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An Etch-A-Sketch Salute To HuffPost: Because You've Got To Draw The Line Somewhere

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"Art, like morality, consists in drawing the line somewhere."

We at HuffPost Weird News ruminate each day on G.K. Chesterton's sage words. As we report on the Internet's freakiest stories, we ask: Where should we draw the line?

Is naked gardening too tacky? Is a roundup of the world's most unusual urinals or pole dancing fails too immature? Should we get close up and personal with a man who will cast your anus in bronze or a company that turns your deceased lover's ashes into a vibrating sex toy?

Our aim is to give you a front row seat to this crazy parade of life. And we do think we fulfill part of HuffPost's mission -- to present what people on the Internet are talking about, both the highbrow and the lowbrow.

Indeed, we're the lowbrow. And by almost every measure, we're No. 1 at what we do.

Many people didn't believe HuffPost could make it when it launched. It dared to compete with journalism's most esteemed brands. And, at the same time, it aimed to keep readers up to date with the crazy trends that set the Internet on fire. Sometimes that's a cats vs. kids video. Sometimes that's a guy who nearly had his arms amputated after a desperate bid to look like The Incredible Hulk.

Indeed, 10 years ago, HuffPost was a sketchy proposition. And that's why HuffPost Weird News is celebrating our website's 10th anniversary in the sketchiest way possible -- with the great Etch-A-Sketch artist Bryan Lee Madden.

Madden's brilliant work proves that truth and beauty can be found in the most unlikely places. For us, it's inspiration.

Thanks, Arianna, for making us part of your dream, even if some of our work delivers things you should only see in your nightmares.

WATCH: THE ART OF BRYAN LEE MADDEN


Videos by Oliver Noble and Sam Wilkes



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How Art Therapy Can Help Children Facing Mental And Emotional Challenges

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May 7 is National Children's Mental Health Awareness Day, a day meant to raise awareness of the many children, youth, and young adults throughout the country facing emotional and mental challenges. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the commemorative day, and various facilities around the country will celebrate accordingly, with family activities, symposiums, lectures, youth rallies and art lessons.

Yes, art lessons. Art therapy, a quickly growing field combining psychotherapy with art media, provides comfort and hope to youths facing a diverse range of challenges, from childhood neglect to the loss of a loved one. "The biggest advantage is that art can express things that are not expressible verbally," Dr. Sarah Deaver, the President of the American Art Therapy Association, explained in a previous interview with The Huffington Post. "That's a huge advantage for people who don't have the language to talk about what's inside of them."

Children often fall into this category.

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In honor of Children's Mental Health Awareness Day, we reached out to an art therapy expert who works primarily with children and adolescents, Gretchen Miller. Miller began her career in the field as the Founder and Art Therapy Program Coordinator of a residential treatment art therapy program with partial hospitalization at The Cleveland Christian Home. She later developed and implemented a clinical art therapy program for Applewood Centers, Inc., within a residential treatment program for adolescent females. Most recently, Miller became a Certified Trauma Consultant through The National Institute for Trauma and Loss in Children (TLC).

We spoke to Miller about her career path and the particulars of working with a younger set of art therapy patients.

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Mandala Collage (collage, chalk pastels on paper): "Working within the containment of a circle (mandala) often can be centering and provide a calm space for self-discovery. This mandala was created in an art therapy group for at risk teens to invite exploration around self-esteem. Using magazine photo collage as a material of choice can be a non-threatening approach to encourage teens to explore their feelings, thoughts, and values without anxiety about drawing skills."


For starters, how do you define art therapy?

I define art therapy as the psychological use of art media and the creative process, facilitated by an art therapist, to help foster self expression, create coping skills, and strengthen sense of self. Using the artistic process to help people explore different challenges and things they're facing in their life.

How did you become involved with the field?

I've always been involved in art, since I was a child. In high school I became interested in mental health and psychopathology. In college I started to explore more of the art therapy field. I was very fortunate to go to a school that had an art therapy degree in undergrad. Combining my love of the practice of art and psychology, and getting to help people in need, it was a perfect fit for me. After that I got a graduate degree in art therapy.

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Safe House Image (crayons and markers on paper): "Re-establishing safety is an essential component to working with youth who have experienced trauma and loss. Creating spaces and places where a child feels safe or to depicts what safety looks like to him/her not only helps foster protection and security through the art, but allows for empowerment and a sense of control over this environment. This drawing was created in response to exploring what it means to have a safe home with a child who had been exposed to family violence."


How did you get started working with children?

I had some experience as an undergrad doing volunteer placements with youths. I had envisioned myself back then working more with adults, but my real first job was in a residential treatment program serving boys ages six to 16, and at that time, I just wanted experience with people.

Did you end up enjoying the experience?

I enjoy working with adolescents a lot. They're a challenge. They definitely keep me on my toes in that age range. It's just a natural expression for kids to use art. That creativity is very freeing and the imagination is so open at that age. It lends itself so well to the therapeutic process and making art. I love their energy and the inspiration that they bring.

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Mask (acrylic paint and markers on paper pulp mask): "Mask making can offer a powerful way to safely externalize emotional states that a child is experiencing. In response to exploring a feeling that sometimes remains bottled up inside; painting or creating a mask can reveal and identify many feelings difficult to describe in words."


What kinds of challenges are the children you're working with facing?

In the past I've worked with children that were in the foster care system or had a lot of behavioral and emotional needs that stemmed from early childhood abandonment or neglect. A lot of times their parents weren't able to take care of them. I then became motivated to focus more on trauma in my work.

From there I started to work with children who had been impacted by domestic violence or who have experienced a loss or death of a loved one, whether through illness or suicide or homicide or accident. Working with those two populations really taught me a lot about how art can be used to heal wounds. Currently I work in a shelter with women and children experiencing homelessness, many of whom are trying to transition out of homelessness and some of whom are vulnerable to human trafficking. We help them strengthen themselves, make themselves less susceptible.

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Heart Image (tempera paint on paper): "This painting was inspired by exploring feelings through depicting them as a kind of landscape in nature or weather."


What does an art therapy session with you look like?

I do a lot of group art therapy. I feel the group work really gives the kids a sense that they're not alone. They're not the only kids who are experiencing these reactions or these responses to the painful things that happened to them. A lot of the job is planning which activities would be most helpful at approaching certain problems.

What activities have you found to be most beneficial?

I like to focus on interventions that will provide safety or reestablish safety for the user. That's really important after traumatic experiences. That sometimes leads to working with spaces of containment, symbolically, or through the metaphor of art.

Also, looking at their own physical responses, their bodies' reactions to trauma or whatever difficulties they are experiencing. Maybe they have stomach aches or headaches or trouble breathing. Using the art to help show that, so they can be more connected to how their bodies are responding, and then explore ways of coping through the art to help with those responses. So art that focuses on self-regulation or soothing or relaxation, through painting or drawing, mask making or things like that. Also using art intervention themes that focus on things like sadness, pain, worry, fear, anger. With these kinds of threatening feelings, it's often easier to explore them through art, than to talk about them verbally.

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What advantages, in your opinion, does art therapy provide children over other types of counseling or treatment?

Art making is a natural expression for children. They're very open and ready to engage with it. It really helps build that sense of self and emotional expression. Giving them that at a young age, hopefully while they're still in childhood, will hopefully help them be stronger as they move through adolescence and into adulthood, and be more able to develop those coping skills. There's that innate, imaginative ability that's not so censored in them yet. Adults often say, "I can't draw," which isn't important -- art therapy is about the process, not the product -- but it's nice to work with kids who don't have that anxiety.

What kind of progress have you witnessed in your time working with children?

Occasionally I've seen people I used to work with as adults, still in difficult situations and trying to find their way. I've definitely seen the process come full circle. Changes can also be seen within the art that a feeling -- such as worry, anger, or sadness -- is not as consuming as it was depicted before, or the child's sense of self and their ability to cope has strengthened. Art therapy can be a helpful intervention for stabilizing overwhelming emotional states and crisis situations because of the safe containment it provides.

Can you talk a little about the meaning and importance of Children's Mental Health Day?

This year is actually the 10th anniversary, so Children's Mental Health Day has been going on for a while. I think it's very helpful to have a day spotlighting children's mental health. It fosters a sense of hope for recovery and builds resilience for these issues. It also raises awareness to help with prevention and early intervention, helping children to be less at risk for mental health issues. The day also helps to take away the stigma attached to mental illness, getting that out of there early on and getting children more aware of the mental health needs that they may have.

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Twitter Fiction Reveals The Power Of Very, Very Short Stories

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"For Sale: Baby shoes, never worn." So goes Ernest Hemingway's famous six-word story, which, in spite of being perfectly compact, manages to paint a complete picture of thwarted desire and elicit strong feelings from the reader (unless said reader is heartless). It would've been the perfect candidate for this year's #TwitterFiction Festival, where writers such as Margaret Atwood and Celeste Ng will practice crafting very brief tales online, beginning on May 11.

