Lately, I have been receiving opinions from my peers (and even professors) that grades are irrelevant. I don't want to imply a lack of rigor or competence present at the school I attend. The school I attend is possibly the most prestigious art school in the United States, and the most selective by a comfortable margin. However, those facts only make encountering attitudes, such as those previously expressed even more bewildering. Now, this attitude is liberating to the extent that it allows one to take risks when producing work, but I have this nagging suspicion that grades must matter to some extent. To what extent do grades define an academic career in visual art?

Paris mayoral candidate  Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet has been doing a lot of thinking about Paris' abandoned "ghost stations," unused subway platforms that have most recently been populated only by urban explorers. But unlike other cities, she doesn't want to simply seal them up and forget about them -- she wants to turn them into dance clubs.

Kosciusko-Morizet has enlisted the help of architect Manal Rachdi in her proposal to remodel the abandoned stations into something more than a hangout for adventurous mischief makers, turning the metro stations into gourmet restaurants, art galleries, dance clubs, gardens, theaters, or even public swimming pools! 

If the final product looks anything like the preliminary renderings, tourists might have a new reason to visit the city of love.

During World War II, one man took our collective minds off the escalating conflict for awhile. DiMaggio had that amazing 56-game hitting streak, and he was the biggest thing going on in the country. Every day after the game, people on the subway, strangers on the street were asking, "What did DiMaggio do?" It was a like a collective hysteria about the streak. "Did he get another hit?" Everything else in the news, and there was a hell of a lot going on, was all secondary to DiMaggio, our regular hero.

My father Benny would take me to Yankee Stadium and sometimes when he got box seats from a friend or some big shot he knew, he sold them and got us seats in the bleachers to be close to watch Joe DiMaggio in center field, and see all his moves. Real smooth. DiMaggio was the first big Italian-American hero who crossed over ethnic lines. A man who just played the game. And after that, he got married to the gorgeous Marilyn Monroe -- what a honey and what a guy! Back then I never had thoughts about becoming a cop. I dreamed about being another Joe DiMaggio and playing center field for the Yankees. I loved DiMaggio so much. I looked up to him and he was everything I wanted to be. He was elegant, dressed to kill and a gentleman at all times. An all-American hero.

DiMaggio and I had an unforgettable conversation. And, just so you know, there were three subjects you didn't talk about with Joe: Marilyn, Frank Sinatra and JFK. If you did, he'd say he was going to the bathroom and then he wouldn't come back! So we spoke about everything else and about my desire to produce his movie biography. When Joe left after dinner, I said to him, "Joe, I've waited my whole life for this. So how about a little hug and kiss?" He shrugged his shoulders as if to say, "Well, if you have to." So joking I said, "On the lips?" He replied, "Hey, c'mon, take it easy!" We laughed, I hugged him and then Joe said, "Me and my lawyer are writing a book and I told him, If anybody films this book it's going to be Sonny Grosso." Joe left and I'm floating on air. I rushed back in and told my friends he's writing a book and he wants me to produce his movie.

Who wrote the first modern English poem? When -- and, indeed, where -- was it written? There are numerous candidates, but one could do worse than propose the answer 'T. E. Hulme, in 1908, on the back of a hotel bill.'

This poem, 'A City Sunset,' would, along with a handful of others by Hulme, set the blueprint for modern poetry. If we most readily associate 'modern poetry' with brevity, precision of language, understatement, unrhymed verse, written about everyday and often very ordinary things, then we owe many of those associations to T. E. Hulme.

Hulme was a larger-than-life figure in virtually every way. Standing at over six feet tall, with a ruddy complexion, a willingness to argue with anyone (or, indeed, to fight them: he once famously boxed with Wyndham Lewis in Soho Square), he hailed from Staffordshire, the county that nearly two centuries before had given the world another magnetic man of letters, Dr Johnson. After a spell at Cambridge (from which he was sent down without a degree) and a brief adventure in Canada in his early twenties, Hulme travelled to London, where he founded a Poetry Club, argued with people, ate lots of sweets (he was a teetotaller and non-smoker who preferred suet pudding and treacle to cigarettes and alcohol), and wrote, in a flurry of activity, the manifesto for modern poetry.

