Arts and Culture

Does politics belong in art? The question arouses heated debate about creative freedom and moral responsibility. Assumptions include the idea that politics cheapens film, music, or literature, or that political art should abandon traditional ideas about beauty and technique. As engaging as such discussions might be in the abstract, they mean little to nothing if they don't account for artists who show us that choosing between politics and art can be as much a false dilemma as choosing between art and love. In the work of writers as varied as William Blake, Muriel Rukeyser, James Baldwin, and James Joyce, for example, themes of protest, power, privilege, and poverty are inseparable from the sublimely erotic—all of them essential aspects of human experience, and hence, of literature. Foremost among such political artists stands Chilean poet Pablo Neruda , who—as the TED-Ed video above from Ilan Stavans informs us—was a romantic stylist, and also a fearless political activist

Admit it, your list of favorite Bowie songs is full of the big hits. Hell, maybe it’s all hits; there’s no shame in that. Digging deep into the crates will yield many an overlooked surprise, many a subtle sleeper, cut-up classic, and electronic experiment. But if all you’ve got is Changesbowie —the 1990 compilation that became, for some generations, a definitive statement of his career—you’ve still got a collection of songs the likes of which have never been heard before or since in modern pop. Completists may grouch, but even resident Bowie scholars/local record store clerks have an “Ashes to Ashes,” “’Heroes’,” “Changes,” or “Modern Love” in their top ten. Whether ardent or casual fans, we connect with Bowie’s music through milestones, both in his career and in our own lives. This truth has been exploited. In 2008, Mike Schiller at Popmatters bemoaned the fact that almost 20 Bowie compilation albums had been released, a few of which “don’t really seem to court any greater pu

"Good artists copy, great artists steal," goes a line we often attribute to Pablo Picasso — even those of us who know little of Picasso's work and nothing of the work from which he may or may not have stolen. Quentin Tarantino's version of the line adds another observation about great artists: "They don't do homages." The director of Reservoir Dogs , Pulp Fiction , and Jackie Brown may well have spoken those words in frustration, the frustration of having his every picture described as an "homage" to some element or other of cinema history. He puts it more bluntly: "I steal from every single movie ever made." A bold claim, to be sure, but if anyone is likely to have seen every film ever made, surely it's him. "How Quentin Tarantino Steals from Other Movies," the INSIDER video essay above, surveys the range of his cinematic sources, from  The Searchers to  The Warriors ,  Band of Outsiders to City on Fire ,  M

We can identify most of the last few centuries by their styles of clothes. But it's one thing to know what people wore in history and quite another to know how, exactly, they wore it. We've previously featured videos that accurately re-enact the whole process of of how soldiers and nurses dressed in World War I , and how women got dressed in the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries . Today we go back again to the eighteenth century with two videos from National Museums Liverpool , one that shows us how European gentlemen got dressed in those days , and another that shows us how ladies did . One obvious way in which dressing points to changes over the past few hundred years: both the gentleman and the lady require the assistance of a servant. The gentleman begins his day wearing his long linen nightshirt and a wrapper over it, Japan- and India-inspired garments, the narrator tells us, that "reflect British interests abroad." To replace them comes first a volum

Pink Floyd is one of few bands in rock history who could play the ruins of Pompeii without seeming to overreach, but it wasn’t their idea to put on a concert for Roman ghosts in 1971, the year before they recorded their magnum opus Dark Side of the Moon . According to the director Adrian Maben , who filmed the performance in the ancient necropolis, he decided upon the location after losing his passport during a holiday in Italy in 1971. He wandered Pompeii alone in search of it and had an epiphany. It was strange. A huge deserted amphitheater filled with echoing insect sounds, flying bats and the disappearing light which meant that I could hardly see the opposite side of this huge structure built more than two thousand years ago. I knew by instinct that this was the place for the film. It  had  to be here. Making creative decisions from a chance encounter with echoes and shadows was, nonetheless, fully in keeping with the band's process. Despite their decision to write

“In forty years of medical practice,” wrote Dr. Oliver Sacks near the end of his famous career, “I have found only two types of non-pharmaceutical ‘therapy’ to be vitally important for patients with chronic neurological diseases: music and gardens.” The comment might not surprise us, coming from such an unorthodox thinker as Sacks. But we might be surprised by the considerable amount of traditional scientific research linking music and mental health. Sixty years ago, when Sacks was still in medical school, avant-garde jazz bandleader Sun Ra had a very Sacks-like experience when he played for an audience of patients in a mental hospital, and inspired a catatonic woman who hadn’t spoken for years to stand up and say ‘Do you call that music ?’” The gig, booked by his manager, constituted a fringe experiment in alternative medicine at the time, not a serious subject of study among medical doctors and neuroscientists. How things have changed in the last half-century. Several re

If a city has been around long enough, it will more than likely have suffered some sort of catastrophically destructive event: the Great Fire of London in 1666, the Great Chicago Fire of 1871, the Great Kant? earthquake that devastated Tokyo in 1923. Most of their names, come to think of it, include the word "great," though not every source refers to San Francisco's 1906 earthquake that way. Not, of course, to minimize its destructiveness: with a force that would measure 7.8 on the Richter scale, the earthquake ultimately destroyed 80 percent of the city — about 25,000 buildings, with lost property equivalent to $11.2 billion in today's dollars — and killed 3,000 people. Six months after the disaster, an inventor named Frederick Eugene Ives arrived to document the still-fresh aftermath of the disaster. He had in hand something called a brr, a 3D color camera he designed himself. Its "system of mirrors and filters behind each lens split and filtered the light