In Bharatanatyam, the dancer’s hand gestures work together with movements of the head, the neck and the eyes. In her history of the dance, Dance of Freedom, the dancer Leela Samson writes: “The rasika, or viewer, receives this as they see fit.”
Some viewers, she adds, “do not receive the meaning at all.” Others receive a meaning that neither the poet nor the dancer intended.
A father ordered an enlarged portrait of his dead daughter, painted from a small picture. He testified that if the portrait “was not perfectly satisfactory to me in every particular, I need not take it or pay for it.” He refused the finished work and would not look at a revised version until the trial. The artist sued.
In 1878 the Michigan Supreme Court ruled for the father in Gibson v. Cranage. “It may be that the picture was an excellent one and that the defendant ought to have been satisfied with it …,” the court wrote. “Artists or third parties might consider a portrait an excellent one, and yet it prove very unsatisfactory …” Under the agreement the father “was the only person who had the right to decide this question.”
Courts keep this personal test for matters of taste, such as a portrait. Where a satisfaction clause concerns “commercial quality, operative fitness, or mechanical utility,” they generally presume that the parties meant what a reasonable person would accept.
Framed motivational posters hung in many American offices in the 1980s and 1990s. Many came from Successories, the company of the Chicago-area entrepreneur Mac Anderson. Its customers included many Fortune 500 firms, schools and athletic organizations.
Despair, Inc., founded in 1998 and now based in Austin, Texas, sells parodies called Demotivators. They copied the look of the originals. One reads: “Meetings. None of us is as dumb as all of us.”
In 1942 the town of Arlington, Vermont, held a town meeting on plans for a new school. Jim Edgerton was the lone dissenter. He stood and stated his objections. Norman Rockwell lived nearby. He watched the others listen to Edgerton with respect.
Rockwell painted the scene as Freedom of Speech. It appeared in The Saturday Evening Post on February 20, 1943. In the painting a young workman stands to speak. Rockwell’s neighbor Carl Hess posed for him.
Broadway Direct advises theatergoers to arrive at least 20 minutes before the start time on their ticket. “Some theatres will not seat latecomers at all.” Others “will wait for a suitable break in the performance” before latecomers are taken to their seats.
From 15 August to 30 September 1923 the Bauhaus held an exhibition in Weimar, at the height of the inflation. Walter Gropius opened it with a lecture called Kunst und Technik – eine neue Einheit, art and technology, a new unity. The largest exhibit was the model house Am Horn.
From 1922 the Bauhaus potters had developed prototypes that factories could produce. The exhibition lost money, but it drew wide attention in Germany and abroad.
In 1924 Wilhelm Wagenfeld first presented a table lamp, then called MT8. At the time it was not made in large numbers, and no dealer wanted to sell it. Since 1980 the firm Tecnolumen in Bremen has made it, as the only manufacturer authorized by Wagenfeld and his family.
The lamp even made it into the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It is also one of the most often counterfeited design objects of all.
About 1,260 works of art were found in Cornelius Gurlitt’s apartment in Munich. About 240 more were found in his house in Salzburg in February 2014. The federal culture commissioner, Monika Grütters, wanted the origin of every picture in the collection cleared up.
A task force worked on the provenance for about two years, at a cost of about 1.9 million euros. It identified works by Liebermann, Matisse, Spitzweg, Menzel and Pissarro as art looted by the Nazis.
After two years of research, only five works had been clearly identified as looted art.
In German public theaters, the week of the whole ensemble is fixed in advance. Since 1 August 2025, the collective agreement for stage artists, the NV Bühne, requires the Wochenplan, the weekly plan, to be published inside the theater by 2 p.m. on the Thursday of the week before. A non-binding preview of the following week is attached. Each member must inform himself about the plan. Most changes must be announced by 2 p.m. on the day before. Later ones need the member’s consent. A rehearsal or performance can be canceled at any time.
Meissen porcelain has carried crossed swords, taken from the arms of the Saxon electors, since the 1720s. The mark was meant to identify the porcelain beyond doubt. The manufactory dates the idea to a proposal of November 8, 1722, and calls the swords the oldest trademark in Europe still in continuous use. The German Patent and Trade Mark Office is more careful. It says that other marks were still common until 1730, and it calls the swords eine der ältesten, wenn nicht gar die älteste deutsche Marke, one of the oldest, if not the oldest, German trademark.