TT: All the way home I review two off-Broadway shows, The Understudy and Nightingale, in today's Wall Street Journal drama column. The first is great...

Posted November 6, 2009

TT: Almanac "People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors." Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution...

Posted November 6, 2009

TT: Julian Hope, R.I.P. The man who made The Letter possible died a few weeks ago, though the news has only just been released....

Posted November 5, 2009

TT: So you want to see a show? Here's my list of recommended Broadway and off-Broadway shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews...

Posted November 5, 2009

TT: Almanac "Not to go to the theatre is like making one's toilet without a mirror." Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga und Paraliponema...

Posted November 5, 2009

Oh, the power(lessness), the absolute power(lessness) If you're getting tired of 'top 20' lists of people who are richer, smarter, more attractive, better connected, and more interesting than you are, the folks over at Hyperallergic have a ranking for you! In response to the Art Review...

Posted November 6, 2009

What if the 'new normal' is really the original normal? Neill Archer Roan posts a rather interesting thought on his weblog about what we're all calling the 'new normal' for our economy, our society, and our work: what if the past 50 years were the exception, not the rule, to...

Posted November 4, 2009

Thoughts on the 'portfolio career' If you thought you were just bouncing from gig to gig, juggling multiple part-time or limited-term jobs in the arts and elsewhere, or just patching together a living from a seemingly diffuse bundle of clients, employers, and projects, you may...

Posted November 2, 2009

An artist's alternative to material wealth In an era when our economy is in flux, and many are revisiting their penchant for buying more stuff, conceptual artist Jonathon Keats offers another way: buy the opposite of stuff. His upcoming exhibit on The First Bank of Antimatter...

Posted October 30, 2009

Signs that you've stayed too long at the party In this job market and this economy, it's challenging to consider leaving a job. But it's never a bad idea for any cultural manager to at least ask the question: Am I in the right place, doing the right work?...

Posted October 28, 2009

IYA 2009 Posters Soundtrack: Donald Fagen's "IGY"...

Posted November 6, 2009

FARBER, MANNY FILE UNDER I've been planning a post devoted to some of the screamers I've been compiling from the Farber anthology, but first Duncan Shepherd from the San Diego Reader: "It is highly salutary to read what was written about such movies before...

Posted October 30, 2009

DO YOUR SCALES

Posted October 29, 2009

MISSION OF BURMA: SOUND SPEED LIGHT (MATADOR)

Posted October 27, 2009

REMASTERED REVISIONISM Haven't jotted down the firehose of details I'm still catching listening through the EMI Beatle remasters, but I enjoyed this podcast with Nik Cohn, who was always more of a Stoner, and poses the most reasonable push-back......

Posted October 26, 2009

The Book Tour ... ... in 140 characters, max. Garry Trudeau is a genius....

Posted November 6, 2009

Circles of Influence At Politico, Pia Catton has a fun look at the social links between the members of the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities. As she writes, "these 26 private-sector appointees are intricately connected through years of leadership in...

Posted November 6, 2009

Lounging at Lincoln Center A few elegant chairs. That's all it took to significantly ameliorate a design disaster in the Barclays Capital Grove at Lincoln Center.The god-awful concrete benches marring the plaza just north of the Metropolitan Opera House are still there in all their multifaceted...

Posted November 5, 2009

Our Sense of Place, Dismantled There was a startling melancholy to a street scene in Chelsea yesterday, just off Eighth Avenue. An old Boston Globe delivery truck, now with New York plates, idled at the curb, removed from its native habitat, disconnected from its...

Posted November 4, 2009

The Yankees' Cautionary Tale Just in time for the World Series, WNYC has a seriously fascinating report on the effect the new Yankee Stadium is having on its Bronx neighborhood. With the team having built what one fan approvingly describes as a mall, brimming...

Posted October 28, 2009

You Cannot Make this Stuff Up: NYC Department of Ed And Its Hypnotherapist Presumably, this blog will be subject to some criticism by the Association of Hypnotherapists. In today's New York Daily News, there is an article about the New York City Department of Education dropping almost $375,000 on the services of a...

Posted November 6, 2009

The Things I Hear About Arts Education Here are a few tidbits I have come across recently and not so recently; most in person and a few in writing:You arts people think that all principals have to do all day is think about arts education.School District OfficialDo...

Posted November 5, 2009

Ted Wiprud, NY Philharmonic Arts Education Advanceman Blog #6: Abu Dhabi and Reflections from Home To read the previous installments of Ted's arts education travelogue click here for the first entry; here for the second; here for the third; here for the fourth; and here for the fifth. I want to thank my friend Ted...

Posted November 2, 2009

Arts Education and the Race for Mayor of New York City Where do the key candidates for Mayor of New York City stand on arts education???Just as we did for the Public Advocate race, The Center for Arts Education is circulating the arts education questionnaires completed by the Republican candidate for...

Posted October 29, 2009

A New Twist on Arts Education and Test Scores The organization I work for is fortunate, very fortunate indeed to have a grant from the USDOE as part of its Arts Education Model Development and Dissemination (AEMDD) program. It is near impossible to be awarded one of these highly...

Posted October 28, 2009

List of Blogs carrying National Arts Journalism Summit Today Thanks to those who volunteered to host a webstream of the Arts Journalism Summit at USC today. Streaming begins at 9AM pdt. See you in a few hours. (Looking for more information about the Summit? Go here. www.minalhajratwala.com/bloghttp://www.bendofbay.org http://www.palmbeachartspaper.com   http://www.centerscene.blogspot.com/  http://www.sfcv.org/node/6909http://www.austin360.com/blogs/content/shared-gen/blogs/austin/seeingthings/index.html http://www.AnnieStrack.blogspot.comhttp://www.mamaramabook.com/blog/www.judithingolfsson.comhttp://evansdonnell.blogspot.com/2009/10/watch-national-summit-on-arts.htmlhttp://arts-america.blogspot.com/http://moppenheim.comhttp://24seven.blogs.heraldtribune.com/10354/usc-to-hold-arts-journalism-summit/http://houseseats.uniontrib.com  www.ced.pro.brwideningthei.wordpress.comhttp://voices.washingtonpost.com/the-classical-beat  http://www.chloeveltman.com/blog/index.htmlhttp://www.joycegehl.blogspot.comhttp://blogs.tampabay.com/art www.HelloBeautifulBlog.comwww.imamuseum.org/bloghttp://clevelandclassical.wordpress.com/http://www.artsengagementexchange.org/resources/entry/national_summit_on_arts_journalism/http://www.belfry.bc.ca/news/webcast-national-summit-on-arts-journalism/www.theatrelouisville.orghttp://movement-museum.blogspot.com/ http://www.newmusicbox.org/chatter.nmbxhttp://cseries.typepad.com/celebrityseries/http://dancealamode.wordpress.comhttp://bosccoartbuzz.blogspot.com...

