marked by walls that recall the former storehouse where enslaved people were held and perished. Sculptures of kneeling figures commemorate those who died here. Visitors confront the present — their reflections in polished granite — as well as the past.Credit...Leslie Ryann McKellar for The New York Times

So even from the outside, this history museum set in a former slave port announces itself as being about something more than slavery. It’s a monument to survival and continuance. It situates Gadsden’s Wharf, and Charleston, on a wide map still being explored and expanded.

Just inside the museum, a version of that map unfolds in the form of a kind of allée of cantilevered video screens flashing images of Afro-Atlantic cultures past and present: the Great Mosque at Djenné in Mali; the “door of no return” in Ghana, and contemporary street festivals in Bahia, Port-au-Prince, and Brooklyn. Accompanied by an oceanic World Music-style soundscape, the videos offer a Sensurround soak in the vitality and variety of diaspora as the museum envisions it.

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The International African American Museum brings the whole Afro-Atlantic world, including Africa itself, fully into the picture.CreditCredit...By Leslie Ryann McKellar for The New York Times

And that view, as set out in a series of nine galleries, is alternately grand and granular. Two large wide-open spaces, labeled “African Worlds” and “South Carolina Connections,” are geared to ambitiously scaled, loosely themed multimedia displays, including a terrific globe-leaping video animation called “Traveling Through Time” by the New York-and-D.C.-based artist Nate Lewis, and a historically programmed touch-table map of the museum’s home state.

Several smaller galleries, densely installed with objects and texts — the lucid exhibition design is by Ralph Appelbaum — tend to be topic-specific, and a handful of cabinet-size pocket displays are even more tightly focused.

One, called “American Journeys,” is a chronological sequence of these mini-installations tracing the Black story as it took place primarily in South Carolina, from plantation slavery through the Civil War and the civil rights era. There are no big surprises, but a familiar national narrative is refreshed and enlivened by being filtered through a regional lens.

Rarely encountered is the kind of data found in a gallery called “African Roots,” where facing displays connect certain African art forms and spiritual practices with related ones in Latin America: Candomblé in Brazil, Santeria in Cuba and Puerto Rico. And it is worth visiting the museum just to find a gallery devoted to the West-African-sourced Gullah Geechee culture of the Carolina, Georgia and Florida Atlantic coast, evoked here in a full-scale chapel-like “praise house” and in a short, poetic film commissioned by the museum from the Ummah Chroma collective and directed by Julie Dash.

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A full-scale chapel-like “praise house,” where visitors can watch videos of people of Gullah ancestry talking and singing.Credit...Leslie Ryann McKellar for The New York Times

Indeed, the sheer volume of new or unfamiliar information delivered by the museum’s displays is exhilarating. At the same time, the brutal, racist realities that fueled the Afro-Atlantic dispersal is never far from view.

In “South Carolina Connections” Charleston’s catalytic role in the slave trade is made plain. (Five years ago, the city issued a formal apology for the part it played in this shameful enterprise.) In a gallery titled “Carolina Gold,” we learn how rice cultivation, the state’s first boom industry, the one that created a rich white plantation-aristocracy, arrived here with enslaved West Africans and flourished through their backbreaking labor.

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The galleries “Carolina Gold” (left) and “Memories of the Enslaved” (right) show how rice cultivation arrived here with enslaved West Africans and the transformative impact of their labor on plantations in South Carolina.Credit...Leslie Ryann McKellar for The New York Times

Historical timelines deliver chilling reports from the past. Some news is good: A list of international revolutionary movements in which African-descendant people participated during the 18th and 19th century is long. But a list of episodes of anti-Black violence in the early 20th century in the United States is even longer.

Charleston is on that list more than once, and would be again in an update: The museum’s opening comes just 10 days after the anniversary of the 2015 fatal shooting by a white supremacist of nine Black members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, known as Mother Emanuel, one of the oldest AME churches in the South. You can see its steeple from the museum.

Evident throughout the museum is an effort to balance negative and positive historical perspectives, to form an identity around the very idea of balance in an unstable nation and world. The decision to go this route can’t have been easy. Given the building’s siting, it would have seemed natural to create a more polemical institution, a museum about slavery, like the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration in Montgomery, Ala. Debate over this — adamant, often rancorous — was surely an early contributing factor in the project’s long-delayed, 23-year realization.

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The elegant, skylit entrance to the International African American Museum.Credit...Leslie Ryann McKellar for The New York Times

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Beneath and around the museum is a public park named the African Ancestors Memorial Garden. It was conceived as a tribute to victims of the torturous Atlantic Ocean crossing known as the Middle Passage.Credit...Leslie Ryann McKellar for The New York Times

(Other roadblocks included financial foot-dragging on the part of both city and state governments and standoffishness on the part of some private donors. There were departures, friendly or otherwise, of board members and museum staff. And finally, last year, close to the finish line, the failure of the building’s climate system, creating a serious humidity problem — at least one person reports seeing mist in the galleries. Potentially damaging to art and artifacts, it required a six-month delay in the opening, scheduled for last January.)

A model the museum shouldn’t pursue is one set by a temporary traveling show organized by the Smithsonian Institution, on view in its special exhibition gallery through Aug. 6. Boomingly titled “Men of Change: Power. Triumph. Truth,” it’s a shoutout to two dozen Black male celebrities from politics, sports and the arts. It’s a pumped-up hall-of-fame affair of a kind that’s been done, and done, and doesn’t need doing anymore.

Yet it does have a saving grace. Its subjects are depicted not just in heroizing photographs, but in portraits, widely varied in concept and style, commissioned by the Smithsonian from young contemporary Black artists, some already well-known (Nina Chanel Abney, Hank Willis Thomas), others (Holly Bass, Shaunté Gates, Tariku Shiferaw, Sisson) well worth keeping an eye on.

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From far left, Demond Melancon’s “Say Her Name” (2021); Carrie Mae Weems’s “All the Boys” (2017); and Hank Willis Thomas’s “That Was Then, This Is Now,” lenticular printing, 2019.Credit...Leslie Ryann McKellar for The New York Times

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“Fund the Fight” (2023), by Fletcher Williams III, an artist from Charleston, S.C.Credit...Leslie Ryann McKellar for The New York Times

The Charleston museum, I’m happy to see, is already on the job. Almost all of its inaugural displays, as well as the garden below, incorporate contemporary art. Much of the work is from a still-young permanent collection that the museum seems interested in expanding (and that should certainly include Charleston-based artists). If anything will keep its institutional thinking critical and flexible, that will.

History museums are hard to build and can be hard to love. (The Charleston museum’s notion of balance will not please everyone.) But if such a museum expands the parameters of history, and this one does, that’s a lot. Which, I guess, is why I ended up on a visit awarding it my sincerest accolade: At closing time I didn’t want to leave.

International African American Museum

Opens June 27, 14 Wharfside Street, Charleston, S.C., (843) 872-5352; iaamuseum.org.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/23/arts ... 778d3e6de3
kmaherali
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Can She Revive the Largest Museum on the African Continent?

Post by kmaherali »

“There was a feeling that we cannot let this fail,” Koyo Kouoh said of taking the top job at Zeitz MOCAA. She wants to make it relevant to the Pan-African world and beyond.

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Koyo Kouoh, the executive director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa, in Cape Town, S.A., with Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s canvas, “11 p.m. Friday.”Credit...Tsele Nthane for The New York Times

Koyo Kouoh wasn’t thinking about becoming an art world player when she finished her degree in business administration in Zurich in her early 20s. She had a day job as a social worker attending to migrant women, was writing articles about cultural events, and hanging out with a group of avant-garde thinkers, artists, musicians and actors.

But 30 years on, Kouoh, 55, the visionary curator and executive director of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (known as Zeitz MOCAA) in Cape Town, is an internationally recognized, torch-bearing advocate for African art that is grounded on the continent, but very much part of a global conversation.

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A man and a woman, presumably onstage, facing each other and talking and laughing, holding microphones.
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French President Emmanuel Macron, left, with Koyo Kouoh, the Cameroonian-born curator and director of MOCAA, at the New Africa-France 2021 Summit in Montpellier, France.Credit...Guillaume Horcajuelo/EPA, via Shutterstock

“I want to show the expanse of culture, the vast history of how the continent and its diaspora inhabits the world,” Kouoh, who is Cameroonian-born, said in the first of several Zoom calls during her travels between Basel, the United States and Cape Town over the last months. “Humanity has always described itself through objects and pictures; I am interested in what kinds of stories and paradigms we are offering about ourselves.”

Zeitz MOCAA, which houses the contemporary African art collection of Jochen Zeitz, the German philanthropist and chief executive officer of Harley-Davidson, is the largest museum on the African continent. A spectacular transformation of an old grain silo in Cape Town’s port area by the British designer Thomas Heatherwick, the museum forms part of the high-end development quarter known as the V & A Waterfront, which paid for the building. At its opening in 2017, the museum was greeted with fanfare for its design and celebration of African art, but also criticism for its perceived elitism and disengagement from local communities.

By the time Kouoh arrived in May 2019 from Dakar, where she had run Raw Material, the cultural center and residency she created there, Zeitz MOCAA was floundering. In 2018, its founding director, Mark Coetzee, was suspended and later resigned, following allegations of staff harassment and questions about the museum’s governance. (Coetzee died last year.) The Nigerian curator Azu Nwagbogu took over as interim director, but morale was low and exhibitions lackluster.

“Koyo came into a young institution that was pretty broken, with a lack of systems, lack of staff, lack of funding,” said Storm Janse van Rensburg, who Kouoh appointed as senior curator and head of curatorial affairs after she arrived. “The urgency was to bring it back to life.”

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A gallery room, with orange walls. “Joy and Revelry” is written in gold on a wall in the foreground. Ten works of art are on a lighter orange wall at the back; the white floor is very shiny and reflects the art.
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Installation view from “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting,” which explores Black self-representation with pan-diasporic perspectives. It brings artworks from the last 100 years, by Black artists working globally, into dialogue with leading Black thinkers, writers and poets of today.Credit...Photo by Dillon Marsh/Zeitz MOCAA.

Kouoh has done more than that. Despite pandemic restrictions and successive lockdowns, she has built an explicitly Pan-African, world-class program, overseeing several large-scale exhibitions that have traveled to Europe and the U.S., most notably the Tracey Rose solo show currently at the Queens Museum, in New York, and the expansive “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting” (currently running through Sept. 3), which will travel to the Kunstmuseum in Basel next year. She has expanded and developed a young curatorial team, added fellowships in curatorial training to the museum’s agenda, hosted artist residencies and encouraged a robust publishing agenda.

