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Sunday, April 29, 2012
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Did Caravaggio meet a grisly end - with the Vatican's complicity?
Citing documents from the Vatican Secret Archives, an Italian historian argues that 17th-century documents reveal Renaissance artist Caravaggio was assassinated by the Knights of Malta.
In one of his most graphic paintings, the rabble-rousing Renaissance artist Caravaggio?depicted his tortured face on the head of Goliath, slain and decapitated by the boy warrior David.
Skip to next paragraphAn Italian historian thinks that Caravaggio may have met just such a grisly end ? at the hands of the Knights of St. John of Malta, the chivalric order founded during the Crusades.
Vincenzo Pacelli, a Caravaggio expert from the University of Naples, has unearthed documents from the Vatican Secret Archives and state archives in Rome that suggest the Knights ordered the artist to be assassinated in revenge for him attacking and wounding on one of their members during a brawl.
They then dumped his body in the sea at Palo, north of Rome, which would explain why there are no documents recording his death.
Until now, conventional wisdom said Caravaggio died either from an illness or lead poisoning from the oil paints he used.
The murder was ?commissioned and organized? by the Knights of Malta and carried out with the complicity of the Vatican, Mr. Pacelli says in his forthcoming book, "Caravaggio ? Between Art and Science."
The historian found strange discrepancies in correspondence between Cardinal Scipione Borghese, a powerful Vatican secretary of state, and Deodato Gentile, a papal ambassador, in which the painter?s place of death was cited as the island of Procida near Naples, ?a place that Caravaggio had nothing to do with,? according to Pacelli.
A document written by Caravaggio?s doctor and first biographer claimed that the painter died at the age of 38 north of Rome, but the place name was later scrubbed out and replaced by the name of a town in Tuscany.?Pacelli also found an account written 20 years after Caravaggio?s death in which an Italian archivist wrote that the artist had been ?assassinated.?
He believes it all adds up to evidence of an assassination plot by the Knights of Malta which was then covered up.
Not all experts are convinced by the new theory.?John T. Spike, a Caravaggio expert at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Va., is skeptical of the idea that the painter was murdered on the Knights' orders.
?The problem with the theory is that the Knights had ample opportunities to kill him sooner ? either when he was living in Malta, or when he then went to Sicily, which is very close,? says Mr. Spike. ?Why did they wait so long??
The academic sparring will continue, but more than four centuries after his death in 1610, the true fate of Caravaggio remains an enigma.
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Saturday, April 14, 2012
Lingerie-Styled Diet Coke Bottles Designed by Jean Paul Gaultier Are Downright Bizarre [Design]
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Friday, April 13, 2012
Wrong turn grants glimpse behind N. Korean curtain
PYONGYANG, North Korea (AP) ? The press bus took a wrong turn Thursday. And suddenly, everything changed in the official showcase of North Korean achievement.
A cloud of brown dust swirled down deeply potholed streets, past concrete apartment buildings crumbling at the edges. Old people trudged along the sidewalk, some with handmade backpacks crafted from canvas bags. Two men in wheelchairs waited at a bus stop. There were stores with no lights, and side roads so battered they were more dirt than pavement.
"Perhaps this is an incorrect road?" mumbled one of the North Korean minders, well-dressed government officials who restrict reporters to meticulously staged presentations that inevitably center on praise for the three generations of Kim family who have ruled this country since 1948.
So as cameras madly clicked, the drivers of the three buses quickly backed up in the narrow streets and headed back toward the intended destination: a spotlessly clean, brightly-lit, extensively marbled and nearly empty building that preserves digital music recordings and makes DVDs.
It was at the Hana Music Information Center, a guide told the reporters, where North Korea's longtime leader, Kim Jong Il, made one of his last public appearances before his December death.
"I hope that the journalists present here report only the absolute truth," said Ri Jinju, her voice trembling with emotion, her flowing hair frozen with hairspray. "The truth about how much our people miss our comrade Kim Jong Il, and how strong the unity is between the people and leadership, who are vigorously carrying out the leaders' instructions to build a great, prosperous and powerful nation."
In North Korea, it's hard to know what's real. Certainly, you can't go looking for it.
Anyone who leaves the press tour, or who walks from the few hotels where foreigners are allowed, can be detained by the police and even threatened with expulsion.
But even in such a controlled environment, reality asserts itself.
Is reality the cluster of tall buildings within view of the main foreigners' hotel, where long strings of bright, colored lights are switched on when the sun goes down, illuminating entire blocks like some gargantuan Christmas decoration? Or is it the vast stretches of Pyongyang, by far the most developed city in impoverished North Korea, that go deathly dark at night?