Ezra Pound often gets the credit for having done this: the American poet and impresario later founded the Imagist movement with English poet Richard Aldington and fellow American Hilda Doolittle (known as 'H. D.'), and wrote 'A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste,' a short rationale which sets down some of the rules for modern poetry which Hulme, five years earlier, had already formulated. Pound and Hulme were associates, although Pound would later - somewhat uncharitably -- play down the role Hulme had played in the formation of Imagist practice.

We can precisely date the event on which Hulme set down his first poem: it was 26 May 1908. That, at any rate, is the date on the hotel bill, on the back of which Hulme began to invent a new idiom for poetry, one built on clear, precise language, what he would later term 'dry, hard, classical verse.' The poem reads somewhat like a poet thinking out loud, composing as he goes, seeking out a new language; and Hulme often later claimed that many of his poems had been improvisations, composed to order in a matter of minutes, letting the images come naturally to him. This first poem, which was later given the title 'A City Sunset,' contains the lines:

A frolic of crimson

is the spreading glory of the sky,

heaven's jocund maid

flaunting a trailed red robe

along the fretted city roofs

about the time of homeward going crowds

-- a vain maid, lingering, loth to go...

Where Hulme had started off the poem by rhyming -- it had begun with a rhyme on conceits/streets -- he now adopts the new practice of vers libre, or 'free verse,' unrhymed poetry which shuns regular metre and stanza structure and which would later be memorably described by Robert Frost as 'like playing tennis with the net down.' From this unrhymed free-falling emerges an image, or rather a pair of images: the sunset, that conventional poetic trope, is likened to a woman's red robe being trailed along the tops of the houses.

From that simple germ of an idea, other poems developed: 'Autumn,' in which the moon is likened to a red-faced farmer; 'Above the Dock,' in which the moon reappears, this time as a child's balloon; and 'The Embankment,' where the star-filled night sky is likened to a moth-eaten old blanket wistfully longed for by someone sleeping rough on the shore of the Thames. In each of these short poems, two images -- one associated with the infinity of the sky and heavens, the other associated with the small and everyday -- are joined together, as if Hulme is seeking to bring the boundless space of conventional poetry down to earth. It is fitting, then, that modern poetry was first put down on something as unremarkable and everyday as a hotel bill. (Another of Hulme's poems was written on the back of a postcard.)

This is micro-poetry, like the haiku which Pound, a few years later, would experiment with. Hulme's experiments gave rise to Imagism, which is the first true poetry of the everyday: it often deals with ordinary details of the modern world, such as traveling in the Tube, walking the London streets, or watching the crowds of people as they leave the cinema. It predates the more famous 'Pylon Poets' of the 1930s by two decades. One of Hulme's poetic fragments even outdoes the haiku for brevity, in comprising just eight words: 'Old houses were scaffolding once / and workmen whistling.' The network of sounds is intricate and carefully considered: 'old' gets a leg up from 'scaffolding,' which encapsulates the word, while 'were' resurfaces in 'workmen,' linking the two images together through a careful and delicate patterning of internal rhymes and echoes.

Of course, there is an alternative modern poetic strand, too -- the more opaque or allusive style of a T. S. Eliot or a Geoffrey Hill -- but the commonest notion of 'modern poetry' is undoubtedly Hulme's. His is the one that has prevailed in the popular imagination.

Carol Ann Duffy suggested in 2011 that poems are a form of texting because of their condensed language and their brevity: a suggestive comparison for the poet who gave us 'Text,' perhaps the first noteworthy poem about the experience of text-messaging. But English poetry was already growing smaller in form a hundred years ago, long before mobile phones and the world of the text message. Hulme thought poetry should be the sort of thing that a normal person could read and appreciate in the Tube on their way to work, or in the armchair after dinner. He left us a handful of poems which were later praised by T. S. Eliot as 'two or three of the most beautiful short poems in the language.' He scaled down poetry, but his achievement is far from small: he helped to create modern poetry as we know it today.

Oliver Tearle is the author of T. E. Hulme and Modernism, published by Bloomsbury Academic.

In the modern era, conceptual innovators have radically transformed the function and role of style in the arts. Traditionally, style was the artist's signature or trademark, the unique and distinctive means by which he expressed his ideas or perceptions. Style was nurtured painstakingly: Cézanne reflected that "style does not develop from the slavish imitation of the old masters; it develops from the artist's personal manner of feeling and expression." A personal style was the distinguishing characteristic of a true artist: Frank Lloyd Wright angrily declared that "The style of the thing...will be the man - it is his. Let his forms alone."

