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Wednesday, February 22, 2012
last updated @ 06:38 PM pst

AJ BLOGS
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culture
About Last Night
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
Artful Manager
Andrew Taylor on the business of arts & culture
Audience Wanted
Matt Lehrman on Audience Development
blog riley
rock culture approximately
critical difference
Laura Collins-Hughes on arts, culture and coverage
Dewey21C
Richard Kessler on arts education
diacritical
Douglas McLennan's blog
Dog Days
Dalouge Smith advocates for the Arts
Engaging Matters
Doug Borwick on vibrant arts and communities
Flyover
Art from the American Outback
Jumper
Diane Ragsdale on what the arts do and why
lies like truth
Chloe Veltman on how culture will save the world
Life's a Pitch
For immediate release: the arts are marketable
Mind the Gap
No genre is the new genre
New Beans
Claton Lord on new art and new audiences
Performance Monkey
David Jays on theatre and dance
Plain English
Paul Levy measures the Angles
Real Clear Arts
Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture
Rockwell Matters
John Rockwell on the arts
rwx
issues in arts, technology, creativity
Speaker
Sarah Lutman amplified
State of the Art
innovations and impediments in not-for-profit arts
Straight Up |
Jan Herman - arts, media & culture with 'tude
Texas, a Concept
Art, Music, and Dance in the Lone Star state

dance
DanceBeat
Deborah Jowitt on bodies in motion
Foot in Mouth
Apollinaire Scherr talks about dance
Seeing Things
Tobi Tobias on dance et al...

media
Out There
Jeff Weinstein's Cultural Mixology
Serious Popcorn
Martha Bayles on Film...

music
Condemned to Music
David Patrick Stearns has no way out
Creative Destruction
Fresh ideas on building arts communities
The Future of Classical Music?
Greg Sandow performs a book-in-progress
Jazz Beyond Jazz
Howard Mandel's freelance Urban Improvisation
ListenGood
Focus on New Orleans. Jazz and Other Sounds
Overflow
Harvey Sachs on music, and various digressions
PianoMorphosis
Bruce Brubaker on all things Piano
Playing the Palace
Opera Lafayette Plays Versailles
PostClassic
Kyle Gann on music after the fact
Rifftides
Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...
Sandow
Greg Sandow on the future of Classical Music
Slipped Disc
Norman Lebrecht on Shifting Sound Worlds
The Unanswered Question
Joe Horowitz on music

publishing
book/daddy
Jerome Weeks on Books
Quick Study
Scott McLemee on books, ideas & trash-culture ephemera

theatre
Drama Queen
Wendy Rosenfield: covering drama, onstage and off
Theatrical Imperative
Ron Russell: non-profit theatre and artist value

visual
Aesthetic Grounds
Public Art, Public Space
Another Bouncing Ball
Regina Hackett takes her Art To Go
Artopia
John Perreault's art diary
CultureGrrl
Lee Rosenbaum's Cultural Commentary





BY TOPIC: architecture | culture | dance | ideas | issues | jazz | media | music | people | publishing | theatre | visual

CULTURE

About Last Night
TERRY TEACHOUT on the arts in New York City
(with additional dialogue by OUR GIRL IN CHICAGO)

TT: Found poem These are the working titles of the thirteen chapters of Mood Indigo: A Life of Duke Ellington. (I say "working"...
Posted February 22, 2012

TT: Snapshot Kenneth Tynan interviews Laurence Olivier in 1966: (This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in...
Posted February 22, 2012

TT: Almanac "Honors go to those who want them." Michael Oakeshott (quoted in Paul Franco, Michael Oakeshott: An Introduction, courtesy of Tim...
Posted February 22, 2012

TT: Almanac "What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory--meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that...
Posted February 21, 2012

TT: At full tilt I went at Mood Indigo: A Life of Duke Ellington with hammer and tongs last week, and by the time...
Posted February 20, 2012

