Pop Culture Roundup: This Week

“The Keeper,” the New Museum’s summer show, a four-floor exhibit that opens on Wednesday, July 20, is a museum blockbuster of a different kind.

With over 4,000 objects representing more than two dozen collectors, including contemporary artists making art conceived by collecting, Massimiliano Gioni, the museum’s artistic director, and his team of curators have mounted a remarkable series of object lessons about what it means to “keep,” the relationship of possession to loss, the madness inherent in love, and the undeniable importance of the individual’s voice in recording and interpreting history and its sweep.

“The Keeper” is its own cultural crowdsourcing, including Korbinian Aigner’s postcard-size still lifes of fruit, painted by Mr. Aigner, a German Catholic priest, while interred in the Dachau concentration camp, where he cultivated apples until his escape. Also on view are 3,000 photographs of people with their teddy bears, assembled by Ydessa Hendeles, a contemporary Canadian artist.

At age 18, Francis O’Neill, an aspiring young painter, went on a train trip around Europe and was struck by the Rembrandt masterpieces he saw in galleries. Like many before him, he was astounded by Rembrandt’s technical accuracy.

“I thought, ‘What sort of magic has this guy imbued in himself?’ ” said Mr. O’Neill, who today produces art and teaches from his studio in Oxford, England.

Now, Mr. O’Neill thinks he’s found an answer to that question — and he says it has more to do with optics than magic.

In a paper published Wednesday in the Journal of Optics, Mr. O’Neill lays out a theory that Rembrandt set up flat and concave mirrors to project his subjects — including himself — onto surfaces before painting or etching them.

Paul Gardullo lifted an iron ballast from a Portuguese slave ship that sank in 1794 out of a crate Wednesday morning and hefted its weight in his hands.

“Anytime I come into contact with the objects from the São José, it’s an incredibly moving experience,” said the curator of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Artifacts from the São José–Paquete de Africa arrived Wednesday at the museum’s storage facility after a research-and-recovery project that’s been going on since 2010.

The long, rectangular ballasts, used to hold the ship down, offset the weight of its human cargo and kept it balanced in the water as it carried 512 enslaved Mozambicans across the sea.

Paul Begala told People magazine that John F. Kennedy Jr. sent Bill Clinton a fax during the height of the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

It read: “Dear Mr. President, I sat under that desk – there’s barely room for a 3-year-old, much less a 21-year-old intern. Cheers, J.K.”

Said Begala: “I showed the President and he laughed his butt off. It was so gutsy. And he was the perfect person to bring a little levity.”

Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign is hosting a special performance of the Broadway smash hit "Hamilton: An American Musical" as part of a joint fund-raiser for the campaign and the Democratic National Committee.

The campaign has rented every seat in the 1,300-seat Richard Rogers Theatre for the extra performance, according to a campaign aide. Tickets to the July 12 show range from $2,700 for general admission to $100,000, which includes two premium seats with the candidate and an invitation to the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia.

“Grover Cleveland, Again!,” an oversize reference book by the renowned documentarian Ken Burns, energetically works its way through the American presidents up to Obama. It offers Burns’s trademarked accessible, conversational style of history. Each president gets a two-page spread that often prods readers to picture themselves in his shoes. “Ever wonder what you’ll be when you grow up? How about a writer, inventor, architect, scientist, botanist, philosopher, musician, historian and president of the United States?” begins the entry on Jefferson. Burns is forthright about his opinions, letting us know where he sees greatness and mediocrity. When people ask him his favorite, “I usually say Abraham Lincoln,” he offers.

Burns says he wrote the book because he used to play a memory game with his own daughters that worked through the presidents in order — Cleveland had to come twice and so became a joke among them — and he promised them 30 years ago he’d do a kids’ book about the presidents. Unfortunately, his gee-whiz tone can seem like someone who hasn’t talked much to an actual child in some time, and he is oddly squeamish about the darker presidential facts, considering his middle-grade audience. There is no mention that Washington was a slaveholder, for example, and he lists all the children of each president but leaves out Jefferson’s children with his slave Sally Hemings (one of whom, James Madison Hemings, is the subject of a picture book coming out this fall, intended for even younger readers). There is a hopelessly vague moment in the spread on Bill Clinton, whom he presents as a successful chief executive — “The things people care about most got better” — whose presidency was marred only when he was “accused of lying about something in his personal life.”

But these quibbles aside, with Kelley’s sweeping art setting a scene for each president and sidebars offering biographical facts along with a couple of telling or simply amusing anecdotes (Taft was the first president to throw out the ball on opening day of the baseball season; when Nixon was a teenager, he had to wake up at 4 a.m. to drive to buy vegetables for his family’s grocery store), the effect of the whole is stirring enough to stoke and satisfy curiosity.