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Wednesday, November 1st, 2017
| Time | Event |
| 2:00p | 25 Million Images From 14 Art Institutions to Be Digitized & Put Online In One Huge Scholarly Archive
Digital art archives, says Thomas Gaehtgens, director of the Getty Research Institute, are “Sleeping Beauties, and they are waiting to be discovered and kissed.” It’s an odd metaphor, especially since the archive to which Gaehtgens refers currently contains photographic treasures like that of Medieval Christian art from the Netherlands Institute for Art History. But soon, Pharos, the “International Consortium of Photo Archives,” will host 25 million images, Ted Loos reports at The New York Times, “17 million of them artworks and the rest supplemental material." The archive aims to have 7 million online by 2020.
Pharos is the joint effort of 14 different institutions, including the Getty and the Frick, the National Gallery of Art, the Yale Center for British Art, Rome’s Bibliotheca Hertziana, the Courtauld Institute, and more. Eventually “users will be able to search the restoration history of the works, including different states of the same piece over time… past ownership; and even background on related works that have been lost or destroyed.” As Artnet puts it, “art history just got a lot more accessible.”
Once the primary domain of well-appointed professors with institutional connections and the budget to fly around the world, the discipline can soon be pursued by anyone with an internet connection, though there is, of course, no virtual substitute yet for engaging with art in three-dimensions. Claire Voon explains at Hyperallergic, “Pharos’s database is primarily aimed at scholars—although it is freely available for all to use—and is dedicated to uploading a work’s attribution and provenance as well as conservation, exhibition, and bibliographic histories.” All of the information, in other words, required for serious research.
Currently featuring almost 100,000 images and over 60,000 separate artworks, Pharos contains classical and Byzantine art and mosaics from the Frick; early Christian art from the National Gallery; many photographs of Roman pottery, sculpture, and statuary from the Bibliotheca Hertziana, and much more. The Frick comprises the bulk of the collection, and the museum is Pharos’s primary partner and “home to the very first photoarchive in the United States, thanks to the initiative of its founder’s daughter.” (Most of the images currently in the Frick archive are in black and white.)
While the current institutions are all based in North America and Europe, the “database will eventually expand,” writes Voon, “to include records from more photoarchives around the world.” Scholars and art lovers worldwide may not necessarily think of these treasures as kissable “sleeping beauties,” but their plentiful appearance in such rich detail and easy accessibility may indeed seem like a fairy tale come true. Enter the Pharos database here. via Hyperallergic Related Content: Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness 25 Million Images From 14 Art Institutions to Be Digitized & Put Online In One Huge Scholarly Archive is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.  |
| 5:42p | Death: A Free Philosophy Course from Yale Helps You Grapple with the Inescapable [Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<div [...] http://cdn8.openculture.com/>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.] <div class="oc-video-container"http://cdn8.openculture.com/>
<p>It pays to think intelligently about the inevitable. And this course taught by Yale professor <a href="http://philosophy.yale.edu/people/shelly-kagan">Shelly Kagan</a> does just that, taking a rich, philosophical look at death. Here's how the course description reads:</p>
<blockquote><p>There is one thing I can be sure of: I am going to die. But what am I to make of that fact? This course will examine a number of issues that arise once we begin to reflect on our mortality. The possibility that death may not actually be the end is considered. Are we, in some sense, immortal? Would immortality be desirable? Also a clearer notion of what it is to die is examined. What does it mean to say that a person has died? What kind of fact is that? And, finally, different attitudes to death are evaluated. Is death an evil? How? Why? Is suicide morally permissible? Is it rational? How should the knowledge that I am going to die affect the way I live my life?</p></blockquote>
<p>Major texts used in this course include Plato's <em><a href="http://amzn.to/2hV7GEm">Phaedo</a>, </em>Tolstoy's<em><a href="http://amzn.to/2is7c5w"> The Death of Ivan Ilych</a>, </em>and John Perry's<em> <a href="http://amzn.to/2iq1pBN">A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality</a>.</em></p>
<p>You can watch the 26 lectures above. Or find them on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLEA18FAF1AD9047B0">YouTube</a> and iTunes in <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/death-video/id341651012?mt=10">video</a> and <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/itunes-u/death-audio/id341650967?mt=10">audio</a> formats. For more information on this course, including the syllabus, please visit <a href="http://oyc.yale.edu/death/phil-176">this Yale site</a>.</p>
<p>This course has been added to our list of <a href="http://www.openculture.com/philosophy_free_courses">Free Online Philosophy courses</a>, a subset of our meta collection, <span style="font-weight: 400;"><a href="http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses">1,300 Free Online Courses from Top Universities</a>.</span></p>
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<p><strong>Related Content:</strong></p>
<p><a title="Permanent Link to Watch <i>Coda,</i> a Prize-Winning, Thought-Provoking Animation About a Lost Soul’s Encounter with Death" href="http://www.openculture.com/2017/05/watch-coda-a-prize-winning-thought-provoking-animation-about-a-lost-souls-encounter-with-death.html" rel="bookmark">Watch Coda, a Prize-Winning, Thought-Provoking Animation About a Lost Soul’s Encounter with Death</a></p>