What makes a Twitter story different from an ordinary tweet?

Author Robert Swartwood, who edited an anthology of "hint fiction," or stories weighing in at 25 words or fewer, is a champion of tweet-length works. He told The Huffington Post, "A story should do four basic things: obviously it should tell a story; it should be entertaining; it should be thought-provoking; and, if done well enough, it should invoke an emotional response. And if a writer can do that with a story that's 140 characters or less, even better!"

So, brevity isn't the only qualifier for a narrative told online. In fact, most Twitter fiction stories are composed of several tweets, and so are characterized not only by pithiness, but also the social nature of the form. Neil Gaiman's Hearts, Keys and Puppetry, for example, has a unique byline: it was authored not only by him, but also "the Twitterverse." Urged to tack sentences onto Gaiman's bombastic first line of a fairy tale, readers hashtagged their way to a complete story.




Though both reading and writing are traditionally solitary acts, participants in this year's #TwitterFiction Festival will employ tactics similar to Gaiman's; If I Stay author Gayle Foreman asked followers to tweet a sentence she could use as a jumping-off point. She'll craft her performance around an entry of her choice, making for a less collaborative but still technically crowd-sourced experience.

Anna North, author of The Life and Death of Sophie Stark, will be offering both previously published flash fiction stories and crowd-sourced works. She likens the latter to performance, where “even if there’s just laughing, there’s feedback from the audience."

The cooperative nature of Twitter fiction isn’t the only thing that appeals to her; she says its inherent brevity allows writers to use flash fiction to tackle esoteric topics that might not be worthy of entire novels. One such topic she's devoted many super short stories to is polar exploration. "I started to write about a polar explorer who was doing these bizarre things, like doing surgery on himself," she told The Huffington Post.

A successful Twitter fiction story, she added, achieves a tone that's absurd, powerful, "and also maybe a little bit funny."




Jennifer Egan's short story "Black Box" ticks each of these boxes. It wasn't written in real-time, but was revealed in 140-character (or less!) spurts, beginning with the tweet above. Her Twitter fiction isn't just easy-to-digest writing; according to North, Egan's work in the medium offers something traditional stories don't have. She "plays with chronology," North asserts. "With the idea of these updates that could add up to be a whole." It doesn't hurt that the story was constructed from witty sentences that work as one liners, such as, "It is technically impossible for a man to look better in a Speedo than in swim trunks," and, "A hundred feet of blue-black Mediterranean will allow you ample time to deliver a strong self-lecture."

Though humor is key in the Twitterverse, it can be too easy to recede to stories propelled only by their ability to induce a chuckle. Which might not be such a bad thing, as Amelia Gray, author of the flash fiction collection Gutshot, demonstrates with her take on Hemingway's notorious story:




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This Calligraphy Wizard Can Recreate Any Font With His Pen

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Seb Lester calls himself a designer and illustrator, though his miraculous handmade fonts suggest some sort of unmentioned wizardry is at work. The London-based artist is a true font-savvy chameleon, rendering the iconic letterings of logos from The New York Times, "Star Trek," "American Horror Story," Vans and Coca-Cola.

Hand Drawn Logos from Seb Lester on Vimeo.



Mining Lester's Instagram, we uncovered additional samples of his artful typefaces. (Side note: it seems like he takes requests, so drop him a note with your most font-astic suggestions.)




Doodle. Longer version, with sound, on my 'Seb Lester' Facebook page & YouTube channel. Link in my profile.

A video posted by Seb Lester (@seblester) on




Doodling

A video posted by Seb Lester (@seblester) on




Doodle

A video posted by Seb Lester (@seblester) on




News doodle

A video posted by Seb Lester (@seblester) on







I just doodled this.

A video posted by Seb Lester (@seblester) on




I doodle a lot.

A video posted by Seb Lester (@seblester) on




Classic TV series. Classic logo. RIP Leonard Nimoy.

A video posted by Seb Lester (@seblester) on




American Horror Story. Requested by @ghost_of_maddie @lkel05 @meow.angiee & many others.

A video posted by Seb Lester (@seblester) on




h/t ThisIsColossal

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50 Photos That Defined The Past Decade

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"Photography is the art of frozen time," Meshack Otieno once said, "the ability to store emotion and feelings within a frame."

There is something almost magical about the camera's ability to record a singular moment in space and time, preserving its beauty, capturing its strangeness, or even warning us of its darkness forever. Throughout the past decade, photography has proved itself to be more than just a means of documentation, capturing the invisible as well as the visible, the false as well as the true, the coincidentally miraculous as much as the momentous.

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We've created a compilation of 50 photographs that captured the joy, the pain, the beauty and the changes experienced throughout the world in the past decade. The following frozen moments don't begin to accurately summarize the infinite, complex stories that unfolded over the past 10 years. They do, however, provide small glimpses at earth-shattering times, places and people. From the emerald green cloud caused by a flare in Afghanistan to the motivated stare of a 14-year-old protester participating in the Occupy movement, the images serve as small portals to the challenges we've faced and experiences we've shared around the globe:

-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.

Photographer Snaps Portraits Of Her Exes, Embraces The Awkwardness Of It All

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To many, the thought of running into an ex at a coffee shop, a bar or just about anywhere is utterly torturous. However, for Boston-based photographer Laura Beth Reese, the idea of reconnecting with a previous lover was intriguing. The possibility of revisiting the passion of a past relationship, rekindling the fond memories two people once shared, no matter how forced the scenario, was too tempting to resist. And since she's a photographer, she brought her camera along for the ride.

"For as long as I can remember I’ve had a difficult time letting go of past relationships, whether they be romantic or not," Reese explained to The Huffington Post. "Even though I understood why my relationships ended, I could never completely move on. Whether I was with someone for a month or a year, I continued to love them in some way after the relationship was over. Truth be told, I missed them. I thought photographing them would give me an excuse to see and reconnect with them again."

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Reese reached out to old flames from throughout her life via Facebook and email, whether they dated at age 13 or 24. "When I began the project, I thought that taking the photographs would help me reclaim some of the power that I felt I had lost in the relationship," she explained. "But what I found is that they actually have all of the power. Rarely do they just agree to be photographed with no strings attached. They often want something in return."

According to Reese, the portraits are most often taken in the subjects' homes, with very little planning done beforehand. The whole ordeal takes from one to two hours, though, from Reese's description, it feels like much longer. "Photographing an ex-boyfriend is a very uncomfortable and awkward situation to begin with so I am generally a mess during the shoots," she said. "I forget steps, drop things, and fumble around. I’m not able to handle myself with the grace and poise that I wish I could, which makes me feel really exposed and defenseless."

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The resulting images, often featuring a stripped down subject in his or her underwear, radiate an unsettling combination of intimacy and rigidity. From one angle the subject appears like a lover, from another, a total stranger. The dynamic of the room is nearly impossible to read, at once emanating both heat and frost. The tension is palpable.

"I think the fact that the process and these photos are completely staged helps to emphasize the idea of the series. I’m using the pictures as a way to reconnect with the men from my past, but it’s a very forced and contrived connection. I wouldn’t even be with them if I weren’t making the photographs for the project. I think by staging the portraits they often end up being really rigid and awkward, which reflects the reality of what was happening when I was taking the picture."

Breakups are rough for countless reasons. Through her work, Reese goes where few have gone before -- back into the bedroom of a lost love in an attempt to capture the closeness they once shared. "To me, the series is about the nature of intimacy," Reese said. "I’m thinking about what it means to be intimate with someone and different ways that we as humans connect with each other. It’s not really about getting closure, but about being close with someone that I care about and working with that person to try to make an interesting and beautiful photograph."




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Creating A Visual Language For Queer, Brown Femininity -- On Its Own Terms

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Instructions for a Home Team




"The cyborg is a kind of disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self," Donna J. Haraway writes in Simians, Cyborgs And Women: The Reinvention Of Nature. "This is the self feminists must code." Haraway uses the metaphor of a cyborg -- part human, part machine -- as a call to action for feminists to break down the existing structures that limit, oppress and marginalize. Structures that have rooted themselves more deeply than many of us realize.

Amaryllis DeJesus Moleski, an artist who's attempted to paint in a language that sits outside the Euro-centric history we're used to, is familiar with how deep-seated traditions can become. In her work, Moleski began by painting women -- brown, queer, femme -- and nothing else, providing visibility to a subject so long excluded by the dominant art narrative.

She soon realized, however, that although her subject matter had broken free of convention, her tools were still entangled in canon, in traditions of proportion, scale, and perspective. That's when the crux of Moleski's project, to truly work outside the systems established decisively not for her, took root.

