“In fact, the more we anticipate wagging fingers, public pillory and guilt, the worse we’re likely to do when it comes to self-control. If we focus on the pride that comes from good behavior, we make better choices. By far.”
Tag: 07.10.11
Why Did Warhol Choose Campbell’s Soup For A Subject? (Blame De Kooning)
Christopher Knight: “Soup was essential studio slang, the conversational lingo among New York School painters when they talked about their work. Specifically, soup was the metaphor used by Willem de Kooning – the most successful artist of the era – to characterize his robust Abstract Expressionism. If soup worked for him, why not for Warhol?”
Has Pop Music Become Too Self-Involved?
“There’s been a rise in narcissism, self-regard, and antisocial hostility at the top of the Billboard charts: Songs have moved from we and us to me and I, and come over all ornery in the process. Surprised?”
Pattern Recognition: Why Some Viewers Can’t Connect With ‘Difficult’ Art Movies
“Moviegoers fed a strict Hollywood diet may find themselves squirming through, say, a film by the Hungarian director Bela Tarr less because of the subtitles than because of the long takes during which little is explained. The same may hold true for those who watch The Tree of Life and want Terrence Malick to connect the dots overtly among his characters, the dinosaurs and the trippy space images.”
Gertrude Stein, Children’s Author And Developmental Psychologist
“The playful yet confusing stories [in Stein’s books for children], liable at any moment to end abruptly, change characters midstream, or pause for some unhelpful explanation, sound very much like the stories that young children tell. As an experimental writer, it turns out, Stein was performing some of the same experiments that we now know children perform as they learn to speak, to assemble narratives, and to understand the world.”
What Its Spring Season Says About American Ballet Theatre
“The main factor that holds Ballet Theater back from the true greatness it sometimes approaches isn’t dancers but repertory. How seriously can you take a company that starts its “Swan Lake” — season after season, complacently — with a prologue that ends with the sorcerer von Rothbart tenderly abusing an imitation swan? “
London’s In Love With Revivals
“Something extraordinary is happening on the London stage this summer. A few of the most resonant new plays to come around in quite a while also happen to be antiques.”
How This Year’s Tchaikovsky Competition Mattered Again
“It’s hard to imagine classical music creating such a stir in any country except Russia. But even in Moscow things are changing. The new Russians flaunting their wealth in indescribably expensive watering holes have little interest in high culture. Gergiev’s achievement was to make attendance at the Tchaikovsky seem socially essential, even to them.”
How Free (Or Really Cheap) Music And Movies Devalue Art
“Has the move toward free really made it impossible for the average creative type to make a living? Is digital convenience trumping good art?”
French Literature Turns Toward Real Life
Through the late 20th century, “French fiction focused on creating literary forms and ‘literature for literature’s sake’ and avoided stories with the so-called nouveau roman (new novel) or honed in on the inner world of the writer. … [T]oday more French novelists are drawing inspiration from their social, economic and political surroundings in a new phenomenon observers are calling literature ‘of the real’.”