Aesthetic Arrest Podcast: Wayne Shorter, Bill Nighy, Akira Kurosawa, Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian & Kay WalkingStick

“The aesthetic experience is a simple beholding of the object . . . you experience a radiance. You are held in aesthetic arrest.” - Joseph Campbell

Aesthetic Arrest is our weekly dip into the Epicurean pleasures we’ve been enjoying lately. Cheers to that!

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Ryan Wildstar’s Recommendations:

Reading: The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy

Purchase here.

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Listening: The Music of Wayne Shorter (August 25, 1933 – March 2, 2023)

Tribute to Wayne Shorter by Wynton Marsalis:

Wynton Marsalis @wyntonmarsalis

An important cog in the ever turning wheel of universal humanism has passed through leaving all he touched better than it was before. He was and will always be: purveyor of pentatonic perfection; master of blues inflected melodies; hero of vertical and horizontal harmonic…

Wynton Marsalis @wyntonmarsalis

implications, giant of saxophone regardless of register; improviser extraordinaire in any and all musical environments; mercurial wit and biting humorist with uncommon humility and depth of understanding, seer, reader, and interpreter of ancient and modern myth…jazz messenger.

“An Open Letter To The Next Generation Of Artists” by Herbie Hancock and Wayne Shorter

(Found via The Honest Broker, the fantastic Substack written by Ted Gioia!)

Read Ted Gioia’s beautiful tributes here:

• Remembering Wayne Shorter (1933-2023)

• How Wayne Shorter Transformed Jazz Composition in the 1960s

Jazz pianist/composer Ethan Iverson discusses Wayne Shorter’s remarkably prolific musical output in the year of 1964 (via The New Yorker), a trio of three perfect albums including my album choice this week:

• JuJu (Wayne Shorter, McCoy Tyner, Reggie Workman & Elvin Jones)

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Looking: The Art of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (1922-2019)

#WOMENSART @womensart1

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (1922 – 2019), Iranian artist known for transforming Persian pictorial language into Modernist sculptural forms #WomensArt

V&A @V_and_A

In 'Variations on the Hexagon', Monir Farmanfarmaian, one of Iran's most important woman artists, uses the traditional Iranian artistic technique of mirror mosaic to create a strikingly modern object. 📸 Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian, Variations on the Hexagon, 2006

#WOMENSART @womensart1

Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian's sculptural work incorporates traditional reverse glass painting, mirror mosaics and principles of Islamic Geometry #womensart

Museum of Fine Arts, Boston @mfaboston

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian composed her modern, minimalist sculptures from basic geometric forms. She then overlaid them with a dazzling surface made using a Persian technique of mirror mosaic that dates back to the 17th century. 🎨 : "Pentagon" (2011)

Steve Silberman @stevesilberman

Sunrise 2015 by amazing Persian artist Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian. When Warhol visited Tehran in 1976, she gave him a mirrored ball that became a model for disco balls everywhere.

SCAD Museum of Art @SCADMOA

Don't miss this dazzling exhibition! 'Lineages' by Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian closes this Sunday, August 6. bit.ly/2q34D0U

Claudia Mangiamele @ClaudMang

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian (b.1924) Iranian Mirror Mosaic Artist

ICA/Boston @ICAinBOSTON

"Mirrors are a reflection of anything and everything. You become part of that mirror. It is communication—the mirror and yourself, the piece of art and yourself," says late Iranian artist Monir Shahroudy #Farmanfarmaian of her sculptural work titled "Muqarnas One," #NowOnView.

