The influence of visual art on popular culture isn’t always obviousto the casual observer.
It often seeps in from the edges, popping up in television dialogue or informing the look and feel of an Oscar-winning film. This is the quiet but expansive role art plays in American culture, trickling from the art-obsessed minds of aesthetes who create our music, television and film and into the mainstream.
One such influential tastemaker is John Sacret Young, an Emmy and Golden Globe-winning art collector and screenwriter who has worked on the television series “China Beach,” “The West Wing” and “Testament.” He will appear at 7 p.m. May 26 in the Burchfield Penney Art Center (1300 Elmwood Ave.) to read from his new book “Pieces of Glass: An Artoir.”
The book charts Young’s fascination with visual art, including the watercolor paintings of Charles E. Burchfield, which began when he was a teenager in the 1960s. It also speaks to the way art has informed every aspect of his life, or, as Farrar, Straus and Giroux publisher Jonathan Galassi put it, “about why and how art – the creating but also the apprehending of it – gives meaning to life.”
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