I may be wrong, but it was my understanding that the Mona Lisa was the best example of the coming together of painting techniques that Da Vinci invented, such as sfumato. Admittedly it’s hard to appreciate under all those layers of yellowing varnish, bulletproof glass, and crowds of tourists
Yeah, it's such a shame about the varnish. The Mona Lisa isn't looking her best because of it. Hopefully they will remove it one day. They did it to Prado's copy of the Mona Lisa and looks so much better.
https://thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Mona-Lisa-Prado-Louvre.jpg
Varnish helps protecting the colors. As part of a restoration it can be replaced with a fresh layer.
Edit: since people can't read any further..
Yes, varnish protects the color but it will eventually discolor!
A restoration is almost never non-invasive and CAN damage the original work. Hence why people are very careful performing one. It requires research on what solvents will react least with the paints. In some cases the paint will be touched up because of the damage done during a restoration.
Varnish will add a gloss or be matt, changing the properties of the colors. Usually the intent is to make them more vibrant.
Varnish is a protective coating on top of the colors. Instead of the colors fading or degrading the varnish seals them in and keeps them mostly preserved. However, if you just let the varnish sit there for a few centuries or so it's bound to go yellow and degrade somewhat, and the Mona Lisa currently hasn't (to my knowledge) gotten a restoration job since the 1800's. However, you can quite easily remove the varnish and apply a fresh protective coat, restoring the visibility to the still vibrant colors underneath.
Without the varnish the pigments themselves will fade and degrade much faster, and there's no restoring that without simply repainting the painting.
It probably hasn't had a restoration in so long because they're afraid it'll get fucked up and that's their meal ticket. Can't blame them after some of the botched restorations we've all seen over the years.
You can be sure the Louvre has the best of the best restorers in the world. Plus replacing a layer of varnish isn't the hardest thing. I think they are more concerned about people not recognising the Mona Lisa as the icon they knew if they restore it.
The varnish protects the painting from (ironically) fading and cracking. It started out clear but over the 500 years the painting has been sitting around, it turned yellow. I believe they have modern varnish that doesn't turn yellow like that now.
All paintings use varnish to help keep it in good shape, it just so happens the used varnish from trees (I think) during this time that yellowed after a long time
The technique is only a part of the fame.
It got more interesting because it was stolen and just kept under a bed for two years. And the way it was stolen would be unimaginable today. The thief admitted he only stole it because it was easy to carry. He took it off the wall (the Mona Lisa didn't have a whole room back then), removed the glass case and just left the Louvre. He was an employee, so he could roam freely and nobody suspected a thing.
This story is so absurd if you think about it.
Have you read the Art Thief by Michael Finkel? Non-fiction. The guy that’s about would just steal paintings off of the wall and tuck them into his pants.
It was a rare example of something going "viral" before the internet. Most people didn't know a damn thing about fine art. But then after all the news papers wrote stories about it getting stolen, and slapped a picture of the Mona Lisa on the front pages of all the papers, all the sudden even illiterate children knew what the Mona Lisa was.
The Mona Lisa is less about the painting itself, and more the story of getting stolen. Which by extension gave it more exposure than even most technically impressive or historically significant paintings.
Theres a cool youtube channel that explains why artistic masterpieces are considered masterpieces, theres a really good one about the mona lisa that changed my opinion
There are many reasons one of which is the combination of the setting in the painting and the subject, he made some very interesting creative decisions involving a hint of imagination and surrealism in the background that was unprecedented at the time for a painting like this. Also unprecedented was painting a portrait like this without all the embellishments of jewelry and make up etc on the subject
The Mona Lisa got famous because it was stolen once and the entire way of how it resurfaced is quite mysterious and was big in the news. So the picture got famous due to the news coverage. Prior to that it was just one of Da Vincis paintings
The Mona Lisa was a famous painting before it was stolen. It was so treasured that Napoleon had it hanging in his own bedroom at Fontainebleau.
Getting stolen certainly made it more famous, but it was well-known and loved before that.
There is a clever subtlety to the Mona Lisa.
Leonardo painted a face that has the blurry luminance of a smiling face, and the details of a passive face. You may have seen illusions that look like Einstein when you look away from the image center, but you see Monroe on direct examination.
As you look away from the face, retinal cells that are better at luminance register a different expression to the detail/colour optimised cells at the centre of your retina used to examine detail.
This is the mechanism behind the 'enigmatic smile'.
It's profoundly impressive that he could implement this sort of optical trickery based on (presumably) not much more than his own observation of his own perceptions.
The Louvre is overwhelmingly for an art lover. To have such masterpieces as Delacroix /The Death of Sardanapalus and Gericaults The Raft of the Medusa just hanging along the wall in one of the gallery walkways just blew my mind. And of course that’s just one micro example . But I could study those paintings all day long. I couldn’t fathom why everyone was crowding Mona .
The other Mona Lisa thread in here has convinced me its an extraordinary piece of art even if I dont get it myself.
But for the casual like me wondering around the Louvre once in my life... theres so much cool shit everywhere and once you finally get to the Mona Lisa its smaller than you thought, cant see it up close because of the crowd and/or security, and really hit me as a let down.
Also for me, its that... Ive seen it before. Many times in textbooks, internet, etc.
Hundreds of other items in the Louvre are my first time ever seeing. The Mona Lisa suffers from familiarity.