Perhaps most important was her confident first step to woo a diverse range of South Africans into the museum and especially residents of Cape Town, where a colonial legacy has had a profound and socially stratifying effect. In October 2020, after a six-month pandemic closure, “there were incredible ideas we could have done,” said Tandazani Dhlakama, a curator at the museum. “But Koyo said, why don’t we do an open call where everyone in Cape Town can bring one artwork from home? We drove all over the city, to the outskirts to collect things and people came for free.” Many South Africans, she added, “have a psychological barrier about coming into this kind of artspace, but this brought them in, to see their own works in a museum.”

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A gallery with two columns and artwork on the floor and walls, portraits from a current show on Black figuration in painting.
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Artists from the current exhibition “When We See Us: A Century of Black Figuration in Painting” include, left to right, Armando Marino, Olivier Souffrant, Devan Shimoyama, Scherezade García, Pamela Phatsimo Sunstrom. Floor: Edouard Duval-Carrié.Credit...Photo by Dillon Marsh/Zeitz MOCAA.

Her success is all the more notable since she initially rejected approaches to consider the job. “Koyo is pulled in two directions all the time —she comes from the margin, but she is very attracted to the centers of power,” said Rasha Salti, a Berlin-based writer and co-curator, with Kristine Khouri, of the exhibition “Past Disquiet,” currently on show at Zeitz MOCAA. “There were certainly questions as to how much she could impact and make the museum relevant, not just for the continent, but for the rest of the world. I was afraid she would be miserable, but when I went to visit, she was like a fish in water.”

The pivotal moment in Kouoh’s career came in her mid-20s, when she decided not to find a job based on her business degree — “I am fundamentally uninterested in profit,” she told me — and to move back to Africa. She grew up in Douala in Cameroon before moving to Zurich at 13 to join her family, and had lived there for 15 years before “it became clear to me I couldn’t stay in Europe, in this highly saturated space. I had become a mother, and I couldn’t imagine raising a Black boy in Europe.” (A single parent at that point, she would subsequently adopt three children.)

Wanting to explore new frontiers, she chose Dakar, the capital of Senegal. “It’s an irresistible city, a beacon on the horizon of African cities, with the Sufi culture that pervades Senegalese society,” Kouoh said. She added, “I think I had a true Pan-African spirit from early on.”

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Green and red walls in an art gallery with a variety of portraits. Barack Obama and Kehinde Wiley, in acrylic on canvas, at right, stand together rubbing shoulders.
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A section of the current show called “Triumph and Emancipation” features art by Sphephelo Mnguni (left); Chéri Samba (rear wall, top and bottom); Mustafa Maluka (right, rear). Raphael Adjetey Adjei Mayne’s “Barack & Kehinde” (foreground, right).Credit...Photo by Dillon Marsh/Zeitz MOCAA.

Kouoh had a plan — “obviously, I’m a Capricorn!” — to start an artist’s residency. Like many first ideas, it didn’t pan out and she began to work as an independent curator and as a cultural officer for the American Consulate. In 2008, she started Raw Material, expanding her residency concept to include an exhibition space, a library and an academy that offers young art professionals mentorship through sessions directed by an experienced figure in the field.

Raw Material “has had an impact way beyond its size and means through a very different way of learning about curatorial and other institutional practices,” said Kate Fowle, a curatorial senior director at Hauser & Wirth, noting that large numbers of now-influential curators and practitioners have been through its program. She considers it “a connection point across the world.”

From Dakar, Kouoh built her reputation as a dynamic force, working on the curatorial teams for Documenta 12 and 13, curating the Educational and Artistic program of 1:54 Contemporary African Art Fair, the Irish Contemporary Art Biennale in 2016, and exhibitions all over the world.

In their search for a new director, Jochen Zeitz and David Green, the co-chair on Zeitz MOCAA’s board of trustees, said that Kouoh came up early on as an ideal candidate. “She ticked all the boxes,” Zeitz said: “Experience on the ground, setting up her own institution, fund-raising, an ambitious artistic vision and a reputation for building a team.”

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Decommissioned grain silos housing the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art. Kouoh said, “The scale and ambition of Zeitz MOCAA is unique on the continent and someone had to take responsibility and make this museum live up to its rightful ambitions.”Credit...Mike Hutchings/Reuters

After the turmoil of Coetzee’s departure, Kouoh was “an experienced, calm person coming from the African continent,” said Albie Sachs, the South African lawyer and anti-apartheid campaigner who has been on Zeitz MOCAA’s Advisory Council since the museum opened. “I loved Koyo’s provenance, like you say about an artwork.”

Kouoh said that she decided to take the job after many conversations with Black colleagues. “There was a feeling that we cannot let this fail,” she said. “The scale and ambition of Zeitz MOCAA is unique on the continent and someone had to take responsibility and make this museum live up to its rightful ambitions.”

When she arrived in May 2019, her first priority was to reorganize the galleries, which were scattered over more than 100 small spaces. She took advantage of an already planned William Kentridge exhibition to break down walls, and create more breathing space, then set about defining “a curatorial articulation in terms of what we want to stand for.” Her goal, she said, was to create a sense of the museum “as a format of public engagement, civic engagement.”

During the strict pandemic lockdowns after March 2020, the museum closed for seven months, and Kouoh used the time to restructure its governance and expand the board of trustees, adding influential African collectors and philanthropists, and creating a global council of advisers, which includes the artists Carsten Holler, Wangechi Mutu and Yinka Shonibare. Kouoh has changed “how the local community see Zeitz,” said the Cape Town-based artist Igshaan Adams, who recently spent eight months in residence there. “My artist friends and I hadn’t felt any interest from the museum, but Koyo made me feel they cared about us, and about new audiences.” Although he was initially resistant to the proposition, the residency, he said, “was a brilliant idea,” allowing visitors to the museum to seriously engage with an artist’s process. “Sometimes over 1,000 people a day would be there,” he said, adding that it was the first time he had experienced that engagement “with people who look like me and speak like me.”

Since her arrival, Kouoh has emphasized solo retrospectives — Tracey Rose, Johannes Phokela, Mary Evans — which she describes as a pillar of her curatorial vision. “My generation of curators were informed and motivated by a strong desire to unearth as many stories as we could, and make them visible, and we all did those group shows,” she said. “But I believe there is a great lack of studying individual voices and how they speak to each other within and across generations. What influences come from an artist like Issa Samb or Gerard Sekoto to younger artists today? I think we African curators haven’t done this enough.”

This doesn’t mean the museum won’t put on group shows, Kouoh added, citing “When We See Us,” as an exhibition which “places figuration in a temporality that is longer and more far-reaching than the last 10 years of market frenzy. It premises Black joy as a serious, contentious, political, joyful subject matter, and at the Black experience across geographies, the continent, the diaspora.”

Asked whether she saw herself as a bearer of the flame of the influential Nigerian curator Okwui Enwezor, Kouoh looked disapproving. “I don’t like the idea of there being one person doing this or that,” she said. “There is a lot of mutual support, of generosity and care across the continent. I am part of that generation of African art professionals who have pride and knowledge about the beauty of African culture, which has often been defined by others in so many wrong ways. I don’t believe we need to spend time correcting those narratives. We need to inscribe other perspectives.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/08/15/arts ... 778d3e6de3
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

A Photo Can Tell the Truth About a Lie. Or a Lie About the Truth.

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In “Let Us Now Praise Famous Men,” the poet and novelist James Agee praises the camera as “the central instrument” of his age. He believed that photography was capable of transmitting, as no other art could, “the peculiar kinds of poetic vitality which blaze in every real thing.” Only photographers like his collaborator Walker Evans, he writes, captured “the cruel radiance of what is.”

“A Long Arc: Photography and the American South since 1845,” a new exhibition at the High Museum in Atlanta, might well have been titled “The Cruel Radiance of What Is.” The reach of its ambitions and the brilliance of its execution offer nothing less than a full visual accounting of this beautiful, punishing and deeply troubled region.

Even before photographs of battle fortifications and mass graves and prison camps and cities in ruin brought home in detail the enormous scale and human cost of the Civil War, images of the realities of enslaved people in the South inspired widespread moral outrage and aided the abolitionist movement. Southern politicians had been lying about both the benevolence of enslavers and the “three-fifths” nature of Black humanity since the founding of this country, but the real truth about slavery began to come clear to most people outside the South only when the first photographs of enslaved people emerged.

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Black and white photograph of rebel army fortifications outside Atlanta, 1864.
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“Rebel Works in Front of Atlanta, Ga., No. 1,” 1864Credit...George N. Barnard

“Slave pens at Alexandria,” reads the hand-labeled reproduction of a photo by the celebrated Civil War photographer Mathew B. Brady. Think about the cold fact of that label for a moment. The places where enslaved people were imprisoned before being sold weren’t called jails. They were called pens. Built to contain livestock.

The photograph of “Whipped Peter,” who fled a Louisiana plantation after a savage whipping, was among the most widely circulated images of the 19th century. “Peter barely survived the beating that made his back a map,” writes the scholar Imani Perry in an Aperture monograph that accompanies the exhibit, “and then ran to freedom, barefoot and chased by bloodhounds.”

The raised scars in that photograph were undeniable in a way that other accounts of slavery’s brutality, however powerful, had not been. The image tells the truth about slavery “in a way that even Mrs. [Harriet Beecher] Stowe can not approach,” wrote a journalist of the time, “because it tells the story to the eye.”

What a camera records, of course, is only what the human being who wields it wants it to record. A photographer shapes an image the way any other artist does: by making decisions about what to focus on, how to light the subject, what angle and distance to view it from, and the like. Those decisions are guided by a unique understanding of the world and a particular artistic intention, as well as by some sense of how a viewer might respond to the image itself.

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“2nd Regiment, United States Colored Light Artillery, Battery A: Ram,” 1864.
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“2nd Regiment, United States Colored Light Artillery, Battery A: Ram,” 1864.Credit...Unidentified Photographer

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“A Burial Party, Cold Harbor, Virginia,” 1865.
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“A Burial Party, Cold Harbor, Virginia,” 1865.Credit...John Reekie


Unsurprisingly, then, it wasn’t long before the moral clarity offered by photographs became considerably less clear as politicians discovered the manipulative power of the medium when its goal is manipulation. In 1867, long before A.I. turned every digital experience into a cause for uncertainty, leaders in New Orleans struck on the idea of commissioning a collection of photographs designed to attract investment in the city.

