What is it about Hamlet that makes him the pinnacle of a male actor’s career? “Each generation and each individual actor who takes him on expresses something different. Each Hamlet is unique but of his time; he is everything and so can be anything. All the humanity, suffering, playfulness, imagination, intelligence, philosophical acceptance of mortality, love of others, self-disgust, Renaissance humanism, medieval Christianity, cruelty, wit and neurosis that a director or actor wishes to find is there, but the cocktail of his personality will be differently mixed by each interpreter.” – The Independent (UK)
Tag: 09.04.00
DID PICASSO HAVE MIGRAINES?
“A Dutch doctor will tell a world congress on headache which begins in London today that Pablo Picasso may have experienced bizarre visual migraine auras. Some people who suffer from migraine experience a disconcerting distortion of their vision. When they look at people or objects, they see them split into two parts, usually on the vertical plane. Others say they see just an illusion of a fractured face.” – The Guardian
SO WHAT? Picasso was dismissive of critics who saw his Cubist paintings as philosophical exercises and tried to understand them through “mathematics, trigonometry, chemistry, psychoanalysis and whatnot”. He was even more dismissive of the idea that he was an abstract artist. Picasso’s visual distortions are always poetic. – The Guardian
TRY TO REMEMBER
US Gulf Coast artist Jane Brokl will create memorial paintings for your loved ones – incorporating their ashes into the paintings. “Brokl’s paintings are vivid and colorful, with small lines of the ash and bone pieces incorporated. They are designed to last, with memorial plates attached, and cost under $500.” – The Sun-Herald (South Mississippi)
THE POLITICS OF RETURNING STOLEN ARTWORK
Earlier this year the Seattle Art Museum returned a Matisse painting that had been stolen by the Nazis. Then the museum sued New York’s Knoedler Gallery, which had originally sold the painting to some Seattle collectors back in 1954. SAM is trying to reclaim the painting’s market value, now estimated at $11 million, from the gallery. “But some legal complications recently led to a court order for the museum to pay $143,000 for part of the gallery’s legal fees.” – Seattle Times
DID PICASSO HAVE MIGRAINES?
“A Dutch doctor will tell a world congress on headache which begins in London today that Pablo Picasso may have experienced bizarre visual migraine auras. Some people who suffer from migraine experience a disconcerting distortion of their vision. When they look at people or objects, they see them split into two parts, usually on the vertical plane. Others say they see just an illusion of a fractured face.” – The Guardian
- SO WHAT? Picasso was dismissive of critics who saw his Cubist paintings as philosophical exercises and tried to understand them through “mathematics, trigonometry, chemistry, psychoanalysis and whatnot”. He was even more dismissive of the idea that he was an abstract artist. Picasso’s visual distortions are always poetic. – The Guardian
BETTER LIVING THROUGH DESIGN
Russian design has gone through a rough patch lately – the rockets don’t fly, the submarines don’t come up and the communications towers burn. Simple cause? No money for infrastructure. “Even so, it would be unwise to demean the Soviet achievement. Soviet architecture continues to inform the designs of some of the world’s most intelligent and adventurous architects.” – The Guardian
CONTROVERSY FOR LATIN GRAMMYS
The Latin Grammys hit national TV in the US later this month, and the event has been touted as a means of bringing Latin music to a wider audience. But the awards have stirred up controversy, with a number of musicians charging that regional styles are being ignored. – Orange County Register
SPERM RACE ANYONE?
The Ars Electronica Festival in Austria likes to be controversial. Organizers “spent the weekend trying to dampen the outcry from local right-wing politicians over a “Sperm Race” exhibit set up in the city’s main square – and also defending the festival from the charge that it was not doing enough to confront the threat posed by Joerg Haider’s right-wing Freedom Party.” – Wired 09/04/00
VIRTUAL FAIR
For decades the Frankfurt Book Fair has been the place where anything of import in the book publishing business gets discussed and largely decided. But this year the fair (and publishers) are setting up e-alternatives. “This 52nd Frankfurt will be confronting a virtual fair that (or so the ads tell us) is replacing face-to-face, buttonholing meetings by clicks. It shouldn’t be necessary for publishers and agents to sit in bars and hotel lobbies till the wee hours, to carry manuscripts back to hotel rooms, to field midnight messages and 6 a.m. wake-up calls. Or will it? – Publishers Weekly
DOES ANYONE CARE?
The BBC’s shift of its national newscast from 9 pm to 10 pm is calculated to get more viewers. “What surprises me about this gloomy, shifty discussion of news programming is how little people consider why it has become, over the course of a decade, such a ratings calamity. With more competition, there will be fewer viewers for any single bulletin, but Britain is the greatest newspaper-reading nation in the world, the home of Radio 5 Live and three indigenous rolling news TV stations. If people are ceasing to watch the best resources news shows of all, maybe there is something wrong with them.” – New Statesman