Notes
From Charles Tayor's review of THE TERMINAL in Salon.com:
"There is a difference between movies that avoid politics because they recognize that the divisions of politics -- or at least the way those divisions are employed -- usually end up diminishing art and movies that soft-pedal the politics they raise for fear of alienating somebody."
"CZJ's Amelia is having an unsatisfying affair with a married pilot (Michael Nouri). Viktor is the man she's able to pour out her heart to. Doesn't Spielberg know that when a woman puts a man in that position, she's implicitly or explicitly telling him she isn't interested in him romantically?"
And a keen point from a review of the modigliani charivari in New York:
"Art interests Klein only insofar as it suits his agenda-the perpetuation of identity politics."
Klein and his fellow catalogue essayists take Modigliani's confrontational "mot" as their cue to give the work a contemporary spin. Their efforts strain credibility. In a revealing aside, Emily Braun, professor of art history at Hunter College, admits that she can only "conjecture" as to "whether or not Modigliani himself felt estranged or 'different' from the School of Paris....
That doesn't stop Braun from pegging Modigliani as "the locus of a prophetic multiculturalism." Identity politics doesn't supplant a myth-it creates a new one. It puts a strait jacket on a painter who found artistic inspiration well beyond the confines of identity, in the art of the classical world; the sculpture of Africa; the Christian iconography of Byzantine art; the languorous contours of Ingres' courtesans; the innovations of Cubism-all are present and accounted for in Head, a limestone sculpture from 1912."
"There is a difference between movies that avoid politics because they recognize that the divisions of politics -- or at least the way those divisions are employed -- usually end up diminishing art and movies that soft-pedal the politics they raise for fear of alienating somebody."
"CZJ's Amelia is having an unsatisfying affair with a married pilot (Michael Nouri). Viktor is the man she's able to pour out her heart to. Doesn't Spielberg know that when a woman puts a man in that position, she's implicitly or explicitly telling him she isn't interested in him romantically?"
And a keen point from a review of the modigliani charivari in New York:
"Art interests Klein only insofar as it suits his agenda-the perpetuation of identity politics."
Klein and his fellow catalogue essayists take Modigliani's confrontational "mot" as their cue to give the work a contemporary spin. Their efforts strain credibility. In a revealing aside, Emily Braun, professor of art history at Hunter College, admits that she can only "conjecture" as to "whether or not Modigliani himself felt estranged or 'different' from the School of Paris....
That doesn't stop Braun from pegging Modigliani as "the locus of a prophetic multiculturalism." Identity politics doesn't supplant a myth-it creates a new one. It puts a strait jacket on a painter who found artistic inspiration well beyond the confines of identity, in the art of the classical world; the sculpture of Africa; the Christian iconography of Byzantine art; the languorous contours of Ingres' courtesans; the innovations of Cubism-all are present and accounted for in Head, a limestone sculpture from 1912."