The beauty of the resulting images by Theodore Lilienthal obscures the dark reality of postwar life for Black Southerners. A photo taken on St. Charles Street and aimed toward the St. Charles Exchange Hotel, for example, makes no reference to the history of the site as a place where enslaved people had been auctioned in the very recent past. As Brian Piper, the photography curator at the New Orleans Museum of Art, notes in an essay for the Aperture monograph, “What was meant to appear splendid on the surface was in fact rotten at its core.”

The curators of “A Long Arc,” like many documentary and fine-art photographers themselves, are far more interested in overt records of injustice. When something terrible has befallen other human beings, and when it continually befalls them for no reason but their own powerlessness, a perfectly captured photograph can sometimes wake the rest of America from its slumber and inspire at least a small measure of social change.

Therefore, this exhibition does not stint on the magnificent documentary photographs that emerged from the South during the Great Depression, emerged again during the civil-rights movement, and emerged yet again during our own age as environmental devastation has ravaged not just the earth but also marginalized human communities.

And yet the most affecting photographs in “A Long Arc” are not — or at least are not merely — visual records of exploitation. The most powerful images capture the beauty and the tenderness and the self-possession of people who are living out their lives mostly invisible to the rest of the world. Or of the scarred but beautiful landscapes they call home. Or of the ramifications of an unresolved history still unspooling in this history-haunted part of the country.

I’m thinking especially of Richard Misrach’s 1998 image of a pipeline running just above swamp waters in Geismar, La.

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A flat green surface of a swamp with barren trees and branches in the background.
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“Swamp and Pipeline, Geismar, Louisiana,” 1998, printed 2012.Credit...Richard Misrach

I’m thinking of Gillian Laub’s 2011 photograph “Prom Prince and Princess Dancing at the Integrated Prom,” taken the year after a high school in Montgomery County, Ga., finally integrated its prom for the first time.

I’m thinking of Dawoud Bey’s series pairing photographs of children the same age as the children who were murdered in the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church with photographs of adults the age they would have been when the photos were taken in 2012.

Though I have focused on the social justice elements of “A Long Arc,” there is far more to this exhibition than I have room here to discuss. The High Museum is uniquely positioned to mount an extravagant and comprehensive show like this, in part because its curators began to collect photographs in the early 1970s, but also because they have done more than simply collect and preserve existing work. Through a series of commissions beginning in 1996, the museum has also empowered gifted photographers to chronicle the South as they see it. To help us see it.

As the title of the exhibition suggests, to see these photographs within a relentlessly unfolding timeline is to discover undeniable evidence that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was not wrong about the arc of the moral universe. Human beings are no longer chained to an auction block in New Orleans or blasted by fire hoses in the streets of Birmingham, Ala., during a peaceful demonstration.

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A 1963 photograph of a group of Black protesters being driven back by water from fire hoses in Birmingham, Ala.
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“Kelly Ingram Park, Birmingham, Alabama,” 1963.Credit...Bob Adelman

But in other ways, evidence of accruing justice is more difficult to discern. Except for the clothing and hair styles of the men in the photos, it would be very easy to confuse the subjects of Charles Moore’s 1964 image of segregationists at the Ole Miss riot in Oxford, Miss., with the subjects of Balazs Gardi’s photograph taken at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. And Wendy Ewald’s photo “Charles and the Quilts,” dated 1975-1982, might just as well have been taken by Walker Evans during the Great Depression.

The magnificence of a retrospective like this is not just the accounting offered by its historical sweep, but the way it conveys the immense complexity of this region, to inspire a renewed attention to the cruel radiance of what is. Suffering does not always lead to compassion and change, but photographs like these remind us that standing in witness to suffering surely should.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/18/opin ... 778d3e6de3
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
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Presidential Portraits by Kehinde Wiley, This Time From Africa

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Mr. Wiley, famous for his portrait of former President Obama, is now showing paintings of 11 current and former African heads of state. “This is not a celebration of individual leadership,” he said.

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Kehinde Wiley at the opening Monday of his exhibition, “A Maze of Power,” featuring new portraits of African presidents, at Musée du Quai Branly. The artist stands before a portrait of Olusegun Obasanjo, a former president of Nigeria.Credit...Julien Mignot for The New York Times

The American artist Kehinde Wiley shot to fame in 2018 with his unconventional presidential portrait, at least as far as U.S. presidential portraiture goes: Barack Obama seated amid a brightly colored, flowery background. Now, Mr. Wiley is again breaking the mold with a series of portraits of 11 current and former African presidents in an exhibition that opened Monday in Paris.

The Democratic Republic of Congo’s president, Félix Tshisekedi, poses with the cityscape of Kinshasa peeking out between curtains in the background.
Macky Sall, Senegal’s president, holds a large staff and stands along a rocky shore, the national flag draped behind him. Former Madagascar President Hery Rajaonarimampianina is on horseback. Ghanaian President Nana Akufo-Addo wears brightly colored traditional clothing, exposing a bare shoulder.

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A man sits in a white and gold chair, dressed in traditional and ceremonial Ghana attire, and exposes a bare shoulder.
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Mr. Wiley’s “Portrait of Nana Akufo-Addo, President of Ghana,” 2023, depicting the leader in brightly colored traditional clothing.Credit...via Kehinde Wiley and Galerie Templon

“I’m trying to look at the African presidency in images, because there is no tradition of it,” Mr. Wiley says as he narrates a video that accompanies the exhibition, showing him dabbing the nose of Mr. Akufo-Addo’s portrait as solemn background music plays. “There is no history surrounding it. The history surrounds Western European cultural hegemony and domination.”

The exhibition, “A Maze of Power,” at the Musée du Quai Branly — Jacques Chirac in Paris, opens as anti-French sentiment is sweeping across Africa’s Sahel, where presidents deemed as being too close to their former French colonial overlords have been ousted in coups. One president in Wiley’s exhibition, Alpha Condé of Guinea, was himself removed in a coup in 2021. Another subject, Olusegun Obasanjo, first became Nigeria’s leader after a military coup in the 1970s but later was democratically elected as president.

Some of Mr. Wiley’s subjects may raise eyebrows for their human rights track records; Mr. Obansanjo and Mr. Condé, as well as other subjects of the paintings, presided over violent crackdowns on demonstrators in their respective countries.

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Kehinde Wiley, “Portrait of Félix Tshisekedi, President of Democratic Republic of Congo,” 2023, from the new exhibition “Kehinde Wiley: A Maze of Power.”
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Kehinde Wiley, “Portrait of Félix Tshisekedi, President of Democratic Republic of Congo,” 2023, from the new exhibition “Kehinde Wiley: A Maze of Power.”Credit...via Kehinde Wiley and Galerie Templon

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“Portrait of Macky Sall, President of Senegal,” 2023. He holds a large staff and stands along a rocky shore.
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“Portrait of Macky Sall, President of Senegal,” 2023. He holds a large staff and stands along a rocky shore.Credit...via Kehinde Wiley and Galerie Templon

Mr. Wiley deliberately chose not to discuss politics with his presidential subjects. Rather, he showed them a book of aristocratic, royal and military portraits from the 17th to 19th centuries, talking to them about “a vocabulary of power that each one of the presidents could choose to work with, or choose to ignore,” Mr. Wiley said in his film.

“Each head of state had the opportunity to engage the question of how they fit in that narrative,” he said.

Mr. Wiley’s selection as the artist for Mr. Obama’s portrait was surprising, because until then he had been known for his depictions of regular people. He has often returned to that subject since — until this latest choice to depict presidents.

For their sessions, the African presidents selected their own outfits and were asked to choose a space that is in keeping with the history of portraiture. Mr. Tshisekedi, for instance, sat in a grand, lavishly decorated hall he often uses as a waiting room for his guests.

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A large portrait of a man in a blue suit and red tie in a ceremonial chair, shrouded by a cloud of red. A statue with a raised hand is visible outside the doorway.
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Kehinde Wiley, “Portrait of Alpha Condé, Former President of Guinea,” 2023. Mr. Condé was removed from power in a coup in 2021.Credit...via Kehinde Wiley and Galerie Templon

In a text message sent through a spokesman, Senegal’s president, Mr. Sall, called being chosen by Mr. Wiley “a pleasant surprise and a source of personal pride.” He noted Mr. Wiley’s ties to Dakar, Senegal’s capital, which is home to the artist’s Black Rock studio and also to his show during Dakar’s art biennale in 2022.

The portrait, Mr. Sall said, is a reference to Moses crossing the Red Sea, leading the Hebrews to the Promised Land.

“I have strived to lead my people to the promised land of ‘emergence,’” he said, referring to one of his programs to provide Senegal with new infrastructure and other projects.

At home, a recent jail sentence for one of Mr. Sall’s political opponents has prompted some of the worst outbreaks of violent protest in the nation’s post-colonial history.

Some of Mr. Wiley’s paintings are reminiscent of his portrayal of Mr. Obama. For instance, Mr. Obasanjo, the former president of Nigeria, his golden ring sparkling from the linen canvas, is almost consumed by his background of brightly colored flowers.

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Mr. Wiley’s depiction of Hery Rajaonarimampianina, the former president of Madagascar.
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Mr. Wiley’s depiction of Hery Rajaonarimampianina, the former president of Madagascar.Credit...via Kehinde Wiley and Galerie Templon

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“Portrait of Olusegun Obasanjo, Former President of Nigeria,” 2023.
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“Portrait of Olusegun Obasanjo, Former President of Nigeria,” 2023.Credit...via Kehinde Wiley and Galerie Templon

The Obama portrait is so popular it has toured the nation, bringing out crowds of supporters to view it in person. The African presidents’ portraits are bound to be received differently. For starters, they are being exhibited in France, a former colonial powerhouse on the continent that, along with other Western nations, has come under increasing scrutiny for its role in looting African art, among other transgressions. Mr. Wiley has plans in the works for an African tour of his show. In the meantime, each president has requested a private viewing.

“This is not a celebration of individual leaders,” Mr. Wiley said in his film. “This is a look at the presidency itself.”

The project was completed in partnership with Templon Gallery in Paris, chiefly because of its connections to help provide access to African heads of state, according to a representative for Mr. Wiley. He had sought to paint each of the 54 presidents on the continent.