Posted October 2, 2009

Need Your Help: Let's Make Arts Journalism Viral - UPDATES II: UPDATE: The first blogs are beginning to sign up to stream: www.createquity.com, www.artsDC.com, http://gatheringnote www.seattledances, www.salvadorcastillo.wordpress.com. One blogger has already tried to embed the feed in Blogger and got back an error. Anyone familiar with embedding in Blogger? Leave a...

Posted September 30, 2009

ArtsJournal Turns Ten Years Old This week I gave a talk in San Francisco and I mentioned that Sunday - today - ArtsJournal is ten years old. In web terms, that makes us pretty old. Except, in the room were the editors of at least...

Posted September 13, 2009

The Upgrades That Make You Feel Worse I've been on a lot of airplanes recently. Flying isn't much fun, but I like being in other places. So in the process of travel I tend to see those around me as either obstacles to my getting where I...

Posted August 27, 2009

Great Expectations (Except When They're Not) Ken Brecher tells this story about Alexander Graham Bell. The inventor of the telephone apparently spent the last part of his life railing against the way people were using his invention. When greeting someone on the phone, he insisted, the...

Posted August 2, 2009

Talking Structural Overhaul at Every Turn Last week we had the California Arts Advocates lobbyist in San Diego to present a briefing on the current political realities in Sacramento. The message I took away was simple: change is coming because every aspect of state government is...

Posted November 4, 2009

Finding Your Inner Arts Advocate Becoming an arts advocate really takes little more than getting over the hurdle of one's own reluctance. My friend and colleague Victoria Saunders articulates this very well in a piece she recently wrote for Americans for the Arts about accepting...

Posted October 3, 2009

An Artist Activist Takes On Globalization While leaders from the G-20 nations met in Pittsburgh this weekend to further pave the road to globalization, Michelle Obama shared the arts with her fellow spouses, and protesters tried to interrupt the meeting, one artist quietly and clearly detailed...

Posted September 28, 2009

Manufacturing Discontent 2 Update: Thanks to Leonard Jacobs for commenting and prompting me to check out his tracking of the anti-NEA campaign at the Clyde Fitch Report. He also links to several other bloggers from the arts world working to unravel the NEA...

Posted September 22, 2009

Manufacturing Discontent I went to 9th grade "Back to School Night" last week and learned that my son's history teacher focuses on critical thinking skills before teaching history. He explicitly aims to give students the tools to analyze history, understand the difference...

Posted September 14, 2009

Fred Wilson Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} Lecture at the Nasher Museum of ArtOctober 27, 2009 He was affable, humorous...

Posted October 27, 2009

They came, they saw, they showed. Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} As it wound down its run towards its final weekend, the group...

Posted October 23, 2009

A Lure of Language Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman";} Normal 0 MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal";...

Posted October 18, 2009

Michael Pollan in Madison and the culture of food Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 st1\:*{behavior:url(#ieooui) } /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name:"Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow:yes; mso-style-parent:""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom:.0001pt; mso-pagination:widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family:"Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} Using a box of Froot Loops...

Posted September 29, 2009

On newspapers, music magazines, and Quincy Jones The web-based culture magazine The Curator kindly published this piece on mine in August exploring the future of music magazines and the difference between them, the music industry they cover, and all the buzz over the fate of newspapers....

Posted September 20, 2009

Going Rogue From the Globe and Mail, headline: "COC Boss Scoops his Own Publicist": The Canadian Opera Company is usually tight-lipped about its plans beyond the current season. I thought the tradition would continue under Alexander Neef, the diplomatic young German who...

Posted November 6, 2009

In which I may get fired 2x I've been working on two ridiculous things. You know how CD release concerts are usually/mostly boring? Or at the very least, exactly the same as the last one you went to? Right, so, next week and the following week, two...

Posted November 4, 2009

Blooper reel My client Eric Owens had a recital at Carnegie Hall's Weill Hall last spring. Typically, I was doing seventeen things at once, two of which were working with Carnegie's Creative Services department on Eric's program and e mailing Hilary Hahn...

Posted November 4, 2009

Group mentality Let me first say that I hope this blog entry doesn't ruin my sister's chances of marrying Jorge Posada. I noticed these Jorge Posada/Mayor Bloomberg ads on The Awl last Tuesday. "Did they press 'submit' on those ads the as...

Posted November 3, 2009

Metababy 'Media' covered by media Maybe I was sleepy, but last night I was actually convinced Mel Gibson had named his new child "Media" and I thought, how amazing is that! Stick it to the press! Upon closer reading, I think ABC News just wrote...

Posted November 2, 2009

Epic Advertising Yes, the "Painfully Honest and Epic Mobile Home Commercial" is more, um, well, more everything. [via BoingBoing] But the one designed by Rhett and Link of "I Love Local Commercials" for Ray's Midbell Music of Sioux City, Iowa, capitalizing...

Posted November 4, 2009

Pardon Our Dust Okay, admittedly this is a Gap commercial, of all things, and extrapolating large life lessons from it might be a little lame and more than a bit misguided, but it got me thinking about the role of art--as in:...

Posted November 3, 2009

Let's Get Philosophical Some years ago Carnegie Hall asked me to draft a composer profile/program note for Idiot Divine, a solo show of Rinde Eckert's they were putting up in Zankel Hall. I didn't know much about Eckert's work before preparing for...

Posted November 1, 2009

They Don't Have WiFi In This Coffee Shop, Do They? Moving into a new community, even for a short time, requires adaptation. When traveling in America, I usually find these adjustments to be small in scale and yet strangely frustrating--challenges of the "they sell 10 kinds of Coke and...

