“His grander salon paintings are embarrassing in their attempt to emulate his idol Claude Lorrain, but they were always striving to portray in paint the emotions he felt in gazing at a storm-swept sea or a tumbling mountain waterfall or a Venetian lagoon at twilight.”
“Our findings raise serious concerns about the effectiveness of the MPAA rating system.”
“The National says it’s the first time in its 63-year-history that an astronaut has appeared on-stage as a Cannon Doll.”
“After the first half-hour, it felt like someone was sticking needles in my arms and legs.”
“What does Love Actually tell us about love, actually? Well, I think it tells us a number of things, most of them wrong and a few of them appalling.”
“The 64-year-old filmmaker called it ‘deaf and insensitive’ to the country’s problems and railed against its ‘awful cultural policy.’ Spanish state funding to the arts, including film, has been drastically reduced in recent years.”
“The moment I unwrapped my present I knew something had gone horribly wrong.”
“Their very cheapness and interest in getting stuff out as quickly as possible ended up unwittingly providing this platform with this incredible breadth to it — just in the diversity of sounds that were captured.”
“The smallest of its spaces, at 44 seats, will be called the Siggy in [Sigourney] Weaver’s honor.”
“About 20 blocks away is another America entirely. It’s astonishing how little we have to do with each other, and yet we are living in such proximity.”
“For shows that don’t normally have music … and achieve a certain longevity, the musical episode is something of a television tradition. These episodes no doubt give the cast a way to shake off the doldrums, and they tend to make a big impression on fans.”
“There has been a growth in Druid orders and in the number of people interested in pagan festivals.
“If you want to understand why the Upworthy style is suddenly everywhere, you start with a program that controls what millions of people see and read everyday—and which very few people understand.”
“Ticket sales to American and European musicals, as well as to a sprinkling of Korean originals, have grown from $9 million in 2000 to an estimated $300 million this year, and a frenzy of licensing deals is underway.”
“Not only did Ms. Kaufman genuinely like writers, but early on, she may have sensed that when one coddles them, one tends to get written about.”
“The whole point of a bankruptcy is to solve deep and structural problems in the economic organization of a major city – not to strip-mine everything from the Bellinis at the museum to the baboons at the Detroit Zoo for however much one-time cash you can squeeze out of them.”
“Perhaps Perry mimics geishas because she recognizes in them the same elaborate traditions of costume, makeup, dance, singing, and erotic performance, to a commercial end, of which she is a part.”
“During the Nazi occupation, she had worked in the Museum Jeu de Paume, an important depot for art plundered by the Nazis. There she tried to keep track of where the artworks ended up, registering every single work.”
“Proprioception (e.g. muscle memory) provides the player with a cognitive shortcut that frees the conscious mind from primarily focusing on the mechanical details of music performance and allows it to address issues of aesthetics.”
“Some artists want their work to stay up forever. For me it’s part of the game, you don’t know if it will stay up or if you will be arrested.”
“Maybe I write stories that people get very involved in, maybe it is the complexity and the lives presented in them. I hope they are a good read. I hope they move people.”
“As the violence snowballed and spilled onto the streets I walked past the museum door, looked at the building’s red facade and tried imagining the silence inside.”
“The nomination, in the Best Orchestral Performance category, is its second in two years.”
“Women rarely appear as women – they appear as sex objects or as ersatz men – sometimes both at once.”
London sucks up most of the air – and definitely most of the money – for the arts in the UK. Can the National Theatre somehow reach “the country’s furthest flung corners”?
“We’ve already had meetings about visioning and marketing and branding and talking about what we want L.A. theater to look like in 30 years.”
Principal ballerina Lauren Cuthbertson: “It can be quite lonely. Sometimes you can feel isolated because you are the only one in your group of friends that really understands what you need to do to get to the next level.”
“That impulse — to find out more about minor or secondary characters — has inspired many books over the years.”
“He is keen to rebel against the beige treatment of sex in mainstream cinema: the soft stroking of hairless limbs, the passionate kiss that cuts to a dishevelled duvet, the straight-sex, softcore-only policies.”
“Dude behind me? Lost it, loudly: ‘That’s it? Really? Really? Worst movie ever! Oscar contender!?’”