Arts and Culture

A quick FYI: Udacity is running a 75% off flash sale, and it has been extended to June 8. Founded by computer scientist and entrepreneur Sebastian Thrun, Udacity partners with leading tech companies and offers an array of courses (and Nanodegree programs) in data science,  cyber security, machine learning, artificial intelligence, cloud computing, and autonomous systems. To get the 75% off discount, click here and select a course/program. The discount should be applied automatically. But in case you have any problems, you could always use the code SAVE75 at checkout. Note: Open Culture has a partnership with Udacity. If readers enroll in certain Udacity courses and programs, it helps support Open Culture. Related Content: For a complete list of online courses, please visit our complete collection, 1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities . For a list of online certificate programs, visit 200 Online Certificate & Microcredential Programs from Leading Universities ...

From KCET (the public broadcaster serving SoCal) comes the documentary, That Far Corner: Frank Lloyd Wright in Los Angeles. “ During his time spent in Southern California in the late 1910s and early 1920s, Frank Lloyd Wright accelerated the search for L.A.’s authentic architecture that was suitable to the city’s culture and landscape. Writer/Director Chris Hawthorne, architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times , explores the houses the legendary architect built in Los Angeles. The documentary also delves into the critic’s provocative theory that these homes were also a means of artistic catharsis for Wright, who was recovering from a violent tragic episode in his life.” You can watch That Far Corner online. It will also be added to our list of Free Documentaries , a subset of collection 1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc. . Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Please consider making a donation to our site . It’s h...

@_theiconoclass If youse come at me again for my Australian pronunciation I swear ? #arthistory #arthistorytiktok #baroque ? original sound – AyseDeniz When a commenter on the Baroque TikTok took umbrage that she referred to  Artemisia Gentileschi  by first name only, McGillivray followed up with an educational video explaining the convention from the 17th-century perspective. @_theiconoclass Reply to @rajendzzz her dad was hot, comment if you agree #baroque #artemisia #arthistoryclass ? Guilty Love – Ladyhawke & Broods At the urging of a Patreon subscriber, she leaps across four centuries to discover an unexpected kinship between Cubism and Renaissance painters, using George Braque’s  Man with a Guitar  and Sandro Botticelli’s  Four Scenes from the Early Life of Saint Zenobius . One is attempting to escape the shackles of perspective by showing surfaces not visible when regarding a subject from a single point. The other is using a single space...

Not so long ago, a wave of long-form entreaties rolled through social media insisting that we stop building rock cairns . Like many who scrolled past them, I couldn’t quite imagine the offending structures they meant, let alone recall constructing one myself. The cairns in question turned out, mundanely, to be those little stacks of flat rocks seen in parks, alongside trails and streams. They’re as common in South Korea, where I live, as they seem to be in the United States. Both countries also share a great enthusiasm for Instagram, and it’s the apparent Instagrammability of these cairns that has increased their number (and consequent ecological and cultural harm) in recent years. No matter how many likes they garner, these common cairns require little or no skill in the building. The same can hardly be said of rock balancing , an art that demands a great deal more discipline and patience than many an influencer can muster. The  Wired video at the top of the post profile...

Image via Ebay The big, stand-up double bass or “bull fiddle,” as it’s been called, dates to the 15th century. The design has evolved, but its four strings and EADG tuning have remained standard features of basses for several hundred years of classical and, later, jazz, country, and early rock and roll. Its booming tone and unwieldy size notwithstanding, the venerable instrument is a member of the violin family. So, when did the four-string bass become a bass guitar ? Leo Fender’s 1951 Precision Bass is frequently cited as the first — “such a special instrument,” writes the Fender company , that “if Clarence Leo Fender were to be remembered for nothing else, surely it would be the Precision — an instrument — indeed a whole new kind of instrument — that simply didn’t exist before he invented it.” Prior to Fender’s innovation, it was thought that the earliest examples of electric basses were stand-up models like Regal’s Electrified Double Bass and Rickenbacker’s Electro-Bass-Viol,...

https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/partiallyexaminedlife/PMP_93_4-30-21.mp3 The tech genius has become the go-to bad guy in recent films: They’re our modern mad scientists with all imaginable resources and science at their command, able to release dystopic technology to surveil, control, and possibly murder us. Even Lex Luthor was made into a “tech bro” in Batman v. Superman . Your Pretty Much Pop hosts Mark Linsenmayer, Erica Spyres, and Brian discuss the HBO Max series Made for Love starring Cristin Milioti, as well as Alex Garland’s Devs , Mike Judge’s Silicon Valley , and Jed Rothestein’s documentary WeWork: Or the Making and Breaking of a $47 Billion Unicorn . How does this trope work in comedy vs. serious media? How does it relate to real-life tech moguls? Can women be villains of this sort, or is a critique of toxic masculinity part of this sort of depiction? To learn more, read what we read: “ HBO’s New Series Found a Better Way to Satirize Si...

Le Corbusier , Frank Lloyd Wright ,  Ray Bradbury : they and other 20th-century notables all gave serious thought to the ideal city, what it would include and what it would exclude. To that extent we could describe them, in 21st-century parlance, as urbanists. But the roots of the discipline — or area of research, or profession, or obsession — we call urbanism run all the way back to the 15th century. At that time, early in the European Renaissance, thinkers were reconsidering a host of conditions taken for granted in the medieval period, from man’s place in the universe (and indeed the universe itself) to the disposal of his garbage. Few of these figures thought as far ahead, or across as many fields as Leonardo da Vinci . In addition to his accomplishments in art, science, engineering, and architecture, the quintessential “Renaissance man” also tried his hand at urbanism. More specifically, he included in his notebooks designs for what he saw as an id...