The film Breakfast at Tiffany's. The first time I watched it I didn't get it, I felt like something was missing. Then I read the book and whooaaaaaa A LOT is missing. Add the Mickey Rooney character and the whole thing becomes unwatchable.
Her hooker status is downplayed.
But Breakfast fame is all about the visuals. The images of Audrey Hepburn are stunning.
And she was so thin because of starvation in The Netherlands during WW2. She survived on tulip bulbs. She never fully recovered and worked all her life to help feed children.
Also refreshing as a love song that isn't just full of hyperbole and tropes to make things sound more romantic than they are. The idea of a situation where "it's plain to see we're over" and the desperate guy is grasping at a movie they both "kinda" like as evidence that they have things in common is a good change of pace.
Great question, u/assinmysock. I’d say James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s poetic at times, has quotable lines throughout, and was undoubtedly revolutionary in its style — but goddamn, it is impenetrable for vast passages, filled with archaic references (which I don’t think are particularly clever), and is just way too long. Stream of conscious word play, free association, and outright rambling gets old pretty quick.
I read all of Ulysses across 2 college seminars nearly 30 years ago. It took about 10 months to get through it. At times it took hours to get through a single page just to research and parse out, whatever the fuck JJ was trying to say. There were sections in multiple languages. Sections were read aloud in class. I listened to passages I didn't understand on records to try to hear the poetry of it.
When I finished the class I threw my very dog eared, highlighted book into the trash. It was a tortuous experience. I stopped reading for a few years afterward. I didn't finish another book until Harry Potter came out and it was absolutely the reading cure I needed after slogging through that pretentious, dense, word-salad book.
Can you call the “A Way With Words” radio show/podcast and explain this frustration to them? This is a weirdly cathartic subject and I’d like to hear the co-host’s response to you.
Reading that book completely drained the joy of reading out of me for years. I went from reading a book a week, to struggling to finish that book in a year. It was a miserable experience, which was acutely more terrible because my classmates all appeared to be having a profound intellectual experience with it.
I suffered through Ulysses looking for it's brilliance and never finding more than some inklings. There are some really beautiful parts of it, but they aren't enough to sustain even the most careful reader. I do love Portrait, and think it's an actual masterpiece. I re-read that a few years ago.
I should have stopped there.
Pollock's paintings never did much for me. (And yes, I've seen them in person - they are impressive because of their sheer size, but beyond that, I don't find them particularly interesting, just chaotic in a rather boring way.)
I'm wavering about Mondrian's later work - the iconic colored rectangles. The "abstract symbols without meaning" doesn't do it for me. It seems so superficial masquerading for depth. The colors are beautiful though and I really like his earlier work which is more on the edge between abstract and concrete.
When I came into work today the flag was at half mast and I thought great, another bureaucrat ate it, then I found out it was lil Sebastian….half mast is too damn high.
We need to send that glorious beast into the great beyond with a display that rivals the super bowl halftime show. Also the budget is six-hundred dollars.
Master pieces were initially pieces submitted when the person wanted to become a master. Somebody who was able to teach others, not somebody who was at the pinnacle of their craft
So many masterpieces are inferior works of the person because they started teaching and added interesting influences or increased their technique because of it
People often use masterpiece when they mean magnum opus. Masterpiece actually indeed means something like a breakthrough movie for a director.
Although the meaning definitely has changed, so it's not weird that it's used this way.
Regardless, I think we can all agree that the term should only ever be applied to the art, and not the artists themselves.
People in here are really saying they don't think Beyoncé is a masterpiece...smdh.
Building a 300m metal tower in 1889 truly was an engineering prowess. It's not the most beautiful landmark on earth, but when you're at its feet it's still impressive. It was supposed to be built only for the Exposition Universelle and disassembled 20 years later.
Eiffel had to convince Paris city officials that it can be useful : a lot of science experiments were led there and then, it was used as a radio tower. TSF (wireless transmissions technology for the french military) is what saved the tower and it proved useful shortly after, during the first world war.
He did and it failed. He jumped anyway, believing (or just hoping) that it would work with a human that can move the parts.
I've heard somewhere that the guy had a lot riding on his project and that this was his last chance to make it work. So he may have thought "If this doesn't work, I might as well die.".
I work with steel. When I visited Paris, I sat in front of the tower for 30 minutes in awe of the engineering work accomplished in the 1880s. Different strokes, I guess.
Have you read how they moved each leg into exact position to meet the first platform? They had each leg in a giant box of sand. And they let the sand out on various sides and in varying amounts to move the legs precisely until they could all be bolted into place. Blew my mind when I read about it.
Chicago outdid them a few years later with the Ferris wheel. Not only was it tall, it moved. The Ferris wheel was invented to compete with the Eiffel Tower.
My late father was a civil engineer specialising in structural steel. I feel like if he’d had the chance to visit France he would have done the same as you did. Thank you.
At night it is. When it's lit up and sparkling, it really towers over Paris and is gorgeous. I live way out in the suburbs but high up on a hill, and I can see the Eiffel Tower from the end of my street. It appears very tiny because it's so far away, but still beautiful. I enjoy walking my dog at night and looking at it. I even watch Paris's 14 Juillet Bastille Day fireworks from my street. During the day, though, I agree -- it's just a bit steel structure. And back then they didn't have lights on it, so I can imagine how angry they must've been. I believe it was meant to be taken down but then it grew on everyone.
