Cast your mind, if you will, back to the year 2020. It now feels like a different time, what with the spreading COVID-19 pandemic and the heated sociopolitical battles being waged online, and indeed in the (socially distanced) streets. That spring, we featured here on Open
Smack in the middle of Pink Floyd’s classic Dark Side of the Moon sits a song many listeners may hear as an extended bridge between the two true centerpieces, “Time” and “Money.” But I’ve always thought of “The Great Gig in the Sky” as the album’s true center, a swirling,
Where the hard edge of physics meets the vulnerable metaphysics of the human heart.
We recommend titles on fiber art, weaving, and textiles, plus Megan O’Grady on a new John Berger biography.
NPR’s Planet Money recently did a show on tariff refunds and interviewed Panic’s Cabel Sasser about how they decided to refund their Playdate -buying customers for the tariffs surcharge they paid.
In a Trumpian move, the government of Abelardo de la Espriella took down works referencing LGBTQ+ and women’s rights and political violence.
Do you believe in life after death? This is a great interactive piece by Alvin Chang about people’s beliefs about the existence of an afterlife and how those beliefs change over the course of our lifetimes.
This year’s iteration of the artistic assembly was a love letter to the neighborhood and its craftsmanship amid an era of remediation, development, and gentrification.
“I want to visualize the fact that, despite our perception, reality is changeable,” the Brooklyn-based artist said of her paintings.
He brought his optical preoccupations into the 21st century, without losing his love of artists from earlier eras.
Merchant's fable-like narratives tap into our anxieties around the environment by conjuring instead a kind of utopia. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The
This is really impressive: a software engineer got a Game Boy emulator running at 30 fps on a tiny e-ink screen. If you’re familiar with e-paper, you know that they normally refresh much slower (2-3 times a second), not nearly quick enough to play even a simple video game.
A 24-minute video tour of the Krasner and Pollock: Past Continuous exhibition at the Met. I hope I make it to NYC to see this before it closes in January.
Santa Paws, Vincent van Doge, and the papal Pup Leo were among this year’s fierce competition.
Towers of Babble is a game that mashes up word games and tower defense games. “Nouns make buildings and other parts of speech make modifiers that you can add to a building to improve its stats.”
I’d never heard of this before: in 1990, the BBC aired a program created by and starring Douglas Adams called Hyperland . It begins with a frustrated Adams throwing his TV out (too linear, too non-interactive) and Tom Baker (from Doctor Who) popping up as an intelligent
Students from the independent École du Louvre and the National School of Fine Arts are leading the ongoing action.
“This history is dirty,” says the Brazilian artist, who sees the colonial past as an active force in her country’s present.
"Like wind itself, the work only fully exists through interaction," say DRIFT founders Lonneke Gordijn and Ralph Nauta. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The
In Mani Haghighi’s new film, an artist’s extensive archive draws the ire of the authorities.
Lane 8 has released his Fall 2026 Mixtape , 4 hours, recorded live at SF’s Castro Theatre. This one’s going straight into the earholes. Soundcloud , YouTube , and elsewhere .
More than sixty artists explore migration, memory, and identity in this survey of Puerto Rican abstraction across and beyond the archipelago.
Won’t Someone Please Stop Me, Dr. Frankenstein, from Building the Creature? “These are serious concerns. And I think we should all stop. Me, especially. Can anyone make me stop doing the thing I want to do? Apparently not.”
The Los Angeles-based photographer, who was raised in a conservative Catholic environment, is reclaiming the divinity of queer and trans identity through religious imagery.
Writing for Vanity Fair ( archive link ), Ta-Nehisi Coates says that Donald Trump is the most visionary politician of his era. Through a mix of moxie, cynicism, and misanthropy, Trump has made himself into the dominant American of our age. Sometimes a man meets his moment, and
The shape is formed by the remains of a dying star with a very dense stellar core that is shedding its outer layers. Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The
"All living relationships are in process of change, of expansion, and must perpetually be building themselves new forms."
"The alleged perpetrators in the 'Cornell Seven' case were doxed. But so was the victim. And the person who doxed her. And people with no connection to the case at all."
For the philosopher Bruno Latour, seeing anything ‘natural’ as good and the ‘artificial’ as bad is perversely human-centric - by Aeon Video Watch on Aeon
Hrag Vartanian on Cannupa Hanska Luger, Artavazd Pelechian’s cinema of connections, and a Ron DeSantis statue melts.
Renaissance Italians saw the gun as the Devil’s work. But soon they embraced this unchivalrous – and necessary – weapon - by Catherine Fletcher Read on Aeon