Ellen DeGeneres is Utterly Charming in the First Oscars Trailer

Women and Hollywood beschreibt den ersten Trailer zur kommenden Oscar-Verleihung:

„After MacFarlane’s “edgy” schtick, DeGeneres may feel like a safe choice – an angle the trailer pushes by showing Ellen doing an old-fashioned song-and-dance routine in her familiar Converse kicks. She also displays her appealing squareness with a few seconds of the now-stale “Gangnam Style” dance – she’s about as hip as your mom, and she wants you to know it.

But DeGeneres’ friendly accessibility belies the fact that she’s a much more provocative and subversive host than MacFarlane could ever hope to be. The comedian and talk-show host is only the second female and the first openly gay emcee in the Oscars’ 84-year history. And the awards ceremony enjoys a global audience, making DeGeneres America’s ambassador to the world – a honor and responsibility all-too-rarely entrusted to a gay woman.“

Hier ist das Video zu The Walker von Fitz and the Tantrums, zu deren Musik Ellen in ihrem Trailer tanzt. (Ich hätte gerne direkt zur Band-Website verlinkt, aber die streamen über YouTube, und da ist das Video – natürlich – für Deutschland gesperrt.)

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Temples of Delight

Der Economist schreibt über den stetig wachsenden Zulauf, den Museen haben. In den letzten zwei Jahrzehnten sind aus weltweit 23.000 mindestens 55.000 Museen geworden:

„On the face of it, that success seems surprising. People now have more choices than ever before in how to spend their leisure. Many travel to see the world, but mostly the world comes to them, often via television and the internet, conveniently delivered to their laptops or smartphones. So why would they want to traipse round museums if most of the stuff they can see there is available at the click of a mouse?

Some of the new enthusiasm for museums is explained by changes in demand. In the rich world, and in some developing countries too, the share of people who are going on to higher education has risen spectacularly in recent decades. Surveys show that better-educated folk are a lot more likely to be museum-goers. They want to see for themselves where they fit in the wider world and look to museums for guidance, which is why so many of these places have been transformed from “restrained containers” to “exuberant companions”, as Victoria Newhouse writes in her book, Towards a New Museum.“

(via @therealstief)

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King of Kings

Ach, wo wir gerade beim Economist sind – in der neuesten Ausgabe findet sich ein Artikel über Ozymandias bzw. Ramses II., den Percy Bysshe Shelley in seinem berühmten Gedicht erwähnte, das mir persönlich durch die vorvorletzte Folge von Breaking Bad (die meiner Meinung nach beste der Serie) wieder ins Gedächtnis gerufen wurde.

„I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: — Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‚My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!‘
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.“

Der Artikel verbindet ägyptische und britische Geschichte mit Literaturwissenschaft:

„As it happened, as Shelley and Smith were scribbling their competing sonnets, Ramesses II was on his way to London. The top half of one of the statues of him at Thebes (though not the one described by Diodorus, which still lies in situ toppled and mutilated) had been dragged, on trolleys and with palm-fibre ropes, as far as the bank of the Nile opposite Luxor, and now waited only for a boat to transport it the rest of the way. The boat would need to be substantial: the pharaoh’s head and shoulders weighed seven tonnes. The French army, passing nearby, had tried to shift the colossus by drilling a three-inch hole in his shoulder and stuffing it with dynamite, but the soldiers had chickened out at the last moment and left him behind. (…)

In 1818 the Younger Memnon was enthroned in a newly built Egyptian Room at the British Museum, where he remains, magnificent in grey and pale brown granite, the French sappers’ hole still in his shoulder. The keeper of the Egyptian Room explained that he was not going to put him under Fine Art, because he did not think he was. But he was certainly impressive. The statue’s arrival sparked an explosion of interest in all things Egyptian—but Shelley, who had flung himself into exile in Italy in March 1818, never actually saw him.“

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Tanja Bernsau

Über cogries‘ Twitter bin ich auf das Blog der Kunsthistorikerin Tanja Bernsau gestoßen. Ich habe noch nicht das ganze Blog durchstöbert, aber schon die neuesten zehn Artikel ergänzen mein Provenienz-Seminar an der LMU gerade hervorragend. Wenn ihr euch auch ein bisschen tiefer über verfolgungsbedingt entzogenes Kulturgut, den Umgang der Alliierten sowie von Nachkriegsdeutschland damit und natürlich auch über den Fall Gurlitt informieren wollt, wäre das hier ein guter Anfang.