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<p><a title="Permanent Link to Watch Animated Introductions to 25 Philosophers by <i>The School of Life</i>: From Plato to Kant and Foucault" href="http://www.openculture.com/2016/04/animated-introductions-to-25-philosophers-by-the-school-of-life.html" rel="bookmark">Watch Animated Introductions to 25 Philosophers by The School of Life: From Plato to Kant and Foucault</a></p>
<!-- permalink:http://www.openculture.com/2017/11/death-a-free-philosophy-course-from-yale-helps-you-grapple-with-the-inescapable.html--><p><a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.openculture.com/2017/11/death-a-free-philosophy-course-from-yale-helps-you-grapple-with-the-inescapable.html">Death: A Free Philosophy Course from Yale Helps You Grapple with the Inescapable</a> is a post from: <a href="http://www.openculture.com">Open Culture</a>. Follow us on <a href="https://www.facebook.com/openculture">Facebook</a>, <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/openculture">Twitter</a>, and <a href="https://plus.google.com/108579751001953501160/posts">Google Plus</a>, or get our <a href="http://www.openculture.com/dailyemail">Daily Email</a>. And don't miss our big collections of <a href="http://www.openculture.com/freeonlinecourses">Free Online Courses</a>, <a href="http://www.openculture.com/freemoviesonline">Free Online Movies</a>, <a href="http://www.openculture.com/free_ebooks">Free eBooks</a>, <a href="http://www.openculture.com/freeaudiobooks">Free Audio Books</a>, <a href="http://www.openculture.com/freelanguagelessons">Free Foreign Language Lessons</a>, and <a href="http://www.openculture.com/free_certificate_courses">MOOCs</a>.</p>
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| 7:00p | Carl Jung Psychoanalyzes Hitler: “He’s the Unconscious of 78 Million Germans.” “Without the German People He’d Be Nothing” (1938)
Were you to google “Carl Jung and Nazism”—and I’m not suggesting that you do—you would find yourself hip-deep in the charges that Jung was an anti-Semite and a Nazi sympathizer. Many sites condemn or exonerate him; many others celebrate him as a blood and soil Aryan hero. It can be nauseatingly difficult at times to tell these accounts apart. What to make of this controversy? What is the evidence brought against the famed Swiss psychiatrist and onetime close friend, student, and colleague of Sigmund Freud? Truth be told, it does not look good for Jung. Unlike Nietzsche, whose work was deliberately bastardized by Nazis, beginning with his own sister, Jung need not be taken out of context to be read as anti-Semitic. There is no irony at work in his 1934 paper The State of Psychotherapy Today, in which he marvels at National Socialism as a “formidable phenomenon,” and writes, “the ‘Aryan’ unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish.” This is only one of the least objectionable of such statements, as historian Andrew Samuels demonstrates. One Jungian defender admits in an essay collection called Lingering Shadows that Jung had been “unconsciously infected by Nazi ideas.” In response, psychologist John Conger asks, “Why not then say that he was unconsciously infected by anti-Semitic ideas as well?”—well before the Nazis came to power. He had expressed such thoughts as far back as 1918. Like the philosopher Martin Heidegger, Jung was accused of trading on his professional associations during the 30s to maintain his status, and turning on his Jewish colleagues while they were purged. Yet his biographer Deirdre Bair claims Jung’s name was used to endorse persecution without his consent. Jung was incensed, “not least,” Mark Vernon writes at The Guardian, “because he was actually fighting to keep German psychotherapy open to Jewish individuals.” Bair also reveals that Jung was “involved in two plots to oust Hitler, essentially by having a leading physician declare the Führer mad. Both came to nothing.” And unlike Heidegger, Jung strongly denounced anti-Semitic views during the war. He “protected Jewish analysts,” writes Conger, “and helped refugees.” He also worked for the OSS, precursor to the CIA, during the war. His recruiter Allen Dulles wrote of Jung’s “deep antipathy to what Nazism and Fascism stood for.” Dulles also cryptically remarked, “Nobody will probably ever know how much Prof. Jung contributed to the allied cause during the war.” These contradictions in Jung’s words, character, and actions are puzzling, to say the least. I would not presume to draw any hard and fast conclusions from them. They do, however, serve as the necessary context for Jung’s observations of Adolph Hitler. Nazis of today who praise Jung most often do so for his supposed characterization of Hitler as “Wotan,” or Odin, a comparison that thrills neo-pagans who, like the Germans did, use ancient European belief systems as clothes hangers for modern racist nationalism. In his 1936 essay, “Wotan,” Jung describes the old god as a force all its own, a “personification of psychic forces” that moved through the German people “towards the end of the Weimar Republic”—through the “thousands of unemployed,” who by 1933 “marched in their hundreds of thousands.” Wotan, Jung writes, “is the god of storm and frenzy, the unleasher of passions and the lust of battle; moreover he is a superlative magician and artist in illusion who is versed in all secrets of an occult nature.” In personifying the “German psyche” as a furious god, Jung goes so far as to write, “We who stand outside judge the Germans far too much as if they were responsible agents, but perhaps it would be nearer the truth to regard them also as victims.” “One hopes,” writes Per Brask, “evidently against hope, that Jung did not intend” his statements “as an argument of redemption for the Germans.” Whatever his intentions, his mystical racialization of the unconscious in “Wotan” accorded perfectly well with the theories of Alfred Rosenberg, “Hitler’s chief ideologist.” Like everything about Jung, the situation is complicated. In a 1938 interview, published by Omnibook Magazine in 1942, Jung repeated many of these disturbing ideas, comparing the German worship of Hitler to the Jewish desire for a Messiah, a “characteristic of people with an inferiority complex.” He describes Hitler’s power as a form of “magic.” But that power only exists, he says, because “Hitler listens and obeys….”
