While buying emergent art is high-risk, speculative investment, acquiring established masterpieces is perceived as the opposite – a back-up in hard times.
In the Koussevitzky days, new works mingled with established masterpieces; there was no contemporary ghetto.
It is far less interested in bringing together established masterpieces than in using unfamiliar artworks to shed light on a machine-infested terrain that is as social and psychological as it is visual.
With all respect to Louis Begley's "About Schmidt," it's uncertain that Mr. Payne would have taken the comparable liberties with an established American masterpiece, like, say, Saul Bellow's "Humboldt's Gift".
Realistic drama in Spain produced few masterpieces but established a bourgeois comedy of manners further developed in the 20th century.
Eight screenings are planned of "My Night at Maud's," the 1969 masterpiece that established Rohmer as a major international filmmaker.
It is now firmly established as a twentieth-century masterpiece.
Once this "masterpiece" consensus is established, it takes a brave critic to say: "Well I thought it sucked".
And rather than dwelling on established touchstones or acknowledged masterpieces, the series assembles an intriguing collage of movies that are, in their different ways, provocative and surprising, capable of challenging our assumptions about their individual makers and even about motion pictures in general.
In 1983, a foundation was established to encourage films with "Islamic values", from which emerged, ironically, a number of cinematic masterpieces.