Inspired by artists including Kehinde Wiley, Mickalene Thomas and Saya Woolfalk, Moleski created a visual lexicon somewhere between the ancient past and the imaginary future. Sprinkling in influences ranging from "Battlestar Galactica" to Judith Butler, Greco-Roman mythology to the cuteness of caterpillars, Moleski built a visual utopia filled with curvaceous bodies, dolled-up fashion, flattened patterns and lots and lots of eyeballs.

Moleski's sci-fi inflected goddesses are currently on view as part of an exhibition titled "Vision Quest" at New York's Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts (MoCADA). We reached out to Moleski to learn more about her life and work.

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Instructions for a Storm


Let's start at the beginning. Where did you grow up?
I grew up moving around all my life. I grew up all over the East Coast, down South and Midwest. We moved at least once a year, so by the time I was 14, I counted, and we had moved about 16 times. So in terms of having a geographic place where I grew up, I don't really have that, it's more of those parts of the country.

Do you remember first becoming interested in art?
I was fortunate enough to grow up in a house where my mom was really aware that I loved to draw, that I could entertain myself for hours that way, and she was really supportive of that. When I was in grade school, she got me this book called Life Doesn't Frighten Me, and the text was a poem by Maya Angelou. And the poem was pieced together with different Basquiat paintings. The words and the paintings, the way they came together -- that's something I'll always remember as part of my artist roots.

Also, my father was incarcerated on and off my whole life, in different states than I lived. So our main mode of communication was by letter. He'd hire artists that he was locked up with to create portraits of us. I loved Garfield, I was a huge fan, and he had his cellmates draw Garfield cartoons for me. I remember the images more than I remember the verbal correspondence. It was this connection that was created between us, even through that separation. So, in that way, I was really nurtured by visual art and images growing up.

Do you recall initially realizing the homogeneity of the Western canon of art history? What was your reaction?
You know, it's almost like elevator music when I think about that. It's like background noise in that, I did, like all of us have, see it all. But it never stuck with me, it was never the thing that really grabbed me or caught my attention. And it wasn't anything necessarily I could relate to.

I went to this arts camp when I was a little older and they would take us on trips to the art museums in the area and that was the first time that I really saw museum art. That was the first time I interacted with those kinds of works and that kind of canon. And then later when I went to art school I was like, "whoa!" I realized then that when they're teaching art history, that pretty much means European art history.

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Bone Oracle


Did this realization impact your practice?
I'm really thankful for that education and how rigorous it was. However, one thing I was really not ready for was how Eurocentric the curriculum was. On the one hand it's important to understand it, seeing as it's a part of the history of the art world, and on the other hand it was so exhausting. It just made me think: What am I even doing here?

It wasn't just art history, but it was also playing into the politics of aesthetics, what could be discussed rigorously and critiqued. I just got this point where I decided I was only going to draw queer, femme, brown and black people. That's all it's gonna be. I've kind of evolved past that at this point but it was a really clear decision. Being so hungry for it and deciding I was going to create it.

Is this related to what you refer to in your statement as the future femme myth? Can you expand on what exactly that means?
Yes, that exploration is something that I'm going to be excited to think about for a long time. I was creating these portraits in a series called "Femme Gold" and I was rendering queer femmes of color and trying to expand what that could look like. I was asking -- how do you represent the aesthetics of queer femininity, without placing the body in relationship to someone else. What is the aesthetic of queer femininity when its not dependent on who's gazing?

I was thinking about that and I had this personal breakthrough that I had made this decision to move away from the European canon and art history and yet I was still using the same rules of proportion and scale and portraiture. Even though I was trying to use different symbols, the vehicle I was using was based and rooted in classical European tradition.

Then I thought to myself, okay, if not that, where will I look for guidance? And I started becoming inspired by all these pre-Columbian artworks and looking a lot at alchemical illustrations that used visual language as a text to be read. I'm super inspired by Saya Woolfalk as a contemporary artist who is calling upon the aesthetics of ancient and folk art.

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Sooth Sayer


And how did the futuristic aspect come into play?
I'm a super big sci-fi nerd and I started thinking about the future. There has been an upsurge in post-apocalyptic, sci-fi and fantasy narratives, and I started to experience this hunger for a different narrative, a different story being told.

There's this idea within that world of future myths that the future equals more masculine, more tech-focused. It shows up in the narratives dealing with outer space versus Earth -- we're leaving the world that we messed up behind, and who are we taking with us? How is that future being portrayed? I was looking at something like "Star Trek," which is pretty diverse for when it was made, and then looking at something like "Battlestar Galactica," which is like this huge decline in representations of diversity of the human race in the future. I started getting interested in that combination. What is queer femme aesthetic? And how to we begin to visualize ourselves as marginalized people in the future, calling upon ancient, present and future imaginings?

One of the most pronounced features of your work are the multiplicity of eyes that surround many of your bodies. What prompted you there?
It's a symbol that is appealing to me because it's pretty global in terms of all the different representations of spiritual texts and ancient art texts across the board.

Also, I'm curious about the aesthetics of holiness and eyes have this divine omnipresent awareness to them, something that's contained all around us and within us. Eyes are symbols of protection, symbols of sovereignty. I place them everywhere to show that they're totally accessible.

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Call Back Your Magics


The women you depict are powerful, and yet don't don any of the markers we traditionally associate with strength or authority. How did you go about creating your own system of visual power?
Something I'm interested in is thinking about the feminine as a presentation or a play or a creative force in the world. I, personally, have used hair and makeup and clothes as armor. I feel like our culture diminishes women and those choices are considered unintelligent. Like, "Oh, you wear too much makeup." Or, "Why are you wearing heels?"

In this way, it's a tactic of people trying to bring the feminine down, implying that those choices aren't intelligent and aren't informed. And I'm thinking about the ways that they really are -- they really are intelligent about how we fit in the world, especially as queer femmes.

I also am interested in cuteness as a sense of armor. Looking at that in caterpillars and butterflies and all of these small creatures that have made themselves appear a certain way to be protected. How do we make ourselves seem larger than life? Cuteness and femininity can be a source of protection and a source of fierceness.

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Weave (for Swallow)


Can you describe the process of naming your works?
It started when I was was looking at a lot of ancient works and pre-Colombian art. Let me just say: I am not a historian, I am not a scientist. I do not know anything about the extensiveness and rigor of the processes of uncovering these histories. But from the outside looking in, as an artist, there was something really humorous to me about the authority involved in these histories. Who is coming up with this shit? Who is saying this is how it was?

I became curious about this voice of authority, who is telling the history, whose history is being canonized as myth and whose history is being categorized as truth. I started to think about using authority as a medium to play with. To use language as my own sense of authority and sovereignty and dominion over whatever it is I'm making. I think having a mixture of play and power behind the intentionality of language is important in my work.

Your statement mentions the influence of Donna Haraway's The Cyborg Manifesto on your work. Can you describe what, specifically, inspired you about the text?
To be totally honest, The Cyborg Manifesto was something I read in school. I don't know how anyone would read it outside of school because it's so academic. Reading it, I remember feeling this frustration around protection of information. This cloaking of information in really academic language.

But I gave it some more time, and there were pieces that really spoke to me, about creation myths and disassembling the systems of history, disassembling systems of language and power and rearranging them. It also spoke to me in how I think queerness functions as a healing force in the world -- breaking down different structures and systems and rearranging them in a way that is catering to the full expression of someone's soul. It's about deconstructing what we've inherited as our origins. And being able to piece them back together in a way that serves the whole expression of who we are as human beings.

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Documentation of a Ghostin


Moleski's work is on view alongside that of Sheena Rose in "Vision Quest," which runs until May 31, 2015 at MoCADA in Brooklyn, New York.

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Cleary Wolters, The Real Alex Vause, Shares Her Story For The First Time

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As fans of "Orange Is the New Black" prepare to spend upwards of 13 hours watching the third season of the Netflix series this June, they may easily forget the reality the show is based on. Many of us already know Piper Kerman -- the real Piper Chapman, played by Taylor Schilling -- from her 2010 memoir, but what about the real woman behind the black-rimmed glasses?

In Kerman's book she's Nora Jansen and on screen she's Alex Vause, portrayed by Laura Prepon. But in real life she's Cleary Wolters, a woman who had no idea her story and likeness would be depicted in a hit Netflix series. She first broke her silence with the media in a Vanity Fair interview las year, which revealed Kerman and Wolters never had sex in prison. Now Wolters is ready to tell the full story for the first time with a memoir of her own, Out of Orange.

"The story I have is that I’m not a bad person," Wolters told The Huffington Post. "I’m not an evil drug lord or kingpin. I’m like so many other people." Wolters recounted to us the first time she saw a commercial for "OITNB" -- which Netflix has still never consulted or informed her about -- what she hopes her story will reveal to readers and how Kerman's book and the series helped her face many of the difficult experiences she'd blocked from her memory.

