Latest entries
Political Pollutant
Polarizing Comedy Exposed in The Dictator Lazily titled after Chaplin’s 1940 Hitler-Mussolini satire The Great Dictator, Sacha Baron Cohen‘s new film The Dictator is part of our current political slackness where propaganda is confused with news, parody is confused with satire, principle is confused with bias and mob-mentality is confused with democracy. Cohen mocks an...
Animal Kingdom
Anne Arnold Humanizes the Wild The sculptures of Anne Arnold, on display at Alexandre Gallery, are so masterful—so pointed and witty, economically configured and nuanced—that you can’t help but wonder: Why has it been 24 years since this artist was last graced with a solo exhibition? Read the accompanying catalogue Anne Arnold: Sculpture from Four...
Shallow Children
Game Prediction: To Err Is Human “Technology will eventually destroy us.” That’s probably an idea you’re familiar with, whether by observation of the increasingly alarming dependency we have on our electronic devices, or maybe just exposure to allegory in science fiction. It also might be an apt description for Binary Domain, a sci-fi shooter that...
Spooky or Kooky?
Tim Burton’s Campy Dark Shadows Gone are the days when Tim Burton films made you laugh first. Now Burton more likely makes you cringe, as in Dark Shadows, his new film version of TV’s 1960s daytime soap opera. It retells the story of Barnabas Collins, an early-American fishing scion who had been turned into a...
Less Talk, More Rock
Neikrug’s New Concerto at the Philharmonic On a Friday afternoon, the New York Philharmonic began a concert with the Corsair overture of Berlioz. Then it was time for a new work, a concerto for orchestra by Marc Neikrug. The conductor, Alan Gilbert, did not stride to the podium to conduct. He and the composer ambled...
Preserved Expectations
Ballet’s Perilous History on Video Not enough of Natalia Makarova’s high artistic quality nor her particular qualities were on view at the tribute to her staged by Youth America Grand prix late last month. The videos shown of her performances existed almost in a class of their own. I don’t think that this was deliberate,...
Moga Better Deco
Japan Shapes 20th Century Art and Culture Sometimes the best way to get at a culture is to smash it up against a disparate element, or encase it in a seemingly alien time frame, seeing unexpected elements in each, even redefining each. So it is with Art Deco, and Japan, a yoking you never thought...
Citizen-Artist
A NoËl Coward Film Series to Remember In a Noël Coward-worthy lyric, a pop singer-songwriter once mused about “the stillness of remembering what you had and what you lost.” Seeing some of the newly restored 35mm prints of classic Noël Coward films in the Film Society of Lincoln Center’s Coward on Film (May 11-13) inspires...
Vuillard Confidential
Master of Intimism Gets Intense Long gone, I hope, are the days when the French painter Édouard Vuillard (1868-1940) was pooh-poohed as being insufficiently radical or, if you prefer, overly bourgeois—as if art steeped in domesticity and comfort somehow precluded pictorial innovation. If Édouard Vuillard: A Painter and His Muses, 1890-1940, an exhibition at the...
The Price of Jazz
Jazz Gallery’s Legacy and Ledger Latest music organization to enter the tight local real estate market: the Jazz Gallery, which lost the lease on its loft at Hudson and Spring streets after 17 years. Moving an ongoing venture at any time is painful, but seldom worse than right now in Manhattan, where the Gallery wants...
Colors That Speak
From Classics to Lloyd Martin Michael Rosenfeld Gallery’s busy and exuberant installation of works on paper (…On Paper) reflects the sheer diversity of American art in the 1940s through ’70s. The three dozen drawings, collages, mixed media works and paintings on paper cover a lot of ground—everything from Gaston Lachaise’s breezy line drawing of a...
Classical Music / Galleries/Gallery Beat / Jazz, Popular and Other / Museums / Music / Theater / Visual Art
Tennessee’s Quiet Storm
Transforming the Classic ‘Streetcar’ Nicole Ari Parker has a triumph in A Streetcar Named Desire that our mainstream media and the cli-quish Tony Awards are ill-equipped to handle. Parker’s ravishing, statuesque presence and intelligent skill make the play what it always ought to have been: a genuine contest between America’s sexual and political hypocrisies; social...
Trompe Liu
Capturing Artists in the Midst Liu Bolin, the “invisible man,” uses photography to turn himself into a ghost. Liu’s“Lost in the City” series shows the artist blending perfectly into cityscapes in his native China; another series shows Liu Lost in New York. He’s recently gone in a new direction with his “Lost in Fashion” series,...
Not Standing Still
Dance Doc Highlights Jacob’s Pillow A documentary filmmaker has two responsibilities. The first is to make an interesting subject even more interesting. The second is to make a good film. Director Ron Honsa hits both marks with Never Stand Still, an intimate look at dance that will galvanize anyone who’s ever moved his body to...
Remembering Adam Yauch and Gunnin’ for that #1 Spot
Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot Directed by Adam Yauch Midway through 2008, something surprising has happened: two films with human dimension and artful expression–Adam Yauch’s Gunnin’ For That #1 Spot and Jonathan Levine’s The Wackness–have flushed the toilet of summer movies. Neither is a special effects extravaganza but they stir emotion by emphasizing the human scale...
Keep on Truckin’
Jade Townsend’s “Beastly” Installation Jade Townsend’s new body of work, entitled “Leviathan,” is a challenging show to get one’s arms around. Upon entering the Lesley Heller Workspace on lower Orchard Street, the viewer is faced with two choices: Option one, to the right is the lower half of a human mannequin with a giant red...
Planet Waves
Why “Free Radio” Rocks “Once upon a time” began Bob Dylan in June, 1965 and his 10-20 page “rhythm thing” became the six minute rock phenomenon “Like a Rolling Stone.” The song hit the radio waves a month later and the “be bright, be brief” juke box format of radio programming changed forever. At CUE...
CITYARTS EXCLUSIVE: The Boy Who Played with Dolls
Jacques Rivette’s Celine and Julie Meta Movie Returns CITYARTS EXCLUSIVE: LOOKING AT A CLASSIC THAT CONFOUNDS FILM CULTURE Legend says (and an eyewitness confirms) that at the 1974 New York Film Festival press screening of Celine and Julie Go Boating, Pauline Kael walked out in the middle announcing, “I’m going to the movies!” Apparently Jacques Rivette’s...
Pavlov’s Franchise
The Delusion of Marvel’s The Avengers Previous Marvel Comics superhero movies such as Iron Man, Hulk, Captain America and Thor were like roughly cut puzzle pieces that looked odd and unfinished by themselves—pretend movies derived from already established brands. Most of them, particularly Jon Favreau’s dung-colored Iron Man, were poorly directed. Now, fitted together in...
All Along the Lines
Alonzo King’s Ballet at the Joyce When Alonzo King established LINES Ballet in 1982 in San Francisco, few believed he could maintain a new company in the city where the San Francisco Ballet had long captured the area’s ballet audience. Moreover, King did not conform to the typical ballet artistic director—he grew up in Santa...
Yuja on Fire
And a visit by a venerable quartet For several years, we have called Yuja Wang a wunderkind, a phenom, a sensation. For how long can we keep talking that way? She’s 25 now. I figure we can continue for a couple more years. Most recently in New York, she played Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3...