The Artful Manager
Andrew Taylor on the business of Arts & Culture

A recurring chrysalis My colleague Paul Beard was telling me about the Smith Center for the Performing Arts now in development in Las Vegas, and remarked that it was actually two entirely different creatures living in the same space. The day before it...
Posted January 24, 2012
SOPA and PIPA untangled If you use the Internet, you likely have heard or read rumblings about legislation currently in Congress about Internet piracy. SOPA and PIPA were the inspiration for a blackout of several major web sites this week over concerns that the...
Posted January 20, 2012
The rise of the 'edge-pert' A recurring theme at this year's Arts Presenters conference in New York was boundary crossing. Artists and arts organizations were celebrated for dancing with unexpected partners -- city planners, farmers, inner-city kids, health professionals. Other speakers encouraged such new connections...
Posted January 18, 2012
Power, Influence, and Performing Arts I'm attending the Association of Performing Arts Presenters annual conference in New York this weekend, along with six of my MBA students from the Wisconsin School of Business. For the seventh year running, the student team has been commissioned by...
Posted January 6, 2012
Sustaining, breakout, and disruptive innovation 'Innovation' is the buzz word at many arts conferences these days, and among many funders. With so many things changing in our environment -- all of the STEEP variables at once (Sociological, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political) -- innovation in programming,...
Posted January 5, 2012
blog riley
rock culture approximately

INFOGRAPHIC SWALLOWS ONLINE MUSIC Click graphic for larger version, via grovo.com...
Posted December 21, 2011

Top 10 Untrue Facts About Robert Johnson: Greil Marcus 10. Like Huey Newton and Bobby Seale listening to Bob Dylan's "Mr. Tambourine Man" as they drew up the charter for the Black Panthers, Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen were listening to "Hell Hound on My Trail" when in 1941...
Posted December 13, 2011

PATRICK MEIGHAN: FAMILY GUY WRITER'S ARREST Image by Getty Images via @daylifeREPRINTED FROM MARK CRISPIN MILLER'S News from Underground: http://myoccupylaarrest.blogspot.com/2011/12/my-occupy-la-arrest-by-p... *My Occupy LA Arrest, by Patrick Meighan* My name is Patrick Meighan, and I�m a husband, a father, a writer on the Fox animated sitcom "Family Guy" and a member of...
Posted December 12, 2011

PROG SLUT [photo: Jim Snyder, Summerfest, Milwaukee, 2011] A friend writes: Was Rundgren good? Hadn't seen him since college, long, long ago.... TR: I didn't realize until I got down there that it was a total UTOPIA gig (tour details, reviews here)....
Posted November 18, 2011

1.5B EMI/UNIVERSAL DEAL APPROACHES CLOSE Universal Music is close to sealing a $1.5 bn-plus deal to buy EMI Music, home to acts including the Beatles and Coldplay, with owner Citigrouppushing for negotiations to be concluded by the weekend. The company is the only bidder...
Posted November 11, 2011

critical difference
Laura Collins-Hughes on arts, culture and coverage

The Best Sign in the History of the World Or a contender, anyway. It's in the subway at 14th Street and Eighth Avenue, disguised as an official Metropolitan Transportation Authority notice -- except that the MTA generally doesn't do numbered screen prints. Artist Jason Shelowitz does.On this poster, evidently...
Posted April 19, 2010

'The Tyger' and the Tangerines It was the kind of spring day, sun-kissed and warm, when frigid winter seemed vanquished, yet the fetid New York City summer felt safely far off. Flowers were bursting out, early, all over town.    As frequently happens when hibernation...
Posted April 1, 2010

Displaced Arts Journalists Strike Back "I don't want to sound self-important on behalf of my colleagues, but we feel that in the scheme of things -- coverage of the arts in the UK -- we are doing something of genuine value. We are aiming to...
Posted April 1, 2010

'Good News If You're a Nerd' The best lede I've read in a long time is from Christopher Borrelli's brainy, completely charming, strangely touching feature in today's Chicago Tribune:Quinn Dombrowski went to the University of Chicago because Quinn Dombrowski is a great big giant nerd. She...
Posted March 24, 2010

