A good definition of the arts is given by the Free Dictionary as "imaginative, creative, and nonscientific branches of knowledge considered collectively, esp. as studied academically" ] The singular term art is defined by the Irish Art Encyclopedia as follows: "Art is created when an artist creates a beautiful object, or produces a stimulating experience that is considered by his audience to have artistic merit." So, one could conclude that art is the process that leads to a product (the artwork or piece of art), which is then examined and analyzed by experts in the field of the arts or simply enjoyed by those who appreciate the arts. The same source states that 'Art is a global activity which encompasses a host of disciplines, as evidenced by the range of words and phrases which have been invented to describe its various forms. Examples of such phraseology include: "Fine Arts", "Liberal Arts", "Visual Arts", "Decorative Arts", "Applied Arts", "Design", "Crafts", "Performing Arts", and so on.'
The term art commonly refers to the "Visual Arts", as an abbreviation of creative art or fine art. For example, the History of art is described as "the history of the visual arts of painting, sculpture and architecture. It is the history of one of the fine arts, others of which are the performing arts and literature. It is also one of the humanities.
The term sometimes encompasses theory of the visual arts, including aesthetics." The term Fine Arts has been addressed in the short article written by Nick Schofield at ezinearticles.com, entitled "What is the Definition of Fine Art?" It states that "many of the performing arts such as ballet and theater are known as the fine arts. On the other hand, [fine art] does not necessarily refer only to [the] performing arts as any art form, [such as] sculpting, painting and many more all [sic] can be considered fine art as long as the purity of the art itself is the best that it can possibly be." In the article for Fine art, we read that 'Confusion often occurs when people mistakenly refer to the Fine Arts but mean the Performing Arts (Music, Dance, Drama, etc.). However, there is some disagreement here: e.g., at York University (Toronto, Canada) Fine Arts is a faculty that includes the "traditional" fine arts, design, [film] and the "Performing Arts." Furthermore, creative writing is frequently considered a fine art as well.' As a further example, the College of Fine Arts at Stephen F. Austin State University (Nacogdoches, TX), consists of the Schools of "Art, Music and Theatre."
More work will be required to standardize the use of the terms "art" and "fine art", but for the purpose of this article the definition of "the arts" is not problematic, because it includes all the arts. One artist has even suggested that "[it] would really simplify matters if we could all just stick with visual, auditory, performance or literary - when we speak of The Arts - and eliminate "Fine" altogether."
History
For all intents and purposes, the history of the arts begins with the history of art, as dealt with elsewhere. Furthermore, the history of the Performing Arts and Literature have been described in other articles. Some examples of creative art through the ages can be summarized here, as excerpted from the history of art.
Ancient Egyptian art saw the veneration of the animal form and the development of equivalent skills to show musculature, poise, beauty and anatomically correct proportions. Ancient Roman art depicted gods as idealized humans, shown with characteristic distinguishing features (i.e. Zeus' thunderbolt).
In Byzantine and Gothic art of the Middle Ages, the dominance of the church insisted on the expression of biblical and not material truths.
Eastern art has generally worked in a style akin to Western medieval art, namely a concentration on surface patterning and local colour (meaning the plain colour of an object, such as basic red for a red robe, rather than the modulations of that colour brought about by light, shade and reflection). A characteristic of this style is that the local colour is often defined by an outline (a contemporary equivalent is the cartoon). This is evident in, for example, the art of India, Tibet and Japan.
Religious Islamic art forbids iconography, and expresses religious ideas through geometry instead.
The physical and rational certainties depicted by the 19th-century Enlightenment were shattered not only by new discoveries of relativity by Einstein and of unseen psychology by Freud, but also by unprecedented technological development. Paradoxically the expressions of new technologies were greatly influenced by the ancient tribal arts of Africa and Oceania, through the works of Paul Gauguin and the Post-Impressionists, Pablo Picasso and the Cubists, as well as the Futurists and others.
