Author: Matthew Westphal

The Couple Who Paid $170 Million For A Modigliani Want To Build China’s Answer To The Guggenheim and MoMA

Liu Yiqian and Wang Wei own the Long Museum in Shanghai and plan to make it one of the world’s great art institutions. “And nothing, Mr. Liu said, says world class quite like a Modigliani nude. … He added, ‘The message to the West is clear: We have bought their buildings, we have bought their companies, and now we are going to buy their art.'”

Building A Full-Fledged Hollywood-Style Studio (Complete With Theme Park And Hollywood Sign), From Scratch, In China

When Wanda Studios Qingdao opens in the spring of 2017, “it will be one of the largest and most technologically advanced feature-film-production facilities in the world, encompassing 30 soundstages; an enormous temperature-­controlled underwater stage; a green-screen-equipped outdoor stage that’s still larger, at 56,000 square feet; a permanent facsimile of a New York City street; and much more.” (Not to mention the theme park, resort hotel, yacht marina, and hospital.)

Do We Over-Romanticize Writers Who Die Too Young?

Dana Stevens: “If by ‘we’ you mean ‘I,’ then yes, probably. … When we mourn the early death of a writer who was just beginning to find his or her true voice, we’re also mourning, by implication, every work that author never finished, or never started.”
Benjamin Moser: “A dead young writer is, above all, a dead human being. … And the fine line that separates romance from treacle is the same that divides mourning from kitsch; to cross it is to glorify a heart-rending death instead of remembering the achievements of a life.”

Processing Atrocities Like The Paris Attacks, From Afar

“What we should be using as a measure is what we call emotional distance. It has to do with what you hear in the news and the media, and how relevant it is to you, and to what extent you identify. There’s not a general rule to that. … If the victims are people who belong to your social group, who you identify with, it’s one thing. Everyone makes his own emotional distance from traumatic events. Atrocities shortcut the emotional distance – they are universally perceived as something so incongruous that you keep thinking about it.”

The Glory Of Hidden Tracks On Records (Remember?)

“We gained a lot when albums went fully digital, but we also lost a bunch of stuff along the way. Among the things we lost: Record sleeves, media towers, and Tower Records. We have digital equivalents of all these things, so it’s not like we necessarily miss them. But perhaps the one thing we lost that we’ll never get back is the hidden track. It was one of the few things about an album that couldn’t easily be converted to MP3 or Spotify.”

Seymour Lipkin, 88, Pianist, Conductor, Teacher

He entered Curtis at age 11; by age 17 he’d been hired by Jascha Heifetz as accompanist for a European tour. He studied with Koussevitzky at Tanglewood and apprenticed with Szell in the late 1940s, even as he was winning the Rachmaninoff Piano Competition in 1948 and going on to play concertos with major American orchestras. He spent decades as a sought-after at Curtis and Juilliard, and re-emerged as a soloist and chamber musicians in the 1980s and ’90s.

Keeping Kids’ Lives On Track As They Perform In Professional Theater

“Adult actors, cast overseers, teachers, and choreographers make sure no child is left behind when it comes to keeping grades up, feeling protected, and maintaining as much of real life for their young castmates as possible.” A director, choreographer, or touring company manager “must deal with tutors, handlers, and parents as an airport-runway controller would a busy flight plan.”