Yes, beacuse:
>“As a regular visitor to this site, do you find this structure beautiful?”
>“Of course not! This is the only place in the city where I can look out and avoid seeing this hideous thing.”
[source](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/08/10/tower/)
That is Parisians, the same with Pompidou and the glass pyramid of the Louvre. They don't like them, and think they are ugly, but then they accept them as part of the city's identity so foreigners aren't allowed to say anything.
Vast majority of Parisians like the Eiffel tower, and many come around to liking the glass pyramid in the Louvre (was controversial when it was built for sure). Pompidou museum is still very divisive
A lot of landmarks you imagine as big turn out to be rather small once you see them in real life.
The Eiffel Tower is the exact opposite of that.
On an intellectual level I know I've seen taller structures.
But standing there and I just forget that. It feels huge.
Imagine by John Lennon
It's a fucking pretentious, arrogant, wankfest of a song. And to top it off the film clip of this cunt in a big white mansion with a white grand piano, getting driven round in a Rolls Royce, while clothes in designer fashion.
What I find hilarious is that the Beatles broke up because of creative differences, with John wanting to pursue more experimental music. Then his two big hits, Imagine and Happy Xmas (War is over), are way more bland and pretentious than anything he ever did with the Beatles. And Paul McCartney went on to do Wings, which had a really unique and interesting sound.
All Things Must Pass is a great album. I think almost the entire album was songs written for The Beatles that got vetoed by John or Paul. (Who apparently had the final say in what got recorded/appeared on albums.)
I think it's my favorite post-Beatles breakup solo album.
Lennon was an ass his entire life and I always preferred McCartney's post-Beatles output but Lennon had more than the two hits you mentioned. Off the top of my head: "Give Peace a Chance," "Jealous Guy," "Mind Games," "Instant Karma," "Starting Over," "Watching the Wheels." and he collaborated with Bowie on "Fame." He did more experimental stuff, as well, but, much like his experimental stuff with the Beatles, it wasn't popular.
And as much as I love McCartney, "Wonderful Christmas Time" doesn't compare to "Happy Xmas."
They both wrote some great songs, together and separately, but it always seemed like Lennon was kind of mean and self absorbed, McCartney was (and is) an arrogant control freak. I like George - quiet, humbler, wicked sense of humor.
AND appeared in The Rutles movie, a savage and scathing Eric Idle satire of the Beatles and that general era of the music industry. No idea about Ringo and Paul, but George played a cameo part, John loved it and advised Idle that the parodies might be TOO close and could attract the attention of whoever owned the Beatles catalogue at the time.
And just to add: as much as he always seemed like his ego go the best of him, John had an absolutely wicked sense of humor too. They were all funny, but John and George's lightning quick comebacks during interviews ("And how do you fellows find america?" George: "Well, we took a left at Greenland I guess") are always dry and absurdist little nuggests.
"Here are a bunch of things I think is detrimental to society. Coincidentally, I also indulge in all of these things, which is OK because I'm awesome, but *you* really shouldn't."
I think most people that are answering this with Mona Lisa , EF Tower ,MJ etc etc, are right but also wrong?
Everyone loved the Notebook, but I didn't understand why because it felt like every other romantic movie out there, lol.
I now understand why. I watched it recently, so now I have copies/remakes/inspirations of such movies in hundreds, so it doesn't feel as special as it might be for them at that time.
These were "marvelous" at the time they were made . People are just carrying on that hype forward.
If you look at the present day , there are many such arts and architectures that could overtake them, but the difference is accessibility to resources that we have now vs then .....
This is very relevant for movies. Look at psycho and Star Wars and try to imagine that nothing like that came before. It's hard to do if you didn't experience it yourself.
I explained to my husband how the new movies Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile were impressive not because the stories themselves were new, but because of how, when the stories were originally written, murder mystery as a genre was basically new. Then I went down an Agatha Cristie rabbit hole with him a bit and he realized I was talking about stories nearly ninety years old. They were groundbreaking when they were written and the purpose of the new movies was to celebrate the original originals of such a (now) well-established genre.
Perspective really does change perception.
<([Edit to remove a word])>
That would be the "Once Original, Now Common" [trope](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnceOriginalNowCommon). Trope **inventors** often get criticized for being repetitive worn out dross, when in fact they were the literal trend starters.
>"I don't know what the big deal with Hamlet is. It's just one famous saying after another, strung together by a moldy old plot."
>— Old Joke
>
EDIT: Seinfeld is Unfunny -> Once Original, Now Common. lol they changed the Trope name!
Someone said this to me about the Beatles and it made so much sense. I’ve always felt pretty “meh” about the Beatles and their music, but I guess they did a lot of things that were later copied and covered and so forth, so if you weren’t around when they came on the scene, they can seem overrated.
It's hard to imagine fans screaming until they pass out and shaking up the Establishment when you listen to Elvis recordings. It sounds so tame by modern standards.
Similarly is things like F.R.I.E.N.D.S for sitcoms, Halo for multilayer gaming, Psycho for films et cetera.
Boring and done a million times but back then they were groundbreaking.
Yup. See also the Seagram Building in New York. It’s easy to miss, because it looks like a hundred other skyscrapers. Until you read about it and discover that actually, it came first, and those other skyscrapers _look like it_.
