Category: culture

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Congregating for Community: Researching how to find purpose

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https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/07/secular-churches-rethink-their-sales-pitch/594109/ Secular congregations that parallel religious structures have gained in popularity across the United States. Offering community, weekly sermons focusing on current topics in science and society, and song, the gatherings are intended to provide human connection and a desire to belong to something with greater meaning. However, while these secular communities are responding to social need they lack sustainability and typically disintegrate within a few years. Systems of sacrifice, ritual, and storytelling structure communities and motivate attendance. The challenge to develop shared purpose and meaningful connections is not simply a response to post-religious structuralism. It also reflects widespread demand … Continue reading Congregating for Community: Researching how to find purpose

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Ushangi: The Sculptor in Silence

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Located between Museum Row and Melrose, up-the-way from Farmer’s Market, and across from CBS, you may find a very, very old rock. However, to describe it as an ordinary rock would be inaccurate. It is not mixed with tar and oil holding the streets of the neighborhood together, and it is not what you would find walking in the local hills to peer across the ocean. Nor is it the ten million dollar rock being installed at LACMA. Rather, it is a unique rock, with its soul revealed, its song let loose, and its heart etched free from earthly bonds. … Continue reading Ushangi: The Sculptor in Silence

art, culture, mythology, psychology4 Comments

The Symbolic Function of Color in the Art of Joan Miró

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The symbolic vocabulary of color has many different languages. These languages allow the voyeur to understand their experience of art and the world within a variety of contexts. Color is a vocabulary of communication as well as a process of creating. It can be understood through techniques of degree but also articulated as modes of emotion in the lexicon of psychology. The relationship between color and symbol is particularly strong in the work of Joan Miró. The question of how to interpret art, literature, music, politics, and basically everything is one that has been postulated, revised, and argued for millennia. Strategies focusing … Continue reading The Symbolic Function of Color in the Art of Joan Miró

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La Luz y El Campanero: Symbolism in 1925 Burgos, Spain

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 “ In the fields with which we are concerned, knowledge comes only in lightning flashes. The text is the long roll of thunder that follows.” [On the Theory of Knowledge, Theory of Progress] Walter Benjamin, Arcades Project The above photograph was taken from the bell tower in Burgos, Spain in 1925. This photo was included in a photo retrospective on Castilla Leon, published in the Spanish periodical El Pais, June 7, 2011. In Spanish, the bell tower is called el campenar and the bell-ringer is el campanero. Throughout Spain, bell towers are found in the central part of each town … Continue reading La Luz y El Campanero: Symbolism in 1925 Burgos, Spain

art, culture, media, mythology, photography, psychology1 Comment

Man Ray: Nude Dialectics

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The Dada movement was founded on anti-war politics and was a direct response to the established standards and manifested these ideas by responding to accepted concepts of art with the creation of anti-art cultural works. The goal was to reveal meaning what was being discarded as meaningless in the modern world. Continuing after WWI, Surrealism evolved from original Dada manifestation. Defined by Andre Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, Surrealism is: Pure psychic automatism, by which one proposes to express, either verbally, in writing, or by any other manner, the real functioning of thought Dictation of thought in the absence of … Continue reading Man Ray: Nude Dialectics

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Joan Didion: Exercising Narrative Rights

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C-Span Interview with Joan Didion In a 1996 C-SPAN Book TV interview, Joan Didion speaks about her body of written work. Incredibly the interview lasts for three hours and includes a huge space for viewers to call in and ask her questions. (As a side note, it is incredible to see such a large amount of time, audience participation, and interest in writing being dedicated by a network. What does this say about the change in audience participation and attention spans?) In this clip, Didion speaks specifically about her first experience of being published and her first encounter with the … Continue reading Joan Didion: Exercising Narrative Rights