Word: jaded
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...finest artworks ever produced in ancient America, the most spectacular of which will be on display at the National Gallery of Art in Washington starting next week. Titled "Olmec Art of Ancient Mexico," the exhibition is the first comprehensive survey of Olmec artifacts, ranging from palm-size jade carvings to a 10-ton, monumental stone head. For the next four months, visitors will be able to see treasures that have never before been permitted to leave Mexico. "It's amazing," says one of the show's curators, Peter David Joralemon of Pre-Columbian Art Research Associates in New York City...
...task, on the face of it, is impossible: to epitomize this vast field of visual culture, across four millenniums, with a mere 475 objects--ink paintings and calligraphy, porcelain and jade, lacquer and bronze. And yet it works, for three reasons. The first is the often sublime beauty of the objects. The second is the coherence of its frame: everything comes from the Chinese imperial collections as they developed over the centuries; thus what we see is the slowly changing profile of the highest court taste. And the third is that the museum's 650-page tome of a catalog...
...dynasty (13th to 11th centuries B.C.) you may have seen, the memory of them will pale beside the massive ting, or tripod pot, in the first room, with its swollen bronze belly and deeply incised decoration. And when, in a nearby case, you see a late neolithic pi, or jade disk--a circle of translucent greenish stone with a hole cut in the center, like a harvest moon rising, whose austerity reveals its maker's deep understanding of its material--the notion of progress in art seems more than normally fatuous...
...Jade and bronze were the quintessential materials of archaic Chinese art, but ink and paper made it possible to run an empire on documents, and they replaced the stylus by the 2nd century A.D. It is notoriously difficult for Westerners to "get" Chinese calligraphy for the obvious reason that we can't read it and so can only admire it, more or less ignorantly, as abstract brush drawing. And yet its range of expressive power comes through marvelously in this show. At one extreme we see the almost chiseled formality of the 12th century Emperor Hui Tsung's script, with...
Paramount executives Jonathan Dolgen and Sherry Lansing were just given new contracts, and Redstone seems eager to work with them--closely. "Sherry said to me, 'I promise you I won't make a picture unless I'm in love with the script,'" Redstone relates. "That was the problem with Jade. I liked the picture, but I didn't know who was killing whom...