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An article about art and power focused on a piece from the Mughal empire, with an intriguing layout that scrolls sentences by on the left while zooming in on different parts of the art on the right. Crosscurrents of religion and culture shaped this stunningly detailed portrait of the 17th-century Mughal emperor who built the Taj Mahal. --- Power, for the Mughals, also came from absorbing the cultural forms under their authority, then reconstituting them in their own image.

Just a bunch of cool/interesting/funny/thought-provoking websites from 2000–2019.

so quite a lot of people expressed interest in a guide to lion dance! and since the lunar new year is coming up in a couple weeks, which means everyone’s exposure to lions is probably going to increase, i figured i’d go ahead and make it! right click + open in new tab to fullview, etc etc, i hope it’s helpful, although if you only take one thing away from this powerpoint, it’s this: lions are not dragons

Here’s an alternative hypothesis: Insanely long copyright terms are how the culture industries avoid competing with their own back catalogs. Imagine that we still had a copyright term that maxed out at 28 years, the regime the first Americans lived under. The shorter term wouldn’t in itself have much effect on output or incentives to create. But it would mean that, today, every book, song, image, and movie produced before 1984 was freely available to anyone with an Internet connection. Under those conditions, would we be anywhere near as willing to pay a premium for the latest release?

“Criticism is only useful when it helps us see something we are having difficulty seeing on our own; it’s not helpful when it tells us to stop looking. ‘But what if everyone pays attention to the wrong things? We have to guide them to the right things!’ Well, eventually everyone stops paying attention to everything: time is pretty effective that way. With that in mind, we should only worry about pointing the good out, and not worrying about the bad. And in the age of the Internet, this dictum takes on added force. Think of it as the Paris Hilton effect: talking about the bad just encourages the bad. No one has ever cured a celebrity of anorexia by posting photographs of her on the Internet, or has helped Charlie Sheen get off alcohol by getting exasperated at his stupidity. Trashing bad people and bad art does not make you a good person.”

"Commercial concerns are both implicit and invisible in the consumption of content."

"But all of a sudden, for a brief time at least, she's the only real pop star around."

"We had an idea. Go to a place. Ask fifty people the same question. Film their responses."

"An artist is Advanced when they do something that is neither expected of them nor the opposite of what is expected of them." Tongue-in-cheek, but the article lives on. Note the notes on Val Kilmer and C-Murder.

On Advancement Theory: it's not bad; you just don't get it. "The most Advanced figure of all time is Lou Reed [who in] 1986 released the song 'The Original Wrapper,' in which he raps about AIDS, Louis Farrakhan, and waffles."