One of the three current exhibitions at CerModern is Dilek Yalçın’s ‘Innocence of Objects’ (‘Nesnelerin Masumiyeti’). Utilizing the lack of urgency of the semester’s first week, I have had a look at the exhibition and took on the responsibility of putting forth an interpretation that you – an interested viewer – may later agree with
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The events of the recently-released movie ‘The King’s Man’ unravels during the First World War, making it a prequel of the previous two films. This action-filled espionage drama pays homage to one of the earliest and most popular authors that depicts the war without the farce of romanticizing – Erich Maria Remarque. Namely, the trench
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This article is a review of ‘The Autumn of the Patriarch’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. As the title suggests, the review focuses on the author’s peculiar stylistic choice on punctuation. But let us first very briefly review the contents of the book. ‘The Autumn of the Patriarch’ was my choice of self-introduction to Latin American
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The first ever article I have written for Gazetebilkent was about Maurizio Cattelan – a provocative Italian artist with provocative and ironic social commentary. This one is about the ones that are very much alike: Italian, ironic, provocative.     To start simple and short, let us have a look at Paolo Grassino’s 2011 installation titled
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One of the exhibits in CerModern’s Ipekyolu exhibition, which presents Italian contemporary art, was a photograph by Mimmo Jodice titled “Vedute di Napoli, Opera 29” (in Turkish “Napoli Manzaraları, Çalışma 29”). In order to dig deeper into the meaning of the title (which is a term I made up and not a real one), some
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One of the highlights of my recent vacation in Istanbul was the visit to the Museum of Modern Art. Several artworks of various kinds – paintings, installations, videos – were particularly thought-provoking for me. Therefore, my next several articles are going to consist of those “provoked thoughts” about the Istanbul Museum of Modern Art. This
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No, this one is not about the streets per se. This article is about the representations of Turkish streets by two different artists – Eren Eyüboğlu and İhsan Cemal Karaburçak – through their paintings “Beylerbeyi” (1970) and “Abstract Landscape” (1964), respectively. A good way to start the comparison would be to compare the artists themselves.
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Anyone who has frequently searched “chill music to study” on YouTube must have come across a tracklist with “Sovietwave” in its title. What is it? Where does it come from? What characteristics make it special?     Briefly, Sovietwave can be called a genre of music dedicated to the Soviet aesthetic. However, it has nothing political
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How I Met Your Mother and Friends are TV shows about inspiring but challenging paths that everyone has to undergo in order to find the one true love. Both shows are supposed to inspire one to go look for “the one”. Immediately. That one last word adds a sinister tone to the message, doesn’t it?
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Well, not all of his tricks, just the ones I have noticed in ‘Crime and Punishment’. Although I have read ‘Notes From Underground’ and ‘Idiot’, only while reading ‘Crime and Punishment’ did I specifically pay attention to the writing technique that I could probably steal for my own creative writing projects. There have been a
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Because the movie ‘Requiem for a Dream’ was recommended to me by a person once very dear to me, and because that person is not around anymore, I have been postponing watching it for almost a year. But I finally did, and here is what the movie is all about.     For anyone who has
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Abstract paintings are confusing. More so are abstract expressionist ones. The whole movement can be characterized as the one that aims to use paint solely to express strong emotions (hence expressionism) in the purest form understandable for everyone (hence abstract). Unfortunately, the movement turned out too abstract and thus became an intellectual entertainment for an
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Reading “I am a Strange Loop” by Douglas Hofstadter sure has not been easy. After all, the book is about computational neuroscience (even though in a very pop-science manner). If there is one thing I can say that I really understood, that would be the concept of emergent phenomena. Now this article/essay is my attempt
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An entire book can be written on the differences of novelistic and epic discourse. However, in the scope of this short article, only short characteristics that are needed to convey the point will be outlined. So, here we go. When we say epic, we generally mean some epic hero in some distant glorious past going
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Language. We all use it but we don’t take time to think about it. I did, though. In the following article, I will try to bring out several perspectives on language and put forth some ideas about it.      First, one can view as a medium, or even barrier, between the mind and reality. What
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For the sake of this article, the entire history of art will be arbitrarily divided into three periods: pre-camera period, camera dominance, and repost-modernism. As it can be seen, the periods have been divided according to technological changes influencing the (re)production of media. The name for the last period I borrowed from the title of
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Although it may be around twenty years too late to do so, I would still like to analyze how Eminem viewed the US of A back in the early 2000’s. However, some parts of the songs that are to be analyzed are still very relevant, because they are concerned with the effects of rap culture
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‘Believing Is Seeing’ is a 1995 book by Mary Anne Staniszewski that, and I am going to state this outright, I did not like. One of the reasons is that it is hard to even define what this book is. Art history book? Not quite. Maybe art theory? Still does not qualify as one. A
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In the following article I am going to define three seemingly unrelated (or very loosely related) terms and demonstrate how they are, at their core, the same idea. The only difference between them is how broad they are and (spoiler alert) that one of them is so broad it is pushed to an impossible extreme.