After a Major Paper Guts Its Arts Coverage Over on ARTicles, I have an interview with Anne Bothwell, director of the Art&Seek initiative in Dallas, which combines radio, television and online cultural coverage at KERA public media. The nearly two-year-old project began in the wake of significant staffing...
Posted March 24, 2010

Dewey21C
Richard Kessler on arts education

White House.Gov Showcases Videos on Arts Education Champions As part of the Obama Administration's Champions of Change, Winning the Future Across America initiative, a series of videos have been posted on Whitehouse.gov, featuring a number of arts and education leaders from across America.Here's my favorite: Ramon Gonzalez, Principal...
Posted July 26, 2011

What Does a Wired-In United States Department of Education Grant Application Look Like? Talk about jumping off the page. Not to mention jumping out of your seat. But rapidly, one realizes what is being circulated here as an "opportunity" is not quite what it seems to be. Read the guidelines.Last week, the USDOE...
Posted July 26, 2011

Waiting for Godot. If you test it they will come. (updated) With today's NY Daily News article about the New York City Department of Education's arts assessment program, I thought I would update and repost this entry from a few month's back.Let me start with some new thoughts and then segue...
Posted July 22, 2011

Steve Reich's New CD Cover: Is It An Outrage or Not? Last night a small thread emerged on Facebook about the cover for Steve Reich's new CD on Nonesuch Records. The cover is a graphic photo of 9/11, due to the fact the recording features Reich's work WTC 9/11.What do you think?...
Posted July 21, 2011

Programs for the Untalented and Ungifted Many, many times, I have been part of formal conversations that made their way around to the question of how we are identifying and supporting the talented and gifted children in the school systems.My response to the question in its...
Posted July 19, 2011

diacritical
Douglas McLennan's blog

Sorry, but I'll take experience over artistry Professional sports has more money than God, and they spend more to attract and entertain fans than anyone else. So how does the NFL sell itself? Not by touting the quality of its games. They sell the contest. They sell...
Posted July 30, 2010

The Lang Lang Experience, Live And In 3D Is the future of live classical music recitals to turn them into a multimedia experience that is somehow more "familiar" to a generation raised on video screens. Here's a report from Lang Lang's concert in London over the weekend:He is...
Posted May 24, 2010

How many True Fans do you have? How do you make a living as an artist? In the old mass-culture model you needed a distribution and marketing engine that could fire up on your behalf to reach as many people as possible. Sell a million albums and...
Posted April 18, 2010

Beware the mushy middle The NYT's Charles Isherwood writes about what he calls the "odd-man-out" syndrome: This can roughly be described as the experience of attending an event at which much of the audience appears to be having a rollicking good time, while you...
Posted April 16, 2010

We're All For Technology Except When... Nick Carr has a great post about the course of technology development. Progress doesn't always go the way we think it ought to (even if we're right).Progress may, for a time, intersect with one's own personal ideology, and during that...
Posted April 15, 2010

Dog Days
Dalouge Smith advocates for the Arts

The Blog Posting I Don't Need to Write My wife, son and I became fans of the band OK GO just after they left their record label EMI and it was covered on NPR's All Things Considered. Molly Sheridan wrote on her AJ blog about this high profile split...
Posted December 18, 2010

Orchestra Fun for a Lifetime Normal 0 0 1 405 2309 19 4 2835 11.517 0 0 0 On Sunday, I'm participating in University of Hartford's President's College Showcase 2010. Dean Aaron Flagg of the Hartt School is convening a panel to focus on...
Posted September 17, 2010

Chasing the Biggest Racers of the Year The race for California Governor is sure to be the highest profile, most expensive, and most media focused election in the country this year. This means it's also the most important race for arts advocates to engage. So we're doing...
Posted August 26, 2010

Have a Party to Put Advocacy in Action San Diego is hosting the first of a series of events across California to bring attention to the importance of the arts and arts education to candidates for elected office. If you are in San Diego for the day on...
Posted August 19, 2010