Drawing is a means of making an image, using any of a wide variety of tools and techniques. It generally involves making marks on a surface by applying pressure from a tool, or moving a tool across a surface. Common tools are graphitepencils, pen and ink, inkedbrushes, wax color pencils, crayons, charcoals, pastels, and markers. Digital tools which simulate the effects of these are also used. The main techniques used in drawing are: line drawing, hatching, crosshatching, random hatching, scribbling, stippling, and blending. An artist who excels in drawing is referred to as a draftswoman or draughtsman.
Architecture (from Latin, architectura and ultimately from Greek, áñ÷éôåêôùí, "a master builder", from áñ÷é- "chief, leader" and ôåêôùí, "builder, carpenter") is the art and science of designingbuildings and structures.
A wider definition would include within its scope the design of the total built environment, from the macrolevel of town planning, urban design, and landscape architecture to the microlevel of creating furniture. Architectural design usually must address both feasibility and cost for the builder, as well as function and aesthetics for the user.
In modern usage, architecture is the art and discipline of creating an actual, or inferring an implied or apparent plan of any complex object or system. The term can be used to connote the implied architecture of abstract things such as music or mathematics, the apparent architecture of natural things, such as geological formations or the structure of biological cells, or explicitly planned architectures of human-made things such as software, computers, enterprises, and databases, in addition to buildings. In every usage, an architecture may be seen as a subjective mapping from a human perspective (that of the user in the case of abstract or physical artifacts) to the elements or components of some kind of structure or system, which preserves the relationships among the elements or components.
Planned architecture often manipulatesspace, volume, texture, light, shadow, or abstract elements in order to achieve pleasing aesthetics. This distinguishes it from applied science or engineering, which usually concentrate more on the functional and feasibility aspects of the design of constructions or structures.
In the field of building architecture, the skills demanded of an architect range from the more complex, such as for a hospital or a stadium, to the apparently simpler, such as planning residential houses. Many architectural works may be seen also as cultural and political symbols, and/or works of art. The role of the architect, though changing, has been central to the successful (and sometimes less than successful) design and implementation of pleasingly built environments in which people live.
Painting taken literally is the practice of applying pigment suspended in a vehicle (or medium) and a binding agent (a glue) to a surface (support) such as paper, canvas, wood panel or a wall. However, when used in an artistic sense it means the use of this activity in combination with drawing, composition and other aesthetic considerations in order to manifest the expressive and conceptual intention of the practitioner.
Painting is also used to express spiritual motifs and ideas; sites of this kind of painting range from artwork depicting mythological figures on pottery to The Sistine Chapel to the human body itself.
Colour is the essence of painting as sound is of music. Colour is highly subjective, but has observable psychological effects, although these can differ from one culture to the next. Black is associated with mourning in the West, but elsewhere white may be.
Some painters, theoreticians, writers and scientists, including Goethe, Kandinsky, Newton, have written their own colour theory. Moreover the use of language is only a generalization for a colour equivalent. The word "red", for example, can cover a wide range of variations on the pure red of the spectrum. There is not a formalized register of different colours in the way that there is agreement on different notes in music, such as C or C#, although the Pantone system is widely used in the printing and design industry for this purpose.
Modern artists have extended the practice of painting considerably to include, for example, collage. This began with Cubism and is not painting in strict sense. Some modern painters incorporate different materials such as sand, cement, straw or wood for their texture. Examples of this are the works of Jean Dubuffet or Anselm Kiefer.
Modern and contemporary art has moved away from the historic value of craft in favour of concept; this has led some to say that painting, as a serious art form, is dead, although this has not deterred the majority of artists from continuing to practise it either as whole or part of their work.
Conceptual art is art in which the concept(s) or idea(s) involved in the work take precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. The inception of the term in the 1960s referred to a strict and focused practice of idea-based art that often defied traditional visual criteria associated with the visual arts in its presentation as text. However, through its association with the Young British Artists and the Turner Prize during the 1990s, its popular usage, particularly in the UK, developed as a synonym for all contemporary art that does not practise the traditional skills of painting and sculpture.
