Artistic merit

Few artists have had a greater influence upon the course of portraiture and history painting than the French Neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David. His canvasses evoked heavy emotion simply not found in the preceding frivolous Rococo era, a severity the artist gravitated to as various governments traded off. First, the conflicting grandeur and inequity of Louis XVI’s Ancien Régime, then the tumultuous French Revolution, and finally the magnificently short lived rule of Napoleon. Ultimately,…

The Painted Veil is a 1925 novel by British author W. Somerset Maugham. The title is taken from Percy Bysshe Shelley's sonnet which begins "Lift not the painted veil which those who live / Call Life". The biographer Richard Cordell notes that the book was influenced by Maugham's study of science and his work as a houseman at St Thomas' Hospital. The novel was first published in serialised form in five issues of Cosmopolitan (November 1924 – March 1925). Beginning in May 1925, it was serialised…

success such as Last Action Hero and Godzilla can be attributed as the blockbuster due to their high budget and subsequent marketing effort (Cook, 2004). However, the focus on creating blockbusters became so intense that it drove some of the more artistic or smaller scale films out of the market (Cook, 2004). This was due to the fact that, producers were not willing to spend money on the movies or ideas that were not creating enough value for them (Biskind, 1975). The fact of the matter was that…

His obsession with El Greco started when he went to study in Madrid where he was impressed by El Greco’s magnificent heads. As early as 1899 he had filled page after page of a sketchbook with caricatures of Greco-like portraits, often with flamboyant ruff collars, exaggerating their pointed chins, their schematic quality and their hyper-refined tonality. One of his heads even had the inscription: Yo El Greco, yo Greco! Shortly afterwards Picasso’s Blue Period followed and there his pictures were…

regard William Shakespeare’s Hamlet as his greatest work, if not the world’s greatest play written in the English language. However, some famous critics such as T.S. Eliot see Hamlet in a different light — they see Hamlet as nothing more than an “artistic failure” full of inconsistencies. For example, why exactly is Hamlet not crowned king when he is already of age? Is it because he is away at Wittenberg? Despite this fault, these myriads of analyses only highlight the fact that Hamlet is…

stained glass window, then one of his lamps may be in fiscal reach for those who were not extremely wealthy. “Of course, Tiffany's lamps were largely priced for the luxury market, but his insistence that the objects of everyday life should have artistic merit set him apart in the industrial age.”5 While Tiffany’s talented team of craftsmen used specified patterns to create lampshades, they were each unique and original due to the individualized pieces of glass and their highly varied colors and…

From the rise of grandeur megachurches to certain celebrity preachers on TV, prosperity gospels have infiltrated into the American culture and indoctrinated believers with the fallacy that faith in God leads to a “good life.” Many Christians habitually assume a false façade of perfection to demonstrate piety while using the Bible as a manual toward the unattainable perfect lives. After all, if believers suffer, it must be due to insufficient prayers and the lack of faith in God. God, then,…

Aspects of Humanity Revealed through Symbolism in Never Let Me Go Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go has been widely acclaimed for its insights into the depths of human life. On the surface, the main characters, Kathy H., Tommy, and Ruth live completely normal lives, but their inevitable futures as organ donors separates them from “normal” people. Throughout their childhood and adolescent lives, the characters encounter various objects that become sentimental to them. Kathy greatly values her…

Airport and the passengers look down at the interestingly shaped runways as the plane is cleared to land. After the smooth landing, the passengers exit the plane to gather their luggage and go about their business in the city. Taking note of the artistic murals on the walls as they walk, passengers move along in a hurry to get where they are going, as they do in any international airport. As passengers leave the airport in their Ubers or taxis, they look out the window to see the big blue…

It was a movie that was based on a true story, of a man by the name of Frank Lucas. American Gangster was basically about Frank Lucas and his life as a big time business man, big time street-pharmacist, but most of all a family man. Frank Lucas was a business man of street drugs; he was a gangster, who transported drugs from Bangkok in the Vietnam War to the east cost of the United States. Frank Lucas was not just and old street-pharmacist, he was smart he had people working for him, people on…