You'd Think the US' 4th Largest Industry Would Have More Clout I've had the good fortune to participate in a variety of state and national gatherings focused on the future of the arts, arts advocacy, and non-profit advocacy since May. This week, I attended a Nonprofit Advocacy Policy Roundtable organized by...
Posted July 26, 2010

Flyover
Art from the American Outback

"Don't be scared; just show yourself" There is a growing body of research and hands-on work in the area of art-making, neighborhood development and community engagement.  In that vein, I wanted to share a story from Madison's 77 Square (by my journalistic compadre Lindsay Christians) about...
Posted August 19, 2011

Creative growth in Detroit A friend in Ypsilanti, Mich., tipped me off to this post on a site called Model D by Sarah F. Cox.  In it, Cox, a former New Yorker who earned an MFA in design criticism, details the reasons for her...
Posted August 9, 2011

Bill Cunningham and the joy of paying attention 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;} Today, at our lovely local Sundance...
Posted June 30, 2011

Beautiful bugs swarm L.A. (thanks to Wisconsin artist) 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:"Arial"; mso-ansi-language:#0400; mso-fareast-language:#0400; mso-bidi-language:#0400;} L.A., you're in for a treat.  Madison-based artist...
Posted June 28, 2011

The future of Michigan I've had my home state of Michigan on the brain quite a lot lately -- and it's not just because, as I sit nearly snow-bound in Madison, Wis., I'm wearing the same U of M sweatshirt I've had since 1987. ...
Posted December 9, 2009

Life's a Pitch
For immediate release: the arts are marketable

Pick-a-little Talk-a-little Today at noon ET, we have the second of our Spring for Music live chats, this time, with composer Steven Stucky. Here is his launch statement, pegged to his piece 'August 4, 1964' which will be performed with the Dallas...
Posted April 28, 2011

Happy talky talky happy talk Today at noon, Melinda Wagner, one of the Orpheus New Brandenburgs composers, will host a chat on behalf of Spring for Music, a festival I'm working on this year. Oh actually: this is double client-plugging (which somehow sounds dirty?), since...
Posted April 25, 2011

You heard it here first: creativity is dead. I was watching some Family Guy on Hulu last night after the tragically disappointing New York City Opera Stephen Schwartz concert thing (if Raúl Esparza bores me--me, who has Loved Him Forever--everyone's in trouble), and saw a preview for this...
Posted April 22, 2011

I might have gone with "Best," but... Available for the bargain price of $4.50 on Etsy:...
Posted April 19, 2011

A voice at the end of the line The New York Times reports that good old group sales still reign supreme on the Great White Way:If Facebooking Broadway is all the rage for shows, the real economic engine remains the sales agents wearing old-fashioned headsets and tapping through...
Posted April 18, 2011

Mind the Gap
No Genre Is the New Genre

The Sound That Fills the World For the past couple of weeks, I've been focused on the music of John Luther Adams as I prepared for and edited together an interview presentation covering his work. Following Adams around New York City, chatting about all manner...
Posted March 1, 2011

W.W.T.E.D.? For years now, whenever my mother would lament my dismal church attendance record, I would point to my religious reading of Randy Cohen's The Ethicist column. Though there was no eternal salvation on offer, I always felt that its...
Posted February 27, 2011

The Index: What To Read Next After a long weekend of travel, the number of "unread items" I had racked up in my blog reader was inducing panic attacks every time I checked in to put a dent in the ominously ever-growing pile. In the...
Posted February 23, 2011

Get Lost Last fall I was captivated by the Google Chrome/HTML5 personalized movie making that was The Arcade Fire's video for their track "The Wilderness Downtown". Using a childhood street address and footage pulled from Google maps, the project draws on...
Posted February 17, 2011

The Art of the Switch [via] This creative little clip, posted by the Royal Opera House in support of the premiere run of Mark-Anthony Turnage's opera Anna Nicole, plays up exactly the kind of trashy, can't-look-away vibe you expect from the subject matter, but...
Posted February 15, 2011

