~Catherine the Great
Low-cost ‘four-hour’ bamboo house wins top prize BBC Really attractive too
GOOD: New device removes mercury from drinking water.
Notorious Art Forger Talks About Ethics
Wolfgang Beltracchi, convicted in 2011 of painting and selling a series of 14 forgeries that fetched a total of $45 million. He compares himself favorably to the likes of Jeff Koons: “I painted individual paintings and I never replicated them, they were always unique pieces from a certain context, a certain period, with a certain technique, with a certain narrative. These artists — Jeff Koons, but also Ai Weiwei, and there are many more — are promoted by great dealer and everyone earns a lot of money. It is trade, but it has no originality.”
At Work With The Ushers At The Metropolitan Opera
“As a shift begins, they pass into the cloakroom to put on their uniforms — tuxedos with burgundy lapels, worn shiny from use. Forty-two work any given performance, each at once a rule keeper, hand holder, problem solver, diplomat.”
Those commentators who argue that Shakespeare is best understood as a Christian artist find it hard to grapple with King Lear, whose “message” is more likely to strike today’s viewers as all but nihilistic. Yet it is in this very aspect that the play’s deepest appeal is to be found. For just as all of us fear that we will die with our minds occluded by senility, so are even the most steadfast of religious believers—Dr. Johnson among them—beset by periodic pangs of doubt. The genius of King Lear is that it stares down this doubt, even broaching the possibility that human life, far from being directed by what Shakespeare elsewhere calls “a divinity that shapes our ends,” is in fact entirely meaningless. As John Simon has written of Lear: “The point of Shakespeare’s work is not that everyone is equally dreary and culpable but, clearly, that some are deserving and even noble, while others are bad and even vicious, yet in the short run the bad may actually have a better time of it. An awe-inspiring vision, startling for its—or any—time.”
