About Last Night

My “Sightings” column in this week’s Wall Street Journal is about large-scale virtual presentations of famous works of art. Here’s an excerpt.

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The bad news is “Immersive Van Gogh,” a 500,000-cubic-foot high-tech video installation that opens in Toronto on Dec. 21, in Chicago on Feb. 11 and in San Francisco on March 18. It makes use of 50 digital projectors to show animated versions of “Starry Night” and several of the painter’s other masterworks, accompanied by New Age-style music. The press release maunders on at length about how the visitor (masked and socially distanced, of course) will “wander through entrancing, moving images…truly illuminating the mind of the genius.” I haven’t seen the show in person, but the extensive video clips I’ve viewed online suggest that attending “Immersive Van Gogh” is not even remotely like the intensely involving experience of encountering a painting up close. Instead, the work of one of the greatest of all visual artists has been turned into something more like a giant video game….

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Read the whole thing here.

“To die is poignantly bitter, but the idea of having to die without having lived is unbearable.”

Erich Fromm, Man for Himself

The Paul Taylor Dance Company performs an excerpt from Taylor’s Musical Offering, set to the music of Bach and accompanied by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s. This performance was filmed on January 16, 2019:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“At that moment the realisation hit me—and has never left me since: true Philistines are not people who are incapable of recognising beauty; they recognise it all too well; they detect its presence anywhere, immediately, and with a flair as infallible as that of the most sensitive aesthete—but for them, it is in order to be able better to pounce upon it at once and to destroy it before it can gain a foothold in their universal empire of ugliness.”

Simon Leys, “Quixotism” (in The Hall of Uselessness: Collected Essays)

From 2013:

• W. Jackson Bate, Samuel Johnson

• David Cairns, Berlioz….

Read the whole thing here.

“The laugh can’t be the goal, the line after is the goal.”

David Cromer (quoted in The World Only Spins Forward: The Ascent of Angels in America, by Isaac Butler and Dan Kois)

“Happy Feet,” a production number from King of Jazz, a 1930 film shot in early Technicolor, directed by John Murray Anderson, and starring Paul Whiteman and His Orchestra. Bing Crosby and Whiteman’s Rhythm Boys are featured in the song, written by Milton Ager and Jack Yellen and arranged by Ferdé Grofe:

(This is the latest in a series of arts- and history-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“I know what the power of silence is. When I used to play in clubs, everybody was loud; there was a lot of noise. So I would take my mute off the microphone, and I would play something so soft that you could hardly hear it…and you talk about listening.”

Miles Davis, quoted in Julie Coryell and Laura Friedman, Jazz-Rock Fusion: The People, the Music