Friday Links: Star Wars, Freud, and the gold toilet

Photographer: Robert Howlett | Isambard Kingdom Brunel, builder of the Great Eastern | ca. 1857-1858 | George Eastman House, eastmanhouse.org

Some stories we’ve been reading this week:

• Another great way to justify our nerdy interests as scholarly: an argument that the most recent Star Wars movie is a classical epic in the same relation to the original trilogy as Virgil’s Aeneid is to Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. (Btw, you did see our links about Game of Thrones from two weeks ago, didn’t you?)
• We’ve all experienced difficulties finding a good plumber, so surely we can all relate to the Guggenheim Museum when they say that serious technical issues are holding up production of Maurizio Cattelan’s 18-karat gold toilet.
• Hieronymus Bosch’s picture of Saint Wilgefortis is not as strange as the works he’s best known for, but that’s not saying much. It depicts a bearded woman being crucified.

• The babies in paintings of Christ’s infancy rarely look like babies in real life. Perhaps that’s why we might not have noticed another remarkable motif that often occurs in these works.
• Julia Cameron wrote The Artist’s Way to help readers reject self-doubt and pursue creative activity not as a profession but as a form of therapy. How is that faring in our age of self-promotion?
• Sigmund Freud has largely fallen from favor in his own field, but today’s artists remain fascinated by his work. Two academics and an artist explain why.
• Earlier this week, Amy Sedaris, author of I Like You: Hospitality Under the Influence, hosted a motel-art giveaway. We hate ourselves for missing it.
• And a question we haven’t asked but we’re glad someone did: Why are so many official city flags so ugly?