Posted October 27, 2009

Music My Mom Likes Indeed!Hipsters everywhere should take heed. Buble's success demonstrates the enormous power of that not-yet-banished sector of entertainment consumers: uncool people. While their tastes may account for zero percent of the stories America's hipster-obsessed music press writes, they still control a...

Posted October 21, 2009

Dystopia, my old friend Can you stage the internet? I'm just back from the sweetest, saddest performance I've seen in ages - and also the first that, in barely more than an hour, tells the story of the web's utopia turning to dystopia. Chris...

Posted November 4, 2009

Only here for the ecstasy It has been a while since the performance monkey put paw to keyboard, but he has still been, y'know, seeing stuff in theatres. Some of these things have been terribly cool, and have involved magical oracles, properly good nervous breakdowns...

Posted October 30, 2009

No half measures There was no halfway house with Pina Bausch. As my editor remarked earlier today, you were either a devotee or sceptic, and if a devotee you were very devoted. There will be many tributes to Pina Bausch in the next...

Posted June 30, 2009

'Pick up the gun and shoot the bastard!' I was much tickled this afternoon to read the performance artist and lecturer Lois Weaver recalling a visit to David Hare's play The Secret Rapture. Her colleague Peggy Phelan, a reluctant co-attendee at the matinee performance ('this sea of the...

Posted June 28, 2009

Swan in a neck brace We critics - dressed in our usual dowdy - were discombobulated when we arrived at Sadler's Wells last week for English National Ballet's tribute to Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. There was a red (actually black) carpet, and a healthy jostle of...

Posted June 25, 2009

That Bloomsbury Voice Wouldn't it be wonderful if we could hear the voice of Boswell, or of Mme de Lieven. Or if we had recordings of the voices of Hume, Gibbon and Macaulay? Or, to enter the realm of the possible, of...

Posted November 6, 2009

That boy's magic horn Tired of commuting to London for my daily culture-fix, it was wonderful to drive only as far as Oxford last week for the opening of the 2008 Oxford Lieder Festival, www.oxfordlieder.co.uk. This is the brainchild and labour of love of...

Posted October 24, 2009

Brecht's problem play Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children is a problem play, and the National Theatre's new production has had more than its share of troubles, with a press night postponed because the actor playing the second lead, the chaplain, either quit...

Posted October 6, 2009

Dies illa I love going to what a former-debutante girlfriend used to call (generically) "the play" at the Almeida Theatre in Islington. The small, 325-seat auditorium is a warm, intimate space, the foyer and bars are welcoming, and it's located just...

Posted September 23, 2009

A high time in Auld Reekie Edinburgh 2009 (2)Apologies are owed to Edinburgh International Festival director, Jonathan Mills, as this is his third, not second, EIF, which I jolly well ought to know, as I was here for his inaugural festival, and very fine it was,...

Posted September 1, 2009

If You Live In Britain, Better Hide That Picasso Art thievery usually boggles the mind -- you can't resell a truly valuable piece -- and yet it flourishes. Do you know where it thrives, and where it's rising? The Art Loss Register, which tracks reported thefts, sent out a notice at the end of...

Posted November 6, 2009

And The Digital Composer-In-Residence Is... David T. Little, the New York City-based composer and percussionist, has won DilettanteMusic.com's digital composer-in-residence contest -- by a huge margin, gaining more than half the votes. This contest, as I mentioned the other day, was judged first by experts and then...

Posted November 5, 2009

A Classical White House: What Happened Last Night So here's how the evening of classical music at the White House went. President Obama warmed up the crowd with remarks about not knowing when to applaud, eliciting laughs, according to the transcript provided by the White House. Now, if any...

Posted November 5, 2009

Tonight At The White House: A Classical Concert I almost forgot, until an email from the White House press office reminded me: tonight is classical music night at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. I wrote about it here, and you can watch streaming live here at 7 p.m. (Unfortunately, I will miss...

Posted November 4, 2009

Falling For The Fall for Dance Festival Once again New York City Center* has pulled off what so many arts organizations only dream about: attracting new audiences and getting them to return. How? Its annual Fall for Dance Festival -- 10 performances, 20 companies -- now in its sixth year. Every year, along...

Posted November 4, 2009

Knowing the Plot The other night I was at the Maly Drama Theatre of St. Petersburg's production of "Life and Fate -- I'll post my roundup of the Lincoln Center Festival's Eastern European theater early next week, after I've seen Pushkin's "Boris Godunov" on Sunday --...

Posted July 24, 2009

Dance That Isn't Ballet But Is Still Dance OK, here's part two of my recent dance roundup, devoted to dance that isn't ballet and as such is usually ignored or dismissed by ballet-oriented critics but is still dance, darn it! As the noted dance critic Stuart Smalley might...

Posted July 19, 2009

The failings of arts journalism, in print and on the internet My latest posting to ARTicles, the blog of the National Arts Journalism Program, in which I bloviate on some phrases in a Doug McLennan commentary on the decline of traditional arts journalism....

Posted July 19, 2009

One Kind of Dance Late spring and early summer are considered by some to be the high point of the New York dance season, and the reason is simple: New York City Ballet is having its spring season at the New York State Theater...

Posted July 18, 2009

Pina Bausch and the Definition of Dance I hesitated to write about Pina Bausch immediately after her death. First, I had long had reservations about her work, though mine were a little different from those of some others. Then second, I decided I should watch Pedro Almodovar's "Talk to...

Posted July 5, 2009

The Outsider Dave Teeuwen's Interview with Graham Masterton on William S. Burroughs is a gem -- every last word of it -- and especially the remark that Burroughs said "he felt as if he had never lived the life he was supposed...

Posted November 3, 2009

And Now for a Change of Pace From Video Poetry and Video Fictions, courtesy of Richard Kostelanetz, who produced the visual content in 1989, and Seth G. Samuel, who composed and performed the music in 2009. Postscript: Nov. 2 -- A change from the change ... and...

Posted October 26, 2009

Straight From the Horse's Mouth Here's the truth, simply stated ... bookstores are suffering from a serious crisis of falling sales. Don't believe a single zero of all those editions claimed to be 100,000! 40,000! ... even 400 copies! just for suckers! Alack! ... Alas!...