Performance Monkey
David Jays on theatre and dance

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

Plain English
Paul Levy measures the Angles

Pilgrimage to the British Museum? Don't Bother. Sydney Smirke's (1797-1877) design for the Round Reading Room of the British Museum made it one of the architectural landmarks of the world. Readers' tickets have been held by Marx, Lenin (who used the name Jacob Richter on his library...
Posted January 26, 2012

To criticise the critics - very slighty v\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} o\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} w\:* {behavior:url(#default#VML);} .shape {behavior:url(#default#VML);} 0 0 1 598 3412 Isishome Ltd 28 8 4002 14.0 Normal 0 false false false false EN-GB JA X-NONE /* 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-priority:99;...
Posted January 25, 2012

Celebrating all the wrong people Normal.dotm 0 0 1 640 3648 Isishome Ltd 30 7 4480 12.0 0 false 18 pt 18 pt 0 0 false false false /* 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:0cm 5.4pt 0cm 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0cm;...
Posted December 12, 2011

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Posted September 10, 2011

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Posted September 9, 2011

Real Clear Arts
Judith H. Dobrzynski on Culture

Boston Patrons Shell Out: Two New Endowed Directorships As I've said before, two's company -- so once again I'll mention something because there've been two instances in a very short time. On Tuesday came the news from the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston that, for the first...
Posted January 26, 2012

Hidden Masterpieces: Science Takes Us Underneath The Paint Out of the Shadows, a film by Kevin Sullivan about the use of advanced technology to discover the way artists work, made its debut in New York yesterday -- a showing at the Winter Antiques Show at the Park Avenue Armory....
Posted January 25, 2012

Since When Does The Departure Of A Museum's Education Director Make News? It's not very often that the departure of a museum's education director merits an article in a city's newspaper. But that is what happened last week, when Williams College announced that it had picked Christina Olsen to head its museum...
Posted January 24, 2012

Rembrandt And The Face of Jesus: A Potent Combination Alexander McQueen isn't the only guy capable of drawing crowds so big that hours must be extended at a museum. Or Leonardo, for that matter. I'm happy to report that the Detroit Institute of Art recently added hours to accommodate...
Posted January 23, 2012

What's In A Name? How An Ivory Sculpture Gained Value This is Old Masters week in New York, and to mark it I have written a short article about an ivory, estimated by Sotheby's in January, 2010, at $120,000 to $150,000.It sold, after much bidding from the trade, for more than...
Posted January 22, 2012

Rockwell Matters
John Rockwell on the arts

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

Straight Up |
Jan Herman - Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

A Long Shot for Carl the Survivor "Death, the last cut, always leaves a bitter feeling mixed with pain & loss . . . and because of its finality gives you no choice but to look back." -- Jurgen Ploog...
Posted February 18, 2012

Portrait of the Writer Broadcast after his death....
Posted February 15, 2012

Ave Atque Vale 1940-2012. Carl Weissner died on Jan. 24, in Mannheim. Carl wrote his first book, The Braille Film, in English. I published it in 1970, under the Nova Broadcast imprint. Although his native language was German, he had an incomparable ear...
Posted February 4, 2012

Cody's Conversation When I asked Cody Mahler to write something for me about the friend we both lost, he wrote back: "I have to sit down with Carl and discuss what he would like me to say." They must've had a great...
Posted January 31, 2012

'Transfers From a Different World' Matthias Penzel's obituary about Carl Weissner, more an appreciation than an obit, appeared in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung this past Sunday. He has kindly translated it from the German for me, and I post it here with his permission. Penzel,...
Posted January 30, 2012

DANCE

Foot in Mouth
Apollinaire Scherr and guests talk about dance

Participatory Art and its Discontents What's participatory art good for? I consider the question in the Village Voice.  Check it....
Posted September 21, 2011

Old masters looking back as we wonder about looking forward (revised already) (Note: Somehow a couple of paragraphs got disappeared last night--not erased but buried in computer code and thus invisible. I've put asterisks by them, newly restored...] Late February and March were chock-a-block with venerated masters of modern dance, from graying...
Posted April 18, 2011