What was your experience like the first time you heard about the show?
Very bizarre. I think the most bizarre incident was seeing a commercial for it, that was really weird. That was the point at which I slipped into some weird parallel universe. In seeing Laura Prepon wearing my glasses and listening to the narration and knowing they’re talking about her lover, that that’s me.



Most people get hooked binge-watching a fictional series, but this is an adaptation of your life. What was it like watching it?
Right. The stuff [the show] did in prison was just really disturbing. I think I realized at that point I genuinely have a little PTSD from it. I knew I had it, but the surreality of it just made it more pronounced because who in the world gets so bothered by just images of women in prison? [...] At first I didn’t know if I would actually like the show, but I had a morbid curiosity. Probably the same morbid curiosity that got me in trouble in the first place. So I kept watching.

Did you continue to watch through Season 2?
Oh, yeah. I watched the first season the minute it came out and the second the minute it came out.

Did it get harder to watch?
It got easier because it got further and further away from reality. The plot diverges so completely, especially in terms of my character. Then it just was entertainment.

Were you grateful that it diverged so much?
Yeah. I didn’t want to see a perfect adaptation of my actual life unfold in front of me. I don’t play front and center in [Piper's] book at all, there’s barely a mention of me. So when Alex’s character does play front and center so much in the first season I was like, "Wow, okay. This is weird." They’re creating this whole fictitious person based on me.

And the whole romance plot between Alex and Piper wasn’t real, right?
Right. No, Piper and I were done. We were friends.

alex piper

Have you and Piper spoken recently?
I’ve spoken with Piper. We had breakfast together. She’s read my book. We’re on good terms. I don’t know what she thinks about the book yet, though.

At what point did you decide to write your memoir?
After the [Vanity Fair] article came out, I was approached by a literary agent. Somebody wanted to do my memoir, but they were unaware of the fact that I was actually a writer, so I said, "Well, I would love to do my memoir myself."

You mention in it that you’d previously written a novel that’s a fictionalized account of your experiences.
I actually wrote three novels, a trilogy, in prison. Some of them I actually wrote on rolls of toilet paper. I have little sheets of toilet papers with chapters on them. I managed to write three 600-page novels.

Do you think you’d have written this had it not been for Piper’s book or the show?
No, I would not. I was not a non-fiction writer and I don’t think I was ready to look at my own story as closely as you have to do. One of the things that was really hard was being honest with myself and reliving some of those experiences. A lot of it I just blocked out of my mind. The only way I can actually convey to the reader the -- I want you to be there, to feel it. I want you to know what that is like so you never go there and so you have more empathy for the people who do go there. We’ve got 800 percent more women in prison than we did in 1987, it’s all because of the drug wars. These women have kids and these kids are growing up without parents and these kids are going to end up in the system too. We can’t just put everyone in jail.

With regard to the show, did Netflix every consult you?
No. I would be happy to, but I doubt that they will if they haven’t already. It almost feels like it’s an inconvenience that I’m an actual human being. Because they haven’t reached out. It surprises me that people in that production company are not sensitive to the fact that when you do use real-life characters, that even though it’s fiction, if you are a hit show that you are going to impact those real-life character’s lives. A head’s up would’ve been nice. But they must have had reasons not to, and I can’t imagine that those reasons are very altruistic. I would never have gotten in the way of their production, but then again I was so stubbornly under my rock [then] I might have thrown a fit. And really in the end, it was the greatest thing anyone’s done for me, to shove me out of that closet and get rid of my secrets.

What are you hoping for now that the book is out?
I would love it if I could be a writer and a technologist. That would make everything in my life suddenly make perfect sense, why I had to go through all of that. But to be a writer and to get to publish a book and have the opportunity to reach so many people is the coolest thing since Wonder Bread.

This interview had been edited and condensed.

Cleary Wolters' Out of Orange is out now and available on Amazon.

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Paul Shaffer Ready To Disband The CBS Orchestra As 'Letterman' Wraps Up

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NEW YORK (AP) — Hidden in the attention being paid to David Letterman leading to his May 20 retirement is the knowledge that it will also mean the end of a regular television role for America's bandleader, Paul Shaffer.


The gravel-voiced sidekick, who's 65, isn't ready to leave show business even with the gig of a lifetime coming to a close after 33 years.


"Of course, I had the old mixed feelings, sadness, etcetera," Shaffer said during an interview in his office behind the Ed Sullivan Theater. "Now I have come around to just being absolutely thankful for such a wonderful run, such a long run, working for a guy who has been nothing but encouraging to me."


Shaffer is a walking trivia answer of show biz credits: bandleader for the original "Saturday Night Live" troupe, same role for the Blues Brothers, part composer of the 1980s hit "It's Raining Men" and the "Late Show" theme, cringe-worthy record executive Artie Fufkin in "This is Spinal Tap" and music director for the annual Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductions. If he hadn't neglected to return Jerry Seinfeld's call, you may have known him as George Costanza, too.


He'll always be linked in public consciousness with Letterman, however, like Ed McMahon and Johnny Carson, or Andy Richter and Conan O'Brien.


Until Shaffer interviewed for the bandleader job that began in 1982, he had never met Letterman. Shaffer was asked what he saw for Letterman's post-midnight "Late Night" on NBC, keeping in mind they could only afford a few musicians. He envisioned something like the lounge bands he saw at the beginning of his career in Toronto, a lead keyboard player and a couple of other instruments, interpreting Stax and Motown hits.


Letterman said that sounded great, that he'd always thought of himself as the Wayne Cochran of comedy. Shaffer cracked up at the reference to an obscure 1960s soul singer who looked a little like Jay Leno with an oversized, platinum blond pompadour.


The time slot after Carson "sounded like the hippest opportunity, like in Las Vegas when a performer would do a late late show for the other performers or cab drivers on the strip. That's how I related to it. It was all perfect for me."


Starting at a time when his five years at one job, on "Saturday Night Live," seemed like an eternity, Shaffer said he never felt tempted to leave Letterman. He's had the freedom to do other things while the "Late Show" let him lead a band — perform in front of an audience, do sketch comedy and match wits with TV's hottest host. That's not to say it was always easy.


"I spent time preparing funny, off-the-wall lines, something Jerry Lewis had said, for example," he said. "I was doing quite well with it, I thought. (Letterman) said, 'I would rather we just have a conversation and try to talk.' Well, that was daunting to me, but I did. That's when I began to see what he really needed from me."


Through the years, Shaffer has become like a security blanket to Letterman. As anyone who's been in his frigid studio knows, he's a host who likes things Just So. Shaffer will interject quick remarks — "Instagram that right away," he said after his boss took a selfie Tuesday night — or lead the band into a snippet of "Tequila" for a Top Ten list about Cinco de Mayo parties. Sometimes it's as simple as breaking the silence, an "ahh" or slight cackle.


Letterman has a habit of calling a pre-show meeting just when there's too little time to seriously discuss things. And after his heart bypass surgery a decade ago, Letterman stopped rehearsing regularly.


"The show got way more fun at that point, way more spontaneous," Shaffer said.


The bandleader worked with plenty of heroes; James Brown asked to come on after he heard Shaffer's band playing some of his music on the show. This added another, delicate task to his duties: it was Shaffer's job to sometimes tell performers they'd have to cut a portion of their song because of television time constraints.


"I've gotten better at what I do over the years, if I may humbly say," he said. "When I started I may not have been able to work with artists as well as I do now. If you work with people, you get to understand what they need, when they need it, what you should or shouldn't say."


In two weeks' time the CBS Orchestra, expanded beyond the bare-bones band Shaffer had in the NBC days, disbands. Shaffer has his options; he plays a little jazz and wants to keep in comedy. Maybe a TV drama will offer a story arc. The biggest adjustment will be the loss of the routine, knowing where he had to be on weekday afternoons.


"This was such a long run, so if I'm meant to get a gig in a piano bar in Palm Springs .... I'm not too worried at this point," he said. "I feel like I've had a lot of fun. How can you keep having all the fun? Eventually, you've got to let others have some fun."

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Cheesy Geniuses Honor The Upper Crust With A Royal Baby Pizza

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Question: When is a pizza more than a pizza?

Answer: When it's the royal family. And they're clearly from the upper crust.

Zizzi, an Italian restaurant chain in the U.K., has created a culinary homage to the royal family, as seen in a photo shared on Facebook Wednesday. It's a pizza-perfect rendition of the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge (aka Will and Kate) posing for photos with their new baby girl, Charlotte:

royal pizza

It's a fairly accurate recreation of the original scene, though the royal family looks a little -- ahem -- doughy?
royal baby


Pizzafying the royal clan is turning into something of a tradition. Two years ago, when Will and Kate had their first child, Scottish pizzaiolo Domenico Crolla masterfully reproduced the young family in cheese:

Fed up waiting! Here's my Royal Baby Pizza. #royalbaby @royalbaby

A photo posted by Domenico Crolla (@domenicocrolla) on



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39 Beautiful And Emotional First Photos Of Moms With Their Babies

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Those first moments a mom holds her newborn baby after giving birth are emotional, surreal, confusing and, most of all, powerful.