Posted October 25, 2009

Vonnegut Tells a Story Here's the beginning of a nice little tale of blackmail and paranoia by the late Kurt Vonnegut. It's one of 14 previously unpublished stories in a new collection of short fiction, Look at the Birdie, just out from Random House....

Posted October 19, 2009

The Mind Reels Did you see this? How could you not? It was frontpage -- front and center above the fold -- the kind of news that sends the mind reeling: Wounded Soldiers Return to Iraq, Seeking Solace. Really. Americans wounded in the...

Posted October 15, 2009

Armitage toys with Africans; Han Tang Yuefu Music and Dance Ensemble brings ancient debauchery to life Karole Armitage is a choreographer who misses more than she hits, but even that bumpy track record didn't prepare me for Itutu, playing BAM for a mercifully short run this week. Here are the first few paragraphs of my...

Posted November 5, 2009

A subdued Garth Fagan Mudan 175/39 by Garth Fagan. Photo by Paula Summit.I don't think this year's Joyce season is the best showing of Fagan's work. There's only one premiere--the lovely Mudan--but even that wouldn't be a problem if the rep didn't also...

Posted October 31, 2009

Spooky shows from Bill T. Jones and Joe Goode I asked my friend and Foot colleague Paul Parish whether I could paste some of his review last week of Bill T. Jones's and Joe Goode's latest shows--Jones's is the big Lincoln fete we New Yorkers will be getting...

Posted October 25, 2009

If the movement is original but induces nausea, should a critic complain or celebrate? I didn't do either in my review for the Financial Times tomorrow of the popular European choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui's Orbo Novo. There were other things, for which I felt distinct dislike, such as the dance's confusion about its...

Posted October 22, 2009

More on online dance-video collections, and why the likes of the Balanchine Trust might need to shut them down...[Wait: No they needn't. Breaking News from real Lawyer] After posting Foot contributor Paul Parish's eloquent and provocative outcry on the YouTube crackdown on user Ketinoa's large video collection, I received some illuminating information on copyright law from Marc Kirshner, of the newly formed Tendu TV. Here it...

Posted October 17, 2009

Wiseman's Lens on Dance Frederick Wiseman's La Danse: Le Ballet de l'Opéra de Paris / Film Forum, NYC / November 4-17, 2009 The Paris Opera, as seen in Frederick Wiseman's La Danse: The Paris Opera BalletCourtesy of Zipporah Films The ticket line at Greenwich...

Posted November 2, 2009

ABT's Experiment American Ballet Theatre / Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center, New York City / October 7-10, 2009 Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center's main concert venue, lacks an orchestra pit, wing space, and a floor suitable for dancing. Musicians performing there stay...

Posted October 16, 2009

Decreation Indeed The Forsythe Company / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House / Brooklyn, NY / October 7-10, 2009 William Forsythe made his name creating ballets with an eye to pushing the art conspicuously forward, as Balanchine had done. Nowadays he makes concoctions...

Posted October 13, 2009

Dancing Without Motion Often the visual arts will make a dance fan feel he or she is in the presence of dancing that doesn't move through space and time, but is dancing nonetheless, or at least its cousin. The actual dance pickings seemed...

Posted September 21, 2009

Dr. Bill: Personal Indulgences No. 15 My father was a doctor, a general practitioner--G.P.--as his type was called back then when it was very common. Regular patients called him "Dr. Bill," instinctively combining honorific with nickname to indicate their respect and affection. At the age of...

Posted September 12, 2009

Our Great-Grandfathers' Butts At this unsure moment, sex doesn't seem to be on everyone's lips. A decade ago, the bodies politic were forever getting it on, at least in the then-pulsating media and groovy groves of academe. But now the topic has cooled...

Posted October 26, 2009

Archie Date Update A while back, when it was "leaked" that the 600th issue of Archie comics would be a wedding announcement, I myself made a modest proposal. Today, the New York Times published an Archie follow that pulls my facetious wishful thinking...

Posted October 6, 2009

The Best Pesto A Modest Lesson in Journalistic AdviceIt may be odd for a former restaurant critic to claim that he always thought anyone could cook anything well, but it's true. Cooking in a restaurant shouldn't be rocket science, yet it certainly isn't...

Posted September 22, 2009

Next Round: Bill Viola Versus the Pope Who Would Expect a Video Artist To Be a Hero?   Every week's cultural and political news is actually a puzzle to be solved, a jigsaw set with antagonistic pieces. Here's one part of the puzzle that I find heartening,...

Posted September 14, 2009

Has 'Project Runway' Jumped the Sharkskin? And Other Crucial Parts of the Culture Puzzle I've never been a fan of purely reactive writing. Most of it banishes those errant ideas and images that have no obvious connection to the fake trend or genuine outrage of the...

Posted September 13, 2009

Long Slog Yes, loyal reader, Serious Popcorn has been suffering from neglect lately.This is because I have spent the summer and autumn slogging through the final revisions of my book, now tentatively titled America's Cultural Footprint: The Good, the Bad, and the...

Posted October 25, 2009

3 Billion Fans, and None in Newark? Do Americans live in a "parallel universe" separate from the rest of humanity?  To judge by this item from Agence France-Presse, the answer is yes.Imagine Brad Pitt being stopped in an airport and questioned by people who don't know who...

Posted August 17, 2009

This is Not Nostalgia Invited by the Wall Street Journal to do a short piece on Woodstock, this is what I came up with:"Both a Dream and a Nightmare"The 1969 Woodstock festival wasn't held in Woodstock, N.Y., but in a dairy-farming hamlet 43 miles...

Posted August 15, 2009

Nailed How do you know who your friends are in Washington?  They're the ones who stab you in the chest.That old joke captures the hard-edged quality of political combat in the nation's capital better than most Hollywood films, perhaps because Hollywood...

Posted August 9, 2009

White Like Him Now that everyone has had a chance to woof about the latest RRT (Racial Rorschach Test), let me recommend 5 minutes of comic relief: the brief but memorable skit by Eddie Murphy on Saturday Night Live called "White Like Me"...

Posted July 26, 2009

Public Concert, Private Music When Doug McLennan asked me to write this blog, he told me that the most successful ones connect the writing to the experiences the blogger has in daily life. I write about building arts communities, and for several weeks...

