“Part of what’s interesting about The Sopranos is that it’s not just an artistic achievement, it’s also the product of real business model innovation. It reflected some broader trends in the industry and had some precursors, but it’s really the show that turned a certain kind of corner about what kinds of programming could be commercially viable and what aspirations it makes sense to finance.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Have We Forgotten Cathy Berberian? She Changed Classical Singing
The new indie film Berberian Sound Studio (about a movie sound effects man) “takes its title and inspiration from the late American mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian. … [It’s] the minimally least we can do to remember the singer who changed singing perhaps more than any vocalist since the 18th century.”
When Mary McCarthy Took Manhattan
“By the time she entered Vassar she was the fully formed person she would be for the rest of her life: beautiful and brilliant, possessed of an eye protected against sentiment coupled with a steel-trap mind and a tongue feared by all who had been at the receiving end of its talented sarcasm … She married straight out of college in 1933, came to live in New York, soon got divorced, rented a tiny apartment in Greenwich Village, and began her life.”
The Complete Tolstoy Is Going Online
A Project Gutenberg-like endeavor called All Tolstoy in One Click is digitizing all 90 volumes of Count Leo’s works. “Not only fiction, but also diaries, letters and articles, as well as religious and philosophical texts … will be legally available for free on the website tolstoy.ru, both for online reading and for mobile download.”
Olivier Awards Add Category For Music Directors And Orchestrators
“Musical supervisors and orchestrators have secured a victory in their campaign to be honoured at the Olivier Awards, with next year’s ceremony set to include a brand new prize category for which they will be eligible.”
How Do You Authenticate A Warhol Soup Can?
In 1995 the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts “set up an authentication committee to pass judgment on artworks attributed to him. Since then several large artist-endowed foundations have adopted the same policy. None have aroused the kind of controversy and ill feeling the Warhol authentication board attracted almost from the start.”
Warhol’s Factory Changed The Art World, And The Art World Changed Warhol’s Factory Art Right Back
“Postmodernism in the arts repudiated many of the basic teachings of modernism: the myth of individual genius, for example, and the concept of originality. Yet arts institutions continued to operate throughout the postmodern period, and do so right up to the present moment, as though that critique never happened. Museums, foundations, government endowments, and university art departments all effortlessly absorbed a movement which was more or less devoted to destroying their conception of the arts.”
Could 3D Printing Makes Copies Of Great Sculptures As Easy To Get As Prints Of Paintings Are Now?
Speaking of endless reproducibility … Artist Cosmo Wenman “has been casing some of the world’s great sculptures for at-home replication, photographing them from every angle in plain sight inside the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the Louvre in Paris, the Tate Britain, the British Museum and a few others.” He uses the images to construct digital files from which a 3D printer can produce quite respectable copies.
You Know What Really Leads To Creativity? Mistakes, Bad Planning, And Delusion
Malcolm Gladwell: “Creativity always comes as a surprise to us; therefore we can never count on it and we dare not believe in it until it has happened. … Hence, the only way in which we can bring our creative resources fully into play is by misjudging the nature of the task, by presenting it to ourselves as more routine, simple, undemanding of genuine creativity than it will turn out to be.”
Actor James Gandolfini Dies Suddenly At 51
While he had a long and successful career as a character on screen and stage, he “swaggered his way to fame as the murderous, clinically depressed mob boss on HBO’s groundbreaking drama The Sopranos.”