“The very act of creating a set of portraits in Europe and now using that language in Africa creates an interesting quagmire, creates an interesting provocation,” he said in the film.

Mr. Wiley said he first began questioning the meaning of “presidency” during Mr. Obama’s term. Starting in 2012, he began touring the continent to meet with presidents and talk about their visions of what it means to be a contemporary African leader.

“The maze of power is being run by me, the painter, but also by the sitter — the sitter deciding how they want to be seen,” he said, “but me responding to their set of decisions.”


https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/25/arts ... 778d3e6de3
kmaherali
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Are ‘Secret Room’ Drawings by Michelangelo? Now, Visitors Can Judge for Themselves.

Post by kmaherali »

Since its discovery nearly 50 years ago, a room beneath the Medici Chapels in Florence covered in sketches has been closed to the public. Next month, that will change.

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Francesca de Luca, the director of the museum at the Medici Chapels, inside the stanza segreta, or secret room, where she noted similarities between the drawings on the wall and the work of Michelangelo.Credit...Clara Vannucci for The New York Times

The narrow, arched room below the Medici Chapels Museum in Florence has some suspiciously virtuosic doodles on the walls.

“The hand is very fast, showing great confidence, it makes you think,” Francesca De Luca, the museum’s director, said as she contemplated a muscular nude by the entrance. She pointed out the legs in another sketch and their resemblance to the powerful gams of a Michelangelo sculpture on a tomb upstairs.

“These have never been seen by the public,” she said.

Until now. Next month, the museum’s so-called stanza segreta, or secret room, where Michelangelo possibly hid and drew on the walls nearly 500 years ago, will open to the public.

The sketches were discovered in 1975 by Paolo Dal Poggetto, then the director of the Medici Chapels, who was hoping to create a new exit for tourists. He and his colleagues discovered a trapdoor hidden beneath a wardrobe off to the side of the New Sacristy, where the tombs Michelangelo created for members of the powerful Medici family line the walls. The door revealed stone steps that led to a room filled with coal.

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A long narrow room has a vaulted ceiling and a low metal railing around its perimeter. The walls are covered in drawings.
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Railings with special LED lights keep visitors back from the walls to prevent any damage. Only four people will be able to visit at one time, and may stay for just 15 minutes. Credit...Clara Vannucci for The New York Times

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A wall drawing shows a pair of legs striding away from the viewer, as well as a head in profile and another pair of legs belonging to a seated person.
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Details from some of the drawings on the walls of the secret room. Despite their age and years covered up, the drawings are “in remarkably good state,” said one expert.Credit...Clara Vannucci for The New York Times

In 1527, Florentines, including Michelangelo, supported a Republic and the overthrow of the Medicis. But the Medicis stormed back in 1530. Michelangelo went into hiding and slipped off the grid for a few months. Dal Poggetto had a hunch about the newly discovered room. He had the plaster walls removed, revealing charcoal and chalk drawings unseen for centuries. He believed he had found Michelangelo’s hiding place and de facto atelier.

Others doubt that Michelangelo, already in his 50s and an acclaimed artist with powerful patrons, would have spent time in such a dingy hide out. But many scholars believe that the sketches show his hand. The general public, except for a brief period in the 1990s, has been kept in the dark, out of fear that the narrow room at the bottom of a flight of steep stairs posed a safety risk for visitors, and that museum-goers would pose a threat to the drawings.

So for decades only accredited scholars, the occasional journalist and big cheeses got to see inside. King Charles III got a peek in 2018. Leonardo Di Caprio was smuggled inside. “We were very good because no one spotted him,” said Paola D’Agostino, the director of the Bargello Museums, to which the Medici Chapels belong.

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A skyline view of Florence shows the dome of the Medici chapels rising above the cityscape.
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The Medici Chapels seen from the Cupola del Duomo, Santa Maria del Fiore.Credit...Clara Vannucci for The New York Times

In September, after years of planning slowed down by the pandemic, Ms. D’Agostino inaugurated a new grand exit, which she said opened the door for the secret room to open. The museum installed LED lights in elegant low rails that were safer for the drawings and also acted as a de facto barrier to keep visitors from getting too close.

To protect the drawings, Ms. D’Agostino said, visits will be kept to groups of four and limited to 15 minutes, with 45 minute lights-out periods in between to protect the drawings. Tickets, each connected to a specific person whose I.D. will be checked to prevent tour operators from gobbling them up, will cost 32 euros (about $34), and include access to the Medici tombs. Depending on how things go, the museum could increase visitor numbers next year.

Ms. D’Agostino noted that the drawings, despite their age and years covered up, were “in remarkably good state.” She added that advancements in technology over the last half century have led to “a certain stage in which I think most scholars agree that certainly there is the hand of Michelangelo in some of these drawings.”

While herself not a Michelangelo scholar, she said she was convinced that at least two of the quick and confident sketches belonged to the master, who left Florence after working in the chapel, never to return.

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A wall drawing of a person falling through space.
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Some scholars have suggested that Michelangelo could have drawn the sketches of a falling man that resemble the central figure of his “The Fall of Phaeton.”Credit...Clara Vannucci for The New York Times

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A drawing of a man's torso is shown, the head is sketched looking in two different directions.
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Some experts believe this standing figure evokes Michelangelo’s “Resurrection of Christ.”Credit...Clara Vannucci for The New York Times

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Wall sketches show a man’s head with a beard and long hair.
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As a visitor’s eyes adjust to the dim light in the chamber, more details become visible.Credit...Clara Vannucci for The New York Times

One is an imposing nude near the entrance, which has the sketch of a face in profile and looking forward. Experts say it evokes Michelangelo’s “Resurrection of Christ.” The other is the sketch of the legs. Other scholars have suggested that Michelangelo could have drawn sketches of a falling man that resemble the central figure of his “The Fall of Phaeton.” Some even think a flexed and disembodied arm on the wall evokes his David statue.

What is certain, Ms. D’Agostino said, is that “nothing of this kind exists in the world of 16th-century drawings.”

“The moment you enter that room you simply are speechless,” she added. Then, as your eyes adjust to the dim light, “you start seeing all the different drawings and all the different layers.”

On a recent morning, a careful descent down the stairs led to a direct confrontation with the drawings, and their apparent mastery. Each minute examining the walls yields new discoveries — a muscular torso sketched from half circles, sloping lines and s-shapes. Shading transforms into sinew, a horse’s head looks down from the ceiling.

At one point, Ms. De Luca swung open a wooden shutter to show that the room is actually above ground. Light from the Florence morning streamed in, illuminating the nook and the sketch of a face bearing a Michelangelo-like beard.

“Someone said that could be a self-portrait,” she said. “Maybe that’s a little much.”

Follow New York Times Travel on Instagram and sign up for our weekly Travel Dispatch newsletter to get expert tips on traveling smarter and inspiration for your next vacation. Dreaming up a future getaway or just armchair traveling? Check out our 52 Places to Go in 2023.

Jason Horowitz is the Rome bureau chief, covering Italy, the Vatican, Greece and other parts of Southern Europe. He previously covered the 2016 presidential campaign, the Obama administration and Congress, with an emphasis on political profiles and features. More about Jason Horowitz

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/26/trav ... wings.html
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Democratizing Art

Post by kmaherali »

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Democratizing Art
Explore How with Our Three Featured Videos

JollyGul Art & Craft Gallery is delighted to showcase three captivating videos that serve as introductions to richer experiences on our virtual platform:

"The Damascus Room at the Met" - Venture into the historic grandeur of the "Damascus Room", an authentic late Ottoman-era reception room meticulously reconstructed within the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

"The Blue Quran" - Discover the celestial beauty of one of Islam’s most stunning manuscripts, renowned for its radiant blue parchment and gold script.

"Kalash Art & Culture" - Join Mazuz from the JollyGul Art & Craft Gallery on an insightful journey into the valleys of the Kalash people, documenting the rich tapestry of their art and traditions, as vibrant and compelling as the community itself.

At the heart of JollyGul Art & Craft Gallery are these core objectives:

To bring the creativity of independent, emerging artists and as well as the unique crafts of remote communities into the global spotlight.

To democratize the experience of world-class art and historical artifacts housed in leading museums, making them accessible to everyone through online presentations on our virtual platform paired with straightforward and engaging explanations.

Our ethos is anchored in the conviction that the best of artistic creation should be accessible to everyone, and equally important, the endeavors of independent artists and lesser-known cultural gems also warrant our admiration and attention. We stand strongly against elitism in the art field, finding it not merely disagreeable, but utterly repugnant to our values of inclusivity and respect for all forms of expression.

We invite you to view these brief videos and follow the accompanying links to our website, where you can immerse yourself in the world's artistic wonders from the convenience of your home or on-the-go, all explained in language that's clear, relatable, and free from pretense. `

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The Damascus Room

Metropolitan Museum of Art
New York

Publisher:
JollyGul Art & Craft Channel

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTh5kbGg6Ic

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The Blue Quran

An Artistic Marvel

Publisher:
JollyGul Art & Craft Channel

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=igyRsjYVzsI

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Kalash Art & Cuture

In The Hidden Valleys

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JollyGul Art & Craft Channel

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfGOOrIOYGc
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Africa & Byzantium

Post by kmaherali »

Largely Ignored by the Western World, Africa’s Medieval Treasures Shine at the Met

North Africa’s influences radiated throughout Byzantium, helping to create a Golden Age. These objects are high on the beauty and rarity scale.

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Some of the 13th century icons on view at “Africa & Byzantium,” an exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that opens Sunday. At center, painting of “Saint George with Scenes of His Passion and Miracles,” Byzantine (Egypt), gold and tempera on wood.Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

We like to keep history as we’ve learned it in a headlock, to make sure it doesn’t shift or change. Standard maps are useful aids in imposing paralysis. They turn the world into a fixed field of safe-spots and blanks, an us-them weave of gates and fences.

One of the many — many — benefits of much-maligned “wokeness” has been its message to relax the hold, toss the charts or, better, revise them: explore blanks, rethink fences.

It’s thanks to this more free-breathing approach to history, including art history, that we’re getting a challenger of an exhibition like “Africa & Byzantium,” which opens at the Metropolitan Museum of Art this Sunday. On the beauty-and-rarity scale it’s way up there: a treasure-chest of fragile and resplendent things — painted books, topline textiles, gilt-flecked mosaics — many on a first-time visit to New York from Africa, Asia and Europe.