Literature
Shakespeare wrote some of the best known works in English literature.
Literature is literally "acquaintance with letters" as in the first sense given in the Oxford English Dictionary (from the Latinlittera meaning "an individual written character (letter)"). The term has generally come to identify a collection of writings, which in Western culture are mainly prose, both fiction and non-fiction, drama and poetry. In much, if not all of the world, texts can be oral as well, and include such genres as epic, legend, myth, ballad, other forms of oral poetry, and as folktale.
Performing arts
The performing arts differ from the plastic arts insofar as the former uses the artist's own body, face, presence as a medium, and the latter uses materials such as clay, metal or paint which can be molded or transformed to create some art object.
Artists who participate in these arts in front of an audience are called performers, including actors, comedians, dancers, musicians, and singers. Performing arts are also supported by workers in related fields, such as songwriting and stagecraft.
There is also a specialized form of fine art in which the artists perform their work live to an audience. This is called Performance art. Most performance art also involves some form of plastic art, perhaps in the creation of props. Dance was often referred to as a plastic art during the Modern dance era.
Music is an art form whose medium is sound. Common elements of music are pitch (which governs melody and harmony), rhythm (and its associated concepts tempo, meter, and articulation), dynamics, and the sonic qualities of timbre and texture.
The creation, performance, significance, and even the definition of music vary according to culture and social context. Music ranges from strictly organized compositions (and their recreation in performance), through improvisational music to aleatoric forms. Music can be divided into genres and subgenres, although the dividing lines and relationships between music genres are often subtle, sometimes open to individual interpretation, and occasionally controversial. Within "the arts", music may be classified as a performing art, a fine art, and auditory art.
Theatre
Theatre or theater (Greek "theatron", èÝáôñïí) is the branch of the performing arts concerned with acting out stories in front of an audience using combinations of speech, gesture, music, dance, sound and spectacle — indeed any one or more elements of the other performing arts. In addition to the standard narrative dialogue style, theatre takes such forms as opera, ballet, mime, kabuki, classical Indian dance, Chinese opera, mummers' plays, and love.
Charlie Chaplin museum to open in Swiss mansion Associated Press 23.11.2009
Former home by Lake Geneva to showcase life and work of legendary actor
Charlie Chaplin's mansion, near Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland, which is to become a museum in celebration of his life and work. Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/Keystone/AP
Charlie Chaplin's Swiss mansion is to become a museum, one of his sons said today.
The Corsier-sur-Vevey property by Lake Geneva was chosen over sites in Los Angeles and London as the site of the first museum dedicated to the screen legend, said Michael Chaplin.
The museum, which has been a decade in the planning and will be finished within two years, will feature objects from the actor's life and displays chronicling his rise from London's music halls to Hollywood stardom. "He was very happy here because he had a family life," Michael Chaplin said of the Swiss home where his father lived for more than 20 years until his death in 1977.
The vaulted wine cellars of the house will be used to evoke the Victorian-era London of Chaplin's youth, while Hollywood will be recreated in the form of film sets in two annex buildings. Exhibits will include a giant recreation of the machine from Modern Times that Chaplin used to portray the desperation of factory workers, as well as footage from his movies and holographic narrators.
High School Musical gets Chinese remake
Disney co-production said to be inspired by original High School Musical, rather than a direct translation
High School Musical 3. Photograph: Disney Enterprises/AP
One has millions of devoted adherents, a doctrine of clean-cut conformity and an unstoppable, culture-changing momentum; the other is China. Now, in a particularly fitting match, two of the most persuasive ideologies of recent times are to unite: the Disney franchise High School Musical is being remade for a Chinese audience.
Four years after the first film in the series hit the screens, achieving a staggering popularity among pre-teens worldwide, the US entertainment giant has announced that it is remaking the film with Chinese partners for release next summer. The news comes weeks after Disney said Chinese authorities had approved plans for a theme park in Shanghai.
