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The New Yorker

  • Vince Aletti: Robert Adams’s noctural landscapes.The forty-five black-and-white photographs in Robert Adams’s current show at the Matthew Marks gallery, “Summer Nights, Walking,” are about the American landscape after dark, when serenity can turn to dread with the snap of a twig. Made between 1976 and 1982 in the . . .
  • Peter Schjeldahl: “Skin Fruit,” at the New Museum.The art world is peculiarly suited to dramatize a problem, or at least a syndrome, of the present day: that of abominable wealth, by which I mean the effect of huge fortunes on people who don’t have them. The global tide of prosperity that rose in the past . . .
  • Nancy Franklin: “The Pacific” on HBO.8220;The Pacific,” a ten-part miniseries that begins Sunday on HBO, is a companion piece to the channel’s “Band of Brothers,” which chronicled a company of paratroopers in the 101st Airborne Division from training to D Day, and on to Germany, through Holland and . . .
  • James Wood: Conflict and convention in Chang-Rae Lee’s “The Surrendered.”Does literature progress, like medicine or engineering? Nabokov seems to have thought so, and pointed out that Tolstoy, unlike Homer, was able to describe childbirth in convincing detail. Yet you could argue the opposite view; after all, no novelist strikes the modern reader as more Homeric than Tolstoy. And Homer . . .
  • Hilton Als: Penny Arcade’s “Bad Reputation.”8220;Bad Reputation” is the self-consciously transgressive title of the performance artist and political activist Penny Arcade’s book of interviews, essays, and documentation of her works, but since when was Penny Arcade shy about rubbing our faces in her outlaw status? Born Susana Ventura in 1950 . . .
  • Hilton Als: Martin McDonagh’s “A Behanding in Spokane.”I don’t know a single self-respecting black actor who wouldn’t feel shame and fury while sitting through Martin McDonagh’s new play, “A Behanding in Spokane” (directed by John Crowley, at the Gerald Schoenfeld). Nor do I know one who would have . . .
  • Goings on About Town: The TheatrePageBreak --> OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS Please call the phone number listed with the theatre for timetables and ticket information. THE ADDAMS FAMILY Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice wrote the libretto and Andrew Lippa wrote the score for this new musical, based on the cartoons of Charles Addams. Phelim McDermott and . . .
  • Goings on About Town: Readings and TalksgoatTitle-->AMERICAN MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY The poets George Green, Joshua Mehigan, Linda Pastan, and David Yezzi join Billy Collins for a reading from “Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds,” which was edited by Collins. (Central Park W. at 79th St. 212-769-5200. March 10 at . . .
  • Goings on About Town: On the HorizonDANCE SPANISH MOVES March 17-20 The charismatic, lovable Ángel Corella comes to City Center as the artistic director of his new company, Corella Ballet Castilla y León. An international roster of dancers—fortified by Corella himself and the prodigious Herman Cornejo—will perform Corella’ . . .
  • Goings on About Town: Night LifePageBreak --> ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors live complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. B. B. KING BLUES CLUB & GRILL 237 W. 42nd St. (212-997-4144)—March 11: The singer and guitarist David (Honeyboy) Edwards, a ninety-four-year . . .
  • Goings on About Town: MoviesPageBreak --> OPENING THE EXPLODING GIRL In this drama, directed by Bradley Rust Gray, a young epileptic woman (Zoe Kazan) contends with romantic overtures from a friend (Mark Rendall). Opening March 12. (Sunshine Cinema.) GREEN ZONE Reviewed this week in The Current Cinema. Opening March 12. (In wide release . . .
  • Goings on About Town: DancegoatTitle-->PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY This is the final week of the company’s annual season at City Center, so if you haven’t seen “Beloved Renegade,” from 2008—a meditation on mortality and love, set to Poulenc’s deeply moving “Gloria” . . .