Is the reality along Pyongyang's drab-but-spotless main roads, the only streets that journalists normally see, with their revolutionary posters urging North Koreans to struggle toward a Stalinist paradise? Or is reality on the streets near the music center?
"They've left very few stones unturned in North Korea," said Anthony Brunello, a professor at Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida, who has studied totalitarian propaganda methods. He said officials will go to nearly any extreme to create a system that will keep the Kim family in power.
If that means using propaganda that seems insensible to outsiders, few of whom believe the official version of Pyongyang as a communist idyll, it is very logical in Pyongyang. After all, the Kims still hold power.
"They've managed to create a process of control that works," he said.
Most foreign visitors to Pyongyang never encounter a pothole, a traffic jam or a piece of litter larger than a cigarette butt. There see no people with physical disabilities, and no graffiti.
They normally see only the clean streets outside their bus windows, and the showcase buildings ? the Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum, the palace commemorating the Kims' "juche" philosophy of self-reliance, the computer labs at Kim Il Sung University ? filled with people that the minders insist are everyday North Koreans.
The students in the classrooms don't glance up as dozens of reporters rumble in, and the professor's lecture continues without pause. The young people in the university pool careen down the plastic slide, in front of TV cameras, as if they are completely alone.
Perhaps they are real students. But look straight into the eyes of these people, and their pupils dance around you like you're not there, as if they've been trained to pretend you are not. Only the official guides, always beautiful women in flowing polyester gowns in ice-cream colors, will talk readily.
Always, those talks center around the Kims: the Great Leader Kim Il Sung; the Great General Kim Jong Il and, since his father's death in December, the Respected General Kim Jong Un.
They speak in relentless, rote hyperbole.
"The more time passes by the more we miss our Dear Leader Kim Jong Il," said Ri, the music center guide. "I don't think we can ever find any person so great."
Behind that robotic facade, though, North Koreans want the same things as just about everyone else; at least, that's what defector after defector has said.
They fight with their wives and worry when their children get fevers. They wage office politics, dream of buying cars and, if they have enough clout, they hope to get away to the beach in the summer. When times are at their worst, as they were when famine savaged the country in the 1990s, they dream of enough food so their children won't starve to death.
It's not clear why the regime hides places like the dusty, potholed neighborhood, which is just a mile or so from the center of town, across the trolley tracks and just off Tongil Street.
It doesn't look like a war zone, or even like a particularly rough New York City neighborhood. Many streets in New Delhi, the capital of one of the world's fastest-growing economies, look far more battered and far poorer.
To most North Koreans, one-quarter of whom depend on international food aid, living in homes without electricity or running water, the neighborhood would look upper-middle-class. Special permits are required to live in the capital city, and life here is vastly better than it is for most people in the countryside.
There are predictable government jobs here, electricity at least a few hours a day, better-stocked stores, schools that have indoor bathrooms.
But the officials still hide the run-down neighborhoods. There's a certain view of North Korea they want visitors to have.
Maybe, though, the regime is opening up. In past years, media minders would order reporters to put down their cameras if they saw something they felt didn't reflect well on North Korea. At times, they would close the curtains on the buses.
But on Thursday, the minders said nothing as the cameras clicked away. The journalists stared. And outside the bus, the North Koreans who never expected to be seen stared back.
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Thursday, April 12, 2012
Support for Afghan war hits a new low
Support for the war in Afghanistan has dropped to a new low in ABC News/Washington Post polls, surpassing even the war in Iraq at its most unpopular. Six in 10 Americans believe most Afghans themselves oppose the U.S. mission. And after a shooting rampage allegedly by a U.S. soldier, eight in 10 say the military should improve mental-health monitoring and limit combat duty alike.
Two-thirds of Americans now say the war in Afghanistan has not been worth fighting, a new high that matches peak opposition to the Iraq war almost exactly five years ago. Support for the Afghanistan war, at just 30 percent, is 3 points lower than the lowest on record for Iraq.
Views on the war were virtually as negative last spring, then improved after the killing of Osama bin Laden. The subsequent erosion follows the U.S. military's inadvertent burning of the Koran and other Muslim holy texts at Bagram Air Base in February, violent protests that followed and, separately, the massacre of 17 Afghan civilians in Kandahar in March, allegedly by a U.S. service member.
In an ABC/Post poll last month, after the Koran burning and related protests, opposition to the war increased from 54 percent to 60 percent, with just three in 10 believing Afghans themselves supported U.S. efforts in their country. Now, after the civilian massacre, opposition to the war has risen by another 6 points, to 66 percent, and the belief that Afghans support the war has dropped by 8 points, to 22 percent.
