Sep 19, 2017 03:12 AM
The art of space art
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017...space-art/
EXCERPT: [...] NASA had a critical revelation early on: an astonishing discovery means nothing if the public only registers it as an abstraction. We can’t quite photograph black holes, for instance, though we’d very much like to. And most objects in space are either so faint or so distant that even the newest generation of telescopes can’t return images that do them aesthetic justice. Hence the value of artists, who can extrapolate scientific findings into fantastical craters and overlarge moons, their colors dark with science-fiction vibrancy....
Five Magnificent Years
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/09/...ent-years/
Five and a half years. That's how long Otis Redding's career lasted. Given where he came from, it's astonishing that his career happened at all.
EXCERPT: Half a century has passed since the shocking disappearance of Otis Redding at age twenty-six, when the twin-engine Beechcraft carrying him and most of his touring band the Bar-Kays to a concert crashed in a Wisconsin lake on December 10, 1967. For many who were around then, the time elapsed has not alleviated the shock. The subtitle of Jonathan Gould’s new biography, An Unfinished Life, properly acknowledges the pang of lost possibilities that accompanied that news bulletin. It came at a time of much violence and protest against violence, and was followed soon enough by further catastrophic losses. In the midst of all that, it was hard to give any meaning to Otis’s death beyond random bad luck—although that didn’t stop the inevitable rumors of conspiracy and murder for political or financial reasons....
MORE: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/09/...ent-years/
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2017...space-art/
EXCERPT: [...] NASA had a critical revelation early on: an astonishing discovery means nothing if the public only registers it as an abstraction. We can’t quite photograph black holes, for instance, though we’d very much like to. And most objects in space are either so faint or so distant that even the newest generation of telescopes can’t return images that do them aesthetic justice. Hence the value of artists, who can extrapolate scientific findings into fantastical craters and overlarge moons, their colors dark with science-fiction vibrancy....
Five Magnificent Years
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/09/...ent-years/
Five and a half years. That's how long Otis Redding's career lasted. Given where he came from, it's astonishing that his career happened at all.
EXCERPT: Half a century has passed since the shocking disappearance of Otis Redding at age twenty-six, when the twin-engine Beechcraft carrying him and most of his touring band the Bar-Kays to a concert crashed in a Wisconsin lake on December 10, 1967. For many who were around then, the time elapsed has not alleviated the shock. The subtitle of Jonathan Gould’s new biography, An Unfinished Life, properly acknowledges the pang of lost possibilities that accompanied that news bulletin. It came at a time of much violence and protest against violence, and was followed soon enough by further catastrophic losses. In the midst of all that, it was hard to give any meaning to Otis’s death beyond random bad luck—although that didn’t stop the inevitable rumors of conspiracy and murder for political or financial reasons....
MORE: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/09/...ent-years/