  • Goings on About Town: Classical MusicPageBreak --> OPERA METROPOLITAN OPERA Zeffirelli’s beloved production of Puccini’s “La Bohème,” with Anna Netrebko, in opulent voice, and Piotr Beczała, a tenor with a broad, healthy sound who is fast becoming a house favorite, and a cast that includes . . .
  • Goings on About Town: ArtPageBreak --> MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES METROPOLITAN MUSEUM Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—“The Drawings of Bronzino.” Through April 18. | “Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage.” This compact exhibition is more than just an entertaining diversion. In the eighteen-sixties and seventies, young . . .
  • Goings on About Town: Above and BeyondgoatTitle-->“PERFORMANCE AT THE STARLITE” The Starlite Lounge, a Crown Heights watering hole whose days as a “non-discriminating” bar date back to the pre-Stonewall era, is at the risk of closing. To call attention to its plight, the curator David Fierman has organized a . . .
  • Books: “Princess Noire.”8220;Princess Noire” was the original, unused title of Nina Simone’s autobiography, and Cohodas duly appropriates it for her account of the singer’s life and career. Simone, born Eunice Waymon and nurtured as a child prodigy, devoted her early years to classical piano. After a . . .
  • Books: “Jealousy.”Millet’s previous memoir, “The Sexual Life of Catherine M.,” was a graphic résumé of her history in libertinism, including trysts with, by her own count, at least forty-nine partners. This follow-up is a chronicle of the “irreversible unravelling of my . . .
  • Books: “February.”Drawing on a nonfictional disaster in which an oil rig off Newfoundland capsized, killing eighty-four men, Moore’s novel captures the consequences of grief in one family. Helen discovers that she is pregnant with her fourth child not long after her husband, Cal, drowns in the accident; thirty . . .
  • Books: “A Dead Hand.”A young Indian man spends a night in a flophouse in Calcutta and wakes up to find a child’s corpse in his room. This is the mystery that the narrator of this crime novel—Theroux’s tentative foray into the genre—is called upon to . . .
  • Ben Greenman: Jason & the Scorchers’s “Halcyon Times.”paragraph class="noindent">Jason & the Scorchers were one of the bright lights of the mid-eighties, fusing rock guitars, punk tempos, and country songwriting on albums like “Fervor.” The band’s double-speed take on Bob Dylan’s “Absolutely Sweet Marie” confirmed the . . .
  • Anthony Lane: “Green Zone” and “Mother.”The fact that “Green Zone” begins with a bombing raid should come as no surprise, given that the director is Paul Greengrass. He made two of the “Bourne” films and “United 93,” and his attitude to the average viewer remains that of a salad . . .
  • Andrea Thompson: Colicchio & Sons, in Chelsea.paragraph class="noindent">Tom Colicchio closed his Craftsteak flagship in New York earlier this fall and vowed to make its revamp personal: he’d be there, behind the stove, doing what he loves to do. The other night, a waiter confirmed that Colicchio was indeed wearing his whites most . . .
  • Alex Ross: The baritone Gerald Finley, at Zankel Hall.The greatest singers, from Callas to Sinatra, make words and music indivisible; even as the voice envelops you, the lyric is etched into your mind. The Canadian baritone Gerald Finley has a similar gift. Partly it’s a matter of diction: Finley makes sure that syllables aren’t . . .
  • Sasha Frere-Jones: Bill Withers makes no apologies.In 1972, a year after the release of his first album, “Just As I Am,” Bill Withers performed a song on British television. “Harlem,” the record’s first single, had done little on the charts, but radio d.j.s had picked up on its B-side . . .
  • Richard Brody: Jared Hess’s “Gentlemen Broncos.”paragraph class="noindent">One of the most audacious American movies of 2009, Jared Hess’s “Gentlemen Broncos” (on DVD from Fox)—a loopy comedy that blends frumpy down-market vulgarity with excremental humor and cartoonish, yet astonishingly simple and clever, action sequences—is hardly the . . .
