Van Morrison

Wikipedia - "His live performances at their best are seen as transcendental and inspired; while some of his recordings, such as the studio albums Astral Weeks and Moondance, and the live album It's Too Late to Stop Now, are acclaimed as among the greatest ever made."
Wikipedia, Google, last.fm, Rolling Stone, YouTube, (1), (2), (3), (4)

The Berlin Wall

Wikipedia - "The Berlin Wall (German: Berliner Mauer) was a physical barrier erected by the German Democratic Republic (GDR) (East Germany) completely encircling West Berlin, separating it from East Germany, including East Berlin. The longer inner German border demarcated the border between East and West Germany. Both borders came to symbolize the Iron Curtain between Western Europe and the Eastern Bloc."
Wikipedia, Berlin Wall Online, Newseum: The Berlin Wall

STAGES

Tree with yellow flowers, Cai Guo-Qiang
Cai Guo-Qiang, Andreas Gursky, José Parlá, Tom Sachs, Rosson Crow, KAWS, Raymond Pettibon, Kenny Scharf, Jules De Balincourt, Geoff McFetridge, Lari Pittman, Eric White, Dzine, Yoshitomo Nara, Richard Prince, Christopher Wool, Shepard Fairey, Catherine Opie, Ed Ruscha, Aaron Young. Lance Armstrong joins STAGES in Paris.
STAGES

Andrei Rublev

Wikipedia - "Andrei Rublev ... also known as The Passion According to Andrei, is a 1966 Russian film directed by Andrei Tarkovsky from a screenplay written by Andrei Konchalovsky and Andrei Tarkovsky. The film is loosely based on the life of Andrei Rublev, the great 15th century Russian icon painter."
Wikipedia, IMDb, YouTube, (1), (2)

Ruth Orkin

"Ruth Orkin was an award-winning photojournalist and filmmaker. Orkin was the only child of Mary Ruby, a silent-film actress, and Samuel Orkin, a manufacturer of toy boats called Orkin Craft. She grew up in Hollywood in the heyday of the 1920s and 1930s."
Ruth Orkin

Acropolis Museum

Goddess Athena, the patron of ancient Athens
Wikipedia - "The Acropolis Museum is an archaeological museum focused on the findings of the archaeological site of the Acropolis of Athens. The museum was built in order to house every artifact found on the rock and on its feet, covering a large period of time, from the Greek Bronze Age to Roman and Byzantine Greece but lies also on the archaeological site of Makrygianni, ruins of a part of Roman and early Byzantine Athens."
Wikipedia, NYT, YouTube, (1)

The End of Bonus Beats?

"The 'Bonus Beats' tracks on 12" singles were used by DJ's to either extend the mix of the main track, or sometimes played within a dj mix on their own. One DJ mourns their passing." - analogue
joshuaIZ, YouTube, (1), (2), (3), (4), (5)

Coffee Cups

henry
"A very cool idea - Boy Obsolete on Flickr ... - using coffee cups as canvas. Most of them are for sale, too. As he puts it: 'they come in a case, with a hand cut name tag and cork base. oh yes, because i am still very 1985.'"
flickr

Kluster

Wikipedia - "Kluster was a German krautrock or experimental musical group whose work often resembles later industrial music. Kluster was short-lived, existing only from 1969 until mid-1971 when Conrad Schnitzler left and the remaining two members renamed themselves Cluster. The band was based in West Berlin."
Wikipedia, YouTube, (1), (2)

Merce Cunningham, Dance Visionary, Dies

"Merce Cunningham, the revolutionary American choreographer, died Sunday night at his home in Manhattan. He was 90. His death was announced by the Cunningham Dance Foundation. Over a career of nearly seven decades, Mr. Cunningham went on posing 'But' and 'What if?' questions, making people rethink the essence of dance and choreography. He went on doing so almost to the last."
NYT, Merce Cunningham - NYT, Merce Cunningham Dance Company, Merce Cunningham Dance Company - 1, PBS, Wikipedia, Google, Google - Video, YouTube, (1)

Luis Meléndez

"Luis Meléndez (1715–1780) is now recognized as the premier still-life painter in 18th-century Spain, indeed one of the greatest in all of Europe, though his reputation had long been eclipsed by the achievements of his Spanish contemporary, Francisco Goya."
NGA, Wikipedia, NYT

René Magritte

The lovers
Wikipedia - "René François Ghislain Magritte (21 November 1898 – 15 August 1967) was a Belgian surrealist artist. He became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images. His intended goal for his work was to challenge the observer's preconditioned perceptions of reality and force the viewer to become hypersensitive to their surroundings."
Wikipedia, Magritte, Google