Posted November 5, 2009

Drive-by Opera In the Epilogue to Alex Ross's marvelous book, The Rest is Noise, he writes "Extremes become their opposites in time." Although he is making a completely different point than I want to focus on, I agree with him entirely.Opera began...

Posted September 25, 2009

A Battle with (and for) Bruckner's Music This entry continues my exploration of Bruckner's Fourth as revealed by two recordings by Bruno Walter, along with a little bit of thinking about remembering to keep "art" first in "arts communities." You can read the previous entries on this...

Posted September 12, 2009

Having Coffee with Bruno Walter In my last entry I wrote the following:I want to start this series of blogs on personal artistic development and its relationship to building communities. Naturally, there are many interpretations of the word "community" - ranging from shared geography to...

Posted September 8, 2009

The End of Summer - This Time The evening chill announces that the Michigan summer is ending. Even on sunny days there is a little spark in the air that, somehow, connects itself to October more closely than to June.  The economic convulsions of last year are...

Posted September 3, 2009

US remains jazz central Jazz is global, but its most ambitious players still flock to the US to soak in its roots and prove they're part of the scene. Tonight a Parisian septet called Fractale wraps up an eight-gig tour of the States at...

Posted November 6, 2009

Henry Threadgill, seer beyond 'jazz' In my City Arts column: a new album and Roulette concert with commissioned work from a worldly-wise 65 yr-old NYC/East Village-based composer-bandleader who keeps looking at music -- Varese's and Wagner's, Scott Joplin's and Ornette Coleman's -- to find something...

Posted November 5, 2009

JazzTimes' robust recovery The November issue of JazzTimes magazine is the first created (not just published) under the imprimatur of Madavor Media, LLC imprint, and the periodical looks very much the same as before its hiatus last spring. Editors Lee Mergener and Evan...

Posted October 27, 2009

Sweet Rhythm quietly ends run as Village jazz stage The 7th Ave. home in the '80s and early '90s of Gil Evans' last orchestra, David Murray's octets, Abdullah Ibrahim's bands, Lester Bowie's Brass Fantasy and other avant-gutsy acts closed last night (Oct. 24) without notice or fanfare. Sweet Rhythm...

Posted October 25, 2009

Soupy Sales, 1926-2009, friend to jazz The silliest pie-in-the-face TV comic of the '50s had trumpeter Clifford Brown with drummer Max Roach on his kiddie show. Soupy Sales loved jazz -- how cool is that? photo courtesy of Craig Marin, www.Flexitoon.com -- more pix there...

Posted October 23, 2009

we could be heroes Rebirth Brass Band snare drummer Derrick Tabb is nominated for a CNN 2009 "Heroes" award. He deserves it. Vote him in here.You'll feel heroic too.Here's my testimony on his behalf: I remember in 2007, when Tabb and his brother,...

Posted October 12, 2009

heeding the wake up call Can arts journalism -- can arts, can journalism--adapt to changing technologies, new media, and a multi-tasking, screen-oriented, thumb-typing audience without losing its way, killing its aesthetic and going broke?Can very smart professionals get together and discuss this issue via...

Posted October 2, 2009

war (what is it good for)? Well, the hate mail has already begun flowing in: I expected it, having written something positive about Jazz at Lincoln Center in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. One email ranted on about how "google news and custom search aggregation" has...

Posted September 25, 2009

De Latin Delight of DeLay I missed the spectacle of Tom DeLay, former Texas Republican Congressman, now rhinestone cowboy, shaking his ass, sliding on his knees, and playing air guitar to "Wild Thing," on Dancing with the Stars, as investigators mulled money-laundering charges against...

Posted September 24, 2009

(jewish) new year's resolution I've said it before. I'm saying it again now. I'm going to take up blogging again in earnest and with respect for what the enterprise offers. Not every day, perhaps. But for real. And I'll get back to posting some...

Posted September 23, 2009

Farewell I remember a moment during the summer of 2002, when I looked at my wife and told her that I needed to make a change in my professional life. I had been managing the Chicago Symphony Orchestra for seventeen years--a...

Posted October 30, 2009

Declining Arts Participation: A Topic for Broad-Based National Dialogue Earlier this year the National Endowment for the Arts released its 2008 Arts Participation Survey, and the picture it paints is worrisome. The study was done in May, 2008, six months into the recession, and certainly we can draw a...

Posted October 23, 2009

The Case for Subsidizing Ticket Prices If you go to symphony concerts in Europe or South America, you see audiences that tend to be more diverse than ours in the United States--more young people, more ethnic diversity, more apparent diversity of economic and demographic background. Since...

Posted October 16, 2009

Artistic Authority in Orchestras: A Tricky Balance I appear to have caused some confusion in the past with my comments about orchestra board members who try to wield too much authority in programming decisions, and conversely about conductors who adopt an autocratic, almost dictatorial stance, saying, "I...

Posted October 9, 2009

The Music Director Search: Integrity and Commitment In last week's blog, I began a discussion of some of the questions I am most frequently asked by orchestras engaged in music director searches. This week, I am continuing that subject.What do we do when we start getting local...

Posted October 2, 2009

Episodic episodes I was in Chicago a week ago to discuss the subject of writing musical biography with some of Prof. Philip Gossett's excellent graduate students at the University of Chicago - a thoroughly enjoyable experience, at least for me.  While I was there, I managed...

Posted October 25, 2009

More Met Since I saw the Met's new Tosca production (see a previous entry), about which I found much less to dislike than most other commentators (not to mention the opening night audience), I've been back to the house for three more...

Posted October 22, 2009

Fascinated again Sometimes, in looking back over periods in your life, you may recognize that certain moments or events were turning-points.  But you may also recognize other moments or events as having been potential turning-points that you passed up for one reason or another. Just now I'm remembering...

Posted October 11, 2009

Puccini and others The New York musical season began, for me, with a double dose of Puccini.  First, I visited the small but interesting exhibition that the Morgan Library and Museum has dedicated to the composer between two of his anniversaries - the 150th of his...

Posted October 7, 2009

Mostly Mozart, but a little Wagner, too Matthew Gurewitsch's New York Times article (August 2nd) on Yannick Nézet-Séguin reminded me that I had wanted to see/hear this much-talked-about young Québecois conductor at work. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend a rehearsal for his concert with the Mostly...