  • Mike Peed: The Standard Grill, in Greenwich Village.paragraph class="noindent">“The Standard Grill in the base of the Standard Hotel—standard meatpacking district,” a diner observed recently, even though a list of adjectives drawn on a blackboard by the hostess stand declared him to be lost among Standardazzle and Standardream and Standardo-it. At . . .
  • John Lahr: “The Tempest” and “Clybourne Park.”8220;Let me not . . . dwell in this bare island by your spell,” Prospero asks the audience in the epilogue of “The Tempest.” The island he is speaking of is both the ambiguous place where he has been marooned for years and the stage itself. Written in 1611 . . .
  • Joan Acocella: Frederick Wiseman’s “Ballet” at MOMA.In Frederick Wiseman’s “Ballet” (1995), a documentary on American Ballet Theatre, Agnes de Mille, in a wheelchair, rehearses her final piece, “The Other.” “You must look like something that’s absolutely broken, and stuck up in the wind,” she tells Amanda . . .
  • Goings on About Town: The TheatrePageBreak --> OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS Please call the phone number listed with the theatre for timetables and ticket information. THE ADDAMS FAMILY Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice wrote the libretto and Andrew Lippa wrote the score for this new musical, based on the cartoons by Charles Addams. Phelim McDermott and . . .
  • Goings on About Town: Readings and TalksgoatTitle-->COLM TÓIBÍN The Irish author reads from and discusses his latest novel, “Brooklyn,” which was recently published in paperback. (Lower East Side Tenement Museum, 108 Orchard St., at Delancey St. 212-982-8420. March 3 at 6:30.) THE STORY PRIZE AWARD NIGHT Daniyal Mueenuddin . . .
  • Goings on About Town: On the HorizonTHE THEATRE SEEING RED March 11 A late addition to the spring slate is John Logan’s drama “Red,” about the painter Mark Rothko. Alfred Molina, who created the role in the Donmar Warehouse production in London, stars; Michael Grandage directs, at the Golden. (212-239-6200.) MOVIES FOUR . . .
  • Goings on About Town: Night LifePageBreak --> ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors live complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. “AMERICAN SONGBOOK” March 3: The baritone singer Gabriel Kahane, who is known for his work in the classical, theatre, and indie-rock worlds. March . . .
  • Goings on About Town: MoviesPageBreak --> OPENING ALICE IN WONDERLAND Tim Burton’s 3-D version of Lewis Carroll’s classic book, starring Mia Wasikowska, Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter, and Anne Hathaway, blends animation and live action. Opening March 5. (In wide release.) BROOKLYN’S FINEST A crime drama . . .
  • Goings on About Town: DancegoatTitle-->PAUL TAYLOR DANCE COMPANY This week, along with two New York premières—the sensual “Brief Encounters” and the more lighthearted “Also Playing”—the company will be performing twelve other works. Highlights include Taylor’s monumental meditation on death, “Beloved . . .
  • Goings on About Town: Classical MusicPageBreak --> OPERA METROPOLITAN OPERA Instead of capitalizing on the considerable strengths of Verdi’s rough-hewn half-masterpiece “Attila”—strong central characters, crowd scenes crackling with patriotic fervor—the Met has opted for a musclebound attempt at what the director, Pierre Audi, calls a . . .
  • Goings on About Town: ArtPageBreak --> MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES METROPOLITAN MUSEUM Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—“The Drawings of Bronzino.” Through April 18. | “Playing with Pictures: The Art of Victorian Photocollage.” Through May 9. | “The Mourners: Medieval Tomb Sculpture from the Court of Burgundy.” Through May . . .
  • Goings on About Town: Above and BeyondgoatTitle-->“TRANSVERSE TEMPORAL GYRUS” The Guggenheim Museum, for the first time in its history, has emptied its spiralling rotunda of art, in order to accommodate Tino Sehgal’s situation-based performance projects. Taking advantage of the setting, the experimental indie band Animal Collective and the visual artist . . .
  • David Denby: Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer.”Why did Tony Blair, in his ten years as Prime Minister, do exactly what the White House wanted on so many occasions? That’s the juicy question buried in the depths of Roman Polanski’s “The Ghost Writer,” an extraordinarily precise and well-made political thriller . . .
