Edward Gorey “was very breezy about his opinions,” tossing them off in an artless manner, Peter Anastos says. “He just sat back and proclaimed evident truths about the company from a lofty cloud.” He had a flair for the bitchy bon mot, dubbing Suzanne Farrell and Peter Martins, neither of whom he could abide, “the world’s tallest albino asparagus.” Asked about the moldy chestnuts of the classical repertoire, he sniffed, “Les sylphides? Where they’re all looking for their contact lenses?” That said, his pronouncements were never mean spirited.
Author: Douglas McLennan
How Architectural Digest Documented Conspicuous Wealth
Si Newhouse had apprehended the seismic shift then afoot in the upper-income levels of American taste—away from the discreet cultivation of East Coast grandees like the Rockefellers and Mellons (which I’ve called stealth wealth), and toward the unabashed display of new money that characterized the Reagan Revolution, especially on the West Coast and across the Sun Belt, where the operative attitude was “If you’ve got it, flaunt it.” And no magazine reflected that change more accurately than Architectural Digest.
Virtual Art – Seeing The World As Artists Imagine It Could Be
While virtual art has sometimes elicited eye rolling reactions from art critics and curators, projects like Nancy Baker Cahill’s 4th Wall show that the medium can apply the language of fine art to new media with subversive ends. The artist highlights that if VR/AR technology continues to enable “hyper-violent, militaristic, or pornographic [images], we allow it to be dominated by themes that don’t contribute thoughtfully to culture,”
Research: Live-Streaming Performances Doesn’t Diversify Audiences
These ‘live to digital’ screenings – which happen either at the same time as the actual performance, or afterwards – were nevertheless found to be popular. Organisations hosting the screenings and the people attending them expressed an interest in this continuing – although a wider take-up is challenged by ongoing capacity and technological barriers across the sector.
How Fascists Connected Themselves To Ancient Culture
Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy both proudly and explicitly connected themselves with the ancient Romans and borrowed many of their symbols — the very name “Fascist” refers to an important Roman status marker, and the Nazi Imperial Eagle is derived from the Roman standard. Himmler’s reading of antiquity, on that train in 1924, was extreme, but it was also the natural extension of the discipline’s origins; earlier classicists had simply been more genteel, or perhaps less proactive, in their application of white supremacy to antiquity.
The Singer And The Clumsy Critic, A Love Story
He tried to fix things by belatedly praising Mr. Fabiano’s performance, but the damage was done. “I said, ‘I’ll see you later,’ and I walked away,” Mr. Fabiano said. That might have been that, had a deus ex machina not intervened in the form of Ann Ziff, the chairwoman of the Met board. She invited them both to her table at dinner.
Studio Turns To AI To Analyze Movie Trailers To Figure Out What Audiences Will Like
Researchers from the company published a paper last month explaining how they’re analyzing the content of movie trailers using machine learning. Machine vision systems examine trailer footage frame by frame, labeling objects and events, and then compare this to data generated for other trailers. The idea is that movies with similar sets of labels will attract similar sets of people.
Soaring Prices For Antiquities Raise New Looting Fears
A bidding war at Christie’s last week sent the price of a 3,000-year-old stone relief from $7 million to more than $28 million, setting a world record for ancient Assyrian artworks and raising fears among some archaeologists that soaring prices will fuel the market for looted antiquities as well as legally acquired ones.
Alas – The Internet Is Designed To Spread Hate Faster Than Love
Social media platforms — and Facebook and Twitter are as guilty of this as Gab is — are designed so that the awful travels twice as fast as the good. And they are operating with sloppy disregard of the consequences of that awful speech, leading to disasters that they then have to clean up after.
Why Would You Write A Book Only For The Future? (No One Alive Now Will Read It)
“When you write a book you have the faith that it will reach out to someone else, to someone who is different from you and it will connect us. That you will be able to transcend the boundaries of the self, that was given to you at birth, that you will be able to touch someone else’s reality.” Yet in 96 years, when the seedlings become trees and the trees are sacrificed to the written word, it is impossible to know whose reality they will touch.