Latest entries
Flying Colors
Horne and Fleming Instruct A Master Class Better than watching a master do what she does best is watching a master teach what she does best. Twin master classes led by divas Marilyn Horne and Renée Fleming under Carnegie Hall’s “The Song Continues…” series illuminated the potential that is unleashed when knowledge is given with...
Cecil Fabulous: Beaton’s New York Years Revived
By Marsha McCreadie One high aesthetic compliment is to call an artist ahead of his time. Yet the real trick is to be of your time and ahead of it, too. Cecil Beaton—photographer, illustrator, set and costume designer, even author—turned that trick, and nicely, too. The fabulous results, even a hint at his motivation, are...
Jar Jar Binks Goes to War
Lucas crashes Red Tails George Lucas’ sales tactics for Red Tails, his $93 million production about the Tuskegee Airmen, the first African-American pilots in the armed forces, make a bigger bang than the film itself. On the publicity rounds, Lucas has talked about the dearth of movies with African-American heroes, promising that Red Tails will...
Stained-Glass Melodrama: Zhang’s ‘Flowers’ Blooms
In The Flowers of War, filmmaker Zhang Yimou presents the Japanese occupation of Nanking in 1937 through the point of view of Chinese Catholic schoolgirl Shujuan (Xinyi Zhang). The rape of Nanking coincides with the development of Shujuan’s sexual identity as a woman, an experience that colors her memories of national trauma. To dramatize this,...
Flickers of Dance: Lincoln Center’s annual Dance on Camera Festival is a must-see
Now in its 40th year, Dance on Camera is at a new level of maturity. The annual event at the Walter Reade Theater that once fit into a three-day weekend has expanded to fill five days, Jan. 27–31, and within its brief duration has its own opening night, centerpiece and closing night films. This year’s...
Pay Dirt and Pigment: Theresa Byrnes mines the human condition
In her manifesto for Dust to Dust, Lower East Side artist Theresa Byrnes states: “I am not afraid to get dirty, I am not afraid of the cold—I have a high discomfort tolerance, I am not afraid of the rare disorder of the nervous system I have (Friedreich’s Ataxia). Because of FA I ride a...
Dr. Kahlil Gibran Muhammad
Dr. Kahlil Gibran Muhammad, formerly an assistant professor of history at Indiana University, was named director of Harlem’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture at a press conference Nov. 17, 2010. On the flight home that day, Muhammad glanced over to see his seatmate unfold the New York Times’ Arts and Leisure section and...
Going, Going Auctions
Rarae Aves Christie’s devotes a Jan. 20 auction to a single, formidable lot: A complete first edition of John James Audubon’s The Birds of America, 1827–38. Of some 200 sets originally issued, this copy, which has remained in the collection formed by the Duke of Portland since it was published, is one of only 13...
Up, Down and Sideways
The year 2012 can wait until my next column. But let’s hope for—let’s go so far as to look forward to—dance events as memorable as those that took place in the closing week of 2011. Winding up its annual City Center season, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater gave an admirable rendition of Paul Taylor’s...
2011’s Most Interesting Games
When the video game industry makes it easy to view gaming as little more than a hub for adolescent power fantasies and play-land warmongering, it can be trying to find the evocative experiences present in other mediums. But if the titles I’ve picked from the past year are any indication (and they are), 2011 was...
Keely Garfield brings her surreal autobiography style to ‘Twin Pines’ at Danspace
“I like to layer meaning and imagery. I think that creates an opportunity for people to enter where they will; one will come in through that door or an open window, someone else is going to dive into the middle of it,” Keely Garfield said recently as she was readying Twin Pines for its Danspace...
Bravery and Mastery
Spielberg’s “lost” treasures Though it’s tempting to dwell upon Steven Spielberg’s superior visual aesthetics—his mellifluous and unstudied reimagining of the Ford and Lean “scene” in War Horse, the extra-dimensional lighting and thrillingly untethered camera of Tintin—it’s the storytelling project that distinguishes both films. A mark of what jazz musician Kenny Werner calls effortless mastery, Spielberg’s...
Spielberg’s Game Changers
Movie watching can never be the same after the doubleheader of Steven Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin, his first animated film, and his live-action War Horse. Each film upgrades the way our imaginations construct the world, the way we see ourselves in the digital age. All art devotees should recognize the history being made. Tintin,...
Song of the Year
Saluting Stevie Nicks’ “Soldier’s Angel” Years from now, 2011 may be remembered as the year postfeminism produced poster girls for the status quo. Female-fronted hits such as the movie Bridesmaids and the TV show New Girl were hailed as breakthroughs, despite their unremarkable content. (Bridesmaids even showed up on some confused critics’ year-end best lists.)...
Best Album and Best Gallery Exhibition of 2011
‘Watch the Throne,’ Kanye West & Jay-Z; ‘Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’amour fou’ Call Larry Gagosian You belong in museums —Jay-Z, “That’s My B**ch” Jay-Z dreams of collapsing the class and race divisions reflected in high art and pop art hierarchies. Reverse the title of Kanye West & Jay-Z’s love song from their Watch the Throne...
Delivering Thrills
When the Vienna Philharmonic plays a New Year’s concert, the program is Viennesey—Strauss polkas and all that. When the New York Philharmonic plays a New Year’s concert, the program is New Yorky. At least it was this year. Their program on New Year’s Eve consisted of Gershwin and Bernstein. The former composer, of course, was...
Winter Wonderings
Jazzfest remains timely Jazz 2012 in New York City began as 2011 did: with a Winter Jazzfest proving that a couple thousand fans in their twenties and thirties will flock to The Village in January for staggered sets by some five dozen original and emergent ensembles for one low price in multiple venues. The excitement...
Two Masters
Turning on to Leaf and Dickinson The Whitney Museum is honoring Sherrie Levine, an artist who helped usher in postmodernism—as if New Yorkers needed another reminder of that movement’s deadening intellectual certainties. Better the arbiter of American art should dedicate its institutional clout to June Leaf, a veteran painter and sculptor whose prodigious oeuvre needs...
LIGHT BULB ARMOND WHITE 01.17.12
Virtuosity—the quality that lit up the best of arts culture during 2011—turns out to be the quality least appreciated in this transitional period for technology, economics and politics. It’s ironic that artists like Steven Spielberg, Kanye West, Jay-Z and Picasso (revived at a Gagosian retrospective), who had the inspiration to see past the confusion and...
Wheeldon and Dealin’: New York City Ballet returns with Balanchine and Wheeldon works
Following a brief winter hibernation after its five-week Nutcracker onslaught, New York City Ballet returns to its primary business this coming Tuesday, Jan. 17, when it opens its six-week winter repertory season. While the company’s repertory has been opened up to an increasing variety of choreographers in recent decades, the vast archive of George Balanchine’s...
