Category Archives: Arts & Literature

Fine Art: 79-Year Old Renowned Stage Director Robert Wilson On Monet’s “Water Lilies” (Video)

Musée d'Orsay logoHailed as “a towering figure in the world of experimental theater” by the New York Times Waco, Texas-born Robert Wilson has created singular works in the realms of opera, performance, video art, glass, architecture, and furniture design since 1963. Prolific yet exacting in his approach to staging, light, and direction, Wilson has been honored with numerous awards for excellence including a Pulitzer Prize nomination, the Golden Lion of the Venice Biennale, and an Olivier Award. He is also the founding director of The Watermill Center, a laboratory for the arts and humanities in Water Mill, New York.

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Interviews: 63-Year Old Author John ‘Rick’ MacArthur On His Book About Graham Greene

On Meet The Writers this week, Georgina Godwin talks to John ‘Rick’ MacArthur about his new book ‘Graham Greene: The Last Interview’. 

Rick is the scion of a great American philanthropic family but, in his own right, a veteran journalist, author and president of ‘Harper’s Magazine’, the second oldest continuous publication in the US. We take a look at how Graham Greene traversed the space between journalism and fiction and brought truth into sharp focus through his storytelling.

Meet The Writers John 'Rick' McArthur Monocle 24

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Art History: Peter Doig & Karl Ove Knausgård On Edvard Munch (Video)

Louisiana Channel logoEnjoy this engaging and far-reaching conversation between two giants of art and literature, Scottish artist Peter Doig and Norwegian author Karl Ove Knausgård about the legendary Norwegian painter Edvard Munch (1863-1944).

Peter Doig (b. 1959) is a Scottish artist, who is celebrated as one of the most important representational painters working today. He has held several solo exhibitions including at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, Faurschou Foundation in Beijing, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montreal, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and Tate Britain in London. His works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, among others. Doig has received several prestigious awards such as the Prix Eliette von Karajan (1994) and the Wolfgang Hahn Prize of the Society for Modern Art (2008).

Peter Doig & Karl Ove Knausgård On Edvard Munch Louisiana Channel January 6 2020 video

Karl Ove Knausgård (b. 1968) is a Norwegian author, internationally recognized for his prizewinning novel ‘My Struggle’. The novel, in which the author describes his own life, is in six volumes spanning over 3,000 pages. He is also the author of a four-volume series following the seasons – ‘On Spring’, ‘On Summer’, ‘On Fall’ and ‘On Winter’ (2015-16), ‘Inadvertent (Why I Write) (2018), and ‘So Much Longing in So Little Space: The Art of Edvard Munch’ (2019). Knausgård is the recipient of several prestigious prizes including the Austrian State Prize for European Literature.

Edvard Munch (1863-1944) is a Norwegian painter and one of the most important artists of the early 20th century. Munch was part of the Symbolist movement in the 1890s, and a pioneer of Expressionism. Among his most iconic paintings are ‘The Scream’ and ‘The Sick Child’.

Peter Doig and Karl Ove Knausgård were on stage with Christian Lund at Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen in Düsseldorf in connection with the exhibition ‘Edvard Munch’, curated by Karl Ove Knausgård, in November 2019.

Camera: Jakob Solbakken

Edited by Klaus Elmer

Produced by Christian Lund

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Arts Podcasts: Moving 100+ Monet Paintings To Denver Art Museum (NPR)

Visitors to the Denver Art Museum can currently see 120 different paintings by Claude Monet from all over the world. But how did they get there — like, literally get there?

NPR PodcastsTo find out, I talked with Sarah Cucinella-McDaniel, chief registrar at the Denver Art Museum. She’s sort of like a travel agent for art — and for this exhibition she booked the itineraries for artworks from more than 70 lenders around the world: museums, as well as private collectors. (One of her recent days started unexpectedly, around 1:45 a.m., when one of her nine Monet shipments for the day arrived at the museum hours ahead of schedule.)

