Asghar Farhadi, director of A Separation, says that, while he may currently be making a film in France, “I love my country and I will not change it for anywhere in the world.”
Tag: 03.10.12
Creativity Isn’t A Divine Gift, It’s Something We Can All Get
“Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It’s a skill. Anyone can learn to be creative and to get better at it. New research is shedding light on what allows people to develop world-changing products and to solve the toughest problems. A surprisingly concrete set of lessons has emerged about what creativity is and how to spark it in ourselves and our work.”
Explosive Art: Gunpowder As A Medium
“Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang uses gunpowder to create two kinds of art. First, there is a performance event where Cai ignites gunpowder on huge canvases. Marked by the explosion, the new canvases reveal designs that resemble forces in nature such as tornadoes, earthquakes and volcanoes.”
Should We Stop Calling It ‘Islamic Art’?
“The very concept of ‘Islamic art’ is alien to the cultures that adhered to Islam, but that apparently has never troubled the scholars who hold forth on the subject in their books as in their university lectures. … The denial of cultural identity in such a meaningless phrase is deeply resented in those Islamic lands, which have ancient cultures that are considerably longer than any West European nation.”
Sergei Polunin Commissions Ballet About James Dean
The impetuous Ukrainian dancer, who famously walked away from his Royal Ballet position in January, commissioned a former Covent Garden colleague, Valentino Zucchetti, to create a solo work about the impetuous 1950s movie star, a longtime hero for Polunin.
André Previn Berates Radio Interviewer On-Air
At several points during an interview on a Pittsburgh public radio station, the 82-year-old composer-conductor – who has grown visibly weaker over the past few years – “exclaimed that he didn’t understand [the interviewer’s] questions and later called them ‘ridiculous.’ It was rude plain and simple.”
Fistfight At Chicago Symphony Concert
“Just as the second movement [of Brahms’s Symphony no. 2] was drawing to a gentle close – with Music Director Riccardo Muti at the podium – a man in his 30s, according to police, started punching a 67-year-old man inside one of the boxes.”
What Are The Consequences Of Human Culture?
“Humans have created cultures that bring out the best of our species in terms of innovation, self-sacrifice and co-operation but at the same time can produce horrors which include parental murders that are excused by neighbours and friends. If we want to explain our social behaviour in scientific terms, we must not only highlight the advantages of close co-operation with others, but also account for the perverse actions that can emerge simultaneously.”
What Might Timothy Potts’ Arrival At The Getty Mean For The Museum?
“The city’s existing institutions already have excellent base collections in areas outside the Getty’s current scope. What they don’t have is Getty-size acquisition funds. With Potts’ arrival, perhaps it’s time collegiality took a different, more productive turn.”
Movie Criticism Is Dead? Hardly!
“The idea makes me giggle that this is the Dark Ages for movie criticism and its finest practitioners have retreated to the monasteries of academe. Countless times during my career, criticism has been declared dead only to pop up its furry groundhog head and give frisky proof to the contrary.”