Ian Stewart pays tribute to Benoît Mandelbrot, who discovered a formula to explain the beauty of the world around us .

from telegraph.co.uk:
'Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line.” With these words pioneering man of ideas Benoît Mandelbrot, who died last week at the age of 85, launched a scientific manifesto — a new field of mathematics, a new way to think about the natural world and a host of reasons why both were needed.

Once your minds’ eye is sensitive to fractal geometry, you see it everywhere. Ferns, grasses, the craters on the Moon, the fluctuations of the stock market, the incidence of large and small floods, the movements of rock deep in the Earth that cause earthquakes, even abstract art.

The Art of the YouTube Video

from Boston.com:

Are YouTube videos art? The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum thinks they might be. A team from the museum has selected 125 YouTube videos to appear in an exhibit called "YouTube Play: A Biennial of Creative Video."

What is the What: Sudan, Manute Bol and Activistic Art

from Scriptorum Daily:

Flannery O’Connor wrote that ‘somewhere is better than anywhere’. The mistake I make – maybe you make it, too – comes when I try to think about ‘the needs of the world’ or ‘the beauty of the world’ rather than starting with the needs or the beauty of somewhere in particular.

In a recent opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal praising Bol’s ‘radical Christianity’ and chiding sports journalists’ tendency to ignore the Christian faith that energizes selflessness like Bol’s, Jon Shields writes:

Bol reportedly gave most of his fortune, estimated at $6 million, to aid Sudanese refugees. As one twitter feed aptly put it: “Most NBA cats go broke on cars, jewelry & groupies. Manute Bol went broke building hospitals.”

Loving the lost and monstrous

from Prospect:
Movie Review of "White Material"
"If you could put your finger on Denis’s trademark as a director, it might be her huge reservoirs of empathy, not just for the deserving but for the lost, the cruel, the monstrous. “This kindness, yes: this is something I’m aware of,” she says after a long pause. “Not because I’m a kind person, I’m not. I’m just kind to my characters. I can be unkind to someone in the street or in the subway, I’m a bad-tempered person, but I’m unable to be unkind to a character. They exist because of me and I have responsibility for them.”"

View from inside Nasher Sculptural Center

Read about museum here.

skyspace provides a quiet, meditative setting in which one concentrates on the view of the sky through a 9 ½ x 9 ½ ft. opening in the ceiling. The rim of the aperture is knife-edge thin, which helps heighten the perception of the sky’s proximity. It often appears that the sky has been drawn like a sheet tightly across the opening. Italian limestone benches line the interior plaster walls of the skyspace. They are heated during the winter, and the skyspace is air-conditioned in warmer months, providing a comfortable viewing environment year round.

Book Review: Making Toast by Roger Rosenblatt (Death and the Dishwasher)

from NewRepublic:
Rosenblatt's book is a tribute to the consolatory power of the concrete. "MultiGrain Cheerios or Froot Loops or Apple Jacks or Special K or Fruity Pebbles": the inventory is the point, the naming of nourishing things, the amassing of small particulars against a big particular, so that the facticity of life becomes a retort to the facticity of death.

In an existence viciously robbed of its banality, Rosenblatt brandishes the banal, it is his defense against disorder and despair. It represents a kind of triumph-not over death, which has already won, but over suffering, which can still destroy. But not if he empties the dishwasher! If he empties the dishwasher, life wins.

Stuart Pearson Wright's 'I Remember You' at Riflemaker in London

from ArtKnowledgeNews:
LONDON.- The work of Stuart Pearson Wright (b. Northampton 1975) reflects a search for lost identity. One of the first children born in the UK by artificial insemination the artist feels that the process has created an ‘identity void’ which his work attempts to deal with. Wright’s new series of paintings at Riflemaker - shown alongside a film installation featuring Keira Knightley - explore and dispel the stereotypes of masculinity and femininity as depicted in films, books and comics; specifically in the stories and myths of the American West.

Elephant art displayed in London

from Telegraph.co.uk:
The life-sized artworks formed part of a collection of 260 model elephants taking over the English capital.

Figge Art Museum Unveils Exhibition of the John Deere Art Collection

from ArtKnowledgeNews:

DAVENPORT, IOWA.- The Figge Art Museum opened Global Currents: The John Deere Art Collection on Saturday April 24, 2010. The exhibition is the first opportunity for the general public to see works from Deere & Company’s corporate art collection. In 1965, William Hewitt, then chairman of Deere & Company, established an art collection to compliment the company’s new modernist world headquarters in Moline, Illinois, which was designed by Eero Saarinen. On view through 24 October.