La Vie (1903). Image courtesy of Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio. All works by Pablo Picasso.

The break with this traditional conception was pioneered by Picasso, who was known from early in his career for his abrupt and frequent changes of style. Experimental artists and critics puzzled over Picasso's versatility, which they perceived as arbitrary and insincere, but in a celebrated interview in 1923 Picasso explained that his shifts and alternations of styles were a product of his conceptual approach to art: "Whenever I had something to say, I have said it in the manner in which I have felt it ought to be said. Different motives inevitably require different methods of expression." Picasso would later reflect that he perhaps had no style: "I'm never fixed and that's why I have no style."

Family of Saltimbanques (1905). Image courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

In Picasso's radical new conception, style was no longer a unique expression of personality, but merely a convenient means of expression, like a language, to be taken up or put aside depending on the particular idea to be represented. This new approach spread rapidly throughout the world of advanced art. Marcel Duchamp was among the early practitioners of stylistic versatility. Setting out to undermine the rigidity of the art world, and reasoning that taste was a product of habit, he determined to avoid repetition, and once declared that "I've had thirty-three ideas; I've made thirty-three paintings." In 1943, Duchamp paid tribute to Picasso's innovation, writing that his "main contribution to art" was his ability, in each of the many phases of his career, "to keep free from preceding achievements," without any "repetition in his uninterrupted flow of masterpieces."

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907). Image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

Duchamp's friend Francis Picabia shared his attitude toward style; Picabia declared that "If you want to have clean ideas, change them as often as you change your shirts." Picabia's refusal to follow any fixed formula earned him Duchamp's praise as "the greatest exponent of freedom in art." Another friend of both Duchamp and Picabia, the painter and photographer Man Ray, also deliberately avoided a fixed style: he explained that "each new approach demanded its particular technique which had to be invented on the spot."

Portrait of Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1910). Image courtesy of the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois.

Whether directly or through the intermediation of Duchamp, Picasso's novel approach to style spread widely among conceptual painters in the following generations. Robert Rauschenberg, who admired Duchamp so much he tried to steal a marble cube from Duchamp's Why Not Sneeze? on a visit to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, explained that whenever he began to work, he tried to clear his mind of all he knew: "Everything I can remember, and everything I know, I have probably done, or somebody else has." In 1960, David Hockney felt liberated by seeing a large exhibition of Picasso's work, because it showed him that "style is something you can use, and you can be a magpie, just taking what you want." Two years later, Hockney's entry in London's Royal College of Art student exhibition comprised four paintings, collectively titled Demonstrations of Versatility. In a 1963 interview, Andy Warhol asked, "How can you say one style is better than another? You ought to be able to be an Abstract Expressionist next week, or a Pop artist, or a realist, without feeling you've given up something." In 1984, Gerhard Richter explained that changing styles gave him "the freedom to do what I like...not to become an artist-painter who is tied down to a single trick." He recognized that "historically speaking, changeable artists are a growing phenomenon. Picasso, for instance, or Duchamp and Picabia - and the number is certainly increasing all the time." Seeing a Man Ray retrospective inspired the young Bruce Nauman: "What I liked was that there appeared to be no consistency to his thinking, no one style." Nauman subsequently avoided predictability: "it's never going to be the same, there is no method." Damien Hirst prides himself on heterogeneity: "I curate my own work as if I were a group of artists." He deliberately avoids repetition: "I mean, I don't want to make 'Damien Hirsts.'"

Olga in an Armchair (1917-18). Image courtesy of Musée Picasso, Paris.

John Berger observed in 1965 that Picasso's stylistic practice had no precedent: "In the life work of no other artist is each group of works so independent of those which have just gone before, or so irrelevant to those which are to follow." And at the close of the 20th century, David Sylvester reflected that Picasso's behavior would not have been possible earlier: "Picasso is a kind of artist who couldn't have existed before this century, since his art is a celebration of this century's introduction of a totally promiscuous eclecticism into the practice of art." What even Berger and Sylvester failed to understand, however, was the underlying change that allowed Picasso to pioneer this practice. Unlike in virtually all earlier times, when artists were subject to the demands of specific individual or institutional patrons, in the first decade of the 20th century Picasso effectively completed the process, that had begun in 1874 with the Impressionists' challenge to the official Salon, of transforming a monopolistic art market into an atomistic and competitive one. Instead of having to submit his work for the approval of a powerful individual patron or a conservative academic jury, Picasso had a number of independent dealers competing for the right to buy his paintings, and to find purchasers for them. This gave him a freedom in making his art that had almost no precedent in the entire history of Western art. The radical innovation of stylistic versatility was just one of the bold and imaginative responses Picasso made to this situation, as he successfully attained his goal of becoming the most innovative artist of his time, and of ranking among the greatest of any time.

