Big, Blue $43.8 million Newman “Zip” Painting On the 8 th of October, a lift technician at a museum in the Netherlands mistakenly threw away a piece of artwork made to look like two empty beer cans. Last year, the infamous artwork consisting of a banana duct-taped to a wall was eaten by a hungry visitor to a gallery in Seoul, South Korea. Last month, I went to an art gallery and convulsed my face in disdain at the random blobs of paint that covered the canvases on the high walls. Modern art can be quite the sore spot for us connoisseurs. The painful abstract paintings, novels of base vocabulary, CGI drowned movies and music made on one beats app with auto-tune or nonsense lyrics physically hurt. I know I sound like your grandmother here, but bear with me when I ask you; how do you feel when you see a plain canvas covered entirely in blue paint? What emotions does a blue rectangle evoke? To me, none. But what if I told you that rectangle sold for almost $44 million? You’d probably a
And sometimes we are devils to ourselves When we will tempt the frailty of our powers, Presuming on their changeful potency. -Troilus and Cressida I have just finished another work by Fyodor Dostoevsky and am tempted to write about it. His work is like a gift that keeps on giving. Those who know the feeling of it crawl and linger in the recesses of the mind may understand. I am persuaded to love and respect Dostoevsky more and more each day. I have felt so since I first read Notes from the Underground, then Crime and Punishment and now Devils. Each of his works influenced me so appreciably that I fail to recollect the state of my mind and thought before I read them. I have found Devils to be different from his previous works. Another fact is that I positively took my time to read it. Thus, I had the opportunity to not only devour it, but to savour it to the fullest extent. In this novel, Dostoevsky exhibits his remarkable abilities as a ma