At the same time, as its title suggests, the show confuses — in a good way — certain expectations about who made what, and what came from where.

Byzantium, we know, or think we do. As a cultural phenomenon it dated from the early fourth century A.D. when Rome’s first Christian ruler, Constantine the Great, moved the imperial capital east to the ancient city of Byzantion, renamed Constantinople (and now Istanbul in present-day Turkey). From there a new art, drawing on Greek and Roman traditions and transformed by fresh intellectual and spiritual impulses from farther east, evolved and radiated outward.

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Two people look at an old painting of two people, one dark-skinned, the other with a halo standing behind the other.
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Wall painting, “Bishop Petros Protected by Saint Peter,” late 10th century. Elements of Bishop Petros’s ecclesiastical robes were distinctive in Nubia. Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

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A small painting of Mary and Jesus Christ with some other saints, in a case that opens to reveal another image of a saint on horseback crushing a dragon. Worn as a pendant by nobility.
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A double-sided diptych worn as a pendant by nobility; early 18th century, Amhara or Tigrinya peoples. Ethiopian artists were increasingly exposed to forms of expression from Europe and Christian subject matter. Mary is flanked by archangels; Saint George slays the dragon.Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

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A small bust of a child with African features.
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Left, small bust of an African child, second — third century; Roman (Samanud, Egypt).Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

Over the centuries, that radiance periodically dimmed. There were internal struggles and external assaults by Persia, Europe, and finally and fatally, in 1453, by Ottoman armies. Yet even when Byzantium ceased to exist as a political entity, it remained a cultural force: a symbol, for both the Christian West and the Islamic East, of an imperishable “golden age” of aesthetic refinement and intellectual breadth.

The Met show introduces a useful check on this textbook account by introducing Africa as a prominent player. Africa would not seem to figure much if we consulted only old art history books, or clung to the still-lingering “dark continent” myths. A main thrust of the show — organized by Andrea Achi, the Met’s associate curator of Byzantine art, with Helen C. Evans, curator emerita, and Kristen Windmuller-Luna, curator of African art at the Cleveland Museum of Art, where the show will travel — is precisely to expand those books and dispel those myth through visual evidence.

For pre-Christian Romans, Africa, or at least the part of it along the Mediterranean that Rome had occupied, was not marginal, not a hinterland. Proof comes at the start of the show in the form of a large second-century mosaic panel depicting male servants, or maybe slaves, busy prepping for a feast. One carries a basket of fruit, another a tray of what looks like bread, a third a flagon of wine.

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A mosaic fragment from North Africa showing several servants carrying food and other items. More floor mosaics of this kind survive in North Africa than in any other province of the Roman Empire.
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Excavated in Tunisia, a large second-century floor mosaic depicting male servants from all over the diverse Roman world prepping for a feast. One carries a basket of fruit, another what looks like bread, a third a flagon of wine. More floor mosaics of this kind survive in North Africa than in any other province of the Roman Empire.Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

In terms of subject, style and workmanship the piece might have adorned an elite residence in Rome itself. It was, in fact, excavated in Tunisia, one of Rome’s wealthiest provinces, a major exporter of grain and olives, and home to a luxury goods industry that specialized in exquisite rock crystal carving, a sampling of which lights up an early section of the exhibition.

Of the servants depicted in the mosaic, the wine-bearer stands out, at least to contemporary race-conscious eyes, for having a complexion darker than that of his colleagues. He’s one of several depictions of “Black African” figures displayed toward the front of the show. We find others on a pair of linen curtain woven in Egypt, on incised ivory plaques from Nubia (now Sudan), and in a small bronze lamp from what is now Algeria.

Yet, as the curators are careful to note in the catalog, we don’t, even in our identity-alert time, yet have a clear understanding of exactly what political weight or symbolic meaning depictions of racial difference might have carried in a late Roman or early Byzantine context, or how we can interpret beyond being an indicator of multiethnicity as simple social reality, the Roman and Byzantine way of life.

And we must live with unanswered questions when it comes to the subject of religious faith and identity as expressed in North Africa art in the earliest centuries covered by the show, a period when African (notably Egyptian) and Western classical beliefs were mingling, followed by the time when pagan Rome was giving way to Christian Byzantium.

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An old mosaic depicts a woman in Roman-style military attire, with large dark eyes and what appears to be a halo, holding a staff.
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Mosaic panel from Tunisia with the “Lady of Carthage” in Roman-style military attire, fourth - fifth century. She could have been a prototype for countless Byzantine Christian icons that followed.Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

A second century A.D. panel painting of a feather-crowned woman with large, anxious, heaven-cast eyes has been identified as representing the ancient Egyptian goddess Isis, actively worshiped during the early Christian era. Two centuries later we find her image still in circulation, but now, depicted, in a Byzantine ivory box, in the guise of the Greek goddess Aphrodite.

And what to make of a commandingly ambiguous portrait-like figure in a fourth-fifth century mosaic panel on loan from the Carthage National Museum in Tunisia? Affectionately called “Lady of Carthage” by modern fans, she projects all kinds of “nonbinary” vibes: She’s coiffured as a female but power-dressed as a male; she gestures a blessing but hefts a spear-like rod. God(ess)? Divinity? Imperial ruler? Personification of Carthage itself? Historians of Roman and Byzantine African art will no doubt suss out an answer — no fewer than 40 such scholars contribute essays to the symposium-like catalog — but one thing is clear: with her haloed head and headlight eyes, she could have been a prototype for countless Byzantine Christian icons that followed.

North Africa, birthplace of the Christian monastic tradition in fourth-century Egypt, was also the source of some of the very first Christian icons, many in the form of portable paintings. There are well over a dozen among the 180 objects at the Met, and a more charismatic ensemble is hard to imagine. The galleries where they are displayed are the engine rooms that heat the show.

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Detail of icon depicting Mary and baby Jesus, flanked by two saints and with two angels behind them.
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One of thousands of important Byzantine images, books and documents preserved at Monastery of St. Catherine’s, Sinai (Egypt), is the icon of the Virgin and Child between Saints Theodore and George. (“Icon” is Greek for “image” or “painting” ); 6th century.Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

Remarkably, two of the very earliest icons known are both here. One is a sumptuously colored tapestry-weave wall hanging, probably from sixth-century Egypt, with an image of a stolid Virgin and Child flanked by archangels with TikTok haircuts. The other icon, also sixth century, is a richly textured panel painting probably done in Constantinople and brought — rumor has it, by the Emperor Justinian — as a gift to the Monastery of Saint Catherine in Sinai (Egypt) believed to be the oldest continuously operating Christian monastery in the world, situated on the peninsula between Africa and Asia. (The picture is still preserved there.)

Though different in form, these two venerable objects share visual features, not only with each other but with images that long preceded and postdated them. The motif of the upward gaze of the Virgin’s eyes in both is the same one seen on the feather-crowned Isis of four centuries earlier, and can be found in icons painted by the Ethiopian Orthodox artists centuries after Byzantium, as a political power, had disappeared.

In Ethiopia today it’s common to see icons old and new — it can be hard to discern the difference, so tenderly are they treated — carried, like healing presences, inside and outside of churches. And when, at the press preview for “Africa & Byzantium,” Archbishop Damianos, the longtime abbot of Saint Catherine at Sinai, delivered a brief dedicatory blessing, there was nothing pro forma about it. He was, after all, leaving living treasures in our keeping.

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People walk by a tapestry-weave wall hanging with a lot of blues and reds that depicts Mary and baby Jesus flanked by saints.
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“Icon of the Virgin Enthroned,” woven, sixth century, Byzantine (Egypt). Credit...Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

Like Saint Catherine’s great icon, many of the objects in this exhibition are of surpassing visual beauty, though to the people who made them, and to those who continue to love them, their real value rests in their spiritual agency. They are animate and interactive, energy sources that never turn off.

Such a dynamic is all but impossible to convey in a museum setting. What museums are good at conveying, or should be, are the confusions and exclusions and ever-changing rhythms of the histories that objects are part of. As for the objects, they are points of light mapping paths through those histories. The paths can be hard to follow; they sometimes are in this dense, winding investigative show. But the vistas that opens are vision-expanding every twist of the way.

Africa & Byzantium

Nov. 19-March 3, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, (212) 535-7710; metmuseum.org.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/16/arts ... useum.html
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Spouted Vessel with Qur'anic Verses and the Names of the Shi'a Imams

Post by kmaherali »

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Spouted Vessel with Qur'anic Verses and the Names of the Shi'a Imams
On view at The Met Fifth Avenue

JollyGul Art & Craft Gallery is thrilled to present this exquisite creation, which is currently on display at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

The "Spouted Vessel with Qur'anic Verses and the Names of the Shi'a Imams" is a significant artifact from the 17th century.

It's one of only two known spouted vessels of its broad baluster shape. This vessel is notable for the inscriptions on its roundels, which provide the names of Shi'ite imams, and other inscriptions that quote the Qur'an. The spout of the vessel declares the Shi'ite credo of the Nadi Aliyan, which means "call to 'Ali".

It's made of chased and worked copper alloy, measures about 5 1/8 inches in height and 4 1/2 inches in diameter. The inscriptions are quite detailed. For example, the interior bottom part includes verse 159 of chapter 3 of the Qur'an in Naskhi script, and the rim features an Arabic poem of Nad Aliyyan. The outer rim includes chapter 112 of the Qur'an, "al’Ikhlas", and part of verse 64 of chapter 12. Additionally, the body of the vessel carries the names of twelve Shi'a Imams, with some noted omissions or errors due to space constraints.
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Mosque Lamp - Iznik, Turkey

Post by kmaherali »

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Mosque Lamp
Iznik, Turkey
JollyGul Art & Craft Gallery is delighted to showcase the "Mosque Lamp" from the Ottoman Period, originating from Iznik, Turkey, and crafted in 1549.

This is a glazed pottery mosque lamp with a pear-shaped body, three ear-like handles, and a flared neck on a wide base. This exquisite glazed pottery lamp, part of The British Museum's collection, is decorated with blue and grey-green cloud bands and repeating geometric patterns, and features bands of Thuluth (calligraphic) script in blue with green details and small rosettes.

There's also a Naskh inscription (a style of Arabic script known for its clarity) with the date AH 956 near the base. The neck has a tulip bud design. One remaining handle is green with blue scrolls. Inside the rim is a black enamel mark, and the lamp's base is open. The lamp is 22.80 cm in diameter and 38 cm in height.

