Category: Culture

The Warhol of Wall Street


We’re Not in Kansas Anymore is about the 2008 financial crisis that kicked off with the implosion of investment bank Lehman Brothers (for the record, Mr. Saiers thinks the government should have bailed them out). Braille-like lettering symbolizes the systemic blindness that created the crisis, he says—blindness of regulators to the realities of modern finance, blindness of ratings agencies to the real risks of pooled mortgage-backed securities—while circles and squares represent the problem of predicting how financial markets will behave. They reference the classic problem known as “squaring the circle,” which is the idea that you could make a square with the same area as a given circle. It is impossible, but you can get very close, Mr. Saiers explained—just as it’s impossible to anticipate financial markets, though you can make very smart guesses.

→ Observer

The Secret Six

Credit : Paul Barshon
Still, the FX holds a special place on his long list of accomplishments. Garella often visits the US to attend events like the Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance in Monterey, and in 2007, he looked up the Marconi Museum and made the trip down the coast to Tustin. Dick Marconi was waiting for him, and the two posed for pictures with the FX — a legend created by one and saved by the other. The car wasn’t running then, but its futuristic carbon fiber was still there; as were its eye-popping design, and its embattled but ambitious transmission. Its advancements in design, construction, and technology make the FX a sort of automotive missing link.

“The FX was definitely ahead of its time for having a semi-automatic gearbox,” says Kim.

Credit : Paul Barshon

“The Sultan and his brother really were R&D for many high-end automakers. They were building custom bespoke cars that not only had unique bodies and interiors, but sometimes exotic technologies. And the money was limitless.”

Credit : Paul Barshon

→ The Verge

The Buddha Of Kabul

Credit : Steve McCurry
When I first came to Kabul, I had, like so many others, known it through war. Moments like these forced me to ask myself why it should come as a revelation that a 3,000-year-old city has layers that are diverse and different from its present. It says something about the way we perceive and talk about Kabul. Perhaps it is just human nature to ignore what is buried and only pay attention to what is apparent and overt. But occasionally, the city raises an aspect of its past almost as if to prove that it did exist, as a reminder of how much is lost, and how much remains within.

• • •

These links to the past are so fragile, made of clay and dust. So easy to break, so easy to return to the earth they came from. Yet these are also the objects that remind the forgetful world, and Afghans themselves, of what they used to be, of the confluence of ideas and civilizations that formed their khak, their ancestry. When I asked Zafar why he works so hard to excavate and preserve the material remains of Afghanistan’s history, he replied flippantly, “Because I am in love with Buddhism, and archaeology.” If so, it is a fraught romance, as the country’s past has been erased over years of war, and now, over an uncertain, uneven peace. Zafar has learned to be like the patient lover of a volatile partner. He cherishes what he has, without asking how long it will stay.

→ Guernica Magazine

Can An Artist Ever Really Own A Colour?

Invisible energy … Vantablack, which absorbs almost all light that hits it. Photograph: Surrey Nano Systems

Long before Klein created IKB, painters and their patrons paid through the nose for the rarest of pigments, lapis lazuli. This mineral that creates the colour ultramarine has only ever been found in Afghanistan. In the middle ages, it was mined there and traded at enormous prices to create European images of the blue heavens. Gold leaf was then daubed on it to make stars.

Colour is magical, colour is divine – you can’t blame Anish Kapoor or his critics for going mad for Vantablack.

→ The Guardian