Musique concrète

Wikipedia - "Musique concrète (French for 'concrete music' or 'real music'), is a form of electroacoustic music that utilises acousmatic sound as a compositional resource. The compositional material is not restricted to the inclusion of sonorities derived from musical instruments or voices, nor to elements traditionally thought of as "musical" (melody, harmony, rhythm, metre and so on). The theoretical underpinnings of the aesthetic were developed by Pierre Schaeffer, beginning in the late 1940s."
Wikipedia, art and culture

Bootsy Collins

Wikipedia - "William 'Bootsy' Collins (born October 26, 1951 in Cincinnati, Ohio) is a funk bassist, singer, and songwriter. Rising to prominence with James Brown in the late 1960s, and with Parliament-Funkadelic in the '70s, Collins's driving bass guitar and humorous vocals established him as one of the leading names in funk."
Wikipedia, last.fm, My Space, Bootsy Collins Homepage, YouTube, (1), (2), (3), (4)

John Riddy

"His subject matter is broad – ranging from the unassuming domestic interior to images of Renaissance or Modernist architecture and the specific qualities of certain city spaces. Time, atmosphere, spatial illusion and cultural histories are compressed and extended in pictures that aim to defeat our expectations of photographic descriptions."
Frith Street Gallery, V&A, Google

Alberto Contador - Tour de France

"The 96th Tour de France will be contested over 2,174 miles, a grueling test of endurance and strategy. Follow the New York Times's coverage of the race on this map, updated during the Tour with articles, photos and multimedia."
NYT, (1), Guardian - Tour de France, Lance Armstrong

James D. Griffioen

Wikipedia - "James D. Griffioen, born February 4, 1977, is an American writer and photographer who resides in Detroit, Michigan. He is the main contributor to the blog Sweet Juniper."
Wikipedia, James D. Griffioen

Kiki Smith

"Kiki Smith was born in 1954 in Nuremberg, Germany. The daughter of American sculptor Tony Smith, Kiki Smith grew up in New Jersey. As a young girl, one of Smith’s first experiences with art was helping her father make cardboard models for his geometric sculptures."
pbs, Wikipedia, MoMA, YouTube, veoh

Country Joe and the Fish

Wikipedia - "Country Joe and the Fish was a rock band most widely known for musical protests against the Vietnam War, from 1966 to 1971."
Wikipedia, Well, rhapsody, last.fm, YouTube, (1), (2)

Milky Way

Wikipedia - "The Milky Way, or simply the Galaxy, is the galaxy in which the Solar System is located. It is a barred spiral galaxy that is part of the Local Group of galaxies. It is one of billions of galaxies in the observable universe."
Wikipedia, University of California, San Diego, The Milky Way System,

Bruce Nauman

One Hundred Fish Fountain
Wikipedia - "Bruce Nauman (born December 6, 1941, in Fort Wayne, Indiana) is a contemporary American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance."
Wikipedia, PBS, Video Data Bank

Lillian Bassman

"In 1940 Lillian Bassman, who was then a fashion illustrator, joined Brodovitch’s classes at the New School for Social Research on a scholarship. After just a few weeks Brodovitch suggested she switch from fashion drawing to graphic design, and by the end of the year he made her his apprentice at Harper’s Bazaar."
Michael Hoppen Gallery, Staley Wise

Miami Vice

Wikipedia - "Miami Vice is an American television series produced by Michael Mann for NBC. The show became noted for its heavy integration of music and visual effects to tell a story. The series starred Don Johnson and Phillip Michael Thomas as two Metro-Dade Police detectives working undercover in Miami."
Wikipedia, Wikipedia - 1, IMDb, YouTube, (1), (2), (3), (4)

Song Dong, Zhao Xiang Yuan

Waste Not, 2005
"The current Projects series at the Museum of Modern Art features the work of Beijing-based artist Song Dong in collaboration with his recently deceased mother, Zhao Xiang Yuan."
The Brooklyn RailZ, flickr, Whitehot Magazine

The Oblique Strategies

"The Oblique Strategies are a deck of cards. Up until 1996, they were quite easy to describe. They measured about 2-3/4" x 3-3/4". They came in a small black box which said 'OBLIQUE STRATEGIES' on one of the top's long sides and 'BRIAN ENO/PETER SCHMIDT' on the other side."
The Oblique Strategies, Wikipedia, enoweb, (1), Stoney's Web Site

