Johannes Vermeer: Light, Silence, and the Art of the Dutch Golden Age
The first time I had the privilege of standing before an original Johannes Vermeer was at the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego, where…
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Love and the Humanist
Love is often treated as religion’s greatest possession, as though only faith can give it depth, sanctity, or meaning. Humanism rejects that idea. Love does…
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The Imagination of Snoopy
One of the great mysteries of Peanuts is that its most imaginative character is not one of the children, but the dog. Charlie Brown worries.…
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Against Contempt: Why Popular Artists Deserve Serious Art-Historical Attention
Introduction: The Problem of Popularity Few charges are more damaging in elite art discourse than the accusation that an artist is “popular.” The word should…
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Harriet Glickman, Charles Schulz, and the Quiet Revolution of Franklin in Peanuts
In the spring of 1968, the United States was grieving, burning, arguing, and changing. Martin Luther King Jr. had been assassinated on April 4. Cities…
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The Greatness of Fantasy Art: Frazetta, Vallejo, the Hildebrandts, and the Visual Imagination of the Modern Mythic Age
Fantasy art is often treated as a lesser branch of visual culture, as though dragons, warriors, sorceresses, strange worlds, heroic bodies, enchanted forests, alien landscapes,…
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The Rabbit and the Hare in World Art History: Fertility, Moonlight, Marginality, and the Sacred Ordinary
Few animals have moved as easily between the sacred, the comic, the erotic, and the domestic as the rabbit and the hare. Across world art,…
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The Pre-Raphaelite School of Art: History, Philosophy, Artists, Influence, and Modern Legacy
Introduction The Pre-Raphaelite school of art occupies one of the most fascinating positions in nineteenth-century cultural history. It was at once a rebellion and a…
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Understanding Entropy
Entropy is one of those words that appears in many different fields—physics, chemistry, information theory, cybersecurity, engineering, biology, and even philosophy. It is often loosely…
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The Hidden Dangers of Putting Personal and Business Information into AI Systems
Artificial intelligence tools have quickly become part of everyday life. People use them to write emails, summarize documents, draft policies, troubleshoot code, analyze spreadsheets, plan…
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