The lamp is inscribed with a Hadith (saying) of the Prophet Muhammad comparing the believer in the mosque to a fish in water and a non-believer in the mosque to a bird in a cage. `
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Live Music Is a Time Machine

Post by kmaherali »

From Phish concerts to Alanis Morissette shows, throwback tours can take us back to our teen years.

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Richard Perry for The New York Times

In September, I went to see Counting Crows, a band whose music formed the soundtrack of my adolescence. The people alongside me at the Greek Theater at the University of California, Berkeley, were mainly in their 40s and 50s; people who might have had a babysitter waiting at home, or a slightly achy back. (I had both.)

As we belted out the lyrics of “Mr. Jones” together — a sea of fans singing a decades-old song — I could’ve sworn I was a teenager again. I forgot that I had a mortgage, two kids and a favorite brand of tea bag. I turned to my husband (it was a shock to remember that I had one), and said, “Did we just travel back in time?”

This experience is fairly common, said Dr. Andrew E. Budson, a professor of neurology at Boston University and author of “Why We Forget and How to Remember Better: The Science Behind Memory.” Music has a powerful ability to make us feel like we’ve been transported to the past.

Many experts say that, as we get older, we tend to remember things that happened to us in our adolescence and early adulthood more than in other eras of our lives, a phenomenon known as the reminiscence bump. Though there are several theories, some experts speculate that it’s because we’re forming our identities during this time, and our brains are particularly receptive to new information. It’s also a period that often includes social milestones, like a first relationship.

So the music we listened to when we were in our teens and early 20s tends to stick with us and evoke strong memories when we hear it again, said Kelly Jakubowski, an associate professor of music psychology at Durham University who studies music and memory. And for many of us, the music we liked when we were younger remains our favorite as we age.

Nostalgia can be good for us, staving off loneliness and enhancing well-being. And while listening to a song or an album can activate memories that make us nostalgic, there are a few reasons that a live concert magnifies the experience.

Memory acts like a time machine.

When we’re initially forming a memory from an experience, different regions of the brain become active. There are several theories about exactly how this happens, but many experts believe that the hippocampus, a part of the brain involved in memory and learning, binds all of the elements of an event into a single memory. If it’s important or emotional, a neighboring region of the brain, the amygdala, will boost activity in the hippocampus to ensure that information is encoded and stored as a lasting memory.

When some part of your current experience matches some part of a memory, the hippocampus helps retrieve and reconstruct the remaining elements of the original event.

“The reason it feels like time travel is that you actually have the same patterns of activity in the brain; when you pull up the memory, they become active,” Dr. Budson said. So things you saw or heard or felt originally, “you’re able to experience many of them again.”


When the Best Gift Costs Nothing at All
Music is particularly good at doing this because it activates so many different brain regions, Dr. Budson said. Plus, a song lasts several minutes, so “it encourages you to be thinking about that memory and retrieving that memory not just for a few seconds, like looking at a picture might, but for a prolonged period of time.”

People and places can influence nostalgia.

Last year, Anna Scott, a retired radio D.J. in Mount Vernon, Wash., attended concerts by the Eagles and Paul McCartney. “You feel young again,” said Ms. Scott, 71. “It’s nice to have that feeling back.”

Another reason that hearing a band live can take you back to your youth is that music activates the motor system, said Dr. Budson, which is why we sometimes dance or tap our feet. And being in a crowd can make that urge stronger as “there is a lot of contagiousness to the kinds of responses people are having,” said Elizabeth H. Margulis, director of the Music Cognition Lab at Princeton University. Research has shown, for instance, that we often clap because others clap and even synchronize heart rate and breathing rate during concerts.

Katie Swinford, 43, a teacher in Cincinnati, has seen the band Phish roughly 20 times since the mid-1990s. The concerts are her “safe and happy place,” she said, where she’s soothed by “the familiarity of the music and the people.”

Though memory hasn’t been studied much in a live concert setting, said Dr. Jakubowski, studies comparing recorded and live listening experiences have found that being among other people contributes to your enjoyment. In a crowd of like-minded fans, you may feel “not only connected to the artist, but connected to all these people around you,” she said.

Location can also heighten the experience. In the summer of 2021, Kristen Bachich attended an Alanis Morissette show with high school friends at a Camden, N.J., theater that she had frequented as a teenager.

“It gave us so many weird feelings,” Ms. Bachich said. “We’re all 40-year-old moms now, but once upon a time we were teenagers screaming ‘You Oughta Know’ in the back seat while our own moms drove us to the mall.”

We tend to remember things more strongly in the environment where we formed the original memory, a concept known as context-dependent memory, said Matthew Schulkind, a psychology professor at Amherst College who studies memory and music cognition. And “the more similar the context is, the more powerful that effect is going to be,” he said.

Your time-travel mileage may vary.

There are pieces of music we’ve heard so much that we no longer associate them with a specific time and place, Dr. Budson said. At some point you may have listened to a song “so many different times that it’s lost its unique time traveling capacity,” he said.

While many things can enhance the feeling of being transported when you see an artist you loved in your youth, Dr. Budson said, it ultimately depends most on whether being at the concert triggers more relevant matches in your brain than hearing a recorded version of the artist.

For me, though, concerts seem to win out. I’m already looking at upcoming tour dates for the Lemonheads and the Smashing Pumpkins, figuring out when I can buy my next ticket to 1996.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/30/well ... ory.html[b]
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Re: General Art & Architecture of Interest

Post by kmaherali »

I’m White. Should I Repatriate My African Art?

The magazine’s Ethicist columnist on whether to return artwork to its original source.

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An illustration of a worried-looking woman walking into a room with various African artworks, including sculptures and masks.
Credit...Illustration by Tomi Um

I was privileged to have been raised in a family who prized the arts, including works from cultures that were not our own. (We are of European ancestry.) Among the art in my childhood home was a significant collection of masks, statues, figurines and other objects from mostly West African cultures. My father, who acquired these pieces in the 1970s and ’80s through art dealers, has always taken pride in the idea that they were not “tourist art.” Most of the items date to the 19th and early 20th centuries.

I have come into possession of several of these items over the years, and always appreciated them for their artistic qualities. But as my understanding of the horrors of colonialism and the legacy of slavery expands, I question whether it’s ethical for me to display a Baule mask or a Yoruba dance wand — ceremonial items with deep spiritual and cultural significance. Knowing they were not created for a tourist market also leads me to believe that at some point in their history they were probably acquired via an unfair transaction.

What is my responsibility to the descendants of the people who created these objects? Some friends have suggested donation to a local museum that specializes in African art, but this would perpetuate the colonialist attitude that these objects don’t belong where they were created. Is it possible to repatriate them? — Kate

From the Ethicist:

When I was a child in Kumasi, in Ghana, Hausa-speaking traders often visited my mother, an Englishwoman who was known to collect certain artifacts from the region. They had bought the items from villagers — often members of my father’s ethnic group — who preferred the money they were offered to the objects, typically brass weights or carved dolls. The weights had been useful when gold dust was the currency and you needed to check how much gold you were getting. Some of the carved dolls were a kind of medicine, which women carried on their backs when they wanted to get pregnant. Pregnancy achieved, you might not need the doll. And so on.

Perhaps in a just world these villagers would have been richer, and perhaps if they had been richer, they would have held onto these objects rather than selling them for the prices they were paid. But if we thought that every market transaction in those circumstances was invalid, we’d have to think that the women who bought textiles from the villages to sell in Kumasi’s central market were doing something wrong.

Many African objects that Westerners now treat as art works were sold, like the weights and carvings my mother bought, by people who had the right to sell them. Still, I’ve heard it argued that anything acquired during the colonial period (as your possessions may have been) was unjustly expropriated — that the colonial context ruled out freely made choices, even outside circumstances of overt violence. The implication is that people who sold these objects were dupes of the buyer, ignoramuses unaware of the value of what they were selling, or else intimidated into making the sale.

Careful accounts of such transactions (notably by Michel Leiris, who accompanied a French collecting expedition through Africa in the 1930s) indicate that skulduggery sometimes took place, but that it wasn’t the norm. So you have to imagine going back and telling, say, a Yoruba family with a Shango wand that they were forbidden to sell it, at least to someone from another culture. How persuasive would you be? Bear in mind, too, that many objects used in traditional rituals were seen as spiritually charged only while they were in use.

Ivory Coast has, in any case, more than enough Baule masks for the Baule to use in rituals like the Mblo dances. Nigeria certainly has more than enough Shango wands for those who want to participate in the rites of the traditional god of thunder and lightning. And because some 90 percent of Yoruba people today are either Christian or Muslim, the traditional religion of Yorubaland doesn’t have precisely the same significance as it did in the past.

Nor, finally, does the fact that you are not of African descent make it wrong for you to have these things, any more than it would be wrong for members of the historically powerful Yoruba to possess a stool from their Nupe neighbors. (Yes, West Africa’s long history, like Europe’s, features plenty of conquest and pillage.) Prizing cultural artifacts from around the globe bespeaks, at its best, a cosmopolitan sensibility — one that’s especially important in a world increasingly narrowed by nativism.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/01/maga ... thics.html
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

What if Dance Could Save the World?

Post by kmaherali »

Over the past year, dance has shown its broader worth, from stage to film, #balletcore to music videos, TikTok tutorials to movement classes.

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Dancers in the Ballet National de Marseille, which is run by the collective (La)Horde. “Maybe dance can save the world,” the group said this summer in an interview before making its New York debut.Credit...Benjamin Malapris for The New York Times

There’s been a lot of dance seemingly coming out of nowhere. A recent unexpected sighting — one of many this year — happened just this month on “Saturday Night Live,” when Chloe Fineman, dressed in a Santa coat, appeared on Weekend Update with an idea for a sexy present: re-enacting the dance that Julia Stiles performed at the end of “Save the Last Dance.” So random!

Stripping off her coat to reveal a leotard and ripstop pants, Fineman, with elfin ballerina determination, bops from side to side in an approximation of the choreography — snapping her fingers alongside high knees, carving shapes into the air with robotic arms, throwing in an occasional pirouette — while describing the plot of this 2001 film and its dubious dance style: street ballet. The surprise comes when Stiles herself jumps beside her to wrap up the number as a duet — folding chairs, shoulder rolls, fist bump and all.