The dancer and the dance (on the occasion of Balanchine and kin) Over Christmas, I deflowered a middle-aged friend of his Nutcracker innocence. A typical European, he'd seen Pina Bausch but no Petipa. Though I suspect he found the whole thing childish, he responded gamely (this was to ABT's new Ratmansky...
Posted March 19, 2011

Step sisters (NEW! comments, and comments on the comments) [Ed. note: while I am slow to get a new post up,  check out the comments to this one. I have some questions for you, dear reader.]For reasons good and bad, choreographers Andrea Miller and Sidra Bell are not typical...
Posted February 8, 2011

Tuning in to tone with five dances and one movie By the time I was nine, home was my mother, my sister, and I. We bickered in twos, with the third as chorus and tie breaker. Sometimes my sister would cut me off or my mother her with a...
Posted January 17, 2011

Seeing Things
Tobi Tobias on Dance et al.

Ave Atque Vale Merce Cunningham Dance Company / BAM Howard Gilman Opera House, Brooklyn, NY / December 7-10, 2011 In addition to showing us wonders we'd never even dreamed of, Merce Cunningham (1919-2009), that inscrutable genius of modern dance, taught us a tough,...
Posted December 14, 2011

Veiled in Darkness Angel Reapers, by Martha Clarke and Alfred Uhry / Joyce Theater, NYC / November 29 - December 11, 2011 The oddest thing about Martha Clarke and Alfred Uhry's Angel Reapers is that it has no plot. This despite the fact...
Posted December 1, 2011

By George! New York City Ballet: The Nutcracker / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / November 25 - December 31, 2010 God Is in the Details: George Balanchine, creator of the New York City Ballet's The Nutcracker, coaching the smallest...
Posted November 28, 2011

The Other Face of ABT American Ballet Theatre / City Center, NYC / November 8-13, 2011 This season's gala-event costumes for women of a certain income emphasize cascading ruffles in weak-willed pastels or glowing jewel tones. The men continue to sport black-tie mufti with almost...
Posted November 20, 2011

Promises, promises Duŝan Týnek Dance Theatre / Tribeca PAC, NYC / October 27-29; November 3-5, 2011 Duŝan Týnek Dance Theatre Photo: Julieta Cervantes Seeing the Dušan Týnek Dance Theatre, recently at Tribeca PAC, in the second of the two programs it offered,...
Posted November 7, 2011

MEDIA

Out There
Jeff Weinstein's Cultural Mixology

George Lang Had an Answer An extremely pleasant and perfectly bright acquaintance surprised me by stating with his usual attractive confidence that food is a frivolity and cooking not part of our cultural life. His spouse, whose every meal gives the lie to such silliness,...
Posted July 11, 2011

I Never Cooked for My Father "I learned about cooking and flavor as a child." Maybe I'm worried that it's too easy, or dislike the part of me that's a permanent boy, but I've become increasingly shy of drawing from the same family well to recount my...
Posted July 2, 2011

Newspaper Fate Do you want to pay for your news with dead trees or the predation of oil? In this case, the form of payment itself makes news. The news corpus above is part of a new artwork by Gustav Metzger shown in...
Posted June 3, 2011

Applause! Applause? Normally, my single question to you at the end of this post would be posed via Twitter or Facebook. But so many smart classical-music mavens are my Artsjournal neighbors that I thought I might borrow some of your tidewrack readers for...
Posted April 29, 2011

Getting Pickled: My Brine Cocktail Comeuppance I was taken aback by my failure to find a worthy pickle cocktail.I love pickles to an extent that should embarrass me. I could eat pickles every day of my life -- especially classic kosher half-sours. I can't explain that,...
Posted April 21, 2011

Serious Popcorn
Martha Bayles on Film...

