Word: stillness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...does so too literally. All That Jazz contains close-ups of open-heart sur gery, but few insights into Gideon's soul. What Fosse regards as self-analysis often comes out as egomaniacal self-congratulation: there's even a scene where Gideon cries at his own funeral. Still, Fosse is no fool, and at times he is his own best critic. All That Jazz is never more honest than when its hero confesses, "Sometimes I don't know when the bull ends and the truth begins." #151; Frank Rich
...scorned 19th century now seems as precious as Suez Canal Co. stock was in its heyday. Twenty years ago, a New York dealer reminisces, "people were giving away Victorian furniture for wood scrap." Today those otherwise indestructible pieces, long derided by the English as "chocolate" (they are Hershey brown), still cost less than glued-and-screwed contemporary furniture-but probably not for long: already a Victorian sleigh bed sells for as much as $30,000. Early American furniture, particularly colonial adaptations of Queen Anne, Chippendale and Hepplewhite, are worth far more than 18th century English pieces of the same style...
...notoriously susceptible, from Catherine the Great, who built Leningrad's incomparable Hermitage ("I am not a nibbler but a glutton") to U.S. Industrialist Joseph Hirshhorn, the great benefactor of the Smithsonian ("I have a madman's rage for art"). To be sure, such stupendous collectors and donors still make record purchases. But it is not the proud possessors who crowd the salesrooms and find bonanzas in baubles...
...paintings, they look "at you. The art puts out the energy." Anything that produces energy these days should be profitable, of course, and Pivar's collection is no exception. "Since I started to collect," he says with satisfaction, "19th century painting has increased tenfold in value. It can still go another tenfold...
Nine of those ten years have passed, and the painting is still contaminated by the fallout from its price. The dance of digits in front of one's eyes renders the thing "special," isolated, fetishistically rare. It not only removes the painting from the flow of discourse about experience that art is meant to sustain, but it makes the price part of the subject of the work, separating it, by implication, from everything else ever painted by Velázquez, turning it from one painting among others into a dead whale on a flatcar, a curiosity to be gawped...