I adore Stiles, and her table dance in “10 Things I Hate About You” remains in my personal Top 10. But this was all about Fineman. As she deftly demonstrated the choreography’s awkwardness while playing it straight, my mind went for a moment to Audrey Hepburn’s beatnik dance in “Funny Face.” And then I thought, no. Fineman is our very own Danny Kaye; like him, her physical comedy comes from a terpsichorean place.

Was I surprised to see dance, the art form I hold above all others, valorized on just another Saturday night? I was, and wasn’t. It’s not only that dance has been everywhere recently; it’s that dance is cool. Our lives are full of words — and words and words. Dance can say what words often can’t. It can be watched, it can be felt through the watching, and it can be a physical part of anyone’s life. It has captured the imagination of people from all walks of life, and this is the fire of dance right now: You can’t put a label on it. It is what it is. You be you. That is dance in 2023.

ImageA woman in a black leotard raises her hand above her head in a dance move. Behind her, two men sit at news anchor’s desk. The backdrop is a map of the world.
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Save the last dance for Chloe Fineman, who demonstrates her terpsichorean know-how on a recent episode of “Saturday Night Live.”Credit...NBC

The cool quotient of dance has been brewing over the past few years. It was boosted, on TikTok, by the solitude of the pandemic, and this year it seems that dance has really spread its wings. It’s not only fashionable to like dance, but also to have others know that you do. At New York City Ballet, where audience members look like extras in “Emily in Paris,” everyone is posing for pictures or asking me to take them. Sure, it’s basic, but it’s also endearing.

In January, I didn’t think that #balletcore would make it to the spring, but it’s still going strong. I’ve seen designer ballet flats selling for $550. Pink — the soft, cozy ballet version — is everywhere. In October, the clothing label Reformation released a collaboration with City Ballet; Urban Outfitters has a balletcore web page. It’s not the way the dancers I know dress on their days off — I find street tulle cringe — but as trends go, this one has its pointe shoes dug in deep.

At least balletcore has given more momentum to the efforts of @modelsdoingballet, an Instagram account and website started a few years ago by a pair of dancers who promote another approach. Their motto: “Just stop. Hire dancers.”

On their feed you can see models in a heartbreaking array of problematic ballet positions. The sight of a woman standing en pointe can be terrifying; feet are disembodied, stiff and lifeless (those are called biscuits); and ribbons, normally laced around the ankle, have been used to tie two legs together. Hashtags like #whodidthistothem point out the obvious, as do comments like “I do love a barre with a kitten heel”; “Looking at this image alone broke my ankles”; and “I keep forgetting I’m following this page and then I feel very confused and distressed for a moment."

I agree: Let’s use this moment of dance popularity to hire actual dancers as models. But dance worship is far-reaching and, mercifully, stretches beyond ballet — and beyond live performance. Along with a dance-inspired outfit, it could be a movie with a memorable dance moment. From late 2022 to now, there have been many examples: “M3GAN,” “Barbie,” “Asteroid City,” ”Poor Things,” “Maestro.”

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In a large room with arches and a patterned floor, a woman with long hair dances, her layered skirt swirling around her. On the left side of the frame is a cameraman on a dolly. On the right side, actors sit at tables dining.
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Emma Stone dancing on the set of “Poor Things,” one of many recent movies with a memorable dance sequence.Credit...Atsushi Nishijima/Searchlight Pictures, via Associated Press

Yet there’s something just as compelling when choreography is less about steps and more about the way a body inhabits space, as it did in the movie “Corsage.” (The film was released in the last days of 2022; I count it.)

Vicky Krieps, as the rebellious, water-loving exercise enthusiast Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, moves through life with a somatic approach, floating through her scenes with dancerly levitation. Her sarcasm, her unhappiness, her wit — they are all ingrained in her body. (Throughout, she reminds me of the downtown choreographer and dancer Jodi Melnick.) And stay for the credits, in which she rolls and curves in dreamy slow motion. It is a dance.

Looking for something new in dance doesn’t interest me as much as watching it morph and grow. As George Balanchine, the founding choreographer of City Ballet, used to say, “There are no new steps, only new combinations.”

Imagination gets to the heart of what new combinations can bring. In a way, that was best epitomized not on a stage this year, but in the viral video for the song “Back on 74” by Jungle, the British electronic music band, from its album “Volcano.”

The album is available as a motion picture, choreographed by Shay Latukolan, and tells a story — as far as I can tell — that loosely follows two extraordinary dancers, Will West and Mette Linturi, throughout a love affair. They move like silk — their fluidity, their precision, their pulse is devastating. Watch it, learn it, do it.

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A woman in a white satiny cutoff shirt and white pants has her arms out and a leg up in a kick. We see a few dancers behind her. And the sloping tin ceiling of the performance space.
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Lavinia Eloise Bruce at Pageant, a dance space in Brooklyn that has smaller-scale performances and a sense of community.Credit...OK McCausland for The New York Times

I love the entire film. But the “Back on 74” video is a stand-alone masterpiece of music and dance, of funk and rhythm. Its older influences, including the Supremes and the Temptations, mixed with the here and now produce such full-bodied gorgeousness and groove that once its movement becomes lodged in my head and body, I lose sleep because I am dancing in my sleep.

As the choreographer Twyla Tharp has said: “Dance is simply the refinement of human movement — walking, running and jumping. We are all experts. There should be no art form more accessible than dance, yet no art is more mystifying in the public imagination.”

Dance gives us the ability to see beyond the obvious. I’m not coming from a place in which “entertainment” is a dirty word. But as the world continues to crumble in big and small ways — and as other art forms suffer from immersive this and commercialized that — there is relief to be found in smaller-scale performances and the community they foster, which you see at dance spaces like Pageant in Brooklyn.

At this moment when dance is everywhere, it’s time to give it deeper attention, to move beyond the ballet-centric surface of it all. Dance isn’t separate from life; movement is a part of life, after all. There is an urgent need not just for spreading the gospel of dance, but for recognizing it, because within its wild wingspan the art form is also this: We all have a body, a body that needs to dance.

In the finale of the Apple TV+ show “Physical,” the troubled aerobics instructor Sheila Rubin (Rose Byrne) concludes that dancing with others releases a chemical “that makes us feel connected to the strangers around us.” She adds, “It makes us feel connected to something bigger than ourselves.”

It does! I keep circling back to something that the French collective (La)Horde, which made its United States debut this year, said to me over the summer: “Maybe dance can save the world.” Maybe it’s not maybe. Maybe, under the radar, dance has already been changing the world in unassuming ways — in a street jazz class at a gym or the line dancing in the back of a Ukrainian restaurant, where movement is seen and shared through the bodies and minds of everyday dancers.

As the world gets darker, and it will, remember that we all have the capacity to be everyday dancers. But it's more than capacity: We just are.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/26/arts ... genre.html
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

Fountains: A Journey Through Time & Culture

Post by kmaherali »

JollyGul Micro-Documentary Channel is excited to present two new captivating releases that explore the timeless allure of fountains. Our first video, "Fountains: A Journey Through Time and Culture," takes viewers on a mesmerizing voyage across history, unraveling the evolution, artistry, and the profound impact of fountains in different civilizations.

The second documentary provides an in-depth look at one of the most renowned fountains in the world, the Trevi Fountain, focusing on its rich history, architectural splendor, and the artistic heritage it represents.

We extend our sincere thanks and appreciation to Afraaz Adam Mulji, whose inspiration was the spark that led us to these fascinating topics. His ideas not only enriched our exploration but also enabled us to bring forth the historical and cultural magnificence of fountains.

Join us in this visually stunning and informative journey to discover the grandeur and stories of these water marvels. `

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Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kr8U09R4XWI

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Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uqe1AmnSTJ8
kmaherali
Posts: 25106
Joined: Thu Mar 27, 2003 3:01 pm

How Art Creates Us

Post by kmaherali »

How to Save a Sad, Lonely, Angry and Mean Society

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Recently, while browsing in the Museum of Modern Art store in New York, I came across a tote bag with the inscription, “You are no longer the same after experiencing art.” It’s a nice sentiment, I thought, but is it true? Or to be more specific: Does consuming art, music, literature and the rest of what we call culture make you a better person?

Ages ago, Aristotle thought it did, but these days a lot of people seem to doubt it. Surveys show that Americans are abandoning cultural institutions. Since the early 2000s, fewer and fewer people say that they visit art museums and galleries, go to see plays or attend classical music concerts, opera or ballet. College students are fleeing the humanities for the computer sciences, having apparently decided that a professional leg up is more important than the state of their souls. Many professors seem to have lost faith too. They’ve become race, class and gender political activists. The ensuing curriculum is less “How does George Eliot portray marriage?” and more “Workers of the world, unite!”

And yet I don’t buy it. I confess I still cling to the old faith that culture is vastly more important than politics or some pre-professional training in algorithms and software systems. I’m convinced that consuming culture furnishes your mind with emotional knowledge and wisdom; it helps you take a richer and more meaningful view of your own experiences; it helps you understand, at least a bit, the depths of what’s going on in the people right around you.

The novelist Alice Walker lamented that she lacked models. She wasn’t aware of enough Black female writers who could serve as exemplars and inspirations as she tried to perceive her world and tell her stories. Then she found the novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, who, decades before, had pointed the way, shown her how to see and express, enabled her to write about her mother’s life, about voodoo, the structures of authentic Black folklore. Thanks to Hurston she had a new way to see, a deeper way to connect to her own heritage.

I’d argue that we have become so sad, lonely, angry and mean as a society in part because so many people have not been taught or don’t bother practicing to enter sympathetically into the minds of their fellow human beings. We’re overpoliticized while growing increasingly undermoralized, underspiritualized, undercultured.

The alternative is to rediscover the humanist code. It is based on the idea that unless you immerse yourself in the humanities, you may never confront the most important question: How should I live my life?

Ralph Waldo Emerson, for example, argued that we consume culture to enlarge our hearts and minds. We start with the tiny circle of our own experience, but gradually we acquire more expansive ways of seeing the world. Peer pressure and convention may try to hem us in, but the humanistic mind expands outward to wider and wider circles of awareness.

I went to college at a time and in a place where many people believed that the great books, poems, paintings and pieces of music really did hold the keys to the kingdom. If you studied them carefully and thought about them deeply, they would improve your taste, your judgments, your conduct.