  • David Denby: “The Graduate” at Film Society of Lincoln Center.Despite its abject flattery of youth and its sour slander of anyone over thirty-five, Mike Nichols’s “The Graduate” (1967) is still funny. Dustin Hoffman’s virginal panic when the leggy Anne Bancroft methodically bullies him into bed is a classic of mimicry, almost Harold . . .
  • Books: “The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson.”Charyn’s novel breezily chronicles the chaotic emotional life of Emily Dickinson. Unfazed by the challenging lack of event in his subject’s biography, Charyn recasts her life, from the early years in Mount Holyoke to her death, in 1886, as a drama of desire, peopled by such . . .
  • Books: “Freefall.”Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winning leader of the New Keynesians, traces how Wall Street, under ideological cover from the Chicago school, conspired with Washington, first to peel away the regulations that might have prevented the mortgage bubble, and then to shield the financial sector from losses once the bubble ruptured . . .
  • Books: “Family Britain, 1951-1957.”The second volume of Kynaston’s epic social history of postwar Britain covers a period of stabilization: jobs abounded; food rationing ended; and though the Conservatives’ victory in 1951 was fuelled partly by Churchill’s derision of the “Queuetopia” created by Labour, his party did . . .
  • Books: “Don Juan.”In this quick and airy fantasia, the quintessential womanizer becomes instead a sad and mostly passive man, possessing a certain magnetism but emphatically not a seducer, who feels pursued by time itself. Handke’s multilayered structure has a sympathetic narrator relaying Don Juan’s account of travel through . . .
  • Anthony Lane: The long, strange history of 3-D.Did you enjoy “Rottweiler”? How about “Bwana Devil” or “Black Lolita”? Maybe you preferred “International Stewardesses,” although you might know it under the more thoughtful title of “Supersonic Supergirls.” You will not need reminding that these are among the crowning . . .
  • Goings on About Town: The TheatrePageBreak --> OPENINGS AND PREVIEWS Please call the phone number listed with the theatre for timetables and ticket information. ALL ABOUT ME Michael Feinstein and Dame Edna star in this musical by Christopher Durang, Barry Humphries, and Feinstein. Casey Nicholaw directs. In previews. (Henry Miller’s, 124 W. 43rd . . .
  • Goings on About Town: Readings and TalksgoatTitle-->“SELECTED SHORTS” The actors Cynthia Nixon, Michael O’Keefe, and Jill Eikenberry join the “Selected Shorts” host Isaiah Sheffer and the poet and performer Staceyann Chin for an evening of stories from and about the nineteen-sixties. Expect pieces by James Baldwin, Joyce Johnson . . .
  • Goings on About Town: Night LifePageBreak --> ROCK AND POP Musicians and night-club proprietors live complicated lives; it’s advisable to check in advance to confirm engagements. THE BELL HOUSE 149 7th St., Brooklyn (718-643-6510)—Feb. 25: The producer Ulrich Schnauss, who was born in Germany but who currently resides in London . . .
  • Goings on About Town: MoviesPageBreak --> OPENING THE ART OF THE STEAL Reviewed below in Now Playing. Opening Feb. 26. (IFC Center and Lincoln Plaza Cinemas.) COP OUT Kevin Smith directed this comedy, about a police officer (Bruce Willis) who recruits his partner (Tracy Morgan) to help him recover a stolen baseball card . . .
  • Goings on About Town: Classical MusicPageBreak --> OPERA METROPOLITAN OPERA The Met may mount Zeffirelli’s circus-like production of “La Bohème” primarily for the tourist trade, but it sure doesn’t stint on casting. This revival features such star singers as Anna Netrebko, Nicole Cabell, Piotr Beczala, and . . .
  • Goings on About Town: ArtPageBreak --> MUSEUMS AND LIBRARIES METROPOLITAN MUSEUM Fifth Ave. at 82nd St. (212-535-7710)—“The Drawings of Bronzino.” The entire corpus of some sixty known drawings (a few attributions are uncertain) by the sixteenth-century Florentine painter is exhibited at the Met to rousing effect. His arrival heralds . . .