Jung’s observations are bombastic, but they are not flattering. The people may be possessed, but it is their will, he says, that the Nazi leader enacts, not his own. "The true leader," says Jung, "is always led." He goes on to paint an even darker picture, having closely observed Hitler and Mussolini together in Berlin:
Read the full interview here. Jung goes on to further discuss the German resurgence of the cult of Wotan, the “parallel between the Biblical triad… and the Third Reich,” and other peculiarly Jungian formulations. Of Jung’s analysis, interviewer H.R. Knickerbocker concludes, “this psychiatric explanation of the Nazi names and symbols may sound to a layman fantastic, but can anything be as fantastic as the bare facts about the Nazi Party and its Fuehrer? Be sure there is much more to be explained in them than can be explained by merely calling them gangsters.” Related Content: Carl Jung Explains Why His Famous Friendship with Sigmund Freud Fell Apart in Rare 1959 Audio Carl Jung Explains His Groundbreaking Theories About Psychology in a Rare Interview (1957) Carl Jung: Tarot Cards Provide Doorways to the Unconscious, and Maybe a Way to Predict the Future Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness Carl Jung Psychoanalyzes Hitler: “He’s the Unconscious of 78 Million Germans.” “Without the German People He’d Be Nothing” (1938) is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
| 8:00p | The Art of the Japanese Teapot: Watch a Master Craftsman at Work, from the Beginning Until the Startling End
People all over the world enjoy Japanese tea, but few of them have witnessed a proper Japanese tea ceremony — and seeing as a proper Japanese tea ceremony can last up to four hours, many probably imagine they don't have the endurance. But Japanese tea culture holds up meticulousness as a high virtue for the preparer, the drinker, and even more so the craftsman who makes the tea ware both of them use. In the video above, you can see one such master named Shimizu Genji at work in his studio in Tokoname, a city known as a ceramics center for hundreds and hundreds of years. Shimizu, writes the proprietor of pottery site Artisticnippon.com about a visit to his workshop, "throws a block of clay onto the wheel, creating the teapot's body, handle, spout and lid one after another, all from the same block. It really is quite mesmerising and awe-inspiring to watch." Once he assembles these formidably solid-looking but deceptively light pieces, he dries them out over three days, a process that offers "just one example of the time and care invested in the crafting of exquisite Tokoname teapots." Finally comes the seaweed, of which certain pieces get a layer applied before firing. Afterward, the traces left by the seaweed create a "charred" patterning called mogake. We would surely welcome any of Shimizu's products, or those by the other respected practitioners of his tradition, into our home. But as with all Japanese crafts honed over countless generations, the process counts for just as much as the product, or even more so. Take, for instance, Shimizu's process as captured by this video: we appreciate the concentration, deliberation, and sensitivity shown at each and every stage, and the pieces of the teapot as they come into existence don't look half bad either. But if we become too attached to the final result we've been anticipating over these fourteen minutes — well, suffice it to say that the master craftsman has a lesson in impermanence in store for us. Related Content: Japanese Craftsman Spends His Life Trying to Recreate a Thousand-Year-Old Sword The Making of Japanese Handmade Paper: A Short Film Documents an 800-Year-Old Tradition Watch a Japanese Craftsman Lovingly Bring a Tattered Old Book Back to Near Mint Condition Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook. The Art of the Japanese Teapot: Watch a Master Craftsman at Work, from the Beginning Until the Startling End is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs. |
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