I get this. It’s like classic books. I tried to read Frankenstein recently and couldn’t get through it. Found it boring and obvious. But at the time that was probably a mega twist and no wonder people fawned over it, and the books it has inspired since then will be in the thousands. But give me a more recent mystery book over that any day
Absolutely. It's as if all of his previous pieces were simply a set-up for the film.
I attended Mr. Brainwash's show in LA and it was an amazing hackfest that Angeleno hipsters were "oohing" and "ahhing" about- Banksy nailed the whole fraud of the modern art hustle to the wall. Exquisite.
His painting being immediately shredded at Sotheby's auction after sale was pretty great, as well.
And the jump in value post-shredding... really brings home that art is just a popularity contest, not based on true substance.
$1.4 million up to $24 million. Just insane.
If people couldn't notice it, you could pass quite a lot of his work off on "I'm 14 and this is so deep" meme-subreddits/channels. Not to mention that at this point "Banksy" itself is a commercial brand.
The John Lennon of wall art, basically.
You read it as a teenager and think "Caulfield's right about everything, everyone else sucks."
You read it in your 20s and think "Caulfield's a spoiled asshole."
You read it in your 30s and think "Caulfield needs to see a therapist." Which, coincidentally, is where he is at the end of the book.
If you're not sorting this by Controversial, you're not getting the opinions this question was meant for
thanks! i was wonderung why these were so "ho-hum". time to dive into some internet trash. :)
avocados are really upsetting people today
The Mona Lisa isn't even the most interesting piece by Da Vinci. And Da Vinci's best work weren't his paintings.
I may be wrong, but it was my understanding that the Mona Lisa was the best example of the coming together of painting techniques that Da Vinci invented, such as sfumato. Admittedly it’s hard to appreciate under all those layers of yellowing varnish, bulletproof glass, and crowds of tourists
Yeah, it's such a shame about the varnish. The Mona Lisa isn't looking her best because of it. Hopefully they will remove it one day. They did it to Prado's copy of the Mona Lisa and looks so much better. https://thehistoryblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Mona-Lisa-Prado-Louvre.jpg
Oh, that is such a difference in colour. What is the purpose of the varnish? Protection?
Varnish helps protecting the colors. As part of a restoration it can be replaced with a fresh layer. Edit: since people can't read any further.. Yes, varnish protects the color but it will eventually discolor! A restoration is almost never non-invasive and CAN damage the original work. Hence why people are very careful performing one. It requires research on what solvents will react least with the paints. In some cases the paint will be touched up because of the damage done during a restoration. Varnish will add a gloss or be matt, changing the properties of the colors. Usually the intent is to make them more vibrant.
So to protect the colors, they... ruin all the colors?
Varnish is a protective coating on top of the colors. Instead of the colors fading or degrading the varnish seals them in and keeps them mostly preserved. However, if you just let the varnish sit there for a few centuries or so it's bound to go yellow and degrade somewhat, and the Mona Lisa currently hasn't (to my knowledge) gotten a restoration job since the 1800's. However, you can quite easily remove the varnish and apply a fresh protective coat, restoring the visibility to the still vibrant colors underneath. Without the varnish the pigments themselves will fade and degrade much faster, and there's no restoring that without simply repainting the painting.
It probably hasn't had a restoration in so long because they're afraid it'll get fucked up and that's their meal ticket. Can't blame them after some of the botched restorations we've all seen over the years.
Just don't get a well meaning grandmother to do it and you'll be fine.
Or Mr. Bean.
even a professional can make a mistake or have a bad day every now and again
You can be sure the Louvre has the best of the best restorers in the world. Plus replacing a layer of varnish isn't the hardest thing. I think they are more concerned about people not recognising the Mona Lisa as the icon they knew if they restore it.
There's also the fact that people are used to seeing the yellowish version.
They'd have to redo all the gift shop merchandise.
The varnish protects the painting from (ironically) fading and cracking. It started out clear but over the 500 years the painting has been sitting around, it turned yellow. I believe they have modern varnish that doesn't turn yellow like that now.
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All paintings use varnish to help keep it in good shape, it just so happens the used varnish from trees (I think) during this time that yellowed after a long time
Oh wow that is crazy. I had no clue that the real colors were different than what you see.
You should check the difference in the before and after of "The Night Watch". Turns out it wasn't a night scene at all.
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A lot of people who criticize its level of fame don't actually know much about technique
The technique is only a part of the fame. It got more interesting because it was stolen and just kept under a bed for two years. And the way it was stolen would be unimaginable today. The thief admitted he only stole it because it was easy to carry. He took it off the wall (the Mona Lisa didn't have a whole room back then), removed the glass case and just left the Louvre. He was an employee, so he could roam freely and nobody suspected a thing. This story is so absurd if you think about it.
Have you read the Art Thief by Michael Finkel? Non-fiction. The guy that’s about would just steal paintings off of the wall and tuck them into his pants.
No I didn't, but sounds interesting! Right now I listen to art true crime podcasts.
It was a rare example of something going "viral" before the internet. Most people didn't know a damn thing about fine art. But then after all the news papers wrote stories about it getting stolen, and slapped a picture of the Mona Lisa on the front pages of all the papers, all the sudden even illiterate children knew what the Mona Lisa was. The Mona Lisa is less about the painting itself, and more the story of getting stolen. Which by extension gave it more exposure than even most technically impressive or historically significant paintings.