Seattle cartoonist launches "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day"

from MyNW:
After Comedy Central cut a portion of a South Park episode following a death threat from a radical Muslim group, Seattle cartoonist Molly Norris wanted to counter the fear. She has declared May 20th "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day."

Matt Groening curates All Tomorrow's Parties

from TimesOnline:
We’re dealing with alt-rock here, so household names are moot, but the one he offers surprises me. “The Boredoms, from Japan, are as important as anyone now making new music,” he says, with the earnestness of Comic Book Guy. “They’re a punk-noise group who have transformed into a driving, pounding, rhythmic trance band. I’ve never heard anything quite like them.” Do they have vocalists, I ask, not knowing them myself. “They do have screaming sometimes,” he chortles. “People will be running for the exits.”

Babar the Elephant at the Tyler Museum of Art

Babar the Elephant at the Tyler Museum of Art

engravings are works of exquisite beauty and incomparable intricacy

from ArtKnowledgeNews:

Composed entirely of lines, engravings are works of exquisite beauty and incomparable intricacy. Northwestern University's Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art will focus on the engraved line from April 9 through June 20 with two exhibitions highlighting the technical virtuosity and innovativeness of European engravers of the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. Both exhibitions are free and open to the public. The Block Museum is located at 40 Arts Circle Drive, on the University's Evanston campus.

relationship between people and the creative beauty of God

from stuffchristianslike:

"“Allowing somebody, one mere person, to believe that he or she is the vessel, the font and the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile human psyche. It’s like asking someone to swallow the sun.”

I can’t encourage you enough to watch this. It honestly was one of the things that helped me finish writing Stuff Christians Like."

Deathcab for Cutie...Passenger Seat

"Passenger Seat"

I roll the window down
And then begin to breathe in
The darkest country road
And the strong scent of evergreen
From the passenger seat as you are driving me home.

Then looking upwards
I strain my eyes and try
To tell the difference between shooting stars and satellites
From the passenger seat as you are driving me home.

"do they collide?"
I ask and you smile.
With my feet on the dash
The world doesn't matter.

When you feel embarrassed then i'll be your pride
When you need directions then i'll be the guide
For all time.
For all time.

Rare Toys Debut in Bertoia's Auction of Donald Kaufman Collection

from ArtKnowledgeNews:
The dreams of thousands of toy collectors worldwide have come true since last March when Bertoia’s auction launched a semiannual series of auctions to disperse the renowned Donald Kaufman Collection. Last September when the hammer fell on the closing lot for part II of the series, the incomparable collection of American, European and Japanese toys had already taken in $7.2 million, with much more to come.

Just Stop

from ArtKnowledge:
Dallas, Texas - Our latest show of the photographs of Terry Falke will be of work never before exhibited or published, from various projects. His images can be found in many museum and corporate collections. Mr. Falke has photographed various aspects and issues in the American landscape for 40 years. After meeting Ansel Adams in the early 1970s, he moved from his native Texas to California to be at what was the epicenter of landscape photography at that time. There, he joined The Friends of Photography in Carmel, a group founded by Adams and others, and met many of the most significant figures in the history of the medium. On view April 17 to June 8, 2010.

The arts world on iPhone: guide to the top 20 cultural apps - Times Online

The arts world on iPhone: guide to the top 20 cultural apps - Times Online

"The current score at Apple’s App Store is 150,000 apps and three billion downloads. That’s a lot of information — and, given the relative ease of app creation, a lot of dross.

So we’ve pared it down — to a selection of iPhone/iPod Touch apps that will enhance your portable cultural life."

Conceptual Art of Luis Camnitzer

from ArtKnowledgeNews:

Formally allied with the American Conceptualists of the 1960s and 1970s, over the past 50 years Camnitzer has developed an essentially autonomous œuvre, unmistakably distinguished from that of his colleagues in the US by its acutely observed detail, its acerbic wit, its ludic-lyrical qualities and its ironically metaphorical polyvalence, as well as by its solid socio-political commitment.

Simple Gifts. A review of Gilead and Home, by Marilynne Robinson

from ClaremontReview:

"...London Times declared Robinson no less than "the world's best writer of prose." If that weren't enough, the enthusiastic reviewer went on to say, "I'm not saying that you're actually dead if you haven't read Marilynne Robinson, but I honestly couldn't say you're fully alive."

"These laurels are well merited. Robinson's language is as lovely as its admirers say—sparse yet concentrated, rich in metaphor and allusion, and suffused with a sad tenderness. At times, her prose approaches a kind of pastoral plainsong."