Corning Museum discusses Lino Tagliapietra and Toots Zynsky

Tina Oldknow interviewed Lino Tagliapietra for the Corning Museum’s podcast series, “Meet the artist.” They really, really, really need to work on their production values, but if you can get over the lousy sound quality it’s an interesting show.

She says Lino is the “most significant Italian influence” in glass art. Interesting characterization. Don’t know that I’d argue, but it seems too limiting to restrict him to “Italian influence.”

I love the idea of a glass podcast, but glass is such a visual medium that I really think vcasting is more appropriate. In particular, Tagliapietra is not a native English speaker and he’s much easier to understand when you can also see him speak. 47 minutes of deciphering ItaloEnglish with compromised sound quality will tax all but his biggest fans. Perhaps they should take a cue from Bullseye, which released a video on Steve Klein that’s certainly more effective in getting the point across.

This is the second in Corning’s “Meet the Artist” series and the only one I can find on iTunes. If you visit the Corning Museum website and do a search, you’ll find the first in the series, Toots Zynsky. If Tagliapietra is my favorite blown glass artist, Zynsky’s my favorite kilnformed glass artist, so this is a treat worth the 25MB MP3 download.

Again, though, this would have been better as a vcast. Corning thoughtfully provides a page of Zynsky images and a page of Tagliapietra images to “view along,” but it’s not the same.

Next up: Marvin Lipofsky, whose strong beliefs and opinions ought to make this an interesting podcast.

Corning’s also promising to release a podcast series on its glass collection this month. I sincerely hope they’ve gotten the vcast stuff down by then.

BTW, Bullseye is beginning to get the whole video thing nicely. They did an early video, Bullseye Connections, that I greatly enjoyed but am told was more a labor of love than profit, so I was sorry when they didn’t release “Connections II.”

Hopefully, with the Klein video, a capture of an Oregon Public Broadcasting piece on wonderful artist Catharine Newell, and now a really intelligently done clip with Tom Jacobs demonstrating the glass sketch, they’ll make releasing new clips a regular thing. Not sure who over at Bullseye is doing it, but I’d love to see Corning (and the Glass Museum up in Tacoma) follow his/her example.