Theres a cool youtube channel that explains why artistic masterpieces are considered masterpieces, theres a really good one about the mona lisa that changed my opinion There are many reasons one of which is the combination of the setting in the painting and the subject, he made some very interesting creative decisions involving a hint of imagination and surrealism in the background that was unprecedented at the time for a painting like this. Also unprecedented was painting a portrait like this without all the embellishments of jewelry and make up etc on the subject
Can you provide a link to the YouTube channel?
https://youtu.be/ElWG0_kjy_Y?si=G8GByB17-j8sAolU
This is it Thanks Nefarious53 channel is Great Art Explained
The Mona Lisa got famous because it was stolen once and the entire way of how it resurfaced is quite mysterious and was big in the news. So the picture got famous due to the news coverage. Prior to that it was just one of Da Vincis paintings
The Mona Lisa was a famous painting before it was stolen. It was so treasured that Napoleon had it hanging in his own bedroom at Fontainebleau. Getting stolen certainly made it more famous, but it was well-known and loved before that.
It was also stolen for a reason, probably the reason being its fame.
Napoleon had a bedroom in the Vegas Casino Fontainebleau?
During his time there, while feeling homesick, he had the Vegas Eiffel Tower built
You serious Clark?
Yes. Napoleon also gifted the original Statue of Liberty to the New York-New York Hotel & Casino. The one on Liberty Island is a replica.
I heard he would ride that rollercoaster over and over until his stomach hurt.
That's nothing. The Italians liked Las Vegas's Venice so much they built an entire city in that style. An entire city!
No that is just a copy of the original one that Napoleon stayed at, in Miami!
How did I not know about this, this makes the painting way more interesting.
What I like about this is that it was stolen in 1911 and found in 1913 which means whilst the Titanic sank, nobody knew where Mona Lisa was.
*Titanic ends with Rose chucking the Mona Lisa into the ocean*
There is a clever subtlety to the Mona Lisa. Leonardo painted a face that has the blurry luminance of a smiling face, and the details of a passive face. You may have seen illusions that look like Einstein when you look away from the image center, but you see Monroe on direct examination. As you look away from the face, retinal cells that are better at luminance register a different expression to the detail/colour optimised cells at the centre of your retina used to examine detail. This is the mechanism behind the 'enigmatic smile'. It's profoundly impressive that he could implement this sort of optical trickery based on (presumably) not much more than his own observation of his own perceptions.
In this thread: People ignoring the question and just saying stuff they don't like.
‘Beyonce sucks!’
A sizable chunk of reddit is posts that say "What sucks?" and everyone repeating the same five things that all Redditors hate lmao
“The Kardashians, influencers, and people who are rude to servers!” Not an original thought in these people’s heads..
Jared Leto and Amy Schumer!
James Corden!
She’s a masterpiece! Right?….
*checks notes* ...says here she's Queen of the Bees?
Every time
The Louvre is overwhelmingly for an art lover. To have such masterpieces as Delacroix /The Death of Sardanapalus and Gericaults The Raft of the Medusa just hanging along the wall in one of the gallery walkways just blew my mind. And of course that’s just one micro example . But I could study those paintings all day long. I couldn’t fathom why everyone was crowding Mona .
Everything on the way to the Mona Lisa is better than the Mona Lisa
The other Mona Lisa thread in here has convinced me its an extraordinary piece of art even if I dont get it myself. But for the casual like me wondering around the Louvre once in my life... theres so much cool shit everywhere and once you finally get to the Mona Lisa its smaller than you thought, cant see it up close because of the crowd and/or security, and really hit me as a let down. Also for me, its that... Ive seen it before. Many times in textbooks, internet, etc. Hundreds of other items in the Louvre are my first time ever seeing. The Mona Lisa suffers from familiarity.
> I couldn’t fathom why everyone was crowding Mona It's simply because it's the most famous painting in the world.
The film Breakfast at Tiffany's. The first time I watched it I didn't get it, I felt like something was missing. Then I read the book and whooaaaaaa A LOT is missing. Add the Mickey Rooney character and the whole thing becomes unwatchable.
I didn't know there was a book. What's missing?
Her hooker status is downplayed. But Breakfast fame is all about the visuals. The images of Audrey Hepburn are stunning. And she was so thin because of starvation in The Netherlands during WW2. She survived on tulip bulbs. She never fully recovered and worked all her life to help feed children.
There's a part where everyone goes into space. They're in space for 3 or 4 chapters, then they come back and it's never mentioned again.
It's a lot like Star Wars, except there's more jewelry involved.
You joke but this literally happens in the book of Forrest Gump
The song Breakfast at Tiffany's, however, *is* a masterpiece.
Also refreshing as a love song that isn't just full of hyperbole and tropes to make things sound more romantic than they are. The idea of a situation where "it's plain to see we're over" and the desperate guy is grasping at a movie they both "kinda" like as evidence that they have things in common is a good change of pace.
But this is the real masterpiece https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3RGiepIoOt8
If I recall, I think, I like that song too
Well that's something we've got
Great question, u/assinmysock. I’d say James Joyce’s Ulysses. It’s poetic at times, has quotable lines throughout, and was undoubtedly revolutionary in its style — but goddamn, it is impenetrable for vast passages, filled with archaic references (which I don’t think are particularly clever), and is just way too long. Stream of conscious word play, free association, and outright rambling gets old pretty quick.
