Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture
Danton Walker’s 1955 novel, Danton’s Inferno: The Story of a Columnist and How He Grew is a memoir by Walker (1899-1960) about his time as a columnist for The New York Times. The book is similar to the Inferno in that it lists people with whom Walker worked throughout his career, sometimes condemning them.
Access Walker’s work for The New York Times here.
Contributed by Scott Reid
“SIGNAL is pleased to present Rachel Rossin’s ‘n=7 / The Wake in Heat of Collapse,’ a virtual reality simulation that employs the structure of side-scrolling gameplay to create an immersive, Oculus Rift-based experience.
“Descending into a 3-dimensional Dantesque underworld, the viewer navigates a landscape of hacked architectural and video game imagery, algorithmic collages generated from famous paintings (e.g. Guernica and Klimt’s The Kiss), corporate signage, browser logos and clippings from scenic destinations. These radiant environments provide participants with a window to sights unseen, and culminate with the experience of witnessing a crumbling staircase made of Susan Sontag’s ‘Against Interpretation.'” —Signal’s website
Click here to read about Rossin’s exhibit in The New York Times.
A recent street art project in Florence, called “L’arte sa nuotare”, or “Art Knows How to Swim”, features iconic figures wearing scuba masks. Among images like the Mona Lisa and Michelangelo’s David is a portrait of Dante. The works are by street artist “Blub.”
Contributed by Simone Marchesi
The Savannah College of Art and Design’s museum featured an exhibit called “The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists” which ran from October 16, 2014 to January 25, 2015.
“SCAD presents the U.S. premiere of ‘The Divine Comedy: Heaven, Purgatory and Hell Revisited by Contemporary African Artists.’ Curated by the internationally acclaimed Simon Njami, this monumental exhibition explores the thematic sequences of Dante Alighieri’s epic poem through works by more than 40 contemporary artists from 19 African countries as well as the African diaspora. [. . .]
“Through a variety of media, this exhibition demonstrates how concepts visited in Dante’s poem transcend Western traditions and resonate with diverse contemporary cultures, belief systems and political issues. Overall, the exhibition provides a probing examination of life, death and the continued power of art to express the unspoken and intangible.” —SCAD Museum of Art
The exhibition was later featured at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art, running from April 8 to August 2, 2015. The large exhibition was on display in the entrance pavilion, stairwells, and all three floors of the museum. See the National Museum of African Art’s exhibition page here, and Elena Goukassian’s review in the Washington Post here (April 16, 2015).
Italian artist Davide Bedoni creates images of fine art as if sponsored by Nike.
“The Ghosts of Paolo and Francesca Appear to Dante and Virgil” by Ary Scheffer (1835): 
“Dante and Virgil in Hell” by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1850): 
Click here to view the images on tumblr.
“The Hipsters in Hell storyline is the perfect way to end the series. Leo dies, and a distraught Nike charges through the gates of Hell to find him. What they discover is patterned after Dante’s Inferno, only specialized for hipsters. There are punishments for wearing vintage tees that were bought new and at full price — then lying that they were picked up at a thrift shop. Women who got those mustache tattoos on their fingers get tossed in a mud pit with the men for having ironic mustaches.” –Larry Cruz, “I was into Hipsters before it got a book,” Comic Book Resources, May 21, 2014
“There is an operatic quality coursing through the work of the Second Empire sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-75), the subject of a powerful exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, through May 26, that inspired a concert of French vocal music at the museum on Saturday evening.
“Look at Carpeaux’s best-known masterpiece, the wrenching ‘Ugolino and his Sons’ based on Dante: Here are both epic scope and intimate detail (those clenched feet!), the combination that 19th-century opera specialized in. It’s no surprise, given the adroitness of his balance between exuberance and restraint, that he was asked to design a relief for the exterior of Charles Garnier’s opera house in Paris. The result, a swirling mass of figures called ‘La Danse,’ fairly explodes off the facade.” –Zachary Woolfe, “A Circle of Composers, Intimate and Epic,” The New York Times, April 29, 2014
“The Legend of Mike Smith is a dynamic multi-platform project combining Hip Hop, Dance, Jazz and visual art to explore the permutations of the Seven Deadly sins in modern culture. Written by Soweto Kinch, and directed by Jonzi D it follows the travails of Mike Smith, a young artist as he struggles to navigate his way through a normal day whilst being possessed by other worldly desires and vices. [. . .] The work compares a fantastical world of sin in Catholic texts with a licentious often encouraging attitude towards these things in modern society. Rather than the remote Dantean world of the Inferno, vice often becomes virtue when placed in our contemporary market place, the music industry or political system.” —Soweto Kinch, The Legend of Mike Smith, 2013
“This new edition of Dante’s great work brings together for the first time the three volumes of the Hollander translation with the art of internationally recognized illustrator Monika Beisner. Beisner has created 100 detailed paintings for this publication, making her the first woman credited with illustrating the entire work. The set begins with an introduction by Carlo Carena and a foreword by Academy Award winning actor Roberto Benigni, known for his lectures and dramatic recitations of Dante’s poem. The third volume ends with an appreciation by writer and cultural historian Marina Warner entitled ‘Monika Beisner: Illuminating Stories.’ Warner writes, ‘The hundred miniatures took her seven years to complete and the achievement is dazzling. The present volume reproduces her work full-size, … with no strokes or drawing visible, but a pure glow of dense color, applied with brushes so small they consist of a half-dozen sable hairs.… Monika Beisner has been scrupulously loyal to Dante’s text, rendering gesture and position as described in the poem as well as its unsurpassed precision of spatial, geographical and temporal coordinates.’ ” [. . .] —Oak Knoll Press