New York Times

Times Magazine

  • All Blogs Must Pass"All blogs must pass away." Okay, apologies to the spirit of George Harrison for that one, but it sums up the purpose of today's post — to lay "Looking Around" to rest. I started this blog in early 2007 as a way to get beyond the weekly newsmagazine format I usually work in and to [...]
  • Tim Burton at MoMAThe director Tim Burton doesn't just make enchantingly loony movies like Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Batman and The Nightmare Before Christmas. He also makes enchantingly loony paintings and drawings, which he's been scribbling away at since his suitably alienated childhood in Burbank, California. This week the Museum of Modern Art in New York opened [...]
  • Toyo Ito in Berkeley — No GoThey tell us the Great Recession is in retreat, though it may not feel that way if you're unemployed. Even if it is, on the way out the door it took down a project I was looking forward to. Earlier this week the University of California at Berkeley announced that it was giving [...]
  • Jeanne-Claude: 1935-2009We got news this morning of the death of Jeanne-Claude, the artist and creative partner of Christo. They are of course the husband-and-wife team who wrapped the Reichstag in Berlin, ran a vast curtain fence for miles across the northern California landscape and created the completely enchanting New York City project called The Gates. [...]
  • Raymond Carver: Another Kind of MinimalismActually, the writer Raymond Carver never cared for the word "Minimalism" as the way to describe his taut, tight-lipped short stories. But that was the term they came to be known by in the late 1970s and '80s, when he was at the height of his influence in American fiction. In this week's Time [...]

Boston Globe

  • Photographer Leibovitz strikes new debt deal to retain portfolioNEW YORK - Annie Leibovitz, the photographer who mismanaged her fortune so badly that she faced losing legal rights to some of pop culture’s most enduring images, has reached a long-term agreement with a private investment firm to help manage her debt and market her vast portfolio, both sides said yesterday.

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  • Stop-motion discourseYui Kugimiya uses her paintings to create stop-motion animation. It’s an eye-catching form, stilted but compelling, like William Kentridge’s animated films made with drawings and erasures. But Kentridge, a South African, touches on issues of violence, oppression, and accountability, and Kugimiya, raised in Japan and educated here, takes on lighter themes, populating her stories with cats and birds. Her show ...

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  • Everyone’s companionAlmost 36 years ago, the first broadcast of “A Prairie Home Companion’’ was hosted in St. Paul by University of Minnesota grad Garrison Keillor. The show ended in 1987, resumed in New York in 1989 under a different name, returned to Minnesota, and in 1993 took back its original name. Sounds like a skit that millions of listeners might hear ...

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  • Candid cameraImagine gaping at Tina Turner, Elvis Presley, Buddy Holly, and Mick Jagger at the same time. Dreams come true at the Worcester Art Museum’s exhibit “Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present , ’’ with more than 100 candid shots, photos of live performances, publicity portraits, and album cover art. Special activities include a Rock ...

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  • A sanctuary for danceYou’re in for a treat whenever you watch the José Mateo Ballet Theatre perform in its intimate, cabaret-style, comfy Sanctuary Theatre (with or without a glass of wine). Tomorrow’s extra treat is “Out of the Dark , ’’ a concert of two ballets. In Mateo’s “Mozart Concerto’’ a monarch is torn between her court and lover; the second piece is ...

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ARTINFO

Lexington Hearld Leader

  • Fourth Friday will feature premiere of 'Darkroom Showcase'We've all heard of being fashionably late showing up to the party long enough after the scheduled starting time to make a big entrance.