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Animation Artists: James Curran Creates World’s Top “Looping GIF’s” (Video)

A selection of GIFs from my NYC, LA and Tokyo Gifathons remastered in 3D. Each inspired by something that happened during my 30 day stays in each city.

See all the looping GIFs on Twitter and Instagram with #3DGifathon

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Video Interviews: 67-Year Old Singer David Byrne

David Byrne is burning down the house on Broadway. His show “American Utopia” is a smash hit, but that isn’t the only reason the former frontman for the Talking Heads is so happy. Serena Altschul talks with Byrne about his love of performing, his growing affinity for collaboration, and his optimism, apparent in his “Reasons to Be Cheerful,” a platform that spotlights ways in which the world is getting better.

New Arts & Culture Books: “Federico Fellini – The Book Of Dreams” (Rizzoli)

Federico Fellini The Book of Dreams Rizzoli 2020The volume will be released to coincide with the centenary of Federico Fellini’s birth (January 2020), which will be celebrated in Italy with a traveling exhibition on the director that will start its journey from Milan in December 2019.

A highly colorful journey into the boundless territory of a genius’s imagination, this is a work that added a fundamental element to the study of Federico Fellini and his creative experience. From the late 1960s until 1990, the great director used this diary to represent his nocturnal visions in the form of drawings or, as he himself described them, “scribbles, rushed and ungrammatical notes.”

About The Author

Sergio Toffetti, born in Turin in 1951, is president of the Museo Nazionale del Cinema and has published essays on Italian and international cinema, and on the conservation and restoration of film. Felice Laudadio is president of the Fondazione Centro Sperimentale di Cinematografia in Rome. He has overseen numerous cinema events, such as MystFest, EuropaCinema, and RomaFictionFest. Gian Luca Farinelli has been director of the Cineteca of Bologna since 2000. In 1986 he created, together with Nicola Mazzanti, Il Cinema Ritrovato an event dedicated to the history of cinema and the activity of film libraries. Together with Martin Scorsese, Raffaele Donato, Thierry Frémaux, and Alberto Luna he founded the World Cinema Foundation, which brings together about twenty great international directors for the restoration of third-world films.

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Interviews: Director Martin Scorsese On Filmmaking & Death (NYT)

From a New York Times online article (01/02/20):

Martin Scorsese Photo by Philip Montgomery for The New York Times
Scorsese would like to take a year to read and spend time with loved ones. “Because we’re all going. Friends are dying. Family’s going.”Credit…Philip Montgomery for The New York Times

In ways both subtle and substantial, Scorsese sees the world changing and becoming less familiar to him. He gratefully accepted a deal with Netflix, which covered the reported $160 million budget for “The Irishman.” But the bargain meant that, after the movie received a limited theatrical release, it would be shown on the company’s streaming platform.

Scorsese has other aspirations but they have nothing to do with moviemaking. “I would love to just take a year and read,” he said. “Listen to music when it’s needed. Be with some friends. Because we’re all going. Friends are dying. Family’s going.”

Martin Scorsese is the most alive he’s been in his work in a long time, brimming with renewed passion for filmmaking and invigorated by the reception that has greeted his latest gangland magnum opus, “The Irishman.”

And what he wants to talk about is death.

Just to be clear, he’s not talking about the deaths in his movies or anyone else’s. “You just have to let go, especially at this vantage point of age,” he said one Saturday afternoon last month.

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Film History: Federico Fellini’s “La Dolce Vita” (1960) At 60 Years (Video)

La Dolce Vita (“the sweet life” or “the good life”) is a 1960 comedy-drama film directed and co-written by Federico Fellini. The film follows Marcello Rubini (Marcello Mastroianni), a journalist writing for gossip magazines, over seven days and nights on his journey through the “sweet life” of Rome in a fruitless search for love and happiness. La Dolce Vita won the Palme d’Or (Golden Palm) at the 1960 Cannes Film Festival[ nd the Oscar for Best Costumes. The film was a worldwide box-office success.

From Wikipedia