Art & Design – The New Modern

Links on Art and Design: A digest of short items from Twitter and other sources

Some interesting links and short items on Art and Design from The New Modern twitter stream and other sources.

Architecture

President Obama’s new budget would end Save America’s Treasures and Preserve America for lack of “metrics.” [read]
Unhappy Hipsters: A new blog invents amusing captions for stark Dwell mag photos [view] via @KateC
Mies masterpiece Farnsworth house revisited. A nice series of photos from @DesignApplause of a wonder of modern world architecture, now managed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation. [view]

Design

Hollywood’s computers: NPR looks at the computer screens shown in films that tell a story in a flash of computer animation. [read/listen]
A blog entirely dedicated to the beauty of ampersands [view] via @swissmiss
Beautiful, historic, and/or interesting letterheads enshrined Letterheady [view] via @walterolson
Why did the modernists love sans serif typefaces? [read] via @thinkaboutart & @ColinPeters

Visual Art

How art affects the brain, a study/exhibition at the Walters Museum [read] via @davetroy
Niagara Falls… to American art what portraits of kings are to European art? [read]
A typically lovely illustration by the legendary Arthur Rackham [view] via @ThinkAboutArt & @EricOrchard

Civil War ghosts haunt Sally Mann’s photography

This segment from a documentary film about photographer Sally Mann focuses on her use of 19th Century technology to capture haunting images of Civil War battlefields. Appropriately spooky.

But Mann’s comments about photographic technique inspire greater respect for Matthew Brady and other period practitioners… they struggled mightily to avoid the “imperfections” Mann regard as stylish postmodern flourishes.

* Welcome new readers from Instapundit and elsewhere! The New Modern will be launching in earnest soon, so please consider subscribing to our mailing list or our RSS feed (or following us on Twitter or Facebook) to see more along the lines of this post as we get rolling. Thanks. –Andrew Hazlett

[Via @GreatDismal and @Charlie_Athanas]

This video clip is from What Remains – a 2005 documentary about Sally Mann’s work and family. Her book of photographs of the same title is available from Amazon.

Sad news: Bannerman’s Castle on an island in the Hudson River is crumbling

Bannerman’s Castle was already an enigmatic ruin in the middle of the Hudson River, a dreamy landmark for passing train travelers and a passionate cause for preservationists.

But then in the silence of last Saturday night, a large chunk of history suddenly disappeared when the castle’s stone, brick and cement sighed under a century’s weight of weather. Overnight, two-thirds of the eastern tower was gone, as well as one-third of the adjacent southern wall, leaving a gaping hole and concern over how to stop the crumbling.

A strange and beautiful American ruin is decaying faster than ever.

Chandigarh, India: The Rock Garden

A dog among the sculptures in Nek Chand’s Rock Garden in Chandigarh, India.

Polaroid film: A 1972 “introduction” by Charles and Ray Eames

So serious–artistically and technically–for what is basically just an advertisement!

This short film is intrinsically interesting because it was made by the iconic designers Charles and Ray Eames, but it’s also fascinating as a time capsule of 1972… as a technical lesson on how a wonderful invention worked… and as a reminder of why–even in our age of instantly sharable digital imagery–people still desire this kind of tangible photography.

[Video found via Merlin Mann]

Note: The above YouTube version is inferior to a Vimeo version that I first posted. Unfortunately, it seems to have disappeared. If I can rediscover the better rendition, I’ll repost it.