Posted August 12, 2009

Mr. Brendel, thank you My introduction of Alfred Brendel last night in Boston: In classical music, there are those who believe that thinking about music can compromise feeling -- compromise our emotional response to music. Alfred Brendel's example vividly shows us that such notions...

Posted November 5, 2009

Iowa was the name of the Star I'm from Iowa. Born there. Grew up there. Studied music there. I wasn't a prodigy. I took lessons from the lady down the street. (Her name was Joy Lord.) In high school, I played concertos with several Iowa orchestras. In...

Posted November 2, 2009

Recenter The "reception" of a piece of music becomes part of its identity. Our performances, recordings, reviews, reactions, lawsuits, teaching, reflection, arrangements, remixes, appropriation -- all of that is the piece, along with the text we started from. Famous music acquires...

Posted October 26, 2009

Quality Control Classical music culture is permeated with judgment making. Maybe it's necessary? Maybe it suits us? We audition musicians to discover who will play better in an orchestra, or to find out which students can develop best in a school. We're...

Posted October 19, 2009

Ascent There's a certain pride associated with rising melodic lines -- in much nineteenth-century music. Singing soars, and in soaring affirms something very positive about being human. As pitch rises, we might get louder, more tonally intense, more emotional. In other...

Posted October 5, 2009

Keeping Good Company I had expected to have two new CDs and a book out this fall, but two of them have been delayed until February. One of the CDs, however, has arrived, titled The Minimalists, by the Orkest de Volharding on Mode Records...

Posted October 29, 2009

Maryanne Amacher (1943-2009) [For emendation to the above dates, see updates below.] The music world lost one of its most bizarre characters today, and I say that with the utmost affection. Maryanne Amacher was an amazing composer of sound installations, who occasionally taught...

Posted October 22, 2009

Total Heaviosity Liturgy opening the New Yorker Festival, October 16, 2009: Tyler Dusenbury, Hunter Hunt-Hendrix, Greg Fox, Bernard Gann. Listen here. The photo completely fails to convey the high-energy maelstrom of their strumming. ...

Posted October 17, 2009

Silence and Noise This Friday night, Oct. 16, my son's black metal band Liturgy plays at the New Yorker festival, at the Bell House in Brooklyn, 149 7th Street, 8 PM. The event is listed as already sold out, but I'm supposed to be on a...

Posted October 14, 2009

Upcoming Appearances Several performances of my music, or in which I am involved, are coming up. First of all, percussionist Andy Bliss will play my vibraphone piece Olana on a concert in Chicago this Sunday, Oct. 4, at the Chicago Temple, 77 Washington Street,...

Posted October 1, 2009

Listen To The Bass Player: Part 6, Scott LaFaro The Rifftides series of posts on improving hearing by listening to bass lines leads inevitably to Scott LaFaro. It was less LaFaro's virtuosity that made a difference in the role of the bass than the uncanny group thinking and interaction...

Posted November 7, 2009

Listen To The Bass Player: Part 5, Red Mitchell In the first paragraph of Part 3 of this series, it was not by random choice that I included Red Mitchell's name in the short list of important bassists who emerged in the 1940s. He discovered ways of playing the...

Posted November 6, 2009

Listen To The Bass Player: Part 4, Paul Chambers For the new segment of our adventure in letting bassists be our guides, author, critic and sometime Rifftides commentator Larry Kart has a fine idea. May I suggest, for Part 4, Paul Chambers behind Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Wynton Kelly...

Posted November 4, 2009

Listen To The Bass Player: Part 3, Bill Crow As you may recall from parts 1 and 2, our theme in this series is that by concentrating on the lines played by a good string bassist, you can gain an understanding of the shape and structure of a piece...

Posted November 4, 2009

Listen To The Bass Player: Part 2, NHØP Let us pursue the music appreciation method outlined in Part 1 (see the following exhibit). The theory is that concentrating on the bass lines of superior players can sharpen your perception of the music. Today's lesson is from another great...

Posted November 3, 2009

No-star game Last night I went to the gala season-opening show at the New York City Opera. That was a night with special meaning, obviously, because the company was coming back from the dead, with a new directo, a refurbished theater, and...

Posted November 6, 2009

Quotation of the day From my wife Anne Midgette's probing review of classical music in the White House, in today's Washington Post: ...what becomes clearer, in this presentation, is that classical music no longer automatically holds a position of predominance among today's power elite....

Posted November 5, 2009

Unexpected classical music In Zombieland (a delectable movie), there's a scene where the four dysfunctional people we're learning to love smash up a store full of tacky western-style souvenirs. And have loads of fun doing it. They're allowed to, because as far as...

Posted November 4, 2009

Crossing cultures Three quick notes about things I learned in Tunis. First: Composers in Guatemala incorporated Afro-Caribbean music into their compositions -- in the 18th century! I learned this from Dieter Lehnhoff, an Austrian violinist and conductor who's been living in Guatemala for...

Posted November 4, 2009

Future of, international edition We hear a lot about classical music in Finland -- about how many orchestras they have, how they train and nourish musicians, how many fine composers they have. Etc.But apparently they have no more luck getting younger people to go...

Posted November 2, 2009

The Record Doctor is back Surgery opens next Monday, Nov 9, at 1400 on WNYC Soundcheck, but the website will open for patient registration before the end of this week. Do check the site for details. A description of the practice can be found here. All musical ailments sensitively...

Posted November 3, 2009

Other side of the Dude Amid the hoopla and hullabaloo of Gustavo Dudamel's arrival in Los Angeles, few seem to have noticed that he has quietly renewed as music director in Gothenburg, Swden, for the next three years. The Swedes can never be faulted for...

Posted November 3, 2009

Fun use of a free newspaper Sitting in the fug of London's Northern Line in the summer of 2007, Christopher Fox began to compose a vocal piece on the small ads in the freesheet London Lite. He called it 20 Ways to Improve Your Life and it has just been released on...

Posted October 29, 2009

The snowman cometh Attempts by Liz Forgan, chair of Arts Council England, to defend her veto of the Mayor of London's candidate are sounding more plaintive than her usual robust self. In a letter printed yesterday in the Guardian, whose ownership Trust she chairs, Dame Liz bleated...

