Fracois Truffaut

            After directing the shorts Une Visite (1954) and Les Miston (1957), Truffaut received widespread recognition for his feature-length big-screen debut, The 400 Blows, an iconic 1959 semi-autobiographical work that followed the travails of youngster Antoine Doinel, played by actor Jean-Pierre Léaud, who would continue the role in future Truffaut films. Truffaut won the Cannes Best Director prize for Blows, receiving a screenwriting Academy Award nomination as well and more importantly becoming a key figure in his country's Nouvelle Vague, or New Wave, movement of moviemaking.

             Truffaut followed up with 1960's Shoot the Piano Player and 1962's Jules and Jim, with the latter often considered a defining work that chronicled the story of two men and a woman caught in a layered romantic triangle.

            Truffaut developed a reputation for having an on-screen sensitivity to women, children and relationships' intricacies not often seen from male directors. Some of his additional work over the ensuing decade includedFahrenheit 451—an English-language 1966 adaptation of the Ray Bradbury dystopic novel—as well as The Wild Child (1970) and Two English Girls(1971).

          I personally find Truffaut's style of film making to be very bold at the time he was making films like The 400 Blows. This film definately would have inspired directors such as Wes Anderson.

          

Wes Anderson

          Wesley Wales Anderson was born in Houston, Texas. His mother, Texas Ann (Burroughs), is an archaeologist turned real estate agent, and his father, Melver Leonard Anderson, worked in advertising and PR. He has two brothers, Eric and Mel. Anderson's parents divorced when he was a young child, an event that he described as the most crucial event of his brothers and his growing up. During childhood, Anderson also began writing plays and making super-8 movies. He was educated at Westchester High School and then St. John's, a private prep school in Houston, Texas, which was later to prove an inspiration for the film Rushmore (1998).

          Wes Anderson is a personal favorite of mine. His work transends reality with a keen eye for color theory and strict camera angles that provide the viewer with a profound sense of space although most of the time the space is altered by the camera. Up above is a model of the grand budapest hotel that at first seems undoubtably real and tricks the audience. His signature techniques have been said to have been inspired by Fracois Trufaut, an earlier film director.

Damien Hirst

          A successful and controversial artist, Damien Hirst was born in Bristol, England, on June 7, 1965. He emerged as a leading figure in the Young British Artists (YBA) movement in the late 1980s and 1990s. His works, which include dead animal displays and spin-art paintings, have sold for exceptionally high prices. Hirst is one of the wealthiest artists living today.


            Hirst participated in a show at the Saatchi Gallery the following year. There he displayed "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living," a 14-foot-long glass tank with a shark preserved in formaldehyde. The shark had been bought from an Australian fisherman. (MORE INFO)

            In 1991, Hirst had his first solo exhibition at the Woodstock Street Gallery in London. He also participated in the Young British Artists. Hirst continued to set the art world on fire with his work at the 1993 Venice Bienniale, a renowned international art exhibition. There he showed "Mother and Child Divided," an installation piece that featured a bisected cow and her calf displayed in four vitrines, or glass cases, filled with formaldehyde. With his controversial and sometimes gruesome works, Hirst soon became one of the best known artists in Britain. He won the prestigious Turner Prize in 1995. "It's amazing what you can do with an E in A-Level art, a twisted imagination and a chainsaw," Hirst said in his acceptance speech.

            Hirst is another artist who I feel capitalizes on expensive materials and the business of his work rather than the art of making itself. It is quite sad to say the least that artists with not dissaplinary talent are making millions more than artists who dedicate there whole life to one medium rather than focusing on the pricey materials of the work.

             

Jeff Koons

             









                       




            


             Jeffrey “Jeff” Koons (born January 21, 1955) is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror-finish surfaces. He lives and works in both New York City and his hometown of York, Pennsylvania. His works have sold for substantial sums of money, including at least one world record auction price for a work by a living artist. On November 12, 2013, Koons’s Balloon Dog (Orange) sold at Christie’s Post-War and Contemporary Art Evening Sale in New York City for US$58.4 million, above its high US$55 million estimate, becoming the most expensive work by a living artist sold at auction. The price topped Koons’s previous record of US$33.7 million. Jeff Koons rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of a generation of artists who explored the meaning of art in a media-saturated era.

            Jeff Koons is seen in the art world to be a modern day Andy Warhol. I believe him to be nothing but a businessman more or less an artist. His use of material is based on his greed to make the work more valuable. Creating monitary value is not something artists have aimed for before him rather the value of creating art itself.