High Museum of Art @HighMuseumofArt

#FridayFacts: Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian’s work fuses traditional Islamic patterns based in sacred mathematics with the geometric abstract art she encountered while living in New York City from 1945 to 1957. buff.ly/37ozyck

Art Dubai @artdubai

.@thethirdline opens in @AlserkalAvenue Jan 5 w/ Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian solo pres: bit.ly/1QpNzJP

Official Site of Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian

Monir Shahroudy Farmanfarmaian - Works for Sale (via Artsy)

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Viewing: Living — directed by Oliver Hermanus, starring Bill Nighy, screenplay by Kazuo Ishiguro (adapted from Akira Kurosawa's Ikiru, which was likewise inspired The Death of Ivan Ilyich by Leo Tolstoy)

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Tasting: Le Sarrasin et le Froment Creperie (86 Rue Saint-Louis en l'Île, Paris, France)

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Ryan Elston’s Recommendations:

Reading: Cantoras by Carolina de Robertis

Purchase here.

“She hadn’t known air could taste like this, so wide, so open. Her body a welcome. Skin awake. The world was more than she had known, even if only for this instant, even if only in this place. She let her lips part and the breeze glided into her mouth, fresh on her tongue, full of stars. How did so much brightness fit in the night sky? How could so much ocean fit inside her? Who was she in this place?” ― Carolina De Robertis, from Cantoras

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Listening: The Music of Wayne Shorter (August 25, 1933 – March 2, 2023)

• Night Dreamer (Wayne Shorter, Lee Morgan, McCoy Tyner, Reggie Workman & Elvin Jones)

• Speak No Evil (Wayne Shorter, Freddie Hubbard, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter & Elvin Jones)

  

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Looking: The Art of Kay WalkingStick

Mary Gregory @MGregoryWriter

"Real success is making art your whole life." - Kay WalkingStick #womenartists

DesertDawn @LanoukArts

Kay WalkingStick New Mexico Desert

#WOMENSART @womensart1

Salt River Canyon, 2016 by Kay WalkingStick, landscape artist and a member of the Cherokee Nation #womensart

Artists of Colour @artistsofcolour

ETERNAL CHAOS / ETERNAL CALM, Kay WalkingStick, 1993

National Gallery of Art @ngadc

“We all see our Earth as a metaphor for ourselves…It is as archetypal a symbol as there is.”🌎 This concept has been a focus of the artistic practice of Kay WalkingStick, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, since she made the statement in the '90s. #NativeAmericanHeritageMonth

americanart @americanart

Renowned artist Kay WalkingStick took to painting early. At six, while driving with her family through the rolling hills of upstate NY, she looked out the window at the landscape and said, “Oh, I wish I had my brushes.” #BecauseOfHerStory Kay WalkingStick, “Two Women II,” 1973

Merrily Kerr @NewYorkArtTours

Kay WalkingStick’s paintings at Chelsea’s Hales Gallery overlay glorious landscapes with Native American design, speaking to the connectedness of Native histories and cultures and the land.

Belinda Tate @tatebe

HAPPY INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S DAY! YOU CAN DO ANYTHING! BE INSPIRED! North Rim Clouds (2016) by Kay WalkingStick, member of the Cherokee Nation, painting acknowledges the Havasupai Tribe

Peabody Essex Museum @peabodyessex

In “Hovenweep #331,” Kay WalkingStick adds abstract forms on the left side of the textured canvas to suggest the masonry structures built by the Ancestral Puebloan peoples in current-day southern Utah. See this work or yourself in “On This Ground: Being and Belonging."

Official Site of Kay WalkingStick

Kay WalkingStick - Works for Sale (via Artsy)

Kay WalkingStick at Hales Gallery

Kay WalkingStick at the Smithsonian American Art Museum

A Long Overdue Retrospective for Kay WalkingStick Dispels Native Art Stereotypes (via Smithsonian Magazine)

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Viewing: Ikiru (生きる, “To Live”) — directed & co-written by Akira Kurosawa, starring Takashi Shimura, and inspired by Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich

Watch via Criterion Channel. Or rent or stream via multiple platforms.

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Tasting: Momo Crepes (Tirana, Albania)

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To participate in our Best of 2022 Invitational, click here!

That’s it for this week! What are your reading, listening, looking, viewing and/or tasting recommendations?