A new book tells the story of a man jailed for impersonating a priest in 1693 Spain when he was likely trying to escape racial persecution. It gives readers a fascinating look at a centuries-old legal case against a man on pilgrimage and shows how Iberians of black-African ancestry faced discrimination and mistreatment. The book,...
Russian researchers from the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, Kurnakov Institute of General and Inorganic Chemistry of RAS, and Russia’s famed Tretyakov Gallery have conducted a comprehensive preconservation study of “The Portrait of F.P. Makerovsky in a Masquerade Costume” (1789) by the Russian painter Dmitry Levitsky. The paper was published in the journal Heritage Science....
What would you do if you could be invisible? Would this newfound power bring out the best in you, instilling you with the courage to discreetly sabotage the efforts of evildoers? Or would the ability to slip in and out of rooms unnoticed tap into darker impulses? This alluring fantasy has long been fodder for...
In this revised extract from the introduction to Troubling Images: Visual Culture and the Politics of Afrikaner Nationalism, the book’s editors assess how art and design helped forge Afrikaner nationalism. In Banal Nationalism British academic Michael Billig writes, “If the future remains uncertain, we know the past history of nationalism. And that should be sufficient...
Art and Soul: what does that mean? The expression has lent itself to many things in American society, such as a crafts studio in Long Island, a tattoo/piercing shop in the Hudson Valley of New York, and a gallery in Boulder, Colorado. Art and Soul echoes the expression heart and soul, which means without reservations...
Many Americans are familiar with Italian, French and even German operas. Some prefer the ease of operas performed in English such as “Porgy and Bess,” but less familiar to audiences stateside are Russian operas. Thankfully, Tchaikovsky gave us eleven worthy operas; and while the most popular is arguably “Eugene Onegin,” his work “The Queen of...
The Oscars have long represented a way for the American film industry to celebrate and market its achievements. Even when there are surprising wins, like this year’s top awards sweep by South Korean film Parasite, the Oscars tell us more about the values of the industry or what it wants to say than what might...
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...
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)...
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...