High School Musical, the first film in the series, was launched as a made-for-TV movie by Disney in January 2006 and has been seen by an estimated 225 million viewers in about 100 countries and in more than 30 languages. It has spawned two successful sequels and a vast array of merchandising.
The Chinese movie is said to have been inspired by the original, rather than being a straight translation of its screenplay. It will focus on an unlikely couple from seemingly opposite school cliques – a basketball jock and a science nerd – brought together in an entirely chaste romance by their love of singing.
Although the US film features a song urging teenagers not to "stick to the status quo", its brand of rebellion encourages nothing more risque than auditioning for the end-of-term school musical, with the doctrine "We're all in this together". It seems unlikely that Disney's Chinese partners will attempt anything more edgy.
Jason Reed, general manager of Walt Disney Studios international production, told Variety that Disney had initially contemplated making martial arts the main sport in the film, rather than basketball. Its Chinese partners pointed out that basketball was vastly more popular among Chinese teenagers.
Disney said the Chinese version, featuring six newcomers, would be shot in Shanghai. The company is working with the Shanghai Media Group and Huaiyi Brothers Media Corporation on what will be its third co-produced film in China, and its sixth international co-production.
The director, New York-based Chen Shizheng, is best known for his stage work. In 1999 he mounted a 20-hour production of the classic Chinese opera piece The Peony Pavilion, and more recently he created the opera Monkey, persuading Damon Albarn to write the music.
His first feature film was Dark Matter, loosely based on the true story of a troubled Chinese astrophysics student studying in the US. It starred Meryl Streep and China's Liu Ye.
Disney announced last year that a fourth English-language film in the series was being written, featuring none of the original characters. Provisionally titled High School Musical: East Meets West, the film will not feature a controversial interracial romance or explore the challenges of clashing cultures in a globalised world, but instead centre on the interschool rivalry between East High Wildcats and West High Knights.
After eight years photographing the dark underbelly of Naples, Johnnie Shand Kydd explains why he thinks it is Europe's most radical city.
When I’m talking about Naples, I don’t feel like I’m talking about a city. It’s more like an organism or a human being. She’s like a fantastically beautiful lover who has severe mental health issues.
The love affair started in 2000, when I was invited out by an Italian gallery and pitched up there with a suitcase and my camera. It’s a city that can drive you mad. I think you need to get a way from it but then it has a strange draw. It’s like a drug addiction. You come back from there and almost immediately get an itch to go back again.
I wanted to show that there were many layers to the city. On one level, it’s very glamorous, the sun shines, there’s the beach culture. But behind it, is something much bleaker. The more time you spend in Naples, the darker the city becomes. With my exhibition and new book of black and white photographs, partly influenced by Neorealist filmmakers like Luchino Visconti, I wanted to avoid Naples as it is so often depicted in lifestyle photography. I’m not interested in another picture of a big fat mamma making pasta. I wanted to be more honest.
The Camorra is ever-present in Naples – as the recent release of their CCTV footage of a man being gunned down in a café, reminded us. I’m not a war photographer, I didn’t want to hunt them down but I think the spirit of the Camorra is in the book. There is a kind of sadness to the city and that’s all tied up with the Camorra.
Decay is all part of it. If you go back to the Eighteenth Century, it was the third greatest city in Europe. It was incredibly grand. With the unification of Italy in 1860, it ceased to be a kingdom in its own right, and with the collapse of the monarchy there was no raison d’etre for the grandeur, the court and the wealth.
Then it became a sad court province. There’s squalor, but there’s also something magical about it. It’s the antithesis to somewhere carefully manicured like Bath – it looks like a bomb’s hit it.
One of the most fascinating pictures in the book, I think, is the one of the transsexual giving birth to a doll. I met the old boy a year ago and discovered that he was one of the last practitioners of this strange ritual.
