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Smart News / Smart News Arts & Culture

Dissident artist Pyotr Pavlensky appears at Moscow's Tagansky District Court on suspicion of vandalism.

Cool Finds

Russian Burger King Campaign Isn’t the First to Mix Art and Advertising

There’s a lot of back-and-forth between these worlds

This book of Grimm's Fairy Tales is entirely written using words with one syllable.

Cool Finds

Channel Childhoods Gone By With This Digital Archive of Victorian Children’s Books

From nursery rhymes to religious lectures, this digital archive shows how kids read in a bygone age

The statue of Lenin where it formerly stood on the roof of the Red Square building on E Houston Street.

Cool Finds

A Statue of Lenin Has Finally Come Down from Red Square…in New York City

One of Manhattan’s strangest buildings has lost its mascot

Dwight Eisenhower and Arnold Palmer smile before a round of golf at the Gettysburg Country Club in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in 1960.

Trending Today

How Arnold Palmer and President Eisenhower Made Golf the Post-War Pastime

The charismatic, working-class golfer and beloved president made golf the sport of elites and middle-class duffers for a generation

This photo by Girma Berta on Instagram helped win the photographer a $10,000 grant.

Cool Finds

Getty Instagram Grant Winners Document the Drama of the Everyday

From teen moms to slices of street life

Alaska's yellow-cedar forests are slowly dying as climate change takes root.

Anthropocene

This Music Was Composed by Climate Change

Dying forests make magnificently melancholy listening

Oscar Wilde spent two years in what was then called Reading Gaol.

Cool Finds

A British Jail Is Paying Artistic Tribute to Oscar Wilde, its Most Famous Inmate

Patti Smith, Ai Weiwei and others envision what it’s like to be Inside

Cool Finds

Amateur Archaeologist Discovers Significant Amount of Scotland’s Ancient Rock Art

Musician and avid walker George Currie has catalogued 670 pieces of prehistoric rock art in the Highlands

These flowers may look beautiful, but in the imagination of Tamiko Thiel, they've turned hostile due to climate change.

Cool Finds

Augmented Reality Art Imagines What Could Be Seattle’s Weird, Bleak Future

Artist envisions mutant flowers and drone-like seaweed that may one day take over a post-climate change Seattle

The hate crime that killed Matthew Shepard was the impetus for a new choral work.

Trending Today

A New Choral Work Was Inspired by the Death of Matthew Shepard

“Considering Matthew Shepard” finds hope inside a story of hate

George Richmond made this chalk portrait of Brontë when she was 34 years old.

Cool Finds

Visit the Manuscript of ‘Jane Eyre’ in New York

The handwritten novel is in the United States for the first time—along with an exhibition of artifacts from Charlotte Brontë’s brief and brilliant life

For sale: a home with a bookish past.

Cool Finds

You Could Own F. Scott Fitzgerald’s House

Live in the Victorian rowhouse where a career was born

America, Maurizio Cattelan, gold, 2016

You’ll Want to Sit on Guggenheim’s Latest Piece, an 18-Karat Golden Toilet

Maurizio Cattelan returns from retirement with this pretentious potty

No matter how you slice it, the most current Census Bureau income report is filled with juicy stats.

Trending Today

Five Things to Know About the Most Recent Census Income Report

Income’s up, but the picture is more complicated than that

A rendering of the 10-ton block of ice.

Cool Finds

Watch a 10-Ton Ice Cube Melt on a Seattle Square

It’s a different kind of block party

Cool Finds

Four Finds from University of Kansas’ Collection of Radical Zines

The university’s Solidarity! Radical Library boasts a collection of almost 1,000 alternative papers

"Shotgun Seamstress"

Cool Finds

The New York Public Library’s Radical Zine Collection Is Now on Display

Check out pamphlets from people like Noam Chomsky and Mumia Abu-Jamal

Kayak may be the best way to explore the climate change memorial of the future.

Anthropocene

What Will the Memorials of the Future Look Like?

From underwater trees to mechanical parrots, the memorials of tomorrow don’t look much like the ones that exist today

Magritte apparently recycled a lost painting to create The Human Condition.

Cool Finds

Curators Are One Piece Closer to Solving the Mystery of Magritte’s Missing Painting

The Enchanted Pose is coming back from the dead—one painted-over quarter at a time

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