masterpieces

Lucasfilm president Kathleen Kennedy with Star Wars fans at the premiere of The Rise of Skywalker.Photo: Alberto E. Rodriguez (Getty Images)We’ll never understand how certain pockets of the internet vilify Kathleen Kennedy. Since Kennedy became the president of Lucasfilm in 2012, she’s been instrumental in bringing one of the most famous franchises in the world back to prominence on the big screen and beyond. Under Kennedy we finally got to see what happens after Return of the Jedi, the first Star Wars TV show, what…

No matter how much thought you put into a tattoo, there’s no guarantee you’re still going to love it in 10 years. Times change, ink fades, and your taste may not be stagnant. But “no ragrets,” right?For those of us who start having second thoughts about our pieces of ink after the freshness wears off, there are thankfully some creative artists out there who will be happy to replace them with new masterpieces. Below, you’ll find some of the best tattoo cover-ups that have been shared in the Fixed Tattoos subreddit, so…

There may still be a soft ban on the importing cultural products from Russia into the UK while the war rages on in Ukraine, but someone has let this one in under the wire. Produced by a Moscow-based production company called Licensing Brands (a fabulously utilitarian name worthy of the Stalinist era), Cats in the Museum is an animated feature that delivers just what its own title suggests. There are some cats, and they are in a museum. Book your ticket now because what else is there to take small children to see in the…

Elspeth Barker could write about anything and have you longing for more, which makes it sad that she wrote so little: we need to cherish every word that has survived of her. She was the wife of the poet George Barker and, in the ways that count, a poet herself – although in prose. When she died, in 2022, she had published one wonderful novel, O Caledonia, about a wayward 16-year-old girl growing up in a Scottish castle. Described by Ali Smith as “one of the best least-known novels of the 20th century”, it became, once…

The late and great Cormac McCarthy’s most famous novel is probably The Road, a hauntingly well-written and shattering story of a father and son trekking across a lawless America, wiped out by an unspecified cataclysmic event. Much has been made of the author’s sparse style, which combines poetic and surreal descriptions with lithe plotting and bleakly surreal settings: an appealing combination for a motion picture adaptation.The Australian director John Hillcoat brought it to the screen in 2009 with a film that…

It’s said that art imitates life, but painters in 19th century Denmark really took that adage to heart. The so-called Danish Golden Age of painting, which lasted from about 1800 to 1850, coincided with a particularly beer-crazed era for the nation. A new study out today in Science Advances suggests Danish artists used grains and yeast leftover from brewing to prep canvases for their masterpieces. Painters during the Danish Golden Age are known for combining…

Where American television hustles to turn recently published beach reads into prestige series, literary classics — Austen, Dickens, Trollope, Waugh, et al. — have long been the bread and butter of British broadcasting. (At least as it’s understood by Americans.)With their colorful characters, pretzel plots, romantic situations, grand set pieces, climactic revelations and seamless blend of drama and comedy, these books are made to be played. They are so full of vivid incident and dialogue that adaptation becomes more a…

Famous painters like Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, and other Renaissance masters may have experimented with mixing egg yolk into their oil paint to help the paintings withstand humidity and to prevent wrinkling and yellowing, scientists have found.Research into the painting habits of the master painters "might improve the preservation of invaluable artworks," a study published by Nature Communication said.While protein residue was previously detected in the masterpieces, the study shows that including the eggs…

Image via Searchlight Pictures If there’s one lesson worth bestowing on those who indulge in film and television on even the most elementarily critical level, it’s that disliking things should not be an enjoyable feeling; indeed, if one jumps at the chance to slander pop culture before attaching buzzwords to anything out of the Criterion Collection, there’s a good to fair chance that such an interest in film is lacking in sincerity. It makes it all the more refreshing, then, when such a phenomenon is flipped on…

Art masterpieces are a risk at any time; AI and new technologies can give a handimages generated by the author using OpenAI’s DALL-E 2In recent months there has been talk about how artificial intelligence can create images from textual prompts. Therefore, when one associates the words artificial intelligence and art, one immediately thinks of DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and other algorithms. In this article, instead, I want to discuss why artworks are often less safe than we think, and how artificial intelligence can help…