Our professors at the University of Chicago had sharpened their minds and renovated their hearts by learning from and arguing against books. They burned with intensity as they tried to convey what past authors and artists were trying to say.

The teachers welcomed us into a great conversation, traditions of dispute stretching back to Aeschylus, Shakespeare, George Bernard Shaw, Clifford Odets. They held up visions of excellence, people who had seen farther and deeper, such as Augustine, Sylvia Plath and Richard Wright. They introduced us to the range of moral ecologies that have been built over the centuries and come down as sets of values by which we can choose to live — stoicism, Buddhism, romanticism, rationalism, Marxism, liberalism, feminism.

The message was that all of us could improve our taste and judgment by becoming familiar with what was best — the greatest art, philosophy, literature and history. And this journey toward wisdom was a lifelong affair.

The hard sciences help us understand the natural world. The social sciences help us measure behavior patterns across populations. But culture and the liberal arts help us enter the subjective experience of particular people: how this unique individual felt; how this other one longed and suffered. We have the chance to move with them, experience the world, a bit, the way they experience it.

We know from studies by the psychologists Raymond Mar and Keith Oatley that reading literature is associated with heightened empathy skills. Deep reading, immersing yourself in novels with complex characters, engaging with stories that explore the complexity of this character’s motivations or that character’s wounds, is a training ground for understanding human variety. It empowers us to see the real people in our lives more accurately and more generously, to better understand their intentions, fears and needs, the hidden kingdom of their unconscious drives. The resulting knowledge is not factual knowledge but emotional knowledge.

The novelist Frederick Buechner once observed that not all the faces Rembrandt painted were remarkable. Some are just average-looking old people. But even the plainest face “is so remarkably seen that it forces you to see it remarkably.” We are jolted into not taking other people for granted but to sense and respect the immense depth of each human soul.

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Rembrandt’s “The Return of the Prodigal Son.”
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Rembrandt’s “The Return of the Prodigal Son.”Credit...Fine Art Images/Heritage Images, via Getty Images

When I come across a Rembrandt in a museum, I try to train myself to see with even half of Rembrandt’s humanity. Once in St. Petersburg, I had the chance to stand face to face with one of his greatest paintings, “The Return of the Prodigal Son.” He painted this one at the end of his life, when popular taste had left him behind, his finances were in ruins, his wife and four of his five children were in their graves. I have seen other renderings of that parable, but not one in which the rebel son is so broken, fragile, pathetic, almost hairless and cast down. The father envelops the young man with a love that is patient, selfless and forbearing. Close observers note the old man’s hands. One is masculine, and protective. The other is feminine, and tender.

Though this painting is about a parable, it’s not here to teach us some didactic lesson. We are simply witnessing an emotional moment, which is about fracture and redemption, an aging artist painting a scene in which he imagines all his losses are restored. It is a painting about what it is like to finally realize your deepest yearnings — for forgiveness, safety, reconciliation, home. Meanwhile, the son’s older brother is off to the side, his face tensely rippling with a mixture of complex thoughts, which I read as rigid scorn trying to repress semiconscious shoots of fraternal tenderness.

Experiences like this help us understand ourselves in light of others — the way we are like them and the way we are different. As Toni Morrison put it: “Like Frederick Douglass talking about his grandmother, and James Baldwin talking about his father, and Simone de Beauvoir talking about her mother, these people are my access to me; they are my entrance into my own interior life.”

Experiences with great artworks deepen us in ways that are hard to describe. To have visited Chartres Cathedral or finished “The Brothers Karamazov” is not about acquiring new facts but to feel somehow elevated, enlarged, altered. In Rainer Maria Rilke’s novel “The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge,” the protagonist notices that as he ages, he’s able to perceive life on a deeper level: “I am learning to see. I don’t know why it is, but everything penetrates more deeply into me and does not stop at the place where until now it always used to finish.”

Mark Edmundson teaches literature at the University of Virginia and is one of those who still lives by the humanist code. In his book “Why Read?” he describes the potential charge embedded in a great work of art: “Literature is, I believe, our best goad toward new beginnings, our best chance for what we might call secular rebirth. However much society at large despises imaginative writing, however much those supposedly committed to preserve and spread literary art may demean it, the fact remains that in literature there abide major hopes for human renovation.”

Wouldn’t you love to take a course from that guy?

How does it work? How does culture do its thing? The shortest answer is that culture teaches us how to see. “The greatest thing a human soul ever does in this world is to see something, and tell what it saw in a plain way,” the Victorian art critic John Ruskin wrote. “Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see.”

Ruskin intuited something that neuroscience has since confirmed: Perception is not a simple and straightforward act. You don’t open your eyes and ears and record the data that floods in, the way in those old cameras light was recorded on film. Instead, perception is a creative act. You take what you’ve experienced during the whole course of your life, the models you’ve stored up in your head, and you apply them to help you interpret all the ambiguous data your senses pick up, to help you discern what really matters in a situation, what you desire, what you find admirable and what you find contemptible.

Another way to put it is this: Artistic creation is the elemental human act. When they are making pictures or poems or stories, artists are constructing a complex, coherent representation of the world. That’s what all of us are doing every minute as we’re looking around. We’re all artists of a sort. The universe is a silent, colorless place. It’s just waves and particles out there. But by using our imaginations, we construct colors and sounds, tastes and stories, drama, laughter, joy and sorrow.

Works of culture make us better perceivers. We artists learn from other artists. Paintings, poems, novels and music help multiply and refine the models we use to perceive and construct reality. By attending to great perceivers, the Louis Armstrongs, the Jorge Luis Borgeses, the Jane Austens, we can more subtly understand what is going on around us and be better at expressing what we see and feel.

When you go to the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, you don’t just see Picasso’s “Guernica”; forever after you see war through that painting’s lenses. You see, or rather feel, the wailing mother, the screaming horse, the chaotic jumble of death and agony, and it becomes less possible to romanticize warfare. We don’t just see paintings; we see according to them.

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People viewing Picasso’s “Guernica.”
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Picasso’s “Guernica.”Credit...Emilio Parra Doiztua for The New York Times

This process of refining and expanding our internal mental models is not a dry, purely intellectual process. If we’re lucky, and maybe only in rare moments, it can be gut-wrenching and intoxicating, a fusion of the head and the heart. As my friend Arthur Brooks writes, “Think of a time when you heard a piece of music and wanted to cry. Or recall the flutter of your heart as you stared at a delicate, uncannily lifelike sculpture. Or maybe your dizziness as you emerged from a narrow side street in an unfamiliar city and found yourself in a beautiful town square; for me, it was the Piazza San Marco in Venice, with its exquisitely preserved Renaissance architecture. Odds are, you didn’t feel as if the object of beauty was a narcotic, deadening you. Instead, it probably precipitated a visceral awakening, much like the shock from a lungful of pure oxygen after breathing smoggy air.”

In this kind of education, you are lured by beauty and deeply pierced by myths that seem primeval and strange. Once in college, I was reading Nietzsche’s “The Birth of Tragedy” in the library. I don’t know what happened next. The book, with its fevered prose and savage genius, sucked me into a trance. I eventually looked up and it was four hours later. I had traveled in time back into some primeval world of bonfires, dancing and Dionysian frenzy, and it left a residue, which I guess you would call a greater awareness of the metaphysical, the transcendent. Life can be much wilder than it seems growing up on a suburban street.

The philosopher Roger Scruton argued that this kind of education gives us the ability to experience emotions that may never happen to us directly. He wrote: “The reader of Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude’ learns how to animate the natural world with pure hopes of his own; the spectator of Rembrandt’s ‘Night Watch’ learns of the pride of corporations, and the benign sadness of civic life; the listener to Mozart’s ‘Jupiter’ symphony is presented with the open floodgates of human joy and creativity; the reader of Proust is led through the enchanted world of childhood and made to understand the uncanny prophecy of our later griefs which those days of joy contain.”

Your way of perceiving the world becomes your way of being in the world. If your eyes have been trained to see, even just a bit, by the way Leo Tolstoy saw, if your heart can feel as deeply as a K.D. Lang song, if you understand people with as much complexity as Shakespeare did, then you will have enhanced the way you live your life.

Attention is a moral act. The key to becoming a better person, Iris Murdoch wrote, is to be able to cast a “just and loving attention” on others. It’s to shed the self-serving way of looking at the world and to see things as they really are. We can, Murdoch argued, grow by looking. Culture gives us an education in how to attend.

The best of the arts are moral without moralizing. Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” is an inquiry into the knowledge of right and wrong, told through the eyes of one who suffers, with all the pity and sorrow that involves.

The best of the arts induce humility. In our normal shopping mall life, the consumer is king. The crucial question is, do I like this or not? But we approach great art in a posture of humility and reverence. What does this have to teach me? What was this other human being truly seeking?

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A man observing a large painting on a wall in a museum.
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The San Fernando Royal Academy of Fine Arts Museum in Spain.Credit...Emilio Parra Doiztua for The New York Times

One of my heroes is Samuel Johnson, the essayist, playwright, poet, dictionary compiler, one of the greatest critics of all time. He was something of a mess as a young man — lazy, envious, unreliable. Over the decades, he read, wrote and felt his way to greatness. He read with astounding sensitivity. Once at age 9 he was reading “Hamlet” when he came to the ghost scene. He was so terrified he ran to the front door so that he could look out at the people in the street, just to remind himself that he was still in the land of the living.

He wrote biographies of his moral exemplars. He wrote essays, poems and plays about the great works of the Western tradition, and especially about his own sins as if he were trying to beat it out of himself through the scourge of self-examination. (Johnson had a special weakness for envy, and so dozens of his essays in his periodicals mention the sin of envy.) His awareness of human depravity led to humility, self-restraint and redemption. And it worked. By the end of his life he was lavishly generous, a man who had the ability to see the world with absolute honesty and sympathetic perception. Johnson socialized with artists and statesmen, but he invited society’s outcasts to live with him so that he could feed and offer them shelter — a former slave, a doctor who treated the poor, a blind poet. One night he found a woman, most likely a prostitute, lying ill and exhausted on the street. He put her on his back and brought her home to join the others. Johnson was a somewhat tortured Christian. These radical moments of welcome are the essential Gospel-like acts.

When he died, his eulogist observed that he left a chasm in national life that nothing could fill up. He embodied that old humanist ideal. He had become a person of taste, a person of judgment, a person of culture. He died a wonderful man.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/25/opin ... 778d3e6de3
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