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There is something quite annoying in art discussion communities: finding “deep” meanings that were obviously not intended to be there. Sure, one can open a discussion about what is meaning, how it arises, and whether the whole power of attributing meanings is left to the author’s intentions or viewers can also participate in the process.
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One does need no proof to know that Ernest Hemingway was one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century. One needs no proof but I will still try to provide some, for as an amateur writer I want to find the key, the secret ingredient for Hemingway’s success. I have recently finished
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My twenty-seventh article I have symbolically chosen to open with the story of  notorious 27 Club. Although the majority is probably aware of what it is (that majority can skip to the next paragraph), I’d like to define it for the sake of coherence. 27 Club is a non-official list of various artists who died
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You ordered a shelf with an unpronounceable Swedish name and it just arrived. You open the box, stare at the instructions for a while and start to assemble. After several more long gazes into the manual during the process of assembly, you finally finish the work. There it is – your creation, your little masterpiece
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Since the early years of the Catholic practice there existed a practice called “indulgence” (Latin: indulgentia). Basically, its premise was that, through certain acts, a person could reduce their punishment in the afterlife (like hell with slightly reduced hell or something). Those actions first included repetition of a certain prayers or visitation of holy places.
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Eternal silence broken by the flash of all creation – the Big Bang. Then the first bacteria and fish developed, in silence. Then those first beings evolved into apes, still in silence. Finally, one of those apes bent wind in the name of art and created the first known melodies somewhere in the caves of
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There, no doubt, have been written numerous articles on Magritte’s ‘The Treachery of Images’; this is not one of them. The following article, roughly speaking, is on implications, on the things written between the lines – some obvious and some not. First, I am going to discuss the name of the scientific thought dealing with
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Despite being so close and so big, Russia seems to be completely unknown for most of the Asians and Europeans. As someone who had a chance to grow up on Soviet heritage, I will try to share my knowledge of the Russian culture within the following articles. For the sake of chronological coherence and visible
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Noam Chomsky is a famous linguist and a political philosopher. He is best known for the common idea he carried out through most if not all of his political writings – anarchism. In Chomsky’s book ‘On Anarchism’, which I have recently read, the author opens with acknowledging and debunking the most common misunderstandings about anarchism,
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Tolstoy had very controversial views on art which are still debated among art theorists. Briefly, he claimed that art should deliver feelings of an artist, and it must do so in a way understandable and accessible to everyone. From this Tolstoy drew conclusions that art should not be institutionalized, that artists should not use complex
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Edward Hopper was an American realist painter of the early and mid-twentieth century. He is most famous for his oil portraits. In the following article I am going to discuss my favorite painting by Hopper – ‘Nighthawks’ – and why the feeling it radiates is so similar to the one most of us might have
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Beloved mainly for its violence, the movie Purge describes the US in the near future. Its plot revolves around a key concept, a law: once a year people are free to commit all types of crimes. Although the movie series is not very successful (because of really poor plot development and nothing to offer except
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Psychoanalytic theory can be applied not only to interpret individual’s weird dreams and fantasies but also the ones of societies. It is famously said that cinema is a dream factory, and those dreams are the ones of society. Although those can be endlessly interpreted, the following article will consider the issue much deeper and much
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With the emergence of Netflix and Spotify, the content created by the artists became more available than ever. Now having a subscription to these services provides us with the experience of enjoying our favorite artists without leaving the living room for the price cheaper than a single ticket to cinema or concert. Then we go
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What are they going to think? Do I appear happy and do I make a good impression? If not, they are going to rate me badly on social media, it will ruin my image; I better smile and be nice. Let’s look at the page of the new person I just met. Are these thoughts