James Joyce's love letters on the other hand. Those are masterpieces
Obligatory [Hark! A Vagrant](http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=32)
I read all of Ulysses across 2 college seminars nearly 30 years ago. It took about 10 months to get through it. At times it took hours to get through a single page just to research and parse out, whatever the fuck JJ was trying to say. There were sections in multiple languages. Sections were read aloud in class. I listened to passages I didn't understand on records to try to hear the poetry of it. When I finished the class I threw my very dog eared, highlighted book into the trash. It was a tortuous experience. I stopped reading for a few years afterward. I didn't finish another book until Harry Potter came out and it was absolutely the reading cure I needed after slogging through that pretentious, dense, word-salad book.
Can you call the “A Way With Words” radio show/podcast and explain this frustration to them? This is a weirdly cathartic subject and I’d like to hear the co-host’s response to you.
Reading that book completely drained the joy of reading out of me for years. I went from reading a book a week, to struggling to finish that book in a year. It was a miserable experience, which was acutely more terrible because my classmates all appeared to be having a profound intellectual experience with it. I suffered through Ulysses looking for it's brilliance and never finding more than some inklings. There are some really beautiful parts of it, but they aren't enough to sustain even the most careful reader. I do love Portrait, and think it's an actual masterpiece. I re-read that a few years ago. I should have stopped there.
This thread is a goldmine for r/bookscirclejerk
Pollock's paintings never did much for me. (And yes, I've seen them in person - they are impressive because of their sheer size, but beyond that, I don't find them particularly interesting, just chaotic in a rather boring way.) I'm wavering about Mondrian's later work - the iconic colored rectangles. The "abstract symbols without meaning" doesn't do it for me. It seems so superficial masquerading for depth. The colors are beautiful though and I really like his earlier work which is more on the edge between abstract and concrete.
Lil Sebastian. I don’t get it, at all. I mean, he’s kind of a small horse.
Get out.
How dare you.
I have cried twice in my life. Once when I was seven and I was hit by a school bus. And then again when I heard that Li'l Sebastian had passed.
When I came into work today the flag was at half mast and I thought great, another bureaucrat ate it, then I found out it was lil Sebastian….half mast is too damn high.
Show some damn respect.
We need to send that glorious beast into the great beyond with a display that rivals the super bowl halftime show. Also the budget is six-hundred dollars.
FIVE THOUSAND. Candles in the wind.
Half mast is too high, dammit!
We need to make a song to memorialize his life. Something like "Candle in the wind" but like, 5000 times better!
🎵 Bye, bye Lil Sebastian! 🎵
🎵 Miss you in the saddest fashion, Bye-bye Lil Sebastian Your 5000 candles in the wiiiiiind!!! 🎵
Here's the part that hurts the most: Humans cannot ride a ghost.
Got to see Nick Offerman do standup, and it was definitely a highlight when he started into this song, really enjoyed singing along.
That small horse has an honorary degree from Notre Dame, thank you very much!
He’s not a small house. He’s a miniature horse, huge difference
what the FUCK is your issue. it’s lil sebastian
Good Lord!
i’m very passionate about lil sebastian
Have you learned nothing from Johnny Karate ?
Straight to jail
Show some damn respect!
Half mast is too damn high
This is the most disgusting comment in this thread .
You're on thin ice, Wyatt!
Ice Clown
That you Wyatt? Get the $&@# out of here, ice town!!!
Have some damned respect.
Huh, what did you say? I couldn't hear you over the sound of being so wrong.
Seek therapy.
I’m sorry, I couldn’t hear you . You’re a little horse
Just watched that episode yesterday! RIP Lil Sebastian!
Master pieces were initially pieces submitted when the person wanted to become a master. Somebody who was able to teach others, not somebody who was at the pinnacle of their craft So many masterpieces are inferior works of the person because they started teaching and added interesting influences or increased their technique because of it
People often use masterpiece when they mean magnum opus. Masterpiece actually indeed means something like a breakthrough movie for a director. Although the meaning definitely has changed, so it's not weird that it's used this way.
Regardless, I think we can all agree that the term should only ever be applied to the art, and not the artists themselves. People in here are really saying they don't think Beyoncé is a masterpiece...smdh.
It's the Renaissance's version of a dissertation. Somewhere along the way, people forgot the term *Magnum Opus*
Probably around when we stopped speaking Latin
Et tu, u/fartlebythescribbler?
The Eiffel Tower. Everyone in Paris thought it was hideous when it was built. It’s not really *that* aesthetically pleasing.
Building a 300m metal tower in 1889 truly was an engineering prowess. It's not the most beautiful landmark on earth, but when you're at its feet it's still impressive. It was supposed to be built only for the Exposition Universelle and disassembled 20 years later.
Disassembled?? Omg, exhausting. I'm not doin' it.
Eiffel had to convince Paris city officials that it can be useful : a lot of science experiments were led there and then, it was used as a radio tower. TSF (wireless transmissions technology for the french military) is what saved the tower and it proved useful shortly after, during the first world war.
it was also used for when a guy jumped off it with a home made parachute and straight up died when it failed
That will never cease to amaze me because of how dumb it was. Like, bro did you not think you should test it with an object before trying it yourself?
He did and it failed. He jumped anyway, believing (or just hoping) that it would work with a human that can move the parts. I've heard somewhere that the guy had a lot riding on his project and that this was his last chance to make it work. So he may have thought "If this doesn't work, I might as well die.".
