Word: artful
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...TIME's postcard from St. Louis: It's clear that the loss of Anheuser-Busch would be a huge blow to the city's self-esteem [July 14]. But St. Louis, Mo., still has a beautiful urban park, a great orchestra, many art venues and an enviable architectural tradition. Dominic Ricciotti, WINONA, MINN...
...will stand up. But for me, it is the casual prosperity so evident in Songzhuang that proves that this is a city going through a revolution. For I can remember precisely the situation faced by artists when I visited Beijing for the first time, in 1994. Then the art scene was still underground, and most artists were poor, often living in squalid conditions. Meeting with foreign reporters could be a problem, I was told, because the authorities had just come down particularly hard on artists, who were still (as if Mao Zedong had yet been alive) seen as a source...
Nowadays, many of those exiles have returned home and joined one of the most exciting contemporary-art scenes in the world. But the explosion in Beijing's arts world is only one aspect of a broader cultural, social and even commercial flowering of the capital, until recently a symbol of authoritarian conformity to many outside China. Much has been written about the transformation of Beijing's hardware ahead of this summer's Olympic Games--both the whirlwind of development that has swept away huge swaths of the old city and the waves of cars that are choking its roads...
Beijing today is a vibrant, increasingly confident metropolis of nearly 20 million, the proud leader of a national social and cultural transformation that is developing hand in hand with China's amazing economic boom. In culture, the blossoming encompasses performance art, painting, sculpting, rock 'n' roll, experimental music, film, poetry and literature. Commercially, where once it conceded all to Shanghai, China's longtime economic powerhouse, Beijing is now at the forefront of a wave of entrepreneurship in telecoms, media, software and the Web. Socially too, Beijing is on fire, with new clubs, bars and restaurants opening every day. The city...
...city hidden under the bland façade of broad boulevards and marbled ministries, argues Hu Xudong, a noted poet, columnist and professor of literature at Peking University. "Underneath the official Beijing we have another Beijing that's more like Latin America than China," he says. The city's other art scenes are supercharged as well. "Ninety percent of China's film directors live here, and so do most of our writers." Today, Hu concludes, "Beijing is a place of real magic...