Old black water, keep on rollin...

thenewenlightenmentage:

Hey, Who Ripped Open a Hole in the Universe?

This eerie patch of blackness in the middle of a busy star cluster may look like a rather misshapen black hole, but it’s actually something even stranger. It’s also quite possibly the loneliest, darkest, coldest place in the entire cosmos.

This is Barnard 68, and it’s what’s known as a dark molecular cloud. Basically, the dust and gas that makes up Barnard 68 is so tightly packed together that it blocks out all the light behind it. The result might look like some alien civilization tore apart the fabric of the universe and opening up a gateway to the howling void, but thankfully - or unfortunately, I guess, depending on how you feel about the howling void - it’s just gas. Make that a lot of gas.

Here’s some additional info on this particular patch of darkness:

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Wright’s Key project for Ellis Island in 1959, New York Harbor

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cavetocanvas:

Alfred Stieglitz, Gable and Apples, 1922

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

When Stieglitz sent this print to Georgia O’Keeffe at Christmas in 1939, he did not need to remind her of the moment of its making. The couple, not yet married, were together at the farm at Lake George, New York. The upward peak of the gable and the tantalizingly incumbent apples joined the symbolic national fruit with Stieglitz’s sexuality and his search for an American art. Upon seeing the photograph, the poet Hart Crane exclaimed to Stieglitz, “That is it, you have captured life.”

cavetocanvas:

Alfred Stieglitz, Spiritual America, 1923

From the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

In the decade leading up to the Great Depression, American modernism was a highly contested concept. Stieglitz, perhaps justifiably, considered himself one of the few qualified to dictate its course, having surrounded himself with a group of like-minded and devoted artists, critics, and writers whom he directed in an almost shamanistic fashion. Spirituality loomed large in his vision of American identity, but he was disheartened and offended with what he viewed as a pent-up, materialist, and culturally bankrupt American way. In a rare attempt at ironic commentary, Stieglitz produced this picture of a harnessed, castrated horse—a pure representation of eradicated sexual prowess and restrained muscular energy—and labeled it Spiritual America. In effect, he suggested that America was lacking in spirit by reinterpreting the horse, a traditional American symbol of unstoppable force, as a trussed-up pattern of slick geometry.