Friday Links: saving a giant fiberglass chicken–and other important stuff

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:

• “Use your blood to paint,” Yoko Ono wrote in her book Grapefruit. “Keep painting until you faint. Keep painting until you die.” Here’s a list of artists who have almost done just that.
• We all have things that keep us up at night. For this writer, it’s the possibility that Michelangelo’s David might have a fatal flaw.
• And for this designer, it was saving a 22-foot-tall fiberglass chicken.
• On the photographs of Lucia Moholy, the unsung heroine of the Bauhaus.
• Yet another reason we love the New York Public Library: Send them your favorite emoji and they’ll send you back a matching image from their archives.
• We might be living in the digital era, but art catalogs are not going away anytime soon–in fact, they’re thriving.
• We knew this blog post was for us from the moment we read its cautionary preface: “WARNING: this blog entry contains excerpts from a talk I gave at the British Museum called ‘Ancient Romans & their Poo’.”