How Art and Science Collide at the CERN Physics Laboratory

“Knowledge is limited,” Albert Einstein once said, “imagination encircles the world.” A new program at the CERN physics laboratory, home to the Large Hadron Collider, takes Einstein’s words as their mantra. Collide@CERN hopes to invite artists of all disciplines to work as artists in residence at the laboratory, where they can both be inspired by the science and inspire the scientists to make new discoveries. While protons collide in the machinery at unimaginable speeds and perhaps reveal some of the secrets of the universe, the artists and scientists will collide in ways that may help make some of those secrets more intelligible to the human imagination. With this initiative, the chasm between the arts and the sciences may finally be bridged. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "How Art and Science Collide at the CERN Physics Laboratory."

[Image: Simon Norfolk. From the CERN Series, 2008.]

Why Are Graffiti and Street Art Destroying One Another?

For most people, there’s little difference between graffiti and street art. To those within that circle, however, there’s a whole world of difference—even enough to drive them to destroy the art of others. Part of that difference comes from the continued rejection of graffiti as a criminal act, whereas street art quickly rose up from the streets into the galleries, where it has become the hot, new genre eagerly bought up by younger collectors. The resentments generated by that difference can be easily encapsulated in the all-out war going on between King Robbo, “king” of the British graffiti artists, and Banksy, the darling of the gallery-gone street artists. What was once posturing (and even alleged slapping) has escalated to destruction of the art itself. Can anything stop this self-destructive feud in which the work itself hangs in the balance? Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Why Are Graffiti and Street Art Destroying One Another?"

Dissecting de Kooning at the MoMA

Is it better to burn out, as Neil Young sang, than to fade away? When it came to the drama of the Abstract expressionists, Jackson Pollock burned out like a supernova in a fatal drunken driving accident while Willem de Kooning’s light faded away slowly into the long night of Alzheimer's disease. In de Kooning: A Retrospective, which runs at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City through January 9, 2012, the artist returns to his rightful spotlight in an amazing exhibition featuring 200 works ranging across seven decades of work—both before and beyond the AbEx years. Organized by John Elderfield, the MoMA’s Chief Curator Emeritus of Painting and Sculpture, this retrospective dissects every aspect of de Kooning and detaches him from the label of Abstract Expressionist to free us to see de Kooning as the truly versatile and vast artist he was. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Dissecting de Kooning at the MoMA."

[Many thanks to the Museum of Modern Art in New York City for providing me with the image above, press materials, and a review copy of the catalog to de Kooning: A Retrospective, which runs through January 9, 2012.]

[Image: Willem de Kooning (American, born the Netherlands. 1904-1997). Seated Woman on a Bench, 1972. Bronze. 37 3/4 x 36 x 34 3/8" (95.9 x 91.4 x 87.3 cm). Private collection. © 2011 The Willem de Kooning Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.]