Parasite may be the first foreign-language film to win a Oscar for best picture, but now that line has been crossed, there’s every hope this might mark a shift in attitudes to what the film’s director Bong Joon-ho calls the “one inch tall barrier of subtitles”. A lot has been said recently about diversity and...
Art & Style
What Is the Place of the Performing Arts Fair in the Age of the Internet?
Review: Platform Papers 62: Performing Arts Markets and their Conundrums, by Justin Macdonnell (Currency Press) The performing arts may be a public good that serve to enrich Australia’s cultural imagination, but they are also a product competing for audience share and government, corporate and private support. Established in 1994, the Australian Performing Arts Market (APAM)...
There’s Been a Spike in Fake African Art. What’s Being Done to Fight It
The art world has been dealing with fakes for more than 2 000 years, with perhaps the most notorious case being the forgeries of Dutch master Johannes Vermeer’s paintings by artist Han van Meegeren during the Second World War. Now African art is becoming a larger and larger target. Fakes are flooding the South African...
Why Italian Cinema Is Starting to Glamorize the Mafia
For almost a century, American filmmakers have glamorized the Mafia, depicting their ranks as so charismatic and quick-witted that you might want to invite them over for dinner. Audiences saw this most recently in “The Irishman,” which reunites a star cast of the usual suspects – Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Joe Pesci –...
Sahel at the Met
From the Met: From the first millennium, Africa’s western Sahel—a vast area on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert, spanning what is today Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, and Niger—was the birthplace of a succession of influential states fueled by regional and global trade networks. Opening on January 30 at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Sahel: Art...
Fonts in Campaign Communications Have Liberal or Conservative Leanings
Yard signs for a local politician captured the curiosity of Katherine Haenschen. “I was driving through the region and noticed the same campaign was using a different font on signs in rural areas than on the signs in town,” said Haenschen, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication. “I thought, why would this candidate...
Inane Things with a Taste of Freedom
In 1945, the Soviet Army seized the film archive of the Third Reich, the so-called Reichfilmarchive, and brought it from Berlin to Moscow. The archive contained thousands of movies from various countries. Since then, the German, American, and a few European trophies circulated throughout the Soviet Union despite a lack of an effective distribution license....
In Review: DESIGN MIAMI/ 2019
Design Miami/ concluded its fifteenth anniversary edition Sunday, December 8, with a major increase in visitor numbers and a newly oriented tent opposite the Miami Beach Convention Center, which is home to Art Basel Miami Beach. Situated in the recently inaugurated Pride Park, the fair drew collector and visitor numbers totalling 42,000 this year, to round out a defining decade...
Pantone: How One Company Built a Business Turning Color Into Cash
Headquartered about an hour outside of Manhattan in Carlstadt, New Jersey, a company called Pantone categorizes color and sells it. Founded in the 1950s by brothers Morris and Jesse Levine as a commercial printing company, M&J Levine Advertising evolved into something else entirely by the 60s when employee Lawrence Herbert revamped the business’s ink and printing division, introduced...
‘The Mandela Effect’ Is the Perfect Film for Our Age of Distrust and Doubt
You’ve likely used the internet to help you remember something, like a quote from a movie, only to discover the answer differed from what you had anticipated. Maybe you shrugged, telling yourself your memory was faulty, and went on with your life. But what if you found thousands of people online had this same experience...