Go look. Click any drawing for a closeup.

Take a look.

At last, Shakespeare for today’s youth:

Generations of schoolchildren have complained of the inaccessibility of Shakespeare’s classic works.

However, with the help of a British satirist, the Ali G generation will have no trouble relating to Hamlet’s woes when they read: “Dere was somefing minging in de State of Denmark.”

In Martin Baum’s updated version of 15 of Shakespeare’s classic plays in “yoof speak”, the Danish prince, who is re-named ‘Amlet, asks: “To be or not to be, innit?”, and Romeo pines for his “fit bitch Jools”.

Mr Baum’s chav-speak Shakespeare, which takes its title from ‘Amlet’s query, includes titles such as Macbeff, Much Ado About Sod All, De ‘Appy Bitches of Windsor, De Taming of de Bitch, Two Geezas Of Verona and All’s Sweet That Ends Sweet, Innit.

Following the well-trodden path of modern interpretations of the Bard’s works, Mr Baum, 48, says his versions, while abridged, remain true to the original formats of Shakespeare’s classics, retaining “the important sexist, duplicitous, cross-dressing and violent moments that made William Shakespeare well wicked.”

Mr Baum’s version of Romeo and Juliet sets the scene for the star-crossed lovers with: “Verona was de turf of de feuding Montagues and de Capulet families.

“And coz they was always brawling and stuff, de prince of Verona told them to cool it or else they was gonna get well mashed if they carried on larging it with each other.”

If the Bard was living today, Mr Baum writes on his website, he would “still be writing in the Globe turf, getting loads of respect from the Stratford upon Avon massive and producing works of pure genius.”

Respect.

Ravel, for one, had it. So did Anne Adams:

Trained in mathematics, chemistry and biology, Dr. Adams left her career as a teacher and bench scientist in 1986 to take care of a son who had been seriously injured in a car accident and was not expected to live. But the young man made a miraculous recovery. After seven weeks, he threw away his crutches and went back to school.

According her husband, Robert, Dr. Adams then decided to abandon science and take up art. She had dabbled with drawing when young, he said in a recent telephone interview, but now she had an intense all-or-nothing drive to paint.

“Anne spent every day from 9 to 5 in her art studio,” said Robert Adams, a retired mathematician. Early on, she painted architectural portraits of houses in the West Vancouver, British Columbia, neighborhood where they lived.

In 1994, Dr. Adams became fascinated with the music of the composer Maurice Ravel, her husband recalled. At age 53, she painted “Unravelling Bolero” a work that translated the famous musical score into visual form.

Unbeknown to her, Ravel also suffered from a brain disease whose symptoms were identical to those observed in Dr. Adams, said Dr. Bruce Miller, a neurologist and the director of the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco. Ravel composed “Bolero” in 1928, when he was 53 and began showing signs of his illness with spelling errors in musical scores and letters.

“Bolero” alternates between two main melodic themes, repeating the pair eight times over 340 bars with increasing volume and layers of instruments. At the same time, the score holds methodically to two simple, alternating staccato bass lines.

“ ‘Bolero’ is an exercise in compulsivity, structure and perseveration,” Dr. Miller said. It builds without a key change until the 326th bar. Then it accelerates into a collapsing finale.

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Fascinating.

from www.ted.com posted with vodpod

A meta-museum for you online browsing. Take a look.

EthanHam.com has a good tip today:

The Brooklyn Museum has a interesting online exhibit of Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo. It features several ways to sort and browse through the images and the ability to magnify the images and really see the prints’ details. Very nicely done!

Very interesting article on art in Cuba today.

Take a look.

Not at all like the slow, painstaking Tibetan Buddhist sandworks. This comes via Ethan Ham’s blog, and the artist is Ferenc Cakó.

With a lot of impact.

Using fired-in-place structures. (More great photos at the link.)

Imagine a sustainable building system that requires only the skills of a potter to complete. A basic earthen structure is formed and finished by traditional clay-firing processes. This remarkable building process culminates in baking every room from the inside, for up to an entire day at up to 1,000 degrees Celsius. The end product is vernacular yet avante garde, traditional but sustainable.

Essentially, the various bricks that compose a building created by using this Geltaftan system are fused into a solid whole after being assembled. The firing process is essentially the same as that which is used in a kiln to finish pottery. Interior furniture (tables, benches and so on) can be fired with the building. The Iranian architect who developed this process first created buildings in Iran but now teaches others who wish to learn his methods in the United States.

Go see/listen. Very cool.

A series of photos, with you to answer after each whether it’s Donald Judd or cheap furniture.

This post is intriguing:

I’m teaching a graduate sculpture course this term… I’ve asked my students to start and keep active a blog for the term as a way of building lines of communication to the greater art world. Here are their blogs… they’re definitely worth checking out!

ArtLook (Seung Ae Kim)
JangSoonNation (Jang Soon)
Rachel Jobe
Rebel Pebble (Elena Stojanova)
REcord (Shani Peters)

Go read, then act.

Very nice, including some videos.

Extremely cool.