Word: arts
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...anonymous door is slowly pushed aside to reveal a slightly colder atmosphere. The chill resides not only in the depressed temperature but also in the stasis of the objects, the artificial lighting. You are now inside the Fogg Art Museum cold storage facility. Located in the basement of the museum, cold storage is not only a repository for the leftover masterpieces of the Fogg's ever-burgeoning collection, but is also the surrogate home of Mark Rothko's mythical Harvard murals. Unlike its fellow occupants, the Rothko murals, wrapped twice over in heavy, light-blocking plastic, have emerged only...
...pale blue denim rinse. Before its deterioration, the painting was of a fabled crimson complexion. Rothko's Harvard murals have been deemed "damaged goods" by the cynics, but more optimistic critics would use the term vita brevis, ars brevis, the aesthetic embodiment of the fragility and impermanence of art and life represented by art...
...Rothko's later paintings, half-jokingly described as "beach blankets", by Professor James Cuno, Director of the Harvard Art Museums, exhibit the potential for spiritual connotations. Indeed, there are as many possible interpretations of Rothko's artwork as there are opinions on the validity of modern art. But none is so evocative as the initial apprehension expressed by the Corporation about the Rothko commission. The walls of Harvard buildings, up to this point, had only been occupied by portrait after safe portrait of this or that Harvard luminary. At that time, the University was more a champion of contemporary architecture...
...What bolsters this assertion is the immediate clarity of Rosetta's uncompromisingly bleak vision of the title character's world. In their sophomore outing, the Dardennes have made an art of stripping cinema down to its bare bones. There are no designed interiors--the entire film was shot using locations in the Dardennes' hometown of Seraing, Belgium--or any other ornaments. The photography is dominated by shaky hand-held camera-work, lighting is sparsely natural and casting is reduced to four principal actors. It is initially frustrating and somewhat trying to a North American audience, used...
Ivanov is a stunningly beautiful work of art. Though he was only 27 when it premiered, Ivanov shows all the subtlety and tenderness that would only grow in Anoton Chekov's later, more famous works. The new production of Ivanov now running at the American Repertory Theatre (A.R.T.) is also astonishingly gorgeous. Directed by Yuri Yeremin, one of Russia's most respected directors, the A.R.T. production unfolds like a visual symphony. Were the play acted in the original Russian, it would still be a joy to watch. Unfortunately, this beauty is the downfall of the A.R.T.'s Ivanov. The subtle...