Polymath's Guide to News and Ideas
What Is Art For?
NEW YORK TIMES :Last April I asked the writer Lewis Hyde if he would take a trip with me to Walden Pond, in Concord, Mass. At 63, Hyde has boyishly tousled brown-gray hair... READ MORE
In the Shadow of a Long Past, Patiently Awaiting the Future
NEW YORK TIMES : Deep below the Egyptian desert, archaeologists have found evidence of yet another pyramid, this one constructed 4,300 years ago to store the remains of a pharaoh’s mother. That makes 138 pyramids discovered here so far, and officials say they expect to find more... READ MORE
Into The Mystic
WWW.BOOKFORUM.COM :An antitechnological, antirational, and antimodern modernist, Andrei Tarkovsky was, with Bresson, Dreyer, and Brakhage, one of twentieth-century cinema’s great solitary figures... READ MORE
Lose the BlackBerry? Yes He Can, Maybe
NEW YORK TIMES :Those are seven words President-elect Barack Obama is dreading but expecting to hear, friends and advisers say, when he takes office in 65 days... READ MORE
Barack Obama's favourite painting
THE DAILY TELEGRAPH : It is Barack Obama's favourite painting: this famous canvas by the visionary Victorian artist George Frederic Watts arguably set the President-Elect on his long path to the White House... READ MORE
Loot! Chicago at center of battle between archeologists, collectors
CHICAGO TRIBUNE :On April 11, 2003, three days after American tanks rumbled into Baghdad and the day after looters swarmed the Iraq National Museum like a plague of locusts... READ MORE
Credit crunch crushes MoMA’s houses of the future.
NEW YORK MAGAZINE : With both the housing and art-bubble markets deflating fast, perhaps it’s no surprise that MoMA’s “Home Delivery: Fabricating the Modern Dwelling” didn’t do so well as real estate... READ MORE
Nirvana Baby -- All Grown Up
MTV :More than 17 years ago, when he was still an infant, Spencer Elden's parents dropped him into a swimming pool in California... READ MORE
Swiss return 4,400 stolen antiquities to Italy
WWW.CBC.CA : The items, taken from archeological sites in the eastern Italian region of Apulia and in northern Italy, were found in the possession of a married couple who are Basel-based art dealers... READ MORE
As art market bottoms out, a painter gives his work away for nothing
THE INDEPENDENT :Even in the era of Banksy, some view the work of street artists as little more than graffiti: idle daubings on walls and bus shelters that councils have to pay people to clean up... READ MORE