Arts and Culture

Whatever our religious background, we all sooner or later have occasion to speak of nailing theses to a door. Most of us use the phrase as a metaphor, but seldom entirely without awareness of the historical events that inspired it. On October 31, 1517, a German priest and theologian named Martin Luther nailed to the door of Wittenberg’s All Saints’ Church his own theses, 95 of them , which collectively made an argument against the Roman Catholic Church’s practice of selling indulgences, or pardons for sins. Luther could not accept that the poor should “spend all their money buying their way out of punishment so they can go to heaven,” nor that it should be “easier for the rich to avoid a long time in purgatory.” In other words, Luther believed that the Church in his time had become “way too much about money and too little about God,” according to the narration of the short film above . Created by Tumblehead Studios and showcased by National Geographic for the 500th a...

On the surface of things, Anthony Roth Costanzo , the internationally-recognized countertenor and Justin Vivian Bond , the subversive performance artist best known for their creation Kiki DuRane , “an alcoholic battle-axe with a throat full of razor-blades,” would have little reason to share a mic, let alone inhabit the same stage. Leave surfaces behind! Their genre-defying, just released album, Only An Octave Apart , explores the depths that lurk beneath them, finding common cause between their chosen art forms and then some. The album’s title, a nod to the opening number of a Metropolitan Opera television special starring comedian Carol Burnett and operatic soprano Beverly Sills , is just the tip of the iceberg. As they state in the program notes for a recent appearance with the New York Philharmonic at Jazz at Lincoln Center: We each sound different from what you would expect when you look at us. The juxtaposition of our voices, personalities, and repertoire subverts...

Last week, a Tennessee school board voted unanimously to ban Maus , the Pulitzer-winning graphic novel about the Holocaust , citing instances of profanity and nudity. Specifically, the McMinn County school board objected to utterances of the words “God damn” and a small, barely-perceptible breast . ( Look closely , and you may eventually find it.) Rather uncomfortably, the banning came on the eve of International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and it figures into a larger right-leaning effort to ban books countrywide . Happily, bad decisions can have good unintended consequences. In recent days, Art Spiegelman’s Maus has soared to #1 on Amazon’s bestseller list . (Another edition of the book sits at #3 on the list.) Elsewhere, a college professor has created a free online course on Maus designed solely for students from McMinn County. And within Tennessee itsel f , bookstores are giving away free copies of Spiegelman’s classic, while a church has decided to convene conversa...

Watch above a classic movie made by David Rogers at Vanderbilt University in the 1950s. It shows “a neutrophil (a type of white blood cell) chasing a bacterium through a field of red blood cells in a blood smear. After pursuing the bacterium around several red blood cells, the neutrophil finally catches up to and engulfs its prey. In the human body, these cells are an important first line of defense against bacterial infection. The speed of rapid movements such as cell crawling can be most easily measured by the method of direct observation.” This comforting video comes courtesy of the estate of David Rogers, Vanderbilt University. Would you like to support the mission of Open Culture? Please consider making a donation to our site . It’s hard to rely 100% on ads, and your contributions will help us continue providing the best free cultural and educational materials to learners everywhere. You can contribute through PayPal , Patreon , Venmo (@openculture) and Crypto...

Marcel Duchamp made films , composed music , painted Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2 , designed an art deco chess set , and of course — the first thing most of us learn about him, as well as the last thing many of us learn about him — he put a urinal in an art galley . But as you might expect of an artist who spent the early 20th century at the heart of the avant-garde, there’s more to him than that. This notion is backed up by the more than 18,000 documents and 50,000 images made available at the Duchamp Research Portal , a newly opened archive dedicated to the life and work of the revolutionary conceptual artist. The fruit of a seven-year collaboration between the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Association Marcel Duchamp, and the Centre Pompidou, this formidable digital collection includes many artifacts related to the artist’s best-known work: the “large glass” of The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even ; the mustachioed  Mona Lisa ; the shocking a...

Gallerists  James Payne and Joanne Shurvell  understand that institutional big gorillas like  the Louvre ,  the Musee d’Orsay ,  Tate Britain , and London’s  National Gallery  require no introduction. Their new art and travel series,  Great Art Cities Explained , concentrates instead on the wonderful, smaller museums the biggies often overshadow. First time visitors to London and Paris may be left scrambling to rearrange their itineraries. The first two episodes have us persuaded that  Sir John Soane’s Museum ,  Kenwood House ,  the Wallace Collection , Le  Musée National Eugène Delacroix ,  Le Musée de Montmartre à Paris , and  Atelier Brancusi  are the true “don’t miss” attractions if time is tight. Credit Payne, whose flair for dishy, far ranging, highly accessible narration made his other web series,  Great Art Explained in Fifteen Minutes , an instant hit. The three Britis...