MUSEYON BOOKS Smart City Guides for Travel, History, Art and Film Lovers

  “Star Wars”, “Blade Runner”, “Avatar”, “The Terminator”, “The Matrix”, “2001”—if you had to count down the list of blockbusters and other films both good and bad that were influenced by Fritz Lang’s 1927 black-and-white silent masterpiece, “Metropolis”, you’d be in for a long night. And that’s before you turned your attention to the video games, comic books, novels, musicians, ... Read More »

  With only 37 works in existence, it’s hard to find a Vermeer, let alone three of them, in any one place. Only five museums can boast that—the Frick (3), the Met (5), the Mauritshuis (3), the Rijksmuseum (4), and the National Gallery of Art in D.C. (4). By the way, in case you weren’t counting, that makes New York ... Read More »

  As seen yesterday, even if you manage to find the vantage from which a painter sketched a real-life scene, history, changes in perspective, and the artist’s own agenda might mean you’ll never actually be able to see the world from that same perspective. Still, it’s sure fun to try. One of the more interesting examples of pairing art with ... Read More »

  There was a long, snaking line of children, little old ladies, and art lovers of all ages as The Folkwang Museum in Essen, Germany reopened earlier this week after a three-year restoration and expansion project whose design was spearheaded by British architect, David Chipperfield. The little old ladies and kids were, of course, just the right crowd to help ... Read More »

In Vienna, Austria, today, the Kunsthistorisches Museum unveiled a masterful restoration of Joannes Vermeer’s legendary masterwork, “The Art of Painting” (c.1666, left). More than just an example of one of time’s greatest painters portraying the practice of his own craft while at the height of his powers, the work is a political and historical hot potato—a national treasure of a ... Read More »

When Istanbul was announced as the 2010 European Capital of Culture, we were excited, but we weren’t exactly surprised. After all, we included the city in two of our guides–Film+Travel Europe and Music+Travel Worldwide.   There’s a reason the city is so full of culture–spanning the Bosphorus, it has one foot in Europe and the other firmly rooted in Asia. ... Read More »

The Sundance Film Festival may just be the best part of winter. Every January the international film community heads to Park City Utah for 10 days of screenings, swag and schmoozing. But this year the festival promises to get back to its roots with a season of “renewed rebellion.” While we can’t vouch for that yet, the festival announced its ... Read More »

  In the days after punk, a new sound grew out of Europe–Coldwave, a chilly counterpoint to the waining disco scene. Inspired by post-punk act Joy Division and industrial music, these new bands opted for a more minimal take on pop music, with haunting vocals, metronomic synthesizers and a DIY aesthetic. The scene stayed largely undergound and mostly in France, ... Read More »