Needlework Beauty

Cat and Lantern , Kobayashi Kiyochika (1886, Japan) The world is so old and massive that it seems almost impossible to narrow art history to the Western World. However old and big the world may be, it’s too big to discuss each culture’s art history. Here, I’ll narrow it down a little bit to Japan. Specifically, let’s talk about the Meiji Era, which lasted from 1868 to 1912. Different art styles encapsulated the Meiji era, and increased contact with the Western World allowed artists to form friendships and study under the “Masters” of Europe and the Americas. Take, for instance, Kobayashi Kiyochika’s Cat and Lantern . Compared to other woodblock prints from previous eras, this was indeed one of the first of its kind in Japan. The attention to detail on the cat’s fur, alongside the shadows and highlights from the lantern, encapsulates the playfulness and whimsy of this tiny creature. We see this typical cat-and-mouse scene, and unlike the dramaticism of Western art at the time, this exud

While video games started appearing in the middle of the 20th century, one could argue that they didn’t become massively popular until the arcade craze of the 80s. Since the first video games, this new genre of art has taken the world by storm. According to the Academy of Animated Art, in 2023 alone, around 3.03 billion people worldwide play video games, or around 38% of the world’s total population. Though the craze for video games didn’t truly begin until the 1980s, the Supreme Court, only recently in 2012, ruled that video games can be considered a form of art. Throughout the creation of video games, there have been around eight distinctive generations of household consoles. For the sake of continuity, I won’t get into the heavy details of arcade machines and will instead focus on the consoles people had in their homes. Consoles started appearing around the end of the 1970s, mainly with the Atari 2600, which was released in 1977 for US families. Though Atari sold a total of 30 mi