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A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.
Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.
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Looking at art leads to thinking about life
“And we’ve got to get ourselves back to the garden,” Crosby, Stills, and Nash sang in “Woodstock,” the song that tried to capture the spirit of the generation-defining gathering. For artists working in Britain after the Romantic movement, getting back to the garden—getting back to a sense of the ...
The Impressionists now stand as the ultimate in artistic comfort food for the mainstream public. The billowy softness of their images graces office walls in framed reproductions and countless calendars. Of all the Impressionists, perhaps none recalls warm mashed potatoes as much as Claude Monet. In ...
It’s amazing to think that the work of a groundbreaking photographer such as Henri Cartier-Bresson could once be found on the coffee tables of middle class homes accross America, and the world. Image-laden popular magazines such as Life made Cartier-Bresson as ubiquitous as a daily newspaper. Ever ...
“Here we are now,” Kurt Cobain intoned in 1991 on Nirvana’s Nevermind album, “entertain us.” With that catch phrase, the entire genre of grunge rock launched itself into the cultural stratosphere. Here we are now, however, in 2010, sixteen years after Cobain took his own life, still wondering what ...
When we think things out, it is usually on paper. Writers scribble random thoughts on scraps near at hand and mine those jotted flashes of insight later for fuller, more realized essays. Artists, however, use paper both for unfinished and finished works—preliminary drawings or paintings pointing ...
“Every generation is born to this same anatomical legacy; how they then fashion it with clothing is, in miniature, the story of culture,” argues Susan J. Vincent in her sweeping study, The Anatomy of Fashion: Dressing the Body from the Renaissance to Today . Clothing not only makes the man and ...
Just as the Philadelphia Museum of Art set to close its showcase of in-house Picassos in Picasso and the Avant-Garde in Paris , The Metropolitan Museum of Art revved up their exhibition machinery to present their in-house collection of the great artist— Picasso in The Metropolitan Museum of Art ...
“I am an optimist,” Brazilian-born artist Romero Britto writes in the introduction to his new book Happy! “I know that isn’t a common trait to have these days, but I just can’t help myself.” When the blues strike you hard, the art of Britto—full of bold color and luscious textures—can soften the ...
It’s usually a tie between watching paint dry and watching grass grow for the title of most boring thing to do ever. Watching the paint dry and, more importantly, flow in Alex Katz: Five Hours , however, may be the most fascinating thing you’ll find yourself watching. Renowned American portraitist ...
Marina Abramović’s exhibition The Artist Is Present , currently at the MoMA, has drawn a lot of attention this year, as her provocative work normally does. She’s perfected the art of attracting eyes to her work for decades. Unfortunately, some people have gone beyond just looking when it comes to ...
“When I tell people I would like to paint them, I already have their portrait in mind,” German artist Otto Dix once said. “I don’t paint people who don’t interest me.” Even more interesting than the people Dix painted is how he painted them. Dix’s 1925 Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber (pictured ...
It’s a common truth now that as much as we create our culture, our culture also creates us. Like Frankenstein’s monster acting with a mind of his own, culture eludes our attempts to rein it in and shapes us in return. Mary A. Favret’s War at a Distance: Romanticism and the Making of Modern Wartime ...
“What do you see?” asks Alfred Molina as Abstract Expressionist painter Mark Rothko in John Logan’s two-character bio-drama, Red, which just began a run on Broadway after a successful tour in London. Ken, Rothko’s assistant played by Eddie Redmayne, stands in for all of us as we try to see the same ...
As a kid, I loved my oversized reproduction of Action Comics #1, the June 1938 issue in which Superman, the first true superhero, burst onto the scene and changed the course of art and literature (seriously) forever. Considering the latest craze of collecting, that oversized reproduction, long ago ...
"We want to make architecture that people like to use," said Kazuyo Sejima, who with partner Ryue Nishizawa won the 2010 Pritzker Architecture Prize yesterday. "The jury somehow appreciated our way of making architecture." The Japanese architects aim towards using everyday materials to build ...