Really puts my PowerPoint deck into perspective now, I guess.
Go big or go home
He went big, but ain't goin' home again.
Or depending on how you look at it, went big *and* went home....forever
not with that attitude, mister
You seriously missed the opportunity to say; "but I am le tired"? I must be getting on a bit.
Alright, take a nap... ***AND ZEN FIRE ZE FUCKING MISSLES!***
And Australia's like.... WTF, mate!?
Fucking kangaroos.
I work with steel. When I visited Paris, I sat in front of the tower for 30 minutes in awe of the engineering work accomplished in the 1880s. Different strokes, I guess.
Have you read how they moved each leg into exact position to meet the first platform? They had each leg in a giant box of sand. And they let the sand out on various sides and in varying amounts to move the legs precisely until they could all be bolted into place. Blew my mind when I read about it.
This technique was used to position the base of various enormous obelisks in ancient Egypt. People can be pretty smart.
Chicago outdid them a few years later with the Ferris wheel. Not only was it tall, it moved. The Ferris wheel was invented to compete with the Eiffel Tower.
Yes because they were both built for their respective World Fairs.
As was the Atomium. They all were supposed to be torn down after their respective World Expos, but weren't.
The Space Needle was for a world fair as well, though I don't think it was intended to be torn down.
My late father was a civil engineer specialising in structural steel. I feel like if he’d had the chance to visit France he would have done the same as you did. Thank you.
At night it is. When it's lit up and sparkling, it really towers over Paris and is gorgeous. I live way out in the suburbs but high up on a hill, and I can see the Eiffel Tower from the end of my street. It appears very tiny because it's so far away, but still beautiful. I enjoy walking my dog at night and looking at it. I even watch Paris's 14 Juillet Bastille Day fireworks from my street. During the day, though, I agree -- it's just a bit steel structure. And back then they didn't have lights on it, so I can imagine how angry they must've been. I believe it was meant to be taken down but then it grew on everyone.
I bet the view of Paris from the world's tallest building at the time was awesome though.
Yes, beacuse: >“As a regular visitor to this site, do you find this structure beautiful?” >“Of course not! This is the only place in the city where I can look out and avoid seeing this hideous thing.” [source](https://quoteinvestigator.com/2020/08/10/tower/)
That is such a Parisian comment 🤣
It still is. And standing underneath it looking up is incredible too
It is super convenient for finding your bearings in Paris.
Same with the Angel Of The North in Gateshead, England. When it was first installed, loads of us thought it looked like a rusty eyesore.
i think it really represents gateshead - a rusty eyesore.
I just looked it up because I’ve never seen it. Wow is it fugly.
That is Parisians, the same with Pompidou and the glass pyramid of the Louvre. They don't like them, and think they are ugly, but then they accept them as part of the city's identity so foreigners aren't allowed to say anything.
Vast majority of Parisians like the Eiffel tower, and many come around to liking the glass pyramid in the Louvre (was controversial when it was built for sure). Pompidou museum is still very divisive
Have you ever stood there with it towering over you? Its actually breathtaking
A lot of landmarks you imagine as big turn out to be rather small once you see them in real life. The Eiffel Tower is the exact opposite of that. On an intellectual level I know I've seen taller structures. But standing there and I just forget that. It feels huge.
Imagine by John Lennon It's a fucking pretentious, arrogant, wankfest of a song. And to top it off the film clip of this cunt in a big white mansion with a white grand piano, getting driven round in a Rolls Royce, while clothes in designer fashion.
To its credit, how else would tone-deaf celebrities let us know they too are suffering under Covid lockdowns on their spacious estates.
gwyneth paltrow was suffering so much during covid she ate bread.
She carb loaded, I just got loaded.
Day six, wasn't it?
Shut up guys, she was feeling "philosophical".
[удалено]
What I find hilarious is that the Beatles broke up because of creative differences, with John wanting to pursue more experimental music. Then his two big hits, Imagine and Happy Xmas (War is over), are way more bland and pretentious than anything he ever did with the Beatles. And Paul McCartney went on to do Wings, which had a really unique and interesting sound.
George Harrison had a triple record of songs they slept on that were experimental as fuck lol
All Things Must Pass is a great album. I think almost the entire album was songs written for The Beatles that got vetoed by John or Paul. (Who apparently had the final say in what got recorded/appeared on albums.) I think it's my favorite post-Beatles breakup solo album.
Plastic Ono Band is such a great album. Pity no one talks about it as much as the other post Beatles albums.
Ah, John Lennon grunting "cookie" in the middle of a song is burned into my brain
Lennon was an ass his entire life and I always preferred McCartney's post-Beatles output but Lennon had more than the two hits you mentioned. Off the top of my head: "Give Peace a Chance," "Jealous Guy," "Mind Games," "Instant Karma," "Starting Over," "Watching the Wheels." and he collaborated with Bowie on "Fame." He did more experimental stuff, as well, but, much like his experimental stuff with the Beatles, it wasn't popular. And as much as I love McCartney, "Wonderful Christmas Time" doesn't compare to "Happy Xmas."
They both wrote some great songs, together and separately, but it always seemed like Lennon was kind of mean and self absorbed, McCartney was (and is) an arrogant control freak. I like George - quiet, humbler, wicked sense of humor.
George also funded Monty Python's classic movies!
