Word: artes
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...about the cover image. Photographer Greg Heisler and art director Arthur Hochstein came up with the idea of shooting our Person of the Year inside an Amazon shipping box, complete with plastic-foam chips. Not only was Bezos game but his cheerfulness never flagged even after he'd spent nearly an hour in cardboard. Bezos' gleeful reaction when he saw a Polaroid shot of the image that day: "This is really weird...
...crime writers are killers, all actors are liars--Ripleys for their art and glory. Highsmith's Tom thinks of himself in moments of stress as a consummate actor thrilled by the conviction of his deceit. "If you wanted to be cheerful, or melancholic, or wistful, or thoughtful, or courteous," he observes, "you simply had to act those things with every gesture." What is acting if not the forgery of someone else's personality in order to possess and consume...
...tomorrow being Dickie Greenleaf!" For all his tomorrows, Tom gets to steep himself in la Dickie vita. He lives in a fine house near Paris with a handsome blond wife who is blessedly indifferent to his shadier activities. From Dickie's estate and from the profits of an art-forgery racket, Tom has an income that gives him the leisure to paint, garden and commit the odd homicide. His whole life is a consummate forgery. He's become a counterfeit Dickie, better than the original...
...last two Ripley novels are slack, ungainly; Ripley is more prey than predator. But the first three (recently issued in a hardcover omnibus by Knopf/Everyman's Library) have the tone of high, dark comedy. Tom kills--Dickie, Dickie's pal Freddie Miles, an American art lover, a bunch of mafiosi--as much for the game of eluding capture as for motives of profit or survival. In Ripley's Game he gets an ailing man involved in a murder plot only because the man once spoke abruptly to Tom. Then, when the man desperately tries to kill a Mafia goon...
Velazquez's achievement was unique in the Spain of his day. He soon grew out of painting religious pictures. Instead he created a secular and courtly art--mainly portraits--in which a meticulous realism was conjoined with an extraordinary sense of the mechanics of painting. Velazquez gives you the physical marks of the brush, declares in advance that they are special effects, and yet defies you to shake free from their illusion...