In honor of Mother's Day, we asked the moms of the HuffPost Parents Facebook community to send us their first photos with their babies and share exactly what thoughts were going through their heads at that moment.

Here are 39 moms' memories from that incredible time.





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Tehran Becomes Giant Open-Air Art Gallery

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The daily commute for many residents of Tehran, Iran, has gotten a little brighter -- a much more cultural.

The city's mayor had 1,500 billboards, which were once covered with advertisements, replaced with reproductions of works of art from some Western and Iranian artists, The New York Times reports.

Many locals are impressed with the project, which is called A Gallery As Big As a Town.

"It’s wonderful to see billboard ads of laundry machines or big corporate banks being replaced by a Rembrandt or a Cézanne or a Picasso," Sadra Mohaqeq, a journalist in the city, told The Guardian.

“This really inspires me to for the first time in my life to go to a museum, instead of again going out and smoke water pipe," a physics students named Majed Hobi told The New York Times.

In a congested city, the billboards provide something of an oasis for the eyes. “My usual morning route has become a big adventure for me,” Hamid Hamraz, a taxi driver, told the paper, adding that the art display has become a conversation topic for him and his clients.

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16 Photos That Show Motherhood Is Beautiful, Anywhere You Look

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Parenting practices can vary greatly between cultures, but the powerful bonds between moms and dads and their children know no geographic limits.

To celebrate Mother's Day, the folks at Instagram scoured its diverse global community to compile a series of images that showcase motherhood around the world -- from Somalia to Indonesia to Tennessee.

Keep scrolling for a look at the truly universal nature of motherhood.









In a tiny mountain village #chechnya

A photo posted by markosian (@markosian) on





Moments like this....

A photo posted by Kassi Bacquet (@kassibacquet) on





Plum was awarded with Honor Roll at school today, so we celebrated with chocolate milk and donuts.

A photo posted by miss james (@bleubird) on













Finding shells

A photo posted by kristinrogers (@kristinrogers) on





✈️ ➕ ❤️

A photo posted by Stasha (@northwestmommy) on


















Right here, always. #bsidesjeans

A photo posted by miss james (@bleubird) on





That one time my girls had a quick chat with a stranger looking all grown up #stopit

A photo posted by kristinrogers (@kristinrogers) on





A mother and her daughters gaze out at the sea in Gaza. #palestine #gaza

A photo posted by Tanya Habjouqa (@habjouqa) on










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Tyler, The Creator Launches Anti-Homophobia Merch, Reappropriating A Neo-Nazi Logo

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Tyler, The Creator has been accused of homophobia for years, but recently revealed a new line of anti-homophobia merchandise that reappropriates an old neo-Nazi logo known for its slogan, "White Pride Worldwide." His shirts features a rainbow version of the logo with the words "Golf Pride Worldwide," referencing the rapper's fashion collective Golf Wang.

@flognawmotors . I JUST WROTE AN ARTICLE ABOUT THIS SHIRT ON GOLF MEDIA.

A photo posted by Tylers Auntie (@feliciathegoat) on





In a post on Golf Wang, he explained his fascination with neo-Nazis and the inspiration for the shirts. "Now it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know that these guys aren’t fans of Blacks, Gays, Asians or anything else that doesn’t fit in 'white' box," he wrote. "Now having the thought process that I have, I asked myself some questions: What if a black guy wore this logo on a shirt? Would he be promoting self hate? Would he be taking the power out of a shape? What if a gay guy wore this on a shirt? Would he promoting Homophobia? Then BAM! I Had it. Throw a little rainbow in the logo."



Tyler, The Creator was criticized for using the word "faggot" over 200 different times in his 2011 album "Goblin," and has defended his use of the word in the past. "It's just another word that has no meaning," he told Arsenio Hall in 2013. He addresses those sentiments while explaining the new shirts and ended his post like this:


...Ever since my career started, I've been labeled as a homophobe, simply because of my use of the word faggot. Again, trying to take the power out of something, I WAS NEVER REFERRING TO SOMEONES SEXUAL PREFERENCE WHEN USING THAT WORD. I mean, i’m legit one of the least homophobic guys to walk this earth but, most people just read the surface. But maybe someone will see this photo and say “Hey, he’s just mocking gays” or “ this has a negative undertone to it, he is still pushing this homophobic whatever the fuck it is”. What ever it is, I just wanted to give you guys some background info on the design before you purchase the shirt. You should know what you are wearing. be safe, love. RACISM FUCKING SUCKS.

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Women In Sitcoms Are Getting A Lot More Three-Dimensional. And That's A Good Thing.

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womeininsitcom
Illustration by Priscilla Frank





It's a crucial moment in the primary campaign, and a New Hampshire reporter has just published a brutal article describing a recording he found of Selina Meyer and her campaign staff mocking her donors. Meyer (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) rounds on her staff, eyes wild, poised to attack. "You know what V.P. stands for? It stands for 'victory permafucked.' I don't deserve it. You know? Goddammit. I don't, but you do, because you are all losers!" she hisses. She points at her loyal, masochistic aide, Gary. "Loser!" She jabs a finger at her campaign manager, Amy. "Loser!!"

Meyer, the protagonist of HBO's biting political comedy "Veep," now in its fourth season, isn't warm and cuddly, or cute and charming. She's foul-mouthed, selfish, nakedly ambitious, opportunistic, and sometimes cruel. She's no Lucille Ball -- she's not even Elaine Benes. Comediennes today are plunging into far more transgressive roles than the female sitcom leads of previous eras, and as Louis-Dreyfus' Meyer exemplifies, it's working.





Audiences have flocked to female-led sitcoms like "30 Rock," "New Girl," "Parks and Recreation" and "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt," leading to an apparent boom in complex, flawed comedy heroines on TV -- but also an unsettling degree of pushback from fans and critics. The bountiful variety of women leading sitcoms today seems like cause for unmitigated celebration, but not everyone is convinced.

Taboo-busting female characters in comedy make many critics feel unsettled, and it’s not just the traditionalists. A surprising level of finger-wagging has been coming from feminist and pro-woman sources, the very viewers who might be expected to back this blossoming of complex female leads.

"Mazel Tov, Dummies!": Women in Sitcoms Are Ascendant

Hoping to get a firmer grip on the current foregrounding of women in the sitcom realm, and why it’s sparking backlash, I sat down with my coworkers to examine major female leads in sitcoms past and present, and the evolution quickly became apparent. We broke the characters down first by whether they exemplified 20 commonly depicted personality traits (a process that involved extensive debate, and admittedly a bit of subjectivity), and noticed that in the past decade, they’ve come to be defined by a more diverse set of personality traits. They're actually becoming, well, three-dimensional.






Breaking these characteristics into four categories -- traits generally perceived as stereotypically masculine, positive and negative, and stereotypically feminine, positive and negative -- we also noticed that earlier female characters typically presented traits from only two of those categories.

Initially, characters such as Lucy Ricardo might have been positive feminine (kind and quirky) but also negative feminine (shallow and incompetent). Women in sitcoms weren't just characters, they were caricatures of their gender.





After a while, there seemed to be a reaction to this one-note depiction -- there followed a wave of funny women given qualities usually bestowed upon male characters. "For a long time, there was pressure to seem like... you were cool," says comedy journalist Elise Czajkowski. "You were one of the guys." For example, Roseanne played a schlubby, gruff working woman just trying to take care of her clan -- a classic man's leading archetype.





Elaine Benes, part of a male-dominated ensemble on "Seinfeld," embodied one of the guys, but also vamped her way into a string of relationships, which she generally torpedoed through her neurotic or self-involved behavior. Elaine spanned the spectrum.





Selina Meyer doesn't have traditional feminine virtues, but she has flaws associated with men and with women, as well as attributes prized in men. Plus, Selina is a fantastic character, a mass of insecurity and narcissism and charm and nastiness, brilliantly portrayed by Louis-Dreyfus. Her performance on the show has met with seemingly universal plaudits.

Not every female sitcom character can be Selina, however. Actually, if the TV landscape were populated with gaffe-prone, cutthroat careerists like the veep, she probably wouldn't seem quite so hilarious.


"Kaboom": What Makes Things Funny?

"The evolution of comedy is toward being more and more specific," says Czajkowsi. "75 years ago... everybody just did each other’s jokes." With shows ranging from the dark, gross-out comedy of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," to the aggressively sunny "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt," sitcoms today are diversifying, refusing to settle into a single, sad rut.

It's still a matter of debate whether clichés and stereotypes make for successful comedy. Though some viewers enjoy the comfort of familiar, trite jokes, the root of humor lies in a moment of surprise, argues cognitive neuroscientist Scott Weems, the author of Ha!: The Science of When We Laugh and Why. Weems studies the cognition behind laughter, and has come to believe that humor is "what the brain does when it's confronted with something that doesn't immediately make sense."





