Art Archives - Attention to the Unseen

William Blake, poet and prophet, was a prescient critic of capitalist alienation

From elsewhere — Thu, 20 Nov 2025 01:30:06 +0000

Jonathan Agin writes: Comparing the poet, painter, and master engraver William Blake to his contemporary William Wordsworth in a 1991 London Review of Books article, Jonathan Bate wrote that “Blake’s wildness was what shaggy men like Ginsberg needed a generation ago, but Wordsworth’s sobriety and steady eye can do more for us now.” A generation further on, it’s time we get back to Blake, who was indeed “wild” in his radically anti-imperialist, counter-enlightenment spirit. Though some of his contemporaries would...

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Remembering JFK on the arts as Trump takes over the Kennedy Center

From elsewhere — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 02:24:55 +0000

In a speech delivered at Amherst College on October 26, 1963, President John F Kennedy said: If sometimes our great artists have been the most critical of our society, it is because their sensitivity and their concern for justice, which must motivate any true artist, makes him aware that our Nation falls short of its highest potential. I see little of more importance to the future of our country and our civilization than full recognition of the place of the...

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Hannah Arendt’s love of the word

From elsewhere — Sun, 19 Jan 2025 01:58:23 +0000

Daegan Miller writes: “What is the subject of our thought? Experience! Nothing else! And if we lose the ground of experience then we get into all kinds of theories.” — Hannah Arendt Hannah Arendt first fled the Nazis in 1933. It was a harrowing escape: she had just been released from the Gestapo prison in Berlin after eight days of interrogation for collecting evidence of German anti-Semitism from the stacks of the Prussian State Library. She knew she had little...

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How the search for beauty drives scientific enquiry

From elsewhere — Thu, 09 Jan 2025 01:49:50 +0000

Bridget Ritz and Brandon Vaidyanathan write: When Paulo was an undergraduate, he was tasked with taking photographs of neurons. ‘A single cell,’ he came to notice, ‘it’s a whole universe.’ Looking at cells beneath a microscope is not unlike gazing at stars in the sky, Paulo realised. ‘We all know they are there, but until you see them with your own eyes, you don’t have that experience of awe, of wow.’ It was then, as he put it, that he...

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Why did our ancestors make startling art in dark firelit caves?

From elsewhere — Sun, 12 May 2024 23:18:06 +0000

Izzy Wisher writes: Charcoal drawings of stags, elegantly rendered in fluid lines, emerge under my torchlight as we squeeze through a tiny hidden entrance to a small chamber deep within Las Chimeneas cave in northern Spain. The chamber has space for just a couple of people, and certainly not standing, so we crouch on the cave floor and stare in awe at the depictions. Despite their remarkable freshness, they were drawn nearly 18,000 years ago. We sit in silence for...

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The puzzle of Neanderthal aesthetics

From elsewhere — Tue, 02 May 2023 23:13:00 +0000

Rebecca Wragg Sykes writes: Sometime between 135,000-50,000 years ago, hands slick with animal blood carried more than 35 huge horned heads into a small, dark, winding cave. Tiny fires were lit amidst a boulder-jumbled floor, and the flame-illuminated chamber echoed to dull pounding, cracking and squelching sounds as the skulls of bison, wild cattle, red deer and rhinoceros were smashed open. This isn’t the gory beginning of an ice age horror novel, but the setting for a fascinating Neanderthal mystery....

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The Romantics who laid the foundations of modern consciousness

From elsewhere — Wed, 21 Dec 2022 02:56:10 +0000

Andrea Wulf writes: In September 1798, one day after their poem collection Lyrical Ballads was published, the poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth sailed from Yarmouth, on the Norfolk coast, to Hamburg in the far north of the German states. Coleridge had spent the previous few months preparing for what he called ‘my German expedition’. The realisation of the scheme, he explained to a friend, was of the highest importance to ‘my intellectual utility; and of course to my...

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A poet who excels at the artistry of mathematics

From elsewhere — Thu, 07 Jul 2022 01:15:30 +0000

Jordana Cepelewicz writes: June Huh often finds himself lost. Every afternoon, he takes a long walk around Princeton University, where he’s a professor in the mathematics department. On this particular day in mid-May, he’s making his way through the woods around the nearby Institute for Advanced Study — “Just so you know,” he says as he considers a fork in the path ahead, “I don’t know where we are” — pausing every so often to point out the subtle movements...

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Who said science and art were two cultures?

From elsewhere — Thu, 18 Nov 2021 01:44:54 +0000

Kevin Berger writes: On a May evening in 1959, C.P. Snow, a popular novelist and former research scientist, gave a lecture before a gathering of dons and students at the University of Cambridge, his alma mater. He called his talk “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution.” Snow declared that a gulf of mutual incomprehension divided literary intellectuals and scientists. “The non-scientists have a rooted impression that the scientists are shallowly optimistic, unaware of man’s condition,” Snow said. “On the...

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51,000-year-old bone carving suggests Neanderthals were true artists

From elsewhere — Wed, 07 Jul 2021 00:19:08 +0000

Gizmondo reports: Patterns deliberately etched onto a bone belonging to a giant deer are signs that Neanderthals possessed the capacity for symbolic thought. Neanderthals decorated themselves with feathers, drew cave paintings, and created jewelry from eagle talons, so it comes as little surprise to learn that Neanderthals also engraved patterns onto bone. The discovery of this 51,000-year-old bone carving, as described in Nature Ecology & Evolution, is more evidence of sophisticated behavior among Neanderthals. “Evidence of artistic decorations would suggest...

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