Dispatches

Fair Weather’s Friends

Though I rarely drive farther than a few miles from home, I am paying inordinate attention to the weather forecast. Maybe this is because I have been cut off for a year from other places I used to feel part of, or because I spend so much more time outside now.But I could also be succumbing to family tradition.

The New Digital Ownership of Art

Artist Mike Winkelmann, known as Beeple, reacts to the amount his art sold for at auction in this screenshot from Christie’s YouTube channel.     Something important has happened in the art world: the possibility of exclusive ownership of digital art, by blockchain technology. As with Bitcoin, a digital “certificate…

The Role of Models

The first model kits were the simple Frog Penguin 1:72 scale airplanes made in 1936. But the first model-maker of note was Leonardo da Vinci, who shrank his ideas to scale and constructed them with exquisite care. No fussy materials or after-market add-ons.

Art and Advocacy Collaborations

Clockwise, from upper left: Geoff Ward, Jordan Weber, Inez Bordeaux, and Michael Allen     The question in yesterday’s Zoom event hosted by the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, in St. Louis, was how artist residencies, art institutions, universities, and activist organizations might work together for social justice. How do you measure…

Why Nobody Dared Stream The Dissident

"The Dissident" brought audiences at the 2020 Sundance Film Festival to their feet, and many left in tears. Then the doc sat, untouched, for six months. Finally, a small company called Briarcliff Entertainment acquired it and made it available for rental online. It will be shown at movie theaters beginning March 11—in New Zealand.

Black Holes and Psychic Vampires

My child-brain pictures a monster waiting to consume me, but black holes are not monsters. They are not even things. A black hole, explains astrophysicist Janna Levin, is nothing: “pure empty spacetime—no atoms, light, strings, or particles of any kind, dark or bright. It’s empty space—or, in physics slang, the vacuum.”

Skip to content