In a recent episode of "Broad City," for example, Ilana's mother tells the girls that the nail salon where they're about to get mani-pedis has been really cheap since someone got a staph infection there. "Staph is not the real bad one, right?" says Abbi hopefully. "Yeah," replies Ilana's mom in a reassuring, maternal tone. "It is." Not only is this a shocking answer, but it's delivered in a downbeat moment, not with the broad wink that cues us to expect a joke.

Peter McGraw, co-author of The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny, has a slightly different take: Laughter comes from a moment of violation that we recognize as ultimately benign. This theory also explains the above example -- at least given that the girls don't get staph infections.

The benign violation theory also, McGraw argues, accounts for the range of possibility in the humor arena. "The world of violations, the world of things that can go wrong is quite vast," he points out, and at the same time, "There are many ways that you can make things okay."


"Retreat To Move Forward": How Feminist Nitpicking Targets Women Comedians

Given the free-wheeling structure of comedy, a laser focus on social equality can be as limiting to female comics as dated stereotypes. A medium that capitalizes on shock and broken taboos can't thrive when performers are expected to hew to a narrow script. Yet many in the audience do expect female characters to maintain certain standards. Characters from Liz Lemon to Mindy Lahiri have been critiqued not for failing as comic figures, but for presenting a negative image of their sex -- for proving to be too weak, selfish or obsessed with men to embody the ideal modern woman.

It's natural that empowered, modern women feel it's time to leave husband-hunting ladies and ditzy chicks in the past. "It's 2015," we think, outraged. "Don't scriptwriters know women can be CEOs and stay single by choice until they die, happily alone?"

Perhaps that's why Selina Meyer has mostly escaped gendered criticism -- she may not be good at her job, but she's still the freaking vice president, and while she's cruel and abrasive, those qualities aren't exactly feminine stereotypes. Selina feels like sociopolitical progress.





What doesn't feel like sociopolitical progress: The gendered critique directed at female stars and showrunners whose characters don't strike us as inspirational.

Mindy Lahiri, of "The Mindy Project," was deemed too "crazy," especially boy-crazy, for the big time. "This is a show about a single woman trying to get -- nay, keep -- a boyfriend," wrote Flavorwire's Jillian Mapes. "I thought Mindy was better than that." And Jessica Day, the titular "New Girl," is too quirky for Seyward Darby, who wrote for The New Republic that Jess's trademark eccentricity is a "painfully shallow presentation." Liz Lemon quickly became a beloved icon of grouchy career women, but toward the end of "30 Rock"'s run, critics became less forgiving of her personal flaws. "Liz has been fully transformed into a needy little girl," wrote Linda Holmes at NPR during Season 6. "Now, she's just dumb, incapable of making her own decisions."

The "New Girl" team directly addressed the relentless critique of Jess Day as too adorkably feminine in the Season 1 episode "Jess and Julia.” "I brake for birds. I rock a lot of polka dots," Jess snaps at a disdainful, hard-edged lawyer. "I'm sorry I don't talk like Murphy Brown ... that doesn't mean I'm not smart and tough and strong." Meanwhile, Emily Nussbaum of The New Yorker, as she so often has, stepped up to bat for the beleaguered Liz, arguing, "From the beginning Liz Lemon was pathetic. That was what was enthralling, and even revolutionary, about the character [...] The show let her be the George Costanza, not the Mary Richards."





Not every female character, in short, should have to be standard-bearers for her sex's worthiness. Male characters have never been saddled with that -- just ask George Costanza.


"Everything Sunny All the Time Always": The Burden of the Admirable Woman Comic

Even the lovable stoners of "Broad City" have run afoul of expectations. They may not be prissy enough to draw the ire of feminist critics, but their post-grad malaise doesn't ideally represent the female sex either. Ilana wears crop-tops to an office job, where she specializes in taking naps sitting up. Abbi just hopes to make it to trainer at the cultish gym where she picks up sweaty towels. The girls explore masturbation, pegging, and drug use. Murphy Brown, though considered controversial in her own time, wouldn't recognize them.

When Jimmy Kimmel hosted Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer on January 19, he took a paternal tack: "I would be worried... if you were my daughters, I'd be like, uh, is this real life or did you cook this up, I hope, in the comedy room?" Kimmel's concern-troll-cum-question hints at his discomfort with women, rather than men, writing and performing comedy about sex, drugs, and misbehavior. When has a late-night host seriously suggested he would be concerned by the comedic antics of a male star, "if you were my son"?





One of the age-old obstacles for women comedians has been this darker side of the benign violation theory of humor: The source of the violation can matter as much to our perception of its benignity as the success of the joke itself. When women break certain taboos, it's not a benign violation anymore. It's just a violation.

But humor by its nature asks performers to break social codes of conduct; successful sitcom protagonists tend to be inconsiderate, intrusive, clumsy, rude or downright dumb. Think Michael Scott, Frasier Crane, Jerry Seinfeld.

By closing certain avenues of comedy to women, critics may feel they're shielding the so-called gentler sex. More often than not, however, they're helping to corral female comics into heavily circumscribed roles, then wondering why people don't think women are funny. They are, of course, but they're also more funny the more diverse and adventurous the roles they take on.

In a recent, aptly named piece on xoJane, "UNPOPULAR OPINION: Hey Broad City, A Woman Doesn't Have To Be A Hot Mess To Be Funny," Emily Gaudette took on Abbi and Ilana directly. Gaudette admits to disappointment that the on-screen BFFs aren't a bit more together. "'Broad City' chooses to exaggerate the misconception that women my age are, essentially, a mess," she complains.

As Gaudette's article demonstrates, Abbi and Ilana may seem, to some viewers, to be reinforcing a frustrating stereotype about slacker millennial women. She regretfully compares "Broad City" to a host of other shows, asking why Abbi and Ilana lack the bouncy resourcefulness of Mindy Lahiri in "The Mindy Project," or the professional drive of Selina Meyer in "Veep," or the big heart and proficiency of Leslie Knope in "Parks and Recreation." Why can't they be admirable in addition to being funny?


“Women in Garbage”: Why Women Comedians Aren't Keeping Their Hands Clean


The strength of "Broad City" lies in its refusal to kowtow to this expectation, or to the expectation that they keep their clothes on and behave. They betray no anxiety about their decidedly un-model behavior in the show; they appear to feel no pressure to represent women in an admirable light.





Even more importantly, "Broad City" doesn't attempt to follow a template laid out by previous ladies of the sitcom world. The show isn't "The Mindy Project" or "Veep." It's specific. It's risk-taking. It can't be mistaken for any other show on TV. To demand more homogeneity, to ask that Ilana Wexler be more like Mindy Lahiri and that Mindy be more like Leslie Knope, disregards the nature of comedy.

Liz Meriwether, the creator and showrunner of "New Girl," has played this game long enough to know she's expected to write a female role model, and to know her response to that expectation: "It doesn't lead you into good work." Instead, Meriwether told me, she strives for honesty and humor. Despite public debates about female characters' relatability, she says, "I think women respond to honesty. I think women respond to all the things that men respond to in characters, and I don’t think men only like to see men portrayed in a positive light."

If you want to watch a sitcom featuring a female lead today, you have an abundance of solid options -- and that's not even accounting for the dramedic "Girls" and "Jane the Virgin," or the transcendent, lacerating sketch comedy of "Inside Amy Schumer." Determined women who brushed aside the traditional restrictions on their comedy have won at least a few major skirmishes, and they've staked out a newly broad territory for women in sitcoms.

What's more, a variety of funny ladies on TV helps make future comic expression for women even more free-ranging. Female-focused humor might feel foreign to audiences accustomed to bro comedy, and until they get used to it, the jokes can be lost in translation.


"Menzies": Why We Don't Laugh About Lady Stuff

Comedy draws from a set of shared experiences, and as long as men in the crowd know little about women outside of the manicured, sanitized version so often presented to them, they have little basis for grasping their humor. "For you and I to be laughing at the same thing," McGraw says, "it really helps if we see the world in the same way." If half the audience knows next to nothing about periods, birth control, or having boobs, jokes about the nuances of such experiences will fall flat -- and when the comedy powers-that-be mostly have penises, that gap in understanding can be particularly damaging.

"Ugh, women comics, they just talk about their period," says Czajkowski, voicing an omnipresent trope that haunts female performers. "I never hear anybody do that, because it’s come to be seen as taboo." The woman comedian who does routines about being on the rag is a despised figure in the comedy scene. But as Chelsea Peretti joked in her special "One of the Greats," "If guys got their period, there's no way a male comedian would be up here, bleeding out of his dick, just like 'I'm not gonna talk about it. It would be declassé.' [...] If guys got their period, 90 percent of standup comedy would just be people running around being like 'I was bleeding out of my diiiiickkkk!'"