Posted October 28, 2009

Opera becomes an app Opera magazine, parish newssheet of hard-core devotees, has gone on-line at iTunes. From this month, you can download the entire issue and a partial archive for $1.99 (£1.19 UK) a week, the equivalent of a couple of chart singles. Try it...

Posted October 22, 2009

Big-City Texas in the '80s: Black Water Rising Attica Locke is a bit of a rarity. She's an African-American, female novelist from Texas who's made her debut with a big-city crime novel. It's called Black Water Rising, and rarer still, Locke is getting compared to such master thriller...

Posted August 6, 2009

Fluxus in Texas Allison McElroy, 411 #2, rolled-up phonebook pages, wire, black frame, 2009 Anarchic and whimsical, Fluxus was a little-known art movement in the '60s -- little-known, even though Yoko Ono was an occasional and influential Fluxite. (John Lennon once quipped...

Posted July 15, 2009

All that glitters can be sold How to Sell: I love the title with its echoes of business advice books. It's easy to imagine someone picking up Clancy Martin's novel to get tips on closing a sale - only to get a shock. But I hope...

Posted June 10, 2009

Money for Art, Pt. 2: Replaying the '50s and '90s Justine Smith, Absolute Power, dollar bills, 2005Money for Art, Pt 1: Arts Funding in AmericaDavid A. Smith's Money for Art: The Tangled Web of Art and Politics in American Democracy recounts the history of federal funding of the arts...

Posted June 5, 2009

Money for Art, Pt 1: Arts Funding in America It's dead certain that our culture wars will rage again. David A. Smith, a senior lecturer in history at Baylor University, does not actually make that prediction in his book, Money for Art: The Tangled Web of Art and Politics...

Posted May 30, 2009

The Focative Case A particular song by the Sex Pistols kept coming to mind while working on this week's column -- and while there are no references to the band in the interview itself, I let the train of thought guide the choice...

Posted October 8, 2009

Studies in Usage The CNN report on the death of former Manson Family member Susan Atkins goes into my file on the word "irony." In the United States we normally use this word to discuss things in which there is no irony whatsoever:...

Posted September 25, 2009

Extreme Unction The announcement of Jim Carroll's death at CatholicBoy includes one sentence that means everything to me: "He was at his desk working when he passed away." A story from my friend Rich Byrne:Idolized him and Basketball Diaries as adolescent. Finally...

Posted September 14, 2009

Relaunch! Home again after a week on a largely deserted island -- a vacation that kept me from attending the NBCC board meeting and 35th anniversary festivities in New York -- I'm now facing so much work that the very thought...

Posted September 14, 2009

Department of Belated and Lackidaisical Self-Promotion I am about to go on vacation,and will be offline for a good while. No comments will be posted until mid-month. But before vanishing, I wanted to put up links to a few -- if by no means all --...

Posted September 4, 2009

Wild Things Make His Heart Sing It's true the Museum of Modern Art's new film retrospective, Spike Jonze: The First 80 Years, opened on Thursday night, so I'm a little late getting to it. But don't mistake my tardiness for a lack of enthusiasm for either...

Posted October 12, 2009

It's Supposed to Be BarryMORE, not BarryLESS Last night marked our li'l version of the Tony Awards, the 15th annual Barrymore Awards for Excellence in Philadelphia Theatre. I've attended a whole bunch of those ceremonies and watched them grow in scale alongside Philly's theater community. However, it's...

Posted October 6, 2009

The Best of the Fests There are still a few days left in the 2009 Philadelphia Live Arts/Fringe Festival, but what with the Jewish new year and other obligations, including the start of the regular theater season, I've had to cash out early. Good news...

Posted September 17, 2009

The Countdown Begins I'm away on vacation right now, and won't return until the start of the Philadelphia Live Arts/Fringe Festival on September 3, when I'll go from being tanned and well-rested to a 24/7 schedule of theater/new-school-year/High Holidays insanity. I know, cry...

Posted August 27, 2009

Finding the Real Spike Lee's filmed version of Passing Strange--that dark horse of a rock-musical coming-of-age tale which garnered 7 Tony noms and won one statuette for Best Book (P.S.: the New York Drama Critics Circle voted it Best Musical, which makes one...

Posted August 12, 2009

Should Playwrights Direct Their Own Plays? Three Bay Area-based dramatists had the following to say in response to this question:Trevor Allen: "I don't chose to direct my own work anymore. I have been very fortunate to have been able to work with some amazing directors who "get"...

Posted November 6, 2009

Abrupt Mood Changes Finessing a sudden change in mood from comedy to tragedy and visa versa in the theatre is a challenging feat. I was reminded of this fact last night at a performance of Dominic Dromgoole's Globe Theatre production of Loves Labours...

Posted November 5, 2009

Dance Of The Seven Whales When headliner Nadja Michael (pictured) became "indisposed" last Friday for that evening's performance of Strauss' Salome at San Francisco Opera, stand-in soprano Molly Fillmore was flown in from Arizona at the last minute and hustled on stage.Considering the fact that...

Posted November 4, 2009

Musings On The "Portfolio Career" Andrew Taylor's latest blogpost at ArtsJournal about "portfolio careers" in the arts got me thinking this morning about whether anything has really changed in the way that many people in the arts make a living, despite the terminology.I first heard...

Posted November 3, 2009

Susan Graham's Nightmare Even the most lighthearted and confident stars of the opera stage suffer from moments of unconscious stress. The bubbly American mezzo-soprano Susan Graham is currently in rehearsals with the Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra for a series of six concerts of the...

Posted November 2, 2009

How to Think about Public Art How to think about public art?  Do you just keep doing the same thing?  Big art?  Architectural intimacy?  Site-specific narrative?  Locally responsive?   Internationally, public art has been institutionalized as the founder's dreamed in the 1960 and 1970s.  Big -...

Posted September 7, 2008

Public Art as Science Project MOMA and PS1 prepare the public for the "Watersfalls" later this month in NYC.  The the scaffolding has been constructed under the Brooklyn bridge. Photo taken on May 26. From the Bay Area and Boston emerge artworks that are mainly science projects overlaid with...