    But if you wait too long to roll into the Lexington Art League's monthly Fourth Friday party tonight, you might miss the fashionable debut of Darkroom Showcase.

    It will last 15 minutes, 7:15 to 7:30. That's it. And they're not going to tell you what it is.

    Well, not specifically.

    The details and descriptions are hush-hush, but LAL events and visitors coordinator Bianca Spriggs and fashion designer Soreyda Begley, the artist for the first Darkroom Showcase, sat down for coffee Tuesday morning in the LAL @ Loudoun House kitchen to talk about the event in general terms.
  • Horsetails in the gateThe connection between horses and orchestral music is celebrated through art that makes up the charity venture, Horsetails 2010.

    Music historians tie the use of horsehair in bows to the first known instances of bowed instruments traced to the 10th century. The practice continues today.

    "It's really quite fascinating when you think about it. The component of the orchestra that sets the orchestra apart from a band is the string section," said Sara Lord, co-chair of the event. "Without the horse we wouldn't have a string section."

    The 54 works of art we're giving you a sneak peek will be for sale during the FEI Alltech World Equestrian Games in September. Each piece features a violin-shaped base and real horsehair. They will be exhibited at the Maker's Mark Bourbon village and the Crossgate Gallery during the games. Some other installations are in the works.

    The first Horsetails was created in 2000 and initiated by Maria and Peter Kucirko, the philharmonic's executive director. Since its inception, the program has raised about $118,000. Proceeds go to the Lexington Philharmonic Orchestra's Partners in Education, a program that benefits children in high-risk areas of Kentucky through music education.
  • 10th annual Art in Bloom is thrivingPerfectly timed to bring a much-needed, spirit-lifting touch of spring to the Bluegrass, the 10th annual Art in Bloom is coming The Art Museum at the University of Kentucky.

    Art in Bloom will feature more than 60 designers, professional and novice, creating floral interpretations to reflect the essence of paintings hanging in the museum's galleries. Be warned, however: Once you see this exhibit, you might be tempted to try your hand at it next year.

    Amy Nelson, director of grants and assets at the museum, said there is something for everyone at the show.

    "It really is for flower and garden lovers, as well as lovers of art," she said. "You view a work of art differently when you see an interpretation in another medium."

    A temporary collection of works from the last century, The British Are Coming!: Discover the New English Art Club , has attracted the attention of many floral designers this year. Designers' statements posted near the arrangements will be posted to clarify a designer's thoughts about process and intent.
  • Business, charity leader Darrell Ishmael gains notice for his artDarrell Ishmael is well known in Lexington for his charitable work. Recently, he has increasingly been recognized as an artist.

    Ishmael co-founded the Lexington Dream Factory with his wife, Kathy, and the Toyota Bluegrass Miracle League, and he has been president of the Lexington Rotary Club. He has served on the boards of Commerce Lexington and the Kentucky Chamber of Commerce.

    About 12 years ago, Ishmael, 57, began to pursue a more creative outlet. He says he can't remember exactly why he chose painting, but he was "looking for an activity," so he took a watercolor class with a friend.

    "We weren't very good at all," Ishmael said, but the concept of layering, essential to watercolor painting, stuck with him as he began to experiment with different materials.

    His first painting in his characteristic style was for his house, the walls of which now provided a rotating exhibition space for his many works.
  • The first Gallery Hop of 2010 features several exhibit openingsFriday night's Gallery Hop, the first of 2010, provides many reasons for Lexingtonians to get out and brave the cold. Some of the shows are familiar, having been open for a few weeks. Others will have their premiere at the Hop.

    Transylvania University's Morlan Gallery will open an exhibit by Kentucky artist Zo Strecker, the Kenan Visiting Artist at Transylvania.

    In Auction Block, Strecker has created a choreographed installation piece that combines ceramics, audio recordings and 180 square feet of mirror in a humorous assessment of value.