Meriwether, who created a whole episode about menstruation and men's discomfort with it during Season 2 of "New Girl," points to another possible consequence of this marginalization of female experiences. "Sometimes it's men who are nervous," she says of the pressure to sanitize female characters in comedies. "Because they don’t understand a woman’s experience, the default is to try to make the character really 'likable.'"

This blind spot isn't irreparable. Much as women have long consumed entertainment featuring male voices and learned to relate to them, men now have a bounty of female-driven comedy -- and other media -- giving them a crash course on how the other half lives. The more women play non-stereotypical, complex comic characters on TV, the more the general audience will relate to and enjoy their comedy.





This suggests there may be an uncomfortable acceptance curve for underrepresented groups in comedy. For example, the benign violation theory makes room for hackneyed jokes exploiting stereotypes, says McGraw. "Because comedy arises from things that aren't quite right, it's often the negative stereotypes that play in comedy," he points out. "Stereotypes are really useful in the sense that they reflect a shared if perhaps flawed understanding of groups."

Still, the most successful humor may buck those stereotypes, he suggests: "What’s considered 'good' comedy, not with regard to the 'haha,' but with regard to the 'aha,'... is the stuff that’s not obvious." Audiences may laugh at a joke poking fun at Asians' driving skills, but a joke skewering the widespread stereotype about Asian people being poor drivers would be fresher and more effective, he says.

It may even make us reexamine our impolitic assumptions. "Primarily, comedy reflects changes in people's belief... In that way we talk about comedy as a thermometer," McGraw says. "But it can work as a thermostat, I believe. If you get people laughing by pointing out the inconsistencies in what people say ... these kinds of social pressures really do work." He cautions that little evidence exists to demonstrate the efficacy of satirical humor in changing minds, but, as Czajkowski points out, "If you're laughing at something then you don't find it scary." That's a powerful shift.


"What to Expect When You're Expanding": The Rocky Road to Comic Representation on TV

Minority groups, including Asian-Americans, face a similar, if perhaps more daunting, tightrope act as women do: Lean into the stereotype, or push against it? Remaining safely in the middle, even pretending the stereotype doesn’t exist, may seem safest, but as long as the stereotypes persist, ignoring them tends to feel bland.

Mindy Kaling, the star and creator of “The Mindy Project," walks a particularly landmine-strewn path; her identity as both a woman and an Indian-American intrudes constantly upon evaluations of her comedy. In the show, her Indian heritage doesn’t take center stage. Surrounded by white coworkers and boyfriends played by Caucasian dreamboats like Chris Messina and Glenn Howerton, Dr. Mindy Lahiri's racial identity is rarely treated as more than an opportunity to throw in glib one-liners ("I'm Indian, I can't be racist!").





Yet the show has been a target for both feminist and race-conscious tsk-tsking. On the one hand, Lahiri's been labeled too vain and melodramatic, a feminine caricature. On the other, Kaling's been slammed for a lack of diversity in the show’s casting. "I'm a fucking Indian woman who has her own fucking network television show, OK?" Kaling responded at SXSW last year. "No one asks any of the shows I adore ... why no leads on their shows are women or of color."

The loveable but problematic “Fresh Off the Boat” distills this liminal position held by Asian-American comics. The first network sitcom to feature an Asian-American family since the 1995 cancellation of Margaret Cho’s “All-American Girl,” it constantly balances cheap stereotypes with insightful humor, with mixed success. It’s now 2015, and we're still laughing at jokes about an Asian mom complaining that school is too easy when her son brings home straight As. It's no coincidence that, as Fusion recently uncovered, Asians make up a disproportionately low percentage of main TV cast members.





Kaling's comedy, which mingles middle-school slumber party perkiness with the acerbic exasperation of that middle-schooler's mother, brings something different and complex to TV (not to mention a starring role in a network show for an Indian comedian and actress, no small feat). Her character may be shallow, selfish, and confrontational, but she's also endearing, idealistic, and a great doctor. Those things may sound contradictory, but real people are complicated like that. Her race, like her gender, also makes things complicated. Her race, like her gender, makes her audience respond to her with a heightened scrutiny, a ready sense of disappointment. This week, FOX canceled "The Mindy Project" after just three seasons; the show had been struggling in the ratings against NBC's stereotype-fueled snorefest "One Big Happy." Though fans remain hopeful for a second chance (a multi-season deal with Hulu has been rumored), the cancellation is another disappointing setback.



"Bro Club for Dudes": Getting Chicks in the Comedy Club

For women, or at least white women, the evolution past screwball punchline has been in the works for decades, and the proliferation of unlikable, uninspiring, and even unrelatable heroines suggests we've reached a tipping point. It's no longer glass-ceiling-exploding news when a Tina Fey or Amy Poehler gets her own show; it's expected. Once comediennes played into or against stereotypes. Now, the most recognizable female characters in sitcoms combine traits from across the spectrum. They're magnetic role models mixed with black sheep, with a soupçon of terrible judgment.





Maybe Jess, Mindy, or Abbi and Ilana enact certain characteristics viewers don't care to see women associated with or find retrogressive. But they're real. "I'm a woman, Zooey's a woman, we're both talking about our experiences," says Meriwether. "Why are our experiences not deemed worth talking about?"

Pretending those aspects of our humanity don't exist only holds back comediennes from gaining parity in their field; they'll never reach their full potential if it remains taboo for one sex to make humor out of shameful or absurd behavior. Women can't be funny if audiences can't stand to see them be the butt of the joke sometimes. Paragons are rarely hilarious.

If the entertainment world has finally evolved past stereotype-driven female comedy, the inclusion of impolitic characters -- a lazy millennial girl, a desperate single woman -- will be part of the deal. To get girls fully accepted into the boys' club of comedy at last, it might just be worth it.



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7 Moving, Must-Read Memoirs Coming Out This Year

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‘Tis almost the season for outdoor reading, on beaches or park benches or quiet front lawns. So, we’d like to shout from the rooftops a few excellent books worth basking in.

Getting lost in a novel can prove difficult if said story doesn’t immerse the reader in its world. With memoirs, the task is less daunting -- when writing confessions or plots culled from their own lives, authors often weave their richest stories. These are just a few memoirs publishing in 2015 that we recommend:



The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
Much of Nelson's book centers on the whirlwind of having and raising a child, but her reliance on theory to explain her feelings makes it a more cerebral look at motherhood than other memoirs can boast. In an anecdote that too many women will find frustrating and relatable, she recalls an academic pointing out that she's "with child" during the Q&A section of a talk. That mothers can't also be thought of as hard workers and bright thinkers is a stereotype worth discussing, and Nelson does so elegantly. She also exposes the insufficiency of the words we use to talk about sex and gender, as well as the lamentable gender inequity in the field of child psychology.
Read our review here




Guantánamo Diary by Mohamedou Ould Slahi
ICYMI: Earlier this year, Mohamedou Ould Slahi's diary, which he wrote in 2005, was finally published. What sets his personal reflections apart from others, and makes it a book worth savoring, is that the entire work was written while its author was detained at Guantánamo Bay, in spite of not being directly charged with a crime. Although he was only suspected to have participated in a thwarted Al Qaeda attack, he remains in the prison today. The pages of his book explore his day-to-day at Guantánamo, as well as the grueling trek he took around the world before arriving there.




Spinster by Kate Bolick
Edith Wharton, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and now, Kate Bolick. These are women who have made deliberate commitments to singledom, in pursuit of a fruitful life sans the responsibilities that come with a nuclear family. Bolick fights boldly and pithily against the notion that a woman's life decisions should be limited to who she should marry. Bolick infuses the details of her own life with those who preceded her -- and notes that she's far from alone.
Read our interview with Kate Bolick here




The Folded Clock: A Diary by Heidi Julavits
Julavits's first foray into personal writing -- her previous books were novels -- proves she's a master of many mediums. Her diary is indulgent in the best way -- when she reveals the personal details and amusing stories of her daily life, she manages to also reveal deeper truths about ambition, art, and relationships. She analyzes everything from The Goncourts' infamous diary to "The Bachelorette" amusingly and thoughtfully, and manages to disrupt conventions about how a story should be told.
Read our essay about The Folded Clock here

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The Seven Good Years by Etgar Keret
Etgar Keret might be one of the most famous living Israeli writers. As such, his work, including a recently anthology of noir set in Tel Aviv, is often published in Hebrew. But his memoir, which chronicles the period of his life during which both his father and his son were alive, will not be. The details, he says, are too intimate. Instead, it’ll be translated into English, and published later this year. If it’s anywhere near as compelling as his eclectic short story collection Suddenly, a Knock at the Door, it’ll be a delight.

