manbartlett

Note to self: Don’t seek to be relevant, or liked, seek to be undeniable. Seek to be compassionate. Seek integrity. Seek humility. Seek Light.

Pinned Post
manbartlett gregdotorg
tonysopranosmom

i love charlie brown so much. what a miserable little child.

butterflypeaflowertea

Charlie Brown, undaunted, seeks tenderness and fulfillment on every side: in baseball, in building kites, in his relationship with his dog, Snoopy, in playing with the girls. He always fails. His solitude becomes an abyss, his inferiority complex is pervasive—tinged by the constant suspicion (which the reader also comes to share) that Charlie Brown is not inferior. Worse: he is absolutely normal. He is like everybody else. This is why he is always on the brink of suicide or at least of nervous breakdown: because he seeks salvation through the routine formulas suggested to him by the society in which he lives...

– Umberto Eco, On ‘Krazy Kat’ and ‘Peanuts’

manbartlett octavio-world
massarrah

Neo-Babylonian Protective Amulet

The obverse of this stone amulet (top photo) shows an image of the demon Ugallu, the lion-headed storm-demon typically depicted with a lion’s head, donkey ears, and the talons of a bird. On the reverse (bottom photo) is an Akkadian inscription in cuneiform. 

Neo-Babylonian, c. 626-539 BCE.

Musée d’art et d’histoire, Geneva. Photo courtesy of CDLI.

manbartlett gregdotorg
gregdotorg

a life-size fiberglass statue of a cocoa brown man, nude, with left arm raised, legs wide astride a knee-high barrel, is engulfed in orange red and yellow airbrushed flames that encircle his head and arm like a fiery wing. the figure stands on a grey painted mdf pedestal, over nine feet tall. luis jimenez's 1969 sculpture man on fire is installed against a chocolate painted wall and black painted 19th century industrial column at the smithsonian american art museum in dc, and trump hates it so much he condemned the show which he's never seen, in an executive order.ALT

In June 2025 I did a roundup of museums and art in Washington DC at a moment when they were just starting to be under attack, and wrote about it for ARTnews.

The attacks have increased since then, but the museums, and the art in them, going back decades and centuries, are more important than ever.

image: installation view of Luis Jiménez's Man on Fire (1969), a 9-ft tall fiberglass resin sculpture of Cuauhtémoc, in the Smithsonian's exhibition, "The Shape of Power"

Man on Fire in Country on Fire [greg.org]