He goes through the whole process of giving birth, so his waters break, and then he rushes to the window and shouts down to the street “help me, help me!”
The next door neighbours rush up to find him and help him give birth. He’s given birth about 13 times. It’s a profundity ritual. I got access to it to photograph it, and then I read a book called ‘The Skin’ by Curzio Malaparte and there’s a chapter in that called ‘The Son of Adam’ which describes exactly the same ritual, in 1947. I then found out that this bizarre ritual goes back thousands of years.
It was one of the most primal experiences I’ve ever gone through. A group of us assembled in this little apartment, and I was sweating like I’d just run a marathon. There was huge seriousness about the whole thing.
Naples is one of the few great cities in Europe that hasn’t been homogenised at all. When you’re in the heart of Naples you don’t hear anything other than Neapolitan dialect. A friend of mind always says, it’s the least global of all the cities in Europe - and I think that makes it the most radical.
Victorian Rhapsody: Queen guitarist Brian May on the photos of a forgotten Britain that became his secret obsession By BRIAN MAY on the detective trail. 16.01.2010.
When I was about 12 years old, Weetabix gave away a series of 3-D picture cards featuring animals - you would find them nestling between the box and the inner bag.
The idea was that you could send off for a special 'Vista-Screen' viewer which, when the pictures were inserted, made them leap into amazing 3-D.
The effect was pure magic - a window into another world. It was the beginning of a love affair that has lasted most of my life, and has drawn me into an extraordinary trail of historical discovery.
Stereoscopy - to give 3-D imaging its proper name - is simple in principle. In real life our eyes see two slightly different versions of the same view - and our brains work to combine these into an instant read-out. Stereoscopy is a form of photography that works in the same way.
Two photographs are taken of the same scene, one from the position of each eye. When viewed through a stereoscope (like the one pictured below) the brain combines these images and interprets the small differences to give us a perception of depth, and the three-dimensional shape of objects. The original pictures were taken long before colour film and were painstakingly hand-coloured.
As a youngster growing up in Feltham in the suburbs of London, I was transfixed by these images and began to scour street markets for old stereo cards. Little was known about the creators of the most ancient and intriguing images, but the same proprietary marks cropped up again and again: Elliott, Silvester, and TRW.
TRW, or Thomas Richard Williams (1824-71), rapidly became my favourite. But frustratingly, the only reference I could find to him was in a little book about stereo cards, which gave just one picture and contained scant detail: the rough dates of his birth and death and that he had created a series of rural stereo views called Scenes In Our Village. But it was enough to capture my imagination.
The series has fascinated and enchanted me ever since, and after 30 years of detective work, I now know that it comprises 59 exquisite scenes, taken in and around an idyllic village of the Victorian age, featuring many local characters.
Scenes In Our Village achieved great popularity at the time it was produced, in the 1850s, but then all but disappeared, until my co-researcher and I were able to rescue it. It's been a bit like an archaeological dig! The photographs now represent an important historical document of a bygone age.
Cards from the series are rare, but, on tour for many years with Queen, I got to know specialist dealers in all the cities that we played in, and would spend hours trawling through dusty boxes in their backrooms, seeking out these gems. I found them all over the world - in America, France, Germany, even Australia. This is not, I admit, the usual leisure activity for rock stars on the road.
BRIAN MAY WRITES: A magnificent 1850s view of the river - tranquil with a hint of suspense. Across the water lies Ferry Farm, busy with goods for the village of Hinton Waldrist, to be delivered by ferry. To the right we can see nets drying
TURNING BARLEY: The photographer, T.R. Williams, captures perfectly the locals of Hinton Waldrist going about their daily pursuits (although to take the photo without blurring, he would have persuaded them to freeze for a minute or two).
Despite the century and a half between us, I have always felt a powerful affinity with TR Williams - an almost physical connection that spans the decades. He was interested in art for art's sake, but he was also compelled to communicate his art to an audience, to elicit a response.