    "Zo has been working in installation for the last seven years, and this new work takes the same approach, stretching our notion of what art should look like and how we can experience it," said Andrea Fisher, director of the Morlan Gallery.

    Just a few blocks away, at ArtsPlace, the Bluegrass Printmakers' Co-op is showing a collection of its work, sharing the space with the dramatic work of multimedia artist Marjorie Guyon.
  • Public art project flagged for 3-mile stretchA major public art project has been proposed to brighten 3 miles of Newtown Pike with more than 250,000 small green and blue utility flags set out in a pattern of long ribbons curling along the road.

    The "Ribbons" project would swing back and forth across Newtown Pike, starting at Interstate 75 and terminating on West Main Street.

    The art project would be installed a few days before the start of the 2010 Alltech FEI World Equestrian Games on Sept. 25 and be taken down soon after the games end on Oct. 10.

    Landscape architect Mark Arnold said the idea grew out of temporary projects by artists Christo and Jeane-Claude, who are known for their large-scale temporary projects like surrounding 11 islands in Miami's Biscayne Bay with 603,850 square meters of floating pink polypropylene fabric. Another time the duo wrapped the Pont-Neuf bridge in Paris with 40,000 square meters of silky, golden fabric. Each of those projects were up for two weeks and then taken down.

    The idea to beautify Newtown Pike originated with 5th District Councilwoman Cheryl Feigel, who also chairs the Corridors Committee. One goal of the committee is to beautify major streets leading into the city.
  • Author's latest book describes the sale of his WarholSome people have asked Richard Polsky whether he should have changed the title of his book I Sold Andy Warhol (Too Soon) .

    They have told the author that the parenthetical phrase no longer seems relevant.

    "I tell them, that is what the book was about, this particular journey," Polsky says.

    The book is about the inflation of the art market in the mid-2000s. Like most financial bubbles of the past decade, it burst in the past couple of years.

    Before that, though, Polsky was certain that he had parted with his prized Andy Warhol green "fright wig" painting a year or two too early.
  • Lesson in nutrition with a taste of operaThe Schmidt Opera Outreach Program is giving Kentucky students food for thought with its new performance, Get Stuffed, beginning Monday at Adkins-Caudill Performing Arts Center in Sandy Hook.

    Get Stuffed is the opera program's new show featuring information about nutrition and its effect on student health and learning. And with Kentucky fifth on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's list of obese states, director Marc Schlackman hopes the show will make an impression.

    "I think the message of this show is so significant," Schlackman said. "And the way to attack a problem like obesity is to start with children. With adults, our eating habits have developed over years, and they are difficult to change. With children we can, hopefully, make them understand how to eat properly."

    Get Stuffed was created by Tapestry, an opera company in Toronto. Schlackman stumbled upon the show on the Internet and thought it would be perfect for Kentucky because of the high obesity rate.

    "I am playing a character named Big Cheese and another one that is Broccoli," said singer Chris Baker. "Big Cheese is all about calcium, and Broccoli is part of a trio that represents vitamins A, B and C."

