Citings & Sightings of Dante's Works in Contemporary Culture
“Running a marathon is a great goal. You accomplish something only a small percentage of the population dares to do. You experience setting out and accomplishing something big. And you get to put that 26.2 sticker on the ass-end of your minivan.
Buuuuuut. Let me tell you something about marathons.
You have to train for them. And training for a marathon is like being in all 9 circles of hell at once…for six straight months.” —DIS Fit Life, August 5, 2015
“‘No, that’s definitely the way you want to go,’ said the same man in the hi-vis jacket, whose integrity we were beginning to doubt. But every route we tried, the satnav eventually led us back to the same roundabout, often by the most circuitous of routes. We had no mobile coverage, so could not raise a map by those means. It was like an episode of The Prisoner. Every wrong turning we took, we expected a huge white barrage balloon to head us off.” –Marcus Berkmann, The Independent, October 9, 2015
“… Vartan, a queer former Orthodox Jew from Chechnya whose sculptures and paintings mostly explore demonic and sexual themes. ‘My work always shows a state of human spirit,’ he tells The Creators Project. ‘Demons and angels, pain and uncontrollable desire, fear and loneliness. The naked body in sculpture represents a spiritual condition. I am not interested in ‘politically correct’ art because it’s boring. Shock, controversy, and honesty. These are the three principles of my art.'” –Anya Tchoupakov, Vice, November 19, 2015
Shown at left is Vartan’s sculpture Inferno.Etude.
“A 750 anni dalla nascita di Dante, è possibile raccontare ai ragazzi La Divina Commedia? La sfida è stata accolta da uno scrittore come Paolo Di Paolo che, accompagnato dalle splendide illustrazioni di Matteo Berton, ci fa rivivere lo straordinario viaggio di Dante.” —La Nuova Frontiera Junior, July 30, 2015
“It was then she appeared, Beatrice, she who would show me, just in time, the illusion of the beast and the spell to return it to the glass.
Virgil, who was able to bring me into this world but not out of it, because of his own self imprisonment in it, began to fade from view and as he paled so Beatrice seemed to absorb his substance and morphed into my new guide.” –Roger Williamson, Saatchi Art, October 24, 2015