Posted June 1, 2008

Starting Over Again Returning to New York City after a 20-year journey in Seattle and South Florida.  New York taught me how to think art.   Psychologically, NYC has changed dramatically.   Signs in the subway remind parents to keep baby carriages off the escalator.  Street territory has been reapportioned for...

Posted May 17, 2008

Public Buyers of Public Art On April 11 in North Carolina, Glenn Harper, Editor of Sculpture Magazine and Bill Thompson, Editor of Landscape Architecture, and I meet to kick off the "Public Art 360" Conference.  Click Here to Attend.  In the next few weeks,...

Posted March 16, 2008

Knitters beat MGM Mirage in Public Art Media Blitz At the end of last week, two public art projects competed for media attention in the USA. In the small town of Yellow Springs, Ohio, a few local women knitted a sweater for ONE tree during a winter day....

Posted March 11, 2008

Street sign - Brett Amory at the crossroads ViaThe light dissolves intention, starting at the legs and paralyzing upward....

Posted November 6, 2009

Street sign: Yankee fan revolt No Standing At Any Time, via...

Posted November 6, 2009

Gun in America The crazy bone in the country's body is the right to bear arms. From The New York Times:The rampage recalled other mass shootings in the United States, including 13 killed at a center for immigrants in upstate New York last...

Posted November 6, 2009

The paper drum: you can't beat it Steven Brekelmans' paper set, Kit Bashing (via)Arjan van Helmond's Drums (ink, gouache, acrylic on paper)Update: Expanding the theme to useless drums in other media, Scott Wayne Indiana suggests Claes Oldenburg's drums in canvas. (Image via)...

Posted November 6, 2009

Karen Sargsyan's Scrap Baroque Karen Sargsyan would rather sing than be a visual artist, thrilling opera houses with his baritone, or maybe dance, leaping across stages as if his body were spring loaded. Were he given the chance, he'd have checked actor before...

Posted November 5, 2009

Jung's Secret Book, Aboriginal Paintings, and Mandalas   What do these images have in common?       Top left is from "Icons of the Desert: Early Aboriginal Paintings from Papunya" at the Grey Art Gallery, N.Y.U., 100 Washington Square East, to Dec.5.   Top right is from...

Posted November 2, 2009

Ken Friedman: Fluxus Prodigy   Refluxions   A recent exhibition at the Stendhal Gallery in Chelsea gave pause for thought. And another chance to play catch-up with Fluxus, during what might be a Neo-Fluxus period. Solidified just before Conceptual Art per se, Fluxus was...

Posted October 18, 2009

Allan Kaprow: The Retread      William Pope.L,YARD (To Harrow), 2009; "reinvention" of Allan Kaprow'sYARD, 1961   Part One: Art By the Yard Allan Kaprow's Yard, now in its 15th reincarnation, celebrates the new quarters (32 E. 69th St.) of Hauser & Wirth, formerly only...

Posted October 4, 2009

Fluxus Redux  Fluxconcert Performance    The End of The Art World, Again Art galleries are closing down. Well, perhaps not enough of them. And, let's face it, museums are dull. As an exercise in nostalgia, we now have O'Keeffe, Kandinsky, and are...

Posted September 18, 2009

Governors Island: New Haunts for Art           The Plot   Site-specific art has subjects. Content needs to be parsed. In the best examples, the artworks initiate a kind of dialogue between place and viewers, illuminating where we are. Dreary forms of personal...

Posted July 19, 2009

BlogBack: Reader Calls for an NEA Voucher System Jim Bondelid, a CultureGrrl reader from Oreland, PA (a Philadelphia suburb), who volunteers at the Curtis Institute of Music, responds to my Cultural Conversation with Rocco Landesman that appeared in the Wall Street Journal:As a fanatical lover of classical...

Posted November 6, 2009

News Flash: Dia to Build New Facility in Chelsea I'm still traveling and time-pressed, but I had to share with you this press release (not online at this writing) about the Dia Art Foundation's plans to build a new facility in New York City, where it surely belongs: DIA...

Posted November 5, 2009

CultureGrrl’s Novel Idea: Paid Journalism, for a Change Where am I going? Where have I been? (This is a clue.)I'm taking my own advice, for the time being, shifting my attention towards remunerated mainstream media work. Having rocked with Rocco, I'm headed out tomorrow on a week-long trip,...

Posted November 3, 2009

Rockin’ with Rocco: More from Our WSJ Conversation Portrait of Rocco Landesman from my Wall Street Journal article, by Ken FallinMy Cultural Conversation with the National Endowment for the Arts' new chairman, Rocco Landesman, ran long today (the whole above-the-fold space on P. D7 of the Personal Journal...

Posted November 3, 2009

Coming Tomorrow: My WSJ Conversation with NEA’s Rocco Landesman UPDATED Rocco Landesman, speaking last month in Brooklyn, NYWhen Rocco Landesman, the new chairman of the National Endowment of the Arts, was in New York on Oct. 21, I didn't merely attend his speech. I also interviewed him. On the "Leisure...

Posted November 2, 2009

See you Monday Back next week. Must look at art....

Posted November 5, 2009

Five things I think I think 1.) I enjoyed the reception to William Powhida's drawing about the problems at the New Museum. I was disappointed that several commenters/publications celebrated Powhida while completely missing the point: In the New York Press, Mike Spence asked if "this is...

Posted November 4, 2009

Artist William Powhida on the NuMu's "suicide" New York-based artist William Powhida, who frequently satirizes art world figures and conventions in his art, has taken on the New Museum's "suicide" in his latest work. Excerpted above, Powhida's drawing details "How the New Museum Committed Suicide with Banality,"...

Posted November 3, 2009

A season of books on Dorothea Lange In this week's New York Review of Books, Jonathan Raban examines two new books about Dorothea Lange: Linda Gordon's Dorothea Lange: A Life Beyond Limits is a biography and Anne Whiston Spirn's Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports...

Posted November 2, 2009

Weekend roundup The Globe's Sebastian Smee explains how Krzysztof Wodiczko is bringing the voices of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans to the ICA Boston. Richard Lacayo examines Arshile Gorky in Philly in Time. Christopher Knight 'reads' R. Crumb's Bible at the Hammer....

Posted November 2, 2009