As a musician, I feel the same way. I make music because I love it, and I really can't help doing it, but the greatest thrill is in the communication - in the fact that people 'out there' get excited about it as well.
When Queen stopped touring, I enlisted the help of photographic historian Elena Vidal to help piece together information about Williams's life and work. The biggest mystery of all was the identity of 'Our Village'. Some people even questioned whether the village was real or merely a composition of images from different places.
I had wrestled with this problem for years when suddenly, in a Eureka moment, I realised that someone out there must live near the church in the series. I published a picture of it on my website, and within 36 hours six people (including two from Italy) had correctly identified it as St Margaret's Church in Hinton Waldrist, which now lies in Oxfordshire, but then in Berkshire. This was the discovery I had been waiting for. I immediately jumped in the car and drove there with a great feeling of anticipation.
THE SCHOOLMISTRESS: A poignant image, the retired village schoolmistress sitting in her neat, ordered world. Is she fondly musing on the fortunes of all her former pupils - or was she a fearsome battleaxe?
GLEANERS RETIRING: The weariness of the labourers, returning from the fields, is palpable. The lady in pink has, understandably, moved during exposure - hence her head appears to have disappeared.
It was an extraordinary spine-chilling moment when I finally saw the church that I had been studying remotely for half of my life. It was almost unchanged - almost suspended in time. I tried to find the same position from which Williams had first photographed it - which just so happened to involve standing on the roof of my car. I took a snap from there.
Today Hinton Waldrist has four streets, 160 houses, two farms and a population of 333 - and is stuffed with cars - but in the Victorian age it was a rural idyll: thatched cottages, rosy- cheeked girls and contented elderly women.
John Lasseter interview: Disney goes back to the drawing board
Animation pioneer John Lasseter explains why the studio bucked Hollywood’s obsession with computers to create its latest cartoon adventure, The Princess and The Frog. By Marc Lee 14.01.2010
John Lasseter’s Pixar studio reinvented the animated movie. Beginning with Toy Story 15 years ago, all 10 of its computer-generated films have been critical and box-office hits, with the most recent release, last year’s wondrous Up, making more than $700 million at the box office. So, when the greatest innovator in modern animation was reunited with the greatest animation studio in the history of the movies, expectations were high. What wasn’t expected was what happened next…
For the first animated film initiated at Disney under his aegis as chief creative officer, Lasseter abandoned the techniques he had so successfully pioneered and went back to the drawing board.
The Princess and the Frog – an enchanting musical tale of voodoo, gumbo and girl power, set in Jazz Age New Orleans – marks Disney’s return to hand-drawn animation, the painstaking method of creating movie magic that the studio employed for decades but which, it seemed, had become old hat in the 21st century. Why, I ask Lasseter, did he do it?
“I never understood,” he says, “why Disney and other studios thought that audiences weren’t interested in watching hand-drawn animation any more. Because of the success of our films at Pixar and other things, I think they decided, 'Oh, people just want to watch computer animation.’ But part of me was thinking that didn’t make any sense because the computer is just the tool, in the same way that the pencil is, or, with live-action filmmaking, the way the camera is.
“You never hear of a live-action studio that has been making so-so films looking over at a studio that’s making great movies and going, 'Oh, we see the difference – we’re using a different camera.’ It seemed 2D animation became the scapegoat for bad storytelling.”
Lasseter says that Pixar, which was bought by Disney for $7.4 billion four years ago, has always prided itself on choosing subject matter that lends itself to computer animation. And you can see what he means. The technique rather obviously suits stories about machines – Cars, for instance, or Wall·E, with its robot hero – but somehow the amazing journey of a grouchy septuagenarian and wide-eyed boy scout in Up is also made more believably fantastical thanks specifically to the way it is realised.
In contrast, with The Princess and the Frog you get the satisfying sense that the style is in complete harmony with the content: using the latest cutting-edge technology would have diminished its considerable period charm. As it is, the look is just right.