Arts Journal

  • Record Number Of Dealers Flocking To $2.7 Billion Tefaf"The 23rd annual edition of the European Fine Art Fair -- Tefaf -- in the Dutch city of Maastricht will be the year's first test of demand from buyers outside the auction rooms, where wealthy collectors have been pushing up prices."...
  • No More Raunchy Bathrooms, Public Theater SaysMonday's "symbolic ground-breaking at the downtown theater complex that produced 'Hair' and 'A Chorus Line' launched a $35 million, two-year project to expand and modernize the building's facade and cramped common areas."...
  • Is There Room Onstage For Moral Ambiguity About War?"I've sat through 'anti-war' theatre from the satire on Lyndon Johnson, McBird, through Rolf Hochhuth's conspiracist anti-Churchill play Soldiers, to David Hare's relatively subtle Stuff Happens. I've seen dozens of 'em. The thought is -- or was -- could there be a pro-war play?"...
  • For City Opera, 2010-11 To Be Another Slender SeasonBut general manager and artistic director George Steel "said that this season City Opera expects to balance its budget for the first time in years. 'The company is light-years ahead of where we were last year at this time,' he said. 'There are still significant challenges, but we are working very hard to address them.'"...
  • Artes Mundi Artists Are International, Little-Known"There was no sight of a light being turned off and on at the preview opening of the fourth Artes Mundi prize exhibition in Cardiff. This was big subject art tackling subjects from post-communist social order to consumerism and globalisation. The prize of £40,000 is one of the most lucrative in the world and the biggest in the UK."...
  • Has Caravaggio Dethroned Michelangelo?"Caravaggiomania ... suggests that the whole classical tradition in which Michelangelo was steeped is becoming ever more foreign and therefore seemingly less germane, even to many educated people." Meanwhile, Caravaggio "exemplifies the modern antihero, a hyperrealist whose art is instantly accessible."...
  • Comparing West End Notes With The Stranger To His Left"Both of us lost sensation in the right leg first, and that meant we both stopped feeling the pain of the opera glasses embedding themselves into the right knee. We talked about the show and discussed the prices. She thought they were disgraceful."...
  • Reconsidering Classical Music's No Applause RuleAlex Ross: "Programme booklets sometimes contain a list of rules, rendered in the style of God on Mount Sinai," telling people when it is and isn't acceptable to applaud. "The underlying message of the protocol is, in essence: 'Curb your enthusiasm. Don't get too excited.' Should we be surprised that people aren't as excited about classical music as they used to be?"...
  • Nightingale: Years Have Not Been Kind To The Phantom"[T]his Phantom is not the phantom we knew. The 'poisoned gargoyle who burns in hell' has clearly taken an anger management course in New York. ... Would he whimsically hang the backstage crew or send a chandelier crashing into a crowd? Not any more."...
  • Billington: Seductive Score, Weak Book In Love Never Dies"I should say that I have no truck with those ghoulish groupies who've seen The Phantom of the Opera 852 times and regard any sequel as equivalent to painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa. No masterpiece has been besmirched. But there is a crucial difference between the two shows."...

smArtHistory

Modern Kicks

  • hold your horses!Flavorwire already had this, so I presume most have seen it already, but still: love it. Catchy, too.
  • yesPretty much what I've been thinking for months now: Facebook epitomizes filter failure for me. Yes, there are ways to segment information and keep groups, but there aren’t very good ways to keep worlds from overlapping. Facebook isn’t a more...
  • two great tastes that taste great togetherI'm talking about art and historiography, of course, the chocolate and peanut butter of the mind. I was delighted to learn yesterday, via the Art History Newsletter, that the University of Glasgow has begun to publish The Journal of Art...
  • day after day, day after still dayAs this mostly dreary summer seeks to belie its dimming through a series of perfect days that can't quite hide the coming fall, a fragment from a Transylvanian idyll, long ago: "The summer solstice was past, peonies and lilac had...
  • long fallen wideTo read C.V. Wedgwood on The Thirty Years War and reflect that she herself had not reached the age of thirty when she completed her astonishing, magisterial volume it is to realize exactly how large a distance separates oneself from...
  • seen at the mfaJust inside the Foster Gallery exhibition Contemporary Outlook: Seeing Songs, a Herb Ritts photograph of Michael Jackson. At the top of the label next to it: "IN MEMORIAM." 'Cause his death, you know, hit the MFA right here. (That was...
  • midweek linksA few things that have crossed my monitor screen recently: - Anaba has the latest on Christoph Büchel's appeal in the MASS MoCA case, including links to the parties briefs. I spent too much time on that story last year...
  • assuming responsibility for timeSnail Garden This is the twilight hour of the morning When the snails retreat over the wet grass To their hidden world, when my dreams, retreating, Leave me wondering what wisdom goes with them, What hides in mouldering earth. Softly...

Chasing Vincent

Art for Arts Sake

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December 7, 2008

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