Arts News

A wide angle look at literature, architecture, visual art, museums, writing, books and so much more. Visit often – always updated…

Art image: Free Creative Stuff, Creative Commons, Pexels.com

    Oh dear! Our feed will be back shortly...

    Oh dear! Our feed will be back shortly...

Open Culture The best free cultural & educational media on the web

  • The Genius of Brian Wilson (RIP) and How He Turned “Good Vibrations” Into the Beach Boys’ Pocket Symphony
    by Colin Marshall on June 13, 2025 at 9:00 am

    This week, Brian Wilson became the last of the Wilson brothers to shuffle off this mortal coil. Dennis, the first of the Wilsons to go, died young in 1983 — but not before offering this memorable assessment of the family musical project: “Brian Wilson is the Beach Boys. He is the band. We’re his messengers.

  • An Architectural Tour of Taliesin West, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Iconic Desert Home and Studio
    by Colin Marshall on June 12, 2025 at 9:00 am

    By some estimations, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West home-studio complex took shape in 1941. But even then, the Arizona Republic presciently noted that “it may be years before it is considered finished.” The Taliesin West you can see in the new Architectural Digest video above is unlikely to change dramatically over the next few generations,

  • Read the Original 32-Page Program for Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927)
    by OC on June 12, 2025 at 8:00 am

    One of the very first feature-length sci-fi films ever made, Fritz Lang’s Metropolis took a daring visual approach for its time, incorporating Bauhaus and Futurist influences in thrillingly designed sets and costumes. Lang’s visual language resonated strongly in later decades. The film’s rather stunning alchemical-electric transference of a woman’s physical traits onto the body of

  • Every Wes Anderson Movie, Explained by Wes Anderson
    by Colin Marshall on June 11, 2025 at 9:00 am

    That Wes Anderson is perhaps the most assiduous maker of short films today becomes clear when you look closely at his recent work. The four adaptations of “The Wonderful World of Henry Sugar” and three other Roald Dahl stories he made for Netflix were presented as a single anthology film; his slightly earlier feature The

  • The History of the World in One Beautiful, 5‑Foot-Long Chart (1931)
    by OC on June 11, 2025 at 8:00 am

    In the image above, we see an impressive pre-internet macro-infographic called a “Histomap.” Its creator John B. Sparks (who later created “histomaps” of religion and evolution) published the graphic in 1931 with Rand McNally. The five-foot-long chart—purportedly covering 4,000 years of “world” history—is, in fact, an example of an early illustration trend called the “outline,”

  • How the BIC Cristal Ballpoint Pen Became the Most Successful Product in History
    by Colin Marshall on June 10, 2025 at 9:00 am

    If you want to see a tour de force of modern technology and design, there’s no need to visit a Silicon Valley showroom. Just feel around your desk for a few moments, and sooner or later you’ll lay a hand on it: the BIC Cristal ballpoint pen, which is described in the Primal Space video

  • Marie Curie Invented Mobile X‑Ray Units to Help Save Wounded Soldiers in World War I
    by OC on June 10, 2025 at 8:00 am

    A hundred years ago, Mobile X‑Ray Units were a brand new innovation, and a godsend for soldiers wounded on the front in WW1. Prior to the advent of this technology, field surgeons racing to save lives operated blindly, often causing even more injury as they groped for bullets and shrapnel whose precise locations remained a

  • The Dylatov Pass Incident: Has One of the Biggest Soviet Mysteries Been Solved?
    by Colin Marshall on June 9, 2025 at 9:00 am

    Most of us would go out of our way not to set foot anywhere near a place the local natives refer to as “Dead Mountain.” That didn’t stop the Dyatlov Hiking Group, who set out on a sixteen-day skiing expedition across the northern Urals in late January of 1959. Experienced and intrepid, those ten young

  • Hear What Shakespeare Sounded Like in the Original Pronunciation
    by OC on June 9, 2025 at 8:00 am

    What did Shakespeare’s English sound like to Shakespeare? To his audience? And how can we know such a thing as the phonetic character of the language spoken 400 years ago? These questions and more are addressed in the video above, which profiles a very popular experiment at London’s Globe Theatre, the 1994 reconstruction of Shakespeare’s

  • An Introduction to George Orwell’s 1984 and How Power Manufactures Truth
    by Colin Marshall on June 6, 2025 at 9:00 am

    Soon after the first election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four became a bestseller again. Shooting to the top of the American charts, the novel that inspired the term “Orwellian” passed Danielle Steel’s latest opus, the poetry of Rupi Kaur, the eleventh Diary of a Wimpy Kid


Enlightenment in the East of England

Why not visit our other site pages whilst you're here...

Latest Blogs

Lorem ipsum dolor sit ame sed do eiusmod tempor incididunt ut labore et dolore

May 2, 2023

Digital learning in museums? A European view…

Welcome to this informative booklet on Digital Learning and Education in Museums! This report, created …

Nov 23, 2020

Four misconceptions about art education?

An article from our archive for the New Year… Are you interested in exploring art …

Dec 15, 2022

Powering through the econo-cultural blizzard. Happy Christmas!

Happy Christmas break from the publishing team at conversationsEAST – remaining resilient, generous of spirit …