Art
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Heads and Feathers on the UES
Mallards with human heads are not what I expect to see on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. But that’s what I saw. Yesterday. And I wasn’t scared, because I was at the Metropolitan Mausoleum of Art in which chamber…
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The Takeo Takei Lab of Ornithology
Works by one of my favorite artists, Takeo Takei (1894-1982). These prints come from one of the jewels of my collection — a handmade artist book that a friend found for me on a recent trip to Japan.
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Gelitin’s “Blind Sculpture”
Over the past couple of weeks, Gelitin, a collective of four Austrian artists—Wolfgang Gantner, Ali Janka, Florian Reither and Tobias Urban—have occupied Chelsea’s Greene Naftali gallery in New York in a happening called “Blind Sculpture.” Their productions are inspired by…
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LIVRENBLOG
I first featured Livrenblog back in January 2009. Since that time I’ve been ogling many more treasures from this wonderful French blog. Here is a taste of what you will find in their archives. Copying what I wrote back then:
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Dash Snow. Creative Master. Baiter.
Artist Dash Snow’s life was cut short at twenty-seven years when he overdosed last summer in his hometown of New York City in a destructive solo hotel stint. Snow created art similarly to how he lived life; he did whatever…
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Les Fleurs du Skull
Carlo Farneti’s illustrations for a 1935 edition of Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. From the collection of Richard Sica:
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“Unoriginal Poetry Based on Junk”
D.A. Powell wrote – a few years ago now – a column for The Poetry Foundation in which he dabbles with the idea of street poetry (think along the lines of the tape poetry of Elvis Christ). Powell’s article was…
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“We have captured a most rare specimen of an extinct insect which was extremely popular at the beginning of the century.”
This second installment of my Soviet-era children’s book series features George Kovenchuk‘s 1974 illustrations for Klop (The Bedbug) by Mayakovsky. You can read a thorough summary of the famous 1929 play — not originally intended for children! — at SovLit.…
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Women, Snakes and Stalkers – South Asian Book Covers
These South Asian book covers come from Quinn Dombrowski’s blog Women, Snakes and Stalkers. Quinn has been photographing covers from the PK (Indo-Iranian languages and literatures) section of the University of Chicago’s Regenstein library. She’s already photographed 1200!
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Katherine Westerhout: Rust Belt
You’re not supposed to look at the dying, the dead; you turn away. Oakland-based photographer Katherine Westerhout looks. Westerhout takes pictures of falling or fallen cities—Pittsburgh, Buffalo, Detroit—focusing on sites of deserted industry and community. She spatially and temporally trespasses,…
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Notable New York, This Week 2/1 – 2/7
This week in New York Unsound, the avant-garde culture festival that began in Eastern Europe, debuts in the city, historian Garry Wills discusses the atomic bomb, a night with filmmaker Ross McElwee at IFC, Jamaica Kincaid and Gary Shteyngart on…
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Czechoslovakian Expose
The first three parts of this book cover series were titled “Slovakian Expose,” but this was mainly because I found these images at online Slovak bookstores. (See the last part.) The previous posts were in fact a mix of Czech…