weak link[5.18.26]

[Henri Matisse (1869-1954) trained as a lawyer, then changed course in his early twenties, choosing a path that would earn him the moniker “king of the wild beasts” and ultimately transform the history of modern art. The son of a successful grain merchant, he rejected the more suitable career to follow his passion to create art. He left the south of France in 1891 to study at two of the more traditional institutions in Paris, the Académie Julian and later the École des Beaux-Arts. But the innovative and overlapping avant-garde styles that Matisse discovered on arrival in fin-de-siècle Paris had a greater impact on his fine arts education. Matisse would have witnessed and absorbed the ground-breaking work of Claude Monet and the Impressionists along side Post-Impressionists such as Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cezanne, and Georges Seurat.

Matisse: Innovation in the Face of Physical Limitations

[Philosopher C Thi Nguyen’s new book tackles precisely this kind of perverse behaviour. He argues that mistaking points for the point is a pervasive error that leads us to build our lives and societies around things we don’t want. “Value capture”, as Nguyen calls it, happens when the lines between what you care about and how you measure your progress, begin to blur

The Score by C Thi Nguyen review – a brilliant warning about the gamification of everyday life

[We seek to explore the learning potentials presented by a better understanding of failure to influence the broader debates about the future of the doctorate in times of uncertainty and crisis.

Learning From Failure for Doctoral Education

[Every ten years this century I’ve posted a list of the “Books of the Decade in Ecocultural Theory.” (The last one was here; the previous, here.) Given how quickly things are evolving — and the precarious state of the world that’s accompanying them — it feels appropriate to take advantage of this quarter-turn in the century’s clock for a deep dig into the kinds of insights we need to make sense of our intertwined ecological and cultural, i.e., ecocultural, challenges.

Books of the quarter-century in ecocultural theory

[The philosophical discipline of aesthetics did not receive its name until 1735, when the twenty-one year old Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten introduced it in his Halle master’s thesis to mean epistêmê aisthetikê, or the science of what is sensed and imagined (Baumgarten, Meditationes §CXVI, pp. 86–7

18th Century German Aesthetics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

The Complete Notebooks by Albert Camus, translated by Ryan Bloom is reviewed by Matthew Lamb at Los Angeles Review of Books and by Benjamin Shull at The Wall Street Journal.