A mysterious tusked animal depicted in South African rock art might portray an ancient species preserved as fossils in the same region, according to a study published September 18, 2024 in the open-access journal PLOS ONE by Julien Benoit of the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa. The Horned Serpent panel is a section of rock...
Art & Style
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Beneath the Brushstrokes, Van Gogh’s Sky Is Alive with Real-World Physics
Vincent van Gogh’s painting “The Starry Night” depicts a swirling blue sky with yellow moon and stars. The sky is an explosion of colors and shapes, each star encapsulated in ripples of yellow, gleaming with light like reflections on water. Van Gogh’s brushstrokes create an illusion of sky movement so convincing it led atmospheric scientists...
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Temple or Museum? How Diego Rivera Designed a Place to Honor Mexico’s Pre-Hispanic Art
In the 1940s, Mexican artist Diego Rivera had a dream: to build a sacred place to preserve and display his lifelong collection of pre-Hispanic art. The Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City, which celebrates its 60th anniversary this month, is everything he hoped for. Inch by inch, its pyramid structure honors the Mexica worldview. Among its...
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AI Art Valuations Are Starting to Give Some Market Players an Edge
Until the past few decades, the art market was a largely analog world, guided by word-of-mouth, reputation, specialized knowledge, and “context.” That traditional structure has kept information in the hands of a tight coterie of power brokers. But new technology has begun to upend that paradigm in recent years through NFT platforms, live-streamed auctions, online...
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Shepard Fairey Endorses Kamala Harris with ‘FORWARD’ Poster
Shepard Fairey released his first Presidency-themed artwork in more than a decade with the latest Kamala Harris poster FORWARD. The poster draws on the Democratic nominee’s slogan and the party’s rallying cry, “We are not going back.” It portrays Harris in profile, looking confident with a slight smile and gazing upward, with the word “FORWARD” written in big capital...
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Ukraine’s Largest Music Festival Returns with a Break from the Inescapable Reality of War
This year, Ukraine’s largest music festival struck a different chord. Gone were the international headliners, the massive performance halls and the hundreds of thousands of visitors. Instead, beloved local artists graced the stage this past weekend at the Atlas Festival — the first since Russia’s full-scale invasion in February 2022 — for a smaller but...
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AI Found to Boost Individual Creativity – at the Expense of Less Varied Content
Stories written with AI assistance have been deemed to be more creative, better written and more enjoyable. A new study published in the journal Science Advances finds that AI enhances creativity by boosting the novelty of story ideas as well as the ‘usefulness’ of stories – their ability to engage the target audience and potential for publication....
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The Road to the Village: Novelist Chigozie Obioma on Nigeria’s Brutal Civil War, Love and Redemption
Chigozie Obioma is the Nigerian author of the novels The Fishermen (2015) and An Orchestra of Minorities (2019), both shortlisted for the Booker Prize for their unique, folkloric tales of Nigerian life in decades past. Like them, his 2024 novel The Road to the Country is “tinged with fable and prophecy”. It’s set in the...
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The Beginnings of Fashion: Paleolithic Eyed Needles and the Evolution of Dress
A team of researchers led by an archaeologist at the University of Sydney are the first to suggest that eyed needles were a new technological innovation used to adorn clothing for social and cultural purposes, marking the major shift from clothes as protection to clothes as an expression of identity. “Eyed needle tools are an...
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Hackers Claim Responsibility for Christie’s Cyberattack and Threaten to Release Client Data
The group RansomHub say they are behind the attack that took down the auction house’s website earlier this month The hacker group RansomHub has claimed responsibility for the cyberattack that took down Christie’s website earlier this month. It said it is now in possession of “sensitive personal information” on the auction house’s clients, which it is threatening...
