The status of contemporary art

The buzz generated by contemporary art in the first decade of the XXIst century sometimes reminds me of the excitement generated by pop music in the 1960's. Something new is in the air — some new cultural trend, some new mass phenomenom of which everybody wants to be part of. Maybe what has happened is that there has been a profound change in the status of contemporary art: no longer an elitist pursuit, it has become part of popular culture. Just as happened with "classical" music, the cannon desintegrated — in the case of art, this desintegration meant the end of the idea of a "vanguard". In its place appeared a bewildering eclecticism, in which it is difficult, maybe even impossible, to distinguish"high" and "low" forms of art. Even though artistic schools produce every year an ever greater quantity of artists, it is no longer necessary to master every detail of the craft to qualify as an artist. You can be a visual artist without knowing how to draw, just as you can play lead guitar in a rock n' roll band without knowing how to read music.

Pietro Citati

Pietro Citati is a reader. He reads for us, voratiously, lovingly, attentively, and then recreates, in romantic and fluid prose, the great literary masterpieces of the western tradition, and the minor half forgotten pieces, the lives and temperament of their heroic authors, the cultural atmosphere in which they worked, their manias, obsessions and visions. He guides us through this labyrinth of words, through this mountain of pages, through this perpetually expanding literary universe and its innumerable bright stars: Daniel Defoe, Goethe, Jane Austen, Thomas De Quincey, Balzac, Alexandre Dumas, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Manzoni, Dickens, Dostoievsky, Poe, Stevenson, Henry James, Proust, Kafka, Fitzgerald... As we read on, we renew old loves, we reacquaint ourselves with friends we hadn't heard of in years and we discover infinite new reading possibilities. These are all the more alluring as most will never be more than that...

Antonio Pedro Vasconcelos

What little is known abroad about the cinema made in Portugal can be reduced to two names: Manuel de Oliveira, who nowadays seems to be celebrated more for the fact that he is 100 years old than for the films he is still making, and Pedro Costa, the new star of art cinema incensed by French critics. Maybe a little place should also be allotted to António Pedro Vasconcelos and his deliberately "commercial" cinema - filmmaking which is well crafted, fast paced, has good scripts and good actors, actually tells a story and even manages to be funny! If only for the sheer audacity of making a portuguese Hollywood style romantic comedy, and actually pulling it off in a very respectable manner ("A Bela e o Paparazzo", his latest movie) António Pedro Vasconcelos would deserve our gratitude. But that's not all: amazingly, his previous films, which always dealt with contemporary themes, actually stand the test of time. So when your hear about "Portuguese cinema" please bear in mind that this is not exactly the same as the cinema made in Portugal.

The joy of music

"The Making of West Side Story", which I picked up as a bargain offer at FNAC Lisbon, is a joyous and moving film of Bernstein's operatic recording of his great musical. Now I am caught: everyday I wake up singing those tunes in my head: "I feel pretty, oh so pretty...."; or "Maria.... Maria, Maria, Maria". Is West Side Story the great opera of the second half of the twentieth century? After all, when it was invented, opera was a popular genre. The day after Rigoletto's opening, people were whistling "La Donne e mobile" in the street. Here, as Bernstein himself remarks, everything still sounds fresh and bubbling. These tunes, sang with great gusto by Tatyana Troyanos, transformed into classical arias by Jose Carreras, or seamlessly delivered by Kiri te Kanawa, will remain with us forever.