Required Reading
This week, an image-heavy Required Reading explores the memes that set the internet on fire, and MoMA's R&D Salons are now online.
This week, an image-heavy Required Reading explores the memes that set the internet on fire, and MoMA’s R&D Salons are now online.
Paola Antonelli of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) has been hosting a fantastic series of R&D Salons over the last few years. They’ve tackled such important topics as big data, philanthropy, taboos, and copyright. Now, all past MoMA R&D Salons are online at the museum’s website, which features videos and reading lists. I highly recommend them.
Lew Rockwell’s Facebook profile page updates a well-known Norman Rockwell image:
Mother Jones looks at the men who have traveled to Syria to save ancient treasures from ISIS and other armed groups:
Middlemen, explains Al-Azm, “buy stuff inside Syria, and they sell it to another middleman, and another, and another.” Eventually the looted objects are bought by “bigger fish” who can afford to sit on them for years, until the heat dies down, and then fabricate their origins. “It’s like wine—the longer you keep it the more valuable it becomes.” There are also stories of items being sold on eBay and rumors that they’re being traded on darknet marketplaces similar to Silk Road.
The Salvation Army has capitalized on #TheDress to focus on the issue of domestic violence:
This is less of a website, more of a meme:
Did Homer of The Simpsons almost discover the Higgs boson in 1998?
During the episode “The Wizard of Evergreen Terrace,” which aired in September 1998, Homer writes an equation on a chalkboard, which turns out to be an equation that nearly predicts the mass of the Higgs boson a.k.a. the “God Particle.”
The politicization of archeology in Israel means that it has long been a tool of the occupation, as Natasha Roth reports:
The use of archaeology as a political tool is in Israel is not new, despite its recent sharp descent into an explicit weapon of occupation. In the 1950s and ’60s, as immigrants arrived in Israel from across the globe, the exploration of the physical connection of Jews to the land contributed to a unifying mythology that sought to provide each new arrival with a profound sense of belonging, no matter their country of origin.
This is also not a tactic unique to Israel: nation-building around the world has often resorted to archaeology as a means of emphasizing the legitimacy of that people’s presence in that place, no matter how new or thrown-together they appear to be. Just as in the wake of the unification of Italy the politician Massimo D’Azeglio stated, “We have made Italy; now we must make Italians.” So too was the creation of Israelis a crucial pursuit in the early decades of the state.
A great project from Providence, Rhode Island, maps 100 years of the history of African diasporan arts (1860s–1960s) in that city:
Simon Beck’s Utah snow murals are so massive they can only be appreciated from mountaintops, helicopters, and drones:
Kanye gave a lecture at Oxford University, and it was unintentionally hilarious:
The Matrix is like the Bible of the post-information age.
“I compared it like, when the hundred guys come at Neo, those are opinions, that’s perception, that’s tradition. Attacking people from every which angle possible. If you have a focus wide and master sense is like Laurence Fishburne and you have a squad behind you, you literally can put the world in slow motion.
… Why do I say the Matrix is like the Bible? What is my definition of the Matrix?
The Japanese translation of the Qur’an is reputedly the most accurate:
Who would have thought that the best translation ever to be conducted of the Qur’an was actually in Japanese? Many scholars agree that Toshihiko Izutsu’s 1958 version of the holy book is one of the most accurate one available. A linguistic genius, Dr. Izutsu finished reading the entire Qur’an just one month after beginning to learn Arabic. His idiosyncratic method of analyzing theology through language (his background knowledge of Zen Buddhism assisted this advanced outlook on other world religions) produced incredible insights into Islam that I have not heard with quite the same level of clarity and objectivity from any other scholar. Later in life, he went on to teach Islamic philosophy at several universities in Tehran, which hints at just how knowledgeable he became of the religion and its history.
The weasel/woodpecker image became a funny meme:
Required Reading is published every Sunday morning ET, and is comprised of a short list of art-related links to long-form articles, videos, blog posts, or photo essays worth a second look.