Paris Walking Tours

Jardin des Plantes, Palace of the Luxembourg, Panthéon, Cathedral of Notre Dame, The Islands of the Seine, Street Markets, Louvre Museum, Musée d'Orsay, Père Lachaise, Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation, Eiffel Tower...
Paris Walking Tours, (1)

The Undertones

Wikipedia - "The Undertones are a Northern Irish punk rock/power pop band formed in Derry in 1975. The original line-up released four studio albums — The Undertones (1979), Hypnotised (1980), Positive Touch (1981), and The Sin of Pride (1983) — before disbanding in 1983."
Wikipedia, The Undertones, last.fm, YouTube, (1), (2)

Doodlers Anonymous

Lisa Currie
"Doodlers Anonymous was founded to celebrate our addiction, and like any other, we're hooked. The need to draw, sketch, and doodle is constant. We doodle on almost anything we can find — pencil in a moleskine, marker on a napkin, ink on a torn receipt, sharpie on concrete. And we do it habitually — while on hold, in a meeting, during class, or while we should be sleeping."
Doodlers Anonymous

Rembrandt in Southern California

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606 or 1607-1669), The rape of Europa, 1632.
"Rembrandt in Southern California is a virtual exhibition of 14 paintings by Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn (Dutch, 1606-1669) on view in five Southern California museums. This collaborative presentation offers a unique guide to exploring these significant holdings and provides information and suggested connections and points of comparison for each work."
Rembrandt in Southern California

The Art of BR1 in Turin, Italy

Wooster Collective - "My project deals with the representation of Muslim women and their social condition. I was been studying and dealing with this theme for years. As you can imagine, here in Turin, my posters are seen as an ambiguous subject. Some people mislead and rip them, while others love them. I would like to make people know that there is nothing strange with this particular subject: Muslim women are equal if compared to Western women."
Wooster Collective, flickr

Shindig!

Wikipedia - "Shindig! is an American music variety show which aired on the ABC TV from September 16, 1964 to January 8, 1966. The show was hosted by Jimmy O'Neill, a disc jockey in Los Angeles at the time, who also created the show along with his wife Sharon Sheeley and production executive Art Stolnitz."
Wikipedia

Mungo Thomson

"Thomson pairs a distinctly West Coast conceptual sensibility with an interest in cosmology, mysticism, and reception. In Thomson’s diverse art—ranging from films and sound works to publications, drawings, and photographic wall murals—simple processes of inversion and transformation are joined with an expansive sense of space and context."
John Connelly, Whitney, artnet

Alfred Hitchcock

Wikipedia - "Sir Alfred Joseph Hitchcock, KBE (13 August 1899 – 29 April 1980) was a British filmmaker and producer who pioneered many techniques in the suspense and psychological thriller genres. After a successful career in his native United Kingdom in both silent films and early talkies, Hitchcock moved to Hollywood."
Wikipedia, Hitchcock, IMDb, senses of cinema, PBS, YouTube, (1)

Barbara Probst

"In Barbara Probst’s Exposure #39, two photographs depict the same woman at exactly the same moment but in very different ways. On one side, a color image captures her as she strides through a bucolic, alpine landscape. On the other, a black-and-white picture reveals the color photograph to be an illusion: the woman is actually on the rooftop of a New York skyscraper, moving in front of a backdrop depicting an idyllic mountain scene."
MoCP, Barbara Probst, Wikipedia, artnet

O Holy Cow! The Selected Verse of Phil Rizzuto

"As a longtime play-by-play announcer for the Yankees, Mr. Rizzuto embodies the divided, sometimes wandering attention, the ebbing and flowing alertness, the genial state of all-but-suspended consciousness that have made the sound of broadcast baseball a beloved national pacifier."
NYT, Cosmic Baseball Association

African American music

Wikipedia - "African American music is an umbrella term given to a range of music and musical genres emerging from or influenced by the culture of African Americans, who have long constituted a large ethnic minority of the population of the United States."
Wikipedia

Joan Mitchell

City Landscape
Wikipedia - "Joan Mitchell (February 12, 1925 - October 30, 1992) was a ‘Second Generation’ Abstract Expressionist painter. Along with Lee Krasner, Grace Hartigan, and Helen Frankenthaler she was one of her era's few female painters to gain critical and public acclaim. Her paintings and editioned prints can be seen in major museums and collections across America and Europe."
Wikipedia, Joan Mitchell, artnet