The aim, says Lasseter, was to give the film a timeless quality, but then that’s been the aim of all the films he has overseen – a timelessness that ensures their longevity.
He recalls a conversation during the making of Toy Story with his friend Steve Jobs of Apple, who also co-founded Pixar. “Steve said, 'You know, John, the computers I make at Apple – at best their life span is three years to five years because the technology has moved on. But, if you do your job right, this movie will be for ever.’
“Doing our job right means making the story and the characters truly timeless, not dependent on topical humour. Look at the films of Walt Disney: Snow White came out in February 1938, and I can’t think of another film from that year that’s watched as much. The same is true of Bambi, Dumbo… even, frankly, Toy Story, which is probably watched more than any other movie of 1995. And our films will continue that way – if we do our jobs right.
“That’s what’s exciting about The Princess and the Frog, coming back to a style that really is timeless.”
Having said that, the film does feature a feisty, go-getting heroine, Tiana, who speaks to modern audiences. And, though Mulan and Pocahontas were non-white, she is also the first black Disney princess, a development widely applauded when the movie was released in the States. The Washington Post enthused: “Her appearance this holiday season, coming on the heels of Michelle Obama’s emergence as the nation’s first lady, the Obama girls in the White House, and the first line of Barbie dolls modelled on black women [crowns] an extraordinary year of visibility for African American women.”
In The Princess and the Frog, Tiana is the daughter of a soldier who, before going off to fight in the First World War never to return, instills in her a passion for food (echoes here of the 2007 Pixar hit Ratatouille). Plans to open her own swanky restaurant, however, are interrupted when she kisses a frog – actually a handsome prince who has fallen foul of local witch doctor – and turns into a frog herself.
She then hops off into the dark and dangerous bayou to elicit a cure from Mama Odie, a funky, fairy-godmother figure. Along the way, she befriends Louis, a jazz-loving alligator, and Ray, a lovesick Cajun firefly. There’s lots of roistering, rip-this-joint music and songs by Randy Newman.
Lasseter may be bringing a new perspective to Disney’s animated output, but The Princess and the Frog is created unmistakably in the spirit that Walt established 72 years ago with Snow White. It is a film for the family audience, which makes me wonder whether Lasseter would ever consider tackling more “grown-up” stories – especially now that films such as the recent Waltz With Bashir and Persepolis have brought an edgy, political dimension to animation.
“No,” he says firmly. “We like to make the sort of movies that we like to watch, with the humour, the heart and the subject matter that compels an adult audience, but which are great for kids, too. Frankly, that’s who I am, as a filmmaker and creative leader – and everybody I work with is that way. When you set out to really entertain adults as well as kids, your audience is basically anybody who is breathing.
“As soon as you decide to make a movie for adults,” he adds with a hint of the steely pragmatism that has helped him make so many billions at the box office, “your potential audience is much, much smaller.”
Light graffiti: Artist Ben Matthews creates incredible images using his camera and light
Incredible never-before-seen pictures show the latest spectacular work from the UK's best light graffiti artist
A 'frog eye' view of animals drinking at a watering hole in the Great Rift Valley, Kenya
Greg du Toit was so determined to photograph wild
lions drinking he sat submerged in their watering hole for three months
and ended up catching several diseases Picture: GREG DU TOIT/ BARCROFT
Gallery (10 pictures): Underwater robot films Sahara seamounts off the Canary islands
1 / 8 Winner: Black-faced blenny by Arthur Kingdon
'This
black-faced blenny (also known as a yellow triple fin) was under
Swanage pier, Dorset, in June 2009. Although only about three inches
long, he was quite easy to spot, but it took me a while to spot the
very well camouflaged female that he was trying to impress'
Photograph: Arthur Kingdon/The Wildlife Trusts
Painter buys old set of negatives for £30 at garage sale... but 10 years later expert values them at £128 MILLION
Their owner said the old set of negatives was worth £50.