The drop in views that Afghans themselves support U.S. efforts makes a difference. This poll, produced for ABC by Langer Research Associates, finds that among those who think most Afghans back the war, a majority - 53 percent - think it's been worth fighting. Among those who think Afghans are opposed to what the U.S. is trying to accomplish, however, just 22 percent think the nation's longest war has been worth it.
KANDAHAR SHOOTING - While there's been speculation about the possible role of post-traumatic stress disorder or battlefield fatigue in the attack on Afghan civilians, the public divides, 44-43 percent, on whether this was an isolated incident or indicative of broader problems with the way the U.S. military monitors the mental health of service members.
Still, apart from the specific incident, there is a broad sense that the military should be doing more to track mental health - 79 percent say so - and to limit the amount of time active duty service members are deployed to combat areas, favored by an almost identical 80 percent. Just 14 and 15 percent, respectively, think the military already is doing enough mental health monitoring and that time limits on deployments are not needed.?
Views of the civilian massacre are intertwined with broader views about military mental health screening. Among those who see the attack on civilians as indicative of broader problems, a near unanimous 93 percent think the military should be doing more to track the mental health of its members. Among those who view the attack as an isolated incident, the belief that the military should be doing more is 25 points lower, but a still broad 68 percent.
PARTISANSHIP and GROUPS - Support for the war in Afghanistan, views of the attack on civilians and support for greater mental health screening divide along partisan lines. A quarter of Democrats, three in 10 independents and 44 percent of Republicans think the war has been worth fighting. While still the most supportive of the war, Republican backing is at an all-time low. But independents and Democrats just are 2 and 6 points from their lows, respectively.
Republicans also are more apt to think Afghans themselves support U.S. efforts in their country - but still just 31 percent think so, compared to 21 percent of Democrats and independents.
Democrats are most likely to think the civilian massacre is indicative of a wider problem (51 percent), and to think the military should be making greater efforts in monitoring mental health (90 percent). Republicans are the least likely to share these views (33 and 70 percent, respectively), and as is customary, independents fall in between the two.
The pattern is similar among ideological groups, with liberals more likely than conservatives to view the shooting incident as indicative of a broader problem and to back more stringent mental health screening, while moderates fall in between.
Among other groups, women are 15 points more likely than men to see the shooting incident as part of a broader problem in the military, 51 to 36 percent. They're also 16 points more likely to think the military should be doing more to monitor mental health (87 vs. 71 percent) and 13 points more apt to want limits on the amount of time service members can spend in combat zones (86 to 73 percent).
OBAMA - Although the war in Afghanistan now rivals the Iraq war in unpopularity, President Obama, so far, has escaped much damage. While support for the war has dropped by 13 points since July, approval of his handling of it is down a scant 5 points to 48 percent. His overall approval, moreover, has risen from a low of 42 in October to 50 percent now.
Yet political risks remain, especially in an election year. Broad discontent with the war in Iraq had severe consequences for George W. Bush's presidency, helping to push his overall approval rating below 25 percent. The question for Obama is the extent to which his withdrawal strategy can continue to hold greater criticism at bay.
METHODOLOGY - This ABC News/Washington Post poll was conducted by telephone April 5-8, 2012, among a random national sample of 1,003 adults, including landline and cell-phone-only respondents. Results have a margin of sampling error of 4 points for the full sample. The survey was produced for ABC News by Langer Research Associates of New York, N.Y., with sampling, data collection and tabulation by Abt-SRBI of New York, N.Y.
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Sunday, April 8, 2012
In tough times, British artists hit the streets
LONDON (AP) ? Christiaan Nagel scrambles up an aluminum ladder, carrying a big blue mushroom.
In seconds, the 29-year-old sculptor is on the roof of a once-handsome, now neglected Victorian building in London. Under a crescent moon, he works quickly; within minutes the polyurethane fungus stands tall over the street below ? an impromptu landmark to be enjoyed and photographed by passers-by.
Nagel is a street artist, one of a growing band of painters, stencilers and sculptors bringing vibrancy to the recession-tattered streets of Britain.
His work pops up unannounced, and in that it captures the spirit of the times.
Unauthorized art in public places is booming in austerity Britain. As public funding dries up, businesses struggle and economic uncertainty hits collectors' pocketbooks, London's streets have been colonized by artists. Empty stores become pop-up art shops, empty walls pop-up galleries ? and every street artist dreams of becoming the next Banksy, the anonymous graffiti-sprayer whose work sells for six-figure sums.