The Band

Wikipedia - "The Band was a rock group active from 1967 to 1976 and again from 1983 to 1999. The original group (1967-1976) consisted of four Canadians: Robbie Robertson (guitar, piano, vocals); Richard Manuel (piano, harmonica, drums, saxophone, organ, vocals); Garth Hudson (organ, piano, clavinet, accordion, synthesizer, saxophone); and Rick Danko (bass guitar, violin, trombone, vocals), and one American, Levon Helm (drums, mandolin, guitar, bass guitar, vocals)."
Wikipedia, Google, The Band, last.fm, YouTube, (1), (2), (3), (4), (5), (6), (7), (8)

Sigmar Polke

Klassenzimmer, 1995
Wikipedia - "Polke's creative output during this time of enormous social, cultural, and artistic changes in Germany and elsewhere, demonstrate most vividly his imagination, sardonic wit, and subversive approach in his drawings, watercolors, and gouaches produced during the 1960s and 1970's."
Wikipedia, Getty, artnet

Yves Klein

Wikipedia - "Yves Klein (28 April 1928 – 6 June 1962) was a French artist and is considered an important figure in post-war European art. New York critics of Klein's time classify him as neo-Dada, but other critics, such as Thomas McEvilley in an essay submitted to Artforum in 1982, have since classified Klein as an early, though 'enigmatic,' Post-Modernist."
Wikipedia, Yves Klein, Google, YouTube, Dailymotion

Celtic art

Wikipedia - "Celtic art is art associated with various people known as Celts; those who spoke the Celtic languages in Europe from pre-history through to the modern period, as well as the art of ancient people whose language is unknown, but where cultural and stylistic similarities suggest they are related to Celts."
Wikipedia

New York School

Wikipedia - "The New York School (synonymous with abstract expressionist painting) was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s, 1960s in New York City.(synonymous with abstract expressionist painting) was an informal group of American poets, painters, dancers, and musicians active in the 1950s, 1960s in New York City."
Wikipedia

Sin & Salvation

The Afterglow in Egypt
"This exhibition interprets Hunt's work in a new light, revealing an artist who grappled with the issues of the day. Sometimes gritty, never conventional, Hunt's art addressed the conflicts between East and West, the crisis of faith in the age of Darwin, the evolving role of women in society, and the complex relationship between the sexes."
Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Susan Rothenberg

Red Studio, 2002-2003
art:21 - "Her early work—large acrylic, figurative paintings—came to prominence in the 1970s New York art world, a time and place almost completely dominated and defined by Minimalist aesthetics and theories. The first body of work for which she became known centered on life-sized images of horses. Glyph-like and iconic, these images are not so much abstracted as pared down to their most essential elements."
PBS, Wikipedia, artnet

The Beau Brummels

Wikipedia - "The Beau Brummels were a successful 1960s American rock band, formed in San Francisco in 1963."
Wikipedia, YouTube, Dailymotion

Dan Graham

Wikipedia - "Dan Graham (March 31, 1942, Urbana, Illinois) is a conceptual artist now working out of New York City. He is an influential figure in the field of contemporary art, both a practitioner of conceptual art and an art critic and theorist."
Wikipedia, Dan Graham, DIA, Whitney, NYT

House music

Wikipedia - "House is a style of electronic dance music that originated in Chicago, Illinois, USA in the late 1970s and early 1980s. It was initially popularized in mid-1980s discothèques catering to the African-American, Latino, and gay communities, first in Chicago, then in New York City and Detroit. It eventually reached Europe before becoming infused in mainstream pop & dance music worldwide."
Wikipedia, Deep House Page, YouTube, (1), (2), (3), (4)

"We choose to go to the moon..."

"Eight years later, on July 20, 1969, two American astronauts landed on the Moon's surface."
JFK Library & Museum, We Choose the Moon, Apollo, YouTune

SimCity

Wikipedia - "SimCity is a city-building simulation game, first released in 1989 and designed by Will Wright. SimCity was Maxis' first product, which has since been ported into various personal computers and game consoles, and spawned several sequels including SimCity 2000 in 1993, SimCity 3000 in 1999, SimCity 4 in 2003, SimCity DS, and SimCity Societies in 2007."
Wikipedia, SimCity

Robert Ryman

Untitled. 1965
"Robert Ryman (born May 30, 1930) is an American painter identified with the movements of monochrome painting, minimalism, and conceptual art. The majority of his works feature abstract expressionist-influenced brushwork in white or off-white paint on square canvas or metal surfaces."
Wikipedia, art21, MoMA, DIA