The Pageant of the Masters is an annual festival held by the Festival of Arts in Laguna Beach, California. The event is known for its tableaux vivants or "living pictures" in which classical and contemporary works of art are recreated by real people who are made to look nearly identical to the originals through the clever application of costumes, makeup, headdresses, lighting, props, and backdrops.
The first Festival of Arts occurred in 1932, and the first presentation of the Pageant occurred in 1933. Since then, the two events have been held each summer, apart from a four year interruption caused by World War II.
Famous quotes containing the words pageant of, pageant and/or masters:
“What helps it now, that Byron bore,
With haughty scorn which mock’d the smart,
Through Europe to the Aetolian shore
The pageant of his bleeding heart?
That thousands counted every groan,
And Europe made his woe her own?”
—Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
“The intellectual man requires a fine bait; the sots are easily amused. But everybody is drugged with his own frenzy, and the pageant marches at all hours, with music and banner and badge.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“It is only a short step from exaggerating what we can find in the world to exaggerating our power to remake the world. Expecting more novelty than there is, more greatness than there is, and more strangeness than there is, we imagine ourselves masters of a plastic universe. But a world we can shape to our will ... is a shapeless world.”
—Daniel J. Boorstin (b. 1914)