The Ultimate Social Network NOH HAO, at 25 the social media's youngest - and first female - multibillionaire, explains her meteoric success in an exclusive interview with MARTHA BAYLES.Cambridge, MA, March 15, 2014 - "Meet me at the Harvard Square Peet's!"  The suggestion evokes...
Posted May 25, 2011

A pinch of merriment If you need a few minutes of joy, open this link to a live performance by Straight No Chaser (after the ad) ....
Posted December 27, 2010

"Sex and the City" Redux "Later that night I got to thinking about safe sex. We talk about it as something physical. But what about the emotions? Is sex ever safe?" So writes Carrie Bradshaw, trendy newspaper columnist in Sex and the City. Played by...
Posted November 27, 2010

SUSPENDED ANIMATION If you are still checking Serious Popcorn, you are a true and loyal reader.  You also may have noticed that SP has been estivating (the summer version of hibernating).Snails do it, frogs do it,Tortoises and salamanders do it,Let's do it,...
Posted August 15, 2010

Animation and Aspiration George Lucas, the creator of Star Wars, once quipped, "Creating a universe is daunting."  This is true, as anyone can tell from a quick perusal of the book of Genesis.  But for animators, being daunted does not pay.  From the...
Posted April 2, 2010

MUSIC

Creative Destruction
Fresh ideas on building arts communities

"Must See" Streaming Internet This afternoon I watched as a great master passed on everything he could leave to the next generation of musicians. Robert Mann, at 91 years old, was teaching a master class in Miller Recital Hall at the Manhattan School of...
Posted January 5, 2012

Penny for your thoughts In a Q & A session at the end of a presentation I made to arts leaders not long ago, a question came up about getting feedback from audiences in real time. Many of the participants said that their audience...
Posted November 25, 2011

After the Last Kiss I met Julia Kurtyka in winter. She had worked to invite me to guest conduct an orchestra that she was involved with, the Birmingham Bloomfield Symphony Orchestra, just outside of Detroit, in a special concert that would feature her protégé,...
Posted October 3, 2011

What are we doing here? When I was little, my father used to tell a story of a little boy from long ago. He was walking among many people engaged in a flurry of activity. "What are you doing?" he asked one man with a...
Posted September 7, 2011

Discovering the Baroque Above a Torture Chamber On a narrow street in the Colonial City area of Santo Domingo, capital of the Dominican Republic, there is a building called Museo Memorial de la Resistencia Dominicana, the Memorial Museum of the Dominican Resistance. A converted home, with a...
Posted August 31, 2011

Jazz Beyond Jazz
Howard Mandel's Freelanc Urban Improvisation

House Appropriations Committee to NEA: Keep Jazz Masters The National Endowment for the Arts has been directed by the US House Appropriations Committee in its report to Interior to continue the American Jazz Masters Fellowships and dump its proposed American Artists of the Year honors. The report also supports continuation of...
Posted July 12, 2011

Urban Realism and Treme "Life is glorious and vibrant and joyous at points, but it is essentially tragic. That's not a unique David Simon perspective." So sayeth David Simon, (pictured left; right is a Mardi Gras Indian portrayed by Clarke Peters), executive producer with...
Posted July 5, 2011

Hurray for Treme "Do Watcha Wanna," the season finale of Treme, had everything I watch the series for: Compelling characters embodied by terrific actors; plausible and suspenseful quick-cutting across and interweaving of plot strands;confident command of realities afflicting post-Katrina/pre-Gulf oil spill New Orleans, andthe extraordinary depiction...
Posted July 4, 2011

Symphonic "jazz" compositions, big bands and holiday blasts The American Composers Orchestra readings of short symphonic works by jazz-oriented composers which I wrote of in my CityArts column and posted about here are now available to hear, thanks to Lara Pelligrinelli at NPR's A Blog Supreme. The 23rd...
Posted July 3, 2011

Jazz in Jordan: Yacoub Abu Ghosh explains and plays Jazz and its evolution goes on everywhere - as bass guitarist/bandleader/composer/producer Yacoub Abu Ghosh explained and demonstrated to me in Amman, Jordan last March. Ghosh and his