But there's an enduring vision and aesthetic yearning at the core of Francis Ford Coppola's quest, and there's nothing cynical or self-serving about his artistic achievement.
An outsider who reportedly played Caruso at home, he had an artistic soul yearning to breathe free and turns out to have been an early precursor of Olafur Eliasson and Matthew Barney and Francis Alys, all of whom digest their environments on our behalf, often making large the fantasies and fears that reside deep in most of us.
New York, especially SoHo, was where aspiring British artists yearned to be. Britain's own DIY artistic culture in London's East End paralleled New York's, but with less elan and almost no audience.
From his mom he appears to have inherited his yearning for artistic accomplishment, and from his dad his wickedly subversive humor, his knowledge that taste can stifle.
He probably comes more from the great rift in the psyche of the playwright Clifford Odets — between a yearning for artistic purity and a need for fame and riches — than from anything Odets ever encountered in real life.
Each is a civilizing influence, affecting an aspect of his psyche, whether that had to do with sexual identity, yearning for an authority figure, or artistic instinct.
To the Editor: Re the July 10 Practical Traveler column ("New Ways to Visit Cuba, Legally"): For years, my architect husband has yearned to visit Cuba for its artistic heritage.
Even the nonspecialist is likely to suspect that these astounding presences add up to the kind of artistic confab that curators and scholars of Indian art yearn for.
The audience will hear about half of Pound's forty-five-minute score on Monday, including "Frères Humains"—more than enough to appreciate the poet's artistic character, which combined fierce modernity with a Pre-Raphaelite yearning for pure beauty.
Her pursuit of love leads her to actions that are, by any journalistic standards, unprofessional; suffice it to say (no spoilers here) that the breach of ethics doesn't go unnoticed by her, yet it's as essential to her self-surprising yearning for love as it is to her artistic impulse as a writer.
This is the crucially vanished element that lends an ineffable yearning to all visions of the past — and poses an artistic challenge to all attempts to recreate it.
