This lineage from engineering study to technical illustration eventually reached Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke. In the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, Space Station V serves as the cinematic successor to the Wohnrad. The film's rotating station follows the exact design logic Potočnik established: a wheel-shaped structure spinning to provide gravity for passengers, complete with observation decks and labs.

Playing The Blue Danube while seated backwards; tormenting a page-turner by tugging on a tie; spending an absurd amount of time adjusting the bench before playing a note — all of these routines worked because he treated trivial actions with the seriousness usually reserved for a difficult passage, allowing classical decorum itself to become comic material.

As a portrait painter, Alice Neel preferred to dissect her subjects, leaving flattery to others. Her work lives at the intersection of psychological autopsy anHer work lives at the intersection of psychological autopsy and radical empathy — a combination that makes her portraits feel simultaneously clinical and intimate; she painted revelation — what her sitters tried, often unconsciously, to conceal.