Nagel, like other street artists, insists he is not motivated by money but by a combination of ego, excitement, and the desire to have his work seen by as many people as possible.
His mushrooms cost just a few pounds (dollars) to make, but generally earn him nothing. He pays the rent by trading second-hand guitars, and by occasional paid art commissions.
He makes mushrooms because they are both a pleasing shape and a flexible metaphor.
"They're pop-up art, they could be mushroom clouds, they could be psychedelic drugs," he said. "I suppose they tie in with the subculture of street art, which is guerrilla art, which is illegal."
Illegal, maybe, but increasingly accepted. Nagel says he has been stopped by police only once, handcuffed by officers while installing a mushroom in the middle of a busy traffic circle.
"They were like, 'What are you doing?' and I said: 'I'm an artist and I've just installed my mushroom.'" said Nagel, an outgoing South African with russet hair and a taste for brightly colored shirts. "They gave me a look for about 10 minutes and they let me go."
The global financial crisis, and the British government's budget-slashing, have hit the arts hard. More than 200 British arts organizations have lost government funding, and dozens say they may have to shut down.
But a do-it-yourself, street-level arts culture is flourishing. Some of London's hipper, scruffier quarters have become so art-encrusted that they are now tourist attractions in themselves, with a burgeoning street-art economy.
Around the east London districts of Shoreditch and Hackney, where canal-side lofts, media businesses and trendy bars mix with derelict factories and run-down housing projects, walls sprout giant birds and furry rodents, brightly colored hands and fantastical landscapes.
One recent morning about 20 well-dressed young tourists were on a walking tour of brick walls and vacant buildings adorned with colorful drawings and murals by artists with names like Stik, Sweet Toof and Phlegm.
The works are the product of young artists attracted to London by its vibrant art scene, and to the streets by a blend of a freedom-loving philosophy and the opportunity provided by so many neglected walls.
"The streets are the biggest gallery, the least pretentious," said Richard Howard-Griffin, who organizes the walking tours and has developed a website guide and an iPhone app to London's booming urban art scene. "They are able to reach people who don't go to galleries."
The downside of street art is its impermanence. What's here today may be gone tomorrow. Nagel says he has installed more than 100 mushrooms, but only a handful are still standing. The longest-surviving has overlooked a busy road for more than a year.
But that's also part of its appeal. Spotting a new Banksy before it is covered up or spirited away ? building owners have been known to remove whole walls to preserve a stencil ? is a bit of a sport. Street art also brings its practitioners a wide audience, the thrill of covert action and a sense of community.
"There's a great energy here," Nagel said. "There are some great street artists from all around the world who come together here."
Many street artists are reluctant to speak publicly. They are, by nature, anti-authoritarian, and their work thrives on secrecy and the mystique of a pseudonym.
Nagel says he finds such silence difficult. "I get too excited about my work. I want to tell everybody."
His mushrooms are the product of serendipity. He grew up surfing the Indian Ocean off Durban, and began experimenting with the kind of foam used in surf boards. One mold produced a mushroom-top shape, and he was smitten.
Now he makes the sculptures on a resin-stained rooftop outside his apartment and leaves them dotting rooftops, bridges and even trees.
Before last year's wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, he left the royal couple a gift in the middle of the Serpentine, the artificial lake in Hyde Park.
"I put on my wet suit, got on my surfboard and paddled out," he said. Nagel lined up 10 in a row along an island, with a sign declaring them "a present for the couple to be married." It was all gone by noon the next day.
Despite the occasional insult or hurled bit of litter, Nagel says the reaction of the public is overwhelmingly friendly.
That sentiment is seconded by Run, a thoughtful Italian-born artist who has been painting bright murals of hands and faces across London for several years.
Run ? he prefers to be identified by his artistic pseudonym ? decided early on that he didn't like painting at night. It was too solitary, too spooky. He paints in daylight, and says most onlookers have a positive reaction.
"You discover that people really want to smile," he said. "If anything makes you smile, and it's a bit different from normality, people are happy and you can see it."
Local authorities and building owners are increasingly likely to protect a colorful mural, rather than paint over it. Since Banksy, high-quality street art has been seen less as vandalism, more as a feature that can add cachet and value to a property and cachet to a neighborhood.
Officially commissioned street art has been used by Olympicsd organizers to get young people excited about this summer's 2012 London games. Unofficial art increasingly escapes the paint-rollers of local-authority cleaners. A spokeswoman for the mayor's office, speaking on condition of anonymity because of mayoral election restrictions, said street art was "part of the fabric of London."
Today's street art grew out of the New York graffiti scene of the 1970s and 80s. It is now global, and the Internet has helped street artists gain an international profile. Artists like the Belgian Roa and the Brazilian twins Os Gemeos travel the world making their mark.