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The following article is going to propose a way of eternal being. But first, I would have to exclude the most famous and the easiest alternative: the notion of soul. For the purpose of this article, I am going to eliminate the possibility of existence of soul and, consequently, the afterlife. With this assumed certainty
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In an unexplainable impulse of nostalgic feelings, this weekend I watched Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Briefly, it is a 1986 movie about a high school boy that has decided to skip school and have a day off with his girlfriend and best friend. Several minutes into the movie I have felt a rush of all
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The book I have read most recently, Art Theory, A Very Short Introduction by Cynthia Freeland, has pointed out something that I have not really thought about before: there are no known women artists. How many people can name female equivalents of Van Gogh, Picasso, Michelangelo, or DaVinci. In other words, female artists are not
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Recently I have watched the last (available on Netflix, at least) season of the show South Park. This article is going to be about episode 6 and 7 of season 22. Of course, spoilers ahead. Episode six starts with a gruesome attack by a wild creature. Investigation by the main characters reveals that the creature
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Long essays, even research papers, can be written on philosophical aspects of a popular TV show Rick and Morty. I, however, want to concentrate on protagonists’ take on existentialism and a way of life Albert Camus in his essay described as Don Juanism.  The sudden deep quote by Morty that I used l for this
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The relationship of music and drug usage dates back to the early 1900’s. First open acknowledgement of usage of cannabis was done by jazz musicians. Most of them still show up on documentaries and confess that cannabis made them more creative while causing no health related issues. Later, the rappers shared the same stance. It
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I came across this painting right after reading The Myth of Sisyphus. It was painted by Pablo Picasso during his blue period between 1901 and 1904 (the name of that period, obviously, comes from an excessive use of blue color). The Old Guitarist was painted in 1903, after Picasso’s close friend committed suicide. Also, the
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Having recently read The Myth Of Sisyphus, I have decided to make a short series about the philosophy it suggests and how it is reflected in art. The author of the book – Albert Camus – was born as an in Algiers in a working class family. Having spent his early years in North Africa,
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Several months back I stumbled upon a Youtube channel called exurb1a. Little did I know that this exact channel would be the cause of my existential dread and a source of a good laugh about it.  I’d like to make a small disclaimer before going on about his videos and books: there is an ongoing
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Gökhan Tüfekçi, better known as Karagözüktü Kaptan, was born in 1988 and now is a street artist in Ankara with a very distinguishable style.The style can be described as an interesting mixture of traditional miniature and modern pop-art. I have been following his artworks for several months, and recently messaged him about having an interview. 
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Refik Anadol is an innovative artist who was born in Istanbul in 1985. He has a bachelor’s degree in Photography and Video, as well as a master of Media Arts degree from University of California and a master of Visual Communication Design degree from Istanbul Bilgi University. As it can be seen, his degrees are
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Nihilist (n.): represents a philosophy of negation of all forms of aestheticism; advocates utilitarianism and scientific rationalism, entirely rejects classical philosophical systems. That is the definition of nihilist by Encyclopædia Britannica. Within the following paragraphs I am going to try to defend a much simpler one: nihilist – someone that Nietzsche is not.  German philosopher
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As art went from baroque to cubism, it is natural to not understand what the painting is about at all. In the following step by step guide I will try to make the process of understanding a Picasso painting easier, using Guernica as an example. Step 1: First impression. What do you feel the first
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Francisco de Goya is one of the most prominent Spanish artists of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. All of his early works carry some “rococo style” style in them, meaning that they had bright colors, were “academical”, looked theatrically aesthetic and had some playfulness. Also, Goya painted the baroque style portraits for royalty,
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Özet: İtalyan sanatçı Maurizio Cattelan’ın 2019 senesinde sunduğu Comedian adlı sanat eserin duvara yapıştırılmış bir muzdan fazlası olduğunu iddia ediyorum. “Sanat eseri nedir?” sorusu 20. Yüzyılın Dada hareketiyle ortaya çıkmasından beri tartışmaya açıktır ve Comedian  bu soruyu bize bir kere daha soruyor. Aynı zamanda, sanatın belli bir açıklaması ve standardı olmalı mı yoksa onların olmaması
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