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That Thing You Do With Your Mouth: The Sexual Autobiography of Samantha Matthews as Told to David Shields
Not so much an autobiography as a truly unique oral history (har har), Matthews’s story, which was told StoryCorps-style to her relative David Fields, is about her long, fraught sexual history. Matthews is a voice-over artist whose work dubbing film translation has exposed her to international pornography. In an excerpt of the book published on McSweeney’s, she begins, “I have a hard time keeping up with my thoughts and narrowing them down. I don’t know. This might be a complete mess.” If she’s true to her word, Matthew’s work is sure to be a fascinating, elliptical journey, at the very least.

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Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids edited by Meghan Daum
Even less a conventional memoir than the others we’ve recommended, Daum’s collection, which she’s edited and written the introduction for, is a roundup of essays about, as its title states, the decision not to have kids. Its contents examine the problem with how taboo the choice –- the conversation, even -– has become. And while Daum herself seems defensive to the point of being almost unfairly critical of those who do raise children, each essay offers a separate and illuminating perspective.
Read our interview with Meghan Daum here


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For Our 10th Birthday, We're Raising Money For These 10 Issues

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The Huffington Post has spent a decade growing, learning and redefining the media landscape. But on our 10th birthday, one founding principle that's remained is that through our coverage, we empower readers to get involved in the issues they read about on our site. And whenever we can, we aim to inspire our readers give back to their communities.

While it is, of course, our journalistic duty to cover news stories surrounding poverty statistics and failing schools, it is also our journalistic priority to show readers what they can do about it.

So we're celebrating our 10th birthday by raising awareness and money for some of the causes we believe will define the next decade. Read through our stories about homelessness, LGBT rights, climate change and more below and click over to Crowdrise to see what you can do to help.

RETHINKING DRUG POLICY AND TREATMENT
America's War On Drugs Has Failed. This Program Might Be The Solution.

PROTECTING THE RIGHTS OF LGBT INDIVIDUALS
How The Global LGBT Movement Can Keep Up Its Stunning Momentum

ENSURING FREE SPEECH AND SAFETY FOR JOURNALISTS
How To Protect Journalists In The World's Most Dangerous Places

EMPOWERING WOMEN TO HELP END POVERTY
Education and Entrepreneurship: These Organizations Are Helping Women Move Out Of Poverty

RETHINKING HOMELESSNESS + HOW TO SOLVE IT
Yes, It's Possible To End Homelessness In The United States

MAKING HEALTHY FOOD AFFORDABLE AND ACCESSIBLE
Eliminating Food Deserts Will Take A Marriage of Private And Public Enterprise

BRINGING MEDITATION AND MINDFULNESS TO THE MASSES
How Mindfulness Has Changed The Way Americans Learn And Work

SOLVING THE GLOBAL ENVIRONMENT CRISIS
You Can Help Save The Planet. Here's How.

REDUCING MATERNAL AND INFANT MORTALITY BY INVESTING IN HEALTH
5 Health Predictions That Give Us Hope For Moms And Babies Around The World

MAKING PET ADOPTION THE STANDARD + MUTTS THE COOLEST BREED
Mutts Are The Coolest Breed: The Unstoppable Rise Of Shelter Pets

These are just some of the causes that are near and dear to our ethos -- causes where we believe meaningful strides can be made in the coming decade, and organizations we believe are already making those strides today. Now we're empowering readers to act and take part. Join us by clicking on the widget below!




























Supporting the causes that will shape the next decade






Donate Now







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Zappa The Greyhound Is Your New Favorite Instagram Celeb

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No teeth? No problem.

Zappa is a mostly toothless and very fashionable 15-year-old Italian greyhound. She has an impressive social media presence (over 20,000 followers on Instagram!) and an enviable collection of chic winter caps and sweaters. And she totally works her looks for the camera.

Because her breed is susceptible to dental issues, Zappa’s owners Sadie and Rosalie Millen explained, she has lost the majority of her teeth, which is why her tongue hangs out the side of her mouth.

But Zaps, honey, we are so down to hang. You do you, girl.



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The Other Entrepreneurs: Brooklyn's 'Indie Capitalists'

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the other hundred


They grew up in the age of Amazon, with computers and iPods manufactured worlds away. But for these New Yorkers, handicraft is far from a thing of the past. In workshops sprinkled across Brooklyn, small groups of artisans are using their hands to bring manufacturing back to a city and a country where most consumer goods are imported.

Whether they are developing high-tech and meticulously crafted instruments, or creating successful jewelry lines with recycled materials, the goal of these “indie capitalists” is to make high-quality, small-run “authentic” goods.

New York, USA | Photographer: Benjamin Petit

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Colin Spoelman founded Kings County Distillery in 2010 in a room in Williamsburg, relocating it to the Brooklyn Navy Yard in 2012.



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Lindsay Carver started working at Stanley & Sons, a producer of bags and aprons based in a basement in Williamsburg, a district of Brooklyn formerly industrial and now ultra-hip, three years ago.



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Paul Rothman’s Fridgebuzzz Electronics, based in Greenpoint, Brooklyn’s most northerly district, makes guitars, synthesizers and other electronic music instruments.



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Clair Catillaz makes a bowl from clay in her ceramic studio, ClamLab, at her home in Bushwick, a working class neighborhood that's been gentrifying in recent years.


the other hundred




"The Other Hundred" is a series of unique photo book projects aimed as a counterpoint to the Forbes 100 and other media rich lists by telling the stories of people around the world who are not rich but whose lives, struggles and achievements deserve to be celebrated.

The second edition of "The Other Hundred" focuses on the world's everyday entrepreneurs. The book offers an alternative to the view that most successful entrepreneurs were trained at elite business schools. Here are people who have never written a formal business plan, hired an investment bank, planned an exit strategy or dreamt of a stock market floatation.


More from The Other Hundred
Inside Gaza
Cairo's Blind, Female Orchestra
The Reality Of Education In Liberia
Inside North Korea
One Of Europe's Poorest Countries

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Roman Mosaics Reportedly Damaged During Botched Restoration In Turkish Museum

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Art restoration: The kind of art that, if done well, doesn’t draw attention to itself. When art restoration is in the news, it’s rarely good, and this is no exception. The Hurriyet Daily News reports that multiple mosaics at the Hatay Archaeological Museum in Turkey have undergone a botched restoration that left them damaged and disfigured.

A local artist, Mehmet Daşkapan, brought the bizarre changes in the mosaics to the attention of a local newspaper, stating, “Valuable pieces from the Roman period have been ruined. They have become caricatures of their former selves.”

Remember that nightmarish amateur fix-up of a Spanish church fresco? This art restoration fiasco not only strikes a similar chord of fear among art lovers, but at least one of the restored mosaic faces actually looks rather similar to the mouthless visage that was christened “Beast Jesus.”




Other commentators have made similar, mocking comparisons -- the above tweet points out the resemblance the restored mosaic bears to Turkey’s president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.




Concerns about the mosaics have prompted an investigation by the Turkish Culture Ministry. According to The Independent, the governor of Hatay province, Ercan Topaca, stated that “eight or nine” pieces had been damaged, and that the current probe aims to pinpoint the culprits. He reportedly told Anadolu Agency, a state-run news service, that the ministry had called a halt to the restoration and opened an inquiry in March, when the ruined panels were first brought to its attention.

The question of art restoration remains controversial -- largely because of episodes like the blundered Turkish mosaic conservation. Seeing great artwork disintegrate inspires us to act, to return the piece to the artist’s original vision. Yet many critics argue that repairing and restoring art risks permanent damage to priceless pieces. After some of the recent scandals, their point is well taken.




While the experienced, highly credentialed team behind the botched rehabilitation must be having a quite unpleasant week, the restorer reportedly claims that their work actually returned the mosaics to a state close to the original after an intrusive French restoration in the 1930s. “According to the restorer, the mosaics’ new muted tones, pronounced contours, and missing sections are more accurate,” wrote Hyperallergic.

But few are convinced that the distorted, disarrayed mosaics represent the original artistry. It takes some chutzpah to argue that your allegedly clunky reworking of a classical mosaic recaptures its true aesthetic, but it’s a difficult argument to disprove. And there’s another concern held by critics of aggressive art restoration: While conservators have access to technology and mountains of research to inform their repairs, some interpretation is inevitable with large-scale overhauls of older works. When the Sistine Chapel’s decade-long restoration was unveiled, the surprising brightness of the murals drew commentary; the team had concluded that Michelangelo only worked on wet clay and stripped pigments and smoke residue that had been added to the fresco after drying. Perhaps this was more true to Michelangelo’s vision, or perhaps their studied conclusion about his technique wasn’t quite accurate. Such a debate cannot be definitively resolved.




As for the damaged Turkish mosaics, which reportedly include several notable pieces, including a depiction of the sacrifice of Isaac, the investigation is still underway. Kenan Yurttagül, a former head of Turkey’s Monuments and Museums General Directorate, told Hurriyet that whether the mosaics have actually been ruined is still being examined. “Errors, if there are any, will be reported and then fixed,” he said.

H/T Hyperallergic

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