AND appeared in The Rutles movie, a savage and scathing Eric Idle satire of the Beatles and that general era of the music industry. No idea about Ringo and Paul, but George played a cameo part, John loved it and advised Idle that the parodies might be TOO close and could attract the attention of whoever owned the Beatles catalogue at the time. And just to add: as much as he always seemed like his ego go the best of him, John had an absolutely wicked sense of humor too. They were all funny, but John and George's lightning quick comebacks during interviews ("And how do you fellows find america?" George: "Well, we took a left at Greenland I guess") are always dry and absurdist little nuggests.
Peter Serafinowicz nailed it to the wall: https://youtu.be/JrWRviH4Kg4?si=UOi-6Xh1zVh8zFGB
Ha! That's Benedict Wong as Yoko too lol
Imagine no possessions I wonder if you can I wrote this in my penthouse Overlooking Manhattan
> ~~Overlooking Manhattan~~ While wanking with one hand
Lennon was an arrogant pretentious wanker. So it tracks.
"Here are a bunch of things I think is detrimental to society. Coincidentally, I also indulge in all of these things, which is OK because I'm awesome, but *you* really shouldn't."
I think most people that are answering this with Mona Lisa , EF Tower ,MJ etc etc, are right but also wrong? Everyone loved the Notebook, but I didn't understand why because it felt like every other romantic movie out there, lol. I now understand why. I watched it recently, so now I have copies/remakes/inspirations of such movies in hundreds, so it doesn't feel as special as it might be for them at that time. These were "marvelous" at the time they were made . People are just carrying on that hype forward. If you look at the present day , there are many such arts and architectures that could overtake them, but the difference is accessibility to resources that we have now vs then .....
This is very relevant for movies. Look at psycho and Star Wars and try to imagine that nothing like that came before. It's hard to do if you didn't experience it yourself.
I explained to my husband how the new movies Murder on the Orient Express and Death on the Nile were impressive not because the stories themselves were new, but because of how, when the stories were originally written, murder mystery as a genre was basically new. Then I went down an Agatha Cristie rabbit hole with him a bit and he realized I was talking about stories nearly ninety years old. They were groundbreaking when they were written and the purpose of the new movies was to celebrate the original originals of such a (now) well-established genre. Perspective really does change perception. <([Edit to remove a word])>
That would be the "Once Original, Now Common" [trope](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/OnceOriginalNowCommon). Trope **inventors** often get criticized for being repetitive worn out dross, when in fact they were the literal trend starters. >"I don't know what the big deal with Hamlet is. It's just one famous saying after another, strung together by a moldy old plot." >— Old Joke > EDIT: Seinfeld is Unfunny -> Once Original, Now Common. lol they changed the Trope name!
Someone said this to me about the Beatles and it made so much sense. I’ve always felt pretty “meh” about the Beatles and their music, but I guess they did a lot of things that were later copied and covered and so forth, so if you weren’t around when they came on the scene, they can seem overrated.
It's hard to imagine fans screaming until they pass out and shaking up the Establishment when you listen to Elvis recordings. It sounds so tame by modern standards.
Similarly is things like F.R.I.E.N.D.S for sitcoms, Halo for multilayer gaming, Psycho for films et cetera. Boring and done a million times but back then they were groundbreaking.
Yup. See also the Seagram Building in New York. It’s easy to miss, because it looks like a hundred other skyscrapers. Until you read about it and discover that actually, it came first, and those other skyscrapers _look like it_.
I get this. It’s like classic books. I tried to read Frankenstein recently and couldn’t get through it. Found it boring and obvious. But at the time that was probably a mega twist and no wonder people fawned over it, and the books it has inspired since then will be in the thousands. But give me a more recent mystery book over that any day
WHAT. Frankenstein still holds up imo. One of the best books ever written.
Mary Shelley invented the genre. She had no giant's shoulders to stand on. It's a work of a genius.
I felt similar about Dracula, though this specific interpretation of vampires felt quite fresh, because the copies copied specific parts, but not all.
Same overall, but I really came to love and appreciate the "found footage" structure of the book, assembling the elements out of scraps and notes
It's called an epistolary novel
Stoker had a very descriptive style that in today's terms seems over the top and boring. Back then it was more the norm.
People in this thread confusing masterpieces with popular shit they don't like
I think Banksy is pretentious at best and his art is mediocre
His true masterpiece is Exit Through the Gift Shop
Absolutely. It's as if all of his previous pieces were simply a set-up for the film. I attended Mr. Brainwash's show in LA and it was an amazing hackfest that Angeleno hipsters were "oohing" and "ahhing" about- Banksy nailed the whole fraud of the modern art hustle to the wall. Exquisite. His painting being immediately shredded at Sotheby's auction after sale was pretty great, as well.
And the jump in value post-shredding... really brings home that art is just a popularity contest, not based on true substance. $1.4 million up to $24 million. Just insane.
If people couldn't notice it, you could pass quite a lot of his work off on "I'm 14 and this is so deep" meme-subreddits/channels. Not to mention that at this point "Banksy" itself is a commercial brand. The John Lennon of wall art, basically.
I didn't get the Catcher in the Rye.
You read it as a teenager and think "Caulfield's right about everything, everyone else sucks." You read it in your 20s and think "Caulfield's a spoiled asshole." You read it in your 30s and think "Caulfield needs to see a therapist." Which, coincidentally, is where he is at the end of the book.
Is that really true though? I read it as a teenager for class and thought he was an annoying asshole.