So Rick Norsigian thought he had a bargain when he managed to haggle down to £30.
Just imagine his joy, then, when he had them valued ten years later and was told that their true worth was £128.5million.
Priceless: Painter Rick Norsigian picked up a set of 65 negatives for just £30 - only to find they were worth £128.5million
The 65 negatives from the 1920s and 1930s are the work of acclaimed U.S. nature photographer Ansel Adams, experts say.
Mr Norsigian, a painter, found the 6.5 x 8.5in glass plates at a California garage sale.
When he turned them into prints, his relatives suggested that they resembled Adams’s work.
Unwanted: The prints were in a garage sale and relatives suggested they resembled the work of nature photographer Ansel Adams
Some find: Mr Norsigian was actually looking for an antique chair before stumbling across the negatives
But it took years of painstaking research before experts said they were sure - and a Beverly Hills gallery revealed their astronomical value.
Mr Norsigian said: ‘These
photographs take your breath away. But it is even more meaningful to
finally confirm what I believed in my heart when I saw the images for
the first time.'
Reward: Rick Norsigian with one of
the prints. Many of the images have never been printed before and are
of scenes from the 1920s and 1930s
Authentic: Mr Norsigian has
carefully researched Ansel Adams' work before experts revealed they
were the work of the nature photographer
Exhibit offers fresh look at Leonardo da Vinci
Jon Hurdle
If it's hard to grasp the genius
of Leonardo da Vinci, it may be because he left no working models of the
drawings that showed his intimate grasp of fields ranging from
engineering to botany and anatomy.
But Philadelphia's Franklin
Institute is hosting an exhibition that explains his paintings and the
construction and operation of his famous inventions using newly created
models as well as dazzling touch-screen technology.
"Leonardo da Vinci's Workshop," which runs from Saturday until May
22, examines his flying machines, weapons of war, robots and other
mechanical devices by using computer graphics to create
three-dimensional pictures of the items that in their original form are
represented only by drawings in the artist notebooks.
"The genius of Leonardo da Vinci, the greatest mind of the
Renaissance, springs to life in this much heralded exhibit from Italy,"
the institute said on its website.
It added that for the first time new discoveries about "The Last Supper," one of his most famous paintings, will be unveiled.
A digital restoration of the work highlights elements that had been
obscured by five centuries of deterioration, including plates of fish
and slices of orange on the table where Jesus and his disciples are
sitting. It also reveals a bell tower rising in the distance behind the
figure of Jesus.
The lack of halos on the figures of Jesus and the disciples
suggests that da Vinci was not a religious man and may even have had an
antagonistic relationship with the monks who commissioned the painting,
according to Mario Taddei, a co-curator of the exhibition.
"These are common people," Taddei said, referring to the figures in the painting.
The exhibit also includes a giant crossbow, one of 1,780 drawings
in the Codex Atlanticus, da Vinci's largest collection of inventions,
that can be selected from a touch screen.
The screen shows a replica of the drawing in the notebook,
alongside the left-handed inventor's famous right-to-left handwriting.
But the touch of a visitor's finger on the notebook draws out a much
larger 3D representation of the device which can be rotated and examined
from all angles.
Another touch illustrates its moving parts.
The touch screens allow visitors to flip the pages of the artist's
notebooks as if they were paper copies, and to select any drawings of
interest for closer inspection.
Another screen can deconstruct, reassemble and present a
three-dimensional representation of the mechanical lion, a complex
machine the artist made as a gift to the King of France in 1515.
The lion is also represented as a large wooden model that has been
created by the exhibition's curators Leonardo3, a Milan, Italy-based
company dedicated to research and media related to the artist and
inventor.
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Charlie Chaplin's mansion, near Corsier-sur-Vevey, Switzerland, which is to become a museum in celebration of his life and work. Photograph: Fabrice Coffrini/Keystone/AP
High School Musical 3. Photograph: Disney Enterprises/AP 
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