Two Women Running on the Beach (1922). Image courtesy of Musée Picasso, Paris.

Picasso's novel approach to style spread widely among painters, but only among those who were conceptual. Stylistic versatility has remained anathema to experimental artists, who almost universally regard the painstaking construction of a unique personal style as a necessary condition for the creation of sincere and truthful art. But for conceptual artists interested in expressing ideas, the flexibility of changing styles was a powerful and liberating innovation. As Picasso explained, "style is often something which locks the painter into the same vision...sometimes during one's whole lifetime...I myself thrash around too much." In language that would echo through generations of brash young conceptual innovators, Picasso declared that "In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find, is the thing...When I paint my object is to show what I have found and not what I am looking for."

Girl before a Mirror (1932). Image courtesy of the Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

Shi Weicheng as the six-year-old Tiedan

Sister Mei's third daughter, Hao Yan (Sabrina Yap) is
obsessed with her bisexual brother-in-law, Tiedan (Feng Si)

"The Chinese hammer dulcimer has been played with Er ren tai for generations. The forms of the Er ren tai are directly embedded in the northwestern heart. The melodies from folk songs and local plays are derived from the same source as the rhythms of local geography, dialects, and even ecologies. I could hear an indistinct song being sung in the distance, although I couldn't hear the words. What I could hear was the sound of my grandmother calling me home for dinner."

Sabrina Yap and Feng Si in The Love Songs of Tiedan

• Using her whip-smart sense of humor to give her characters plenty of sass and let them deliver acid-tinged zingers.


• Developing subplots that lead to a deeper cultural understanding of feminism.


• Building character-driven stories based on scientific fact that can rock an audience's world.


• Capturing the extreme vulnerability and identity crises of confused outcasts, troubled teens, and awkward intellectuals.


• Wrapping up an evening's storytelling with mind-bending dénouements.

Henrietta Leavitt (Elena Wright) with her sister, Margaret
(Jennifer LeBlanc) in Silent Sky (Photo by: Mark Kitaoka)

"I am continuously compelled by characters who struggle in the tidal pulls of the heart and the mind, love and truth, what we know versus what we feel. I write bold women and their friends. I write about legacy, what of us lingers after we are gone, what grander arcs we help to build with our lives. I find science and history a perfect source for examining our modern journeys and connecting to the stories before us. That amounts to a lot of stories that confront mortality, legacy, and ideas that exist beyond ourselves."

Henrietta Swan Leavitt at work in the Harvard College Conservatory
(Photo by: Wikimedia Commons)

"I found Henrietta's story by chance while perusing the stalls of used books in New York. There wasn't that much known of her, but what is known is that, in 1912, this unassuming but meticulous and curious woman gave the flagging field of astronomy the ingredient it needed to leap into the future. Without her finding a pattern in Cepheid stars, great astronomers like Shapley and Hubble wouldn't have shown us how huge and fast moving our universe is. Henrietta's key discovery takes a musical form at some point and finding that synchronicity fell to our brilliant composer, Jenny Giering."

Henrietta Leavitt (Elena Wright), Annie Cannon
(Sarah Dacey Charles) and Williamina Fleming (Lynne Soffer)
in a scene from Silent Sky (Photo by: Tracy Martin)

Henrietta Leavitt (Elena Wright) with Peter Shaw
(Matt Citron) in Silent Sky (Photo by: Tracy Martin)

... I would walk alone,
In storm and tempest, or in starlight nights
Beneath the quiet heavens; and, at that time
Would feel whate'er there is of power in sound
To breathe an elevated mood by form
Or image unprofaned; and I would stand,
Beneath some rock listening to sounds that are
The ghostly language of the ancient earth,
Or make their dim abode in distant winds.
- Wordsworth, Prelude, 1805, 2.321-329