Museums and galleries have begun holding exhibitions of street art, and street artworks have become increasingly valuable ? which leaves some worrying that the movement has lost its soul.
Many street artists look with a combination of suspicion and respect at Banksy, who has managed to retain an outsider image even as his satirical stencils ? policemen kissing; riot police with yellow happy faces ? change hands at white-walled galleries and high-end auction houses.
The graffiti artist has made a fortune and won celebrity fans including Angelina Jolie without ever revealing his identity. (It's generally accepted that he is in his late 30s and from the English city of Bristol.)
He still stencils buildings and bridges, but also creates portable works intended for sale ? often for tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. He drew a title sequence for "The Simpsons" and directed the acclaimed documentary "Exit Through the Gift Shop."
"Banksy has been groundbreaking in terms of what he has done for public perceptions of street art," said Gareth Williams of auctioneer Bonham's, which recently sold 17 Banksy screen prints and works on canvas for a total of 400,000 pounds ($640,000). "He's a household name."
No one else has yet reached that level, though many artists hope to emulate Banksy by having one foot on the street and the other in galleries. And the mainstream is drawing ever nearer. A few years ago, London street artist Ben Eine began painting colorful blocky letters on the metal shutters of East End shops. When Prime Minister David Cameron visited Washington for the first time after being elected in 2010, he gave President Barack Obama an Eine painting as a gift.
Williams says the market is going to continue to boom. For collectors who find much contemporary art alienating, with its pickled sharks and enigmatic installations, street art has an appealing freshness and immediacy,
"It's very, very accessible," he said. "People can relate to pieces they see on the street."
Artists worry that the increasing commercialization of street art risks killing the magic.
Nagel does accept private commissions, and recently sold a mushroom for 900 pounds ($1,440) to a wealthy asset manager with an Andy Warhol on his office wall.
But he says a sense of excitement and "the magic of the unknown" keep him going out onto the streets.
Run calls his art "the opposite of an advert" ? designed to give viewers pleasure rather than get them to buy something. But he's aware he's not motivated solely by idealism.
"It's a big ego thing," he said. "My aim is to see my painting really big in the public space ? and eventually get money from that."
Run worries about street art becoming commercialized, but can see the positive side. The business of street art is providing jobs in tough times.
"A friend of mine just arrived in England," he said, "and the other day she was at the Job Center. And she found a vacancy asking somebody to do street art tours around east London. ... Plumber, van driver, bar attendant, catalog distributor ? now street art tour manager. It's great."
___
Online: http://streetartlondon.co.uk
___
Jill Lawless can be reached at: http://twitter.com/JillLawless
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Actress Amanda Bynes arrested on suspicion of DUI
FILE - In this Sept. 13, 2009 file photo, Amanda Bynes arrives at the MTV Video Music Awards in New York. Bynes was arrested early Friday, April 6, 2012, on suspicion of drunken driving after allegedly hitting a sheriff's patrol car. (AP Photo/Peter Kramer, file)
FILE - In this Sept. 13, 2009 file photo, Amanda Bynes arrives at the MTV Video Music Awards in New York. Bynes was arrested early Friday, April 6, 2012, on suspicion of drunken driving after allegedly hitting a sheriff's patrol car. (AP Photo/Peter Kramer, file)
FILE - In this Sept. 13, 2009 file photo, Amanda Bynes arrives at the MTV Video Music Awards in New York. Bynes was arrested early Friday, April 6, 2012, on suspicion of drunken driving after allegedly hitting a sheriff's patrol car. (AP Photo/Charles Sykes, file)
In this police booking photo released by Los Angeles Conty Sheriff's Department showing actress Amanda Bynes, 26, who was arrested on suspicion of drunken driving after allegedly hitting a sheriff's patrol car. (AP Photo/Los Angeles Conty Sheriff's Department )
LOS ANGELES (AP) ? Authorities say actress Amanda Bynes has been arrested on suspicion of driving under the influence after she grazed a sheriff's patrol car.
The 26-year-old actress was arrested around 3 a.m. Friday in West Hollywood.
The Los Angeles County sheriff's department says that Bynes attempted to pass a patrol car making a right turn when she hit it. Deputies who arrested her suspect she was drunk at the time.
Bynes is being held on $5,000 bail. Her publicist, Melissa Raubvogel, did not immediately return a call and an email from The Associated Press.
The actress appeared in the 2010 film "Easy A" and the Nickelodeon series "What I Like About You."
Deputies say there was paint damage to both cars, but no one was injured.
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