From an early age, Donnelly was known for marking buildings in New Jersey and Manhattan with 'KAWS', a tag he chose because he liked the way the letters looked together. He soon moved on from this simple tag, however, and developed a unique style that involved adding cartoon-like figures to bus-shelter advertisements. https://image.nostr.build/09231f7af80cd67cd63725adb85a4daf4f6d26c9f200a95a15674fa2405a397f.jpg
Oh Wonder created an album by releasing one song a month and never expected it to be a full album:
Starting in September 2014, Anthony West and Josephine Vander Gucht wrote, recorded and released one song on the first of every month for a year on Soundcloud. They have described the creation and release of their debut album as nontraditional, stating that the album consists of fifteen singles and was never conceived as an entire record. The debut album consisted of all thirteen songs, as well as two additional songs, “Without You” and “Plans”.
Another example is Ray LaMontagne, a shoe-factory worker from Lewiston, Maine, who at age twenty-two had an epiphany that he should become a singer-songwriter. LaMontagne had little musical experience and less money, so he took a simple approach to learning: he bought dozens of used albums by Stephen Stills, Otis Redding, Al Green, Etta James, and Ray Charles, and holed up in his apartment.
For two years. Every day he spent hours training himself by singing along to the records. LaMontagne’s friends assumed he had left town; his neighbors assumed he was either insane or had locked himself inside a musical time capsule—which, in a sense, he had. “I would sing and sing, and hurt and hurt, because I knew I wasn’t doing it right,” LaMontagne said. “It took a long time, but I finally learned to sing from the gut.”
Eight years after he started, LaMontagne’s first album sold nearly half a million copies. The main reason was his soulful voice, which Rolling Stone said sounded like church, and which other listeners mistook for that of Otis Redding and Al Green. LaMontagne’s voice was a gift, it was agreed. But the real gift, perhaps, was the practice strategy he used to build that voice.
In the early morning hours of March 18, 1990, 13 works of art were stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Guards admitted two men posing as police officers responding to a disturbance call, and the thieves bound the guards and looted the museum over the next hour. The case is unsolved; no arrests have been made, and no works have been recovered. The stolen works have been valued at hundreds of millions of dollars by the FBI and art dealers. The museum offers a $10 million reward for information leading to the art's recovery, the largest bounty ever offered by a private institution…
…Experts were puzzled by the choice of artwork, as more valuable works were left untouched. As the collection and its layout are intended to be permanent, empty frames remain hanging both in homage to the missing works and as placeholders for their return.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isabella_Stewart_Gardner_Museum_theft
Legend has it that Picasso was at a Paris market when an admirer approached and asked if he could do a quick sketch on a paper napkin for her. Picasso politely agreed, promptly created a drawing, and handed back the napkin — but not before asking for a million Francs.
The lady was shocked: “How can you ask for so much? It took you five minutes to draw this!”
“No”, Picasso replied, “It took me 40 years to draw this in five minutes.”
“If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.”
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Interesting: The Cato Institute was named after the Cato Letters which were written in the 18th Century using the pseudonym Cato for Cato the Younger’s opposition to Julius Cesar. Cato the Younger is the great grandson of Cato the Elder.
There’s a passage in “How Innovation Works” by Matt Ridley talking about how we have ‘bred’ the human race to be more docile over the past 10,000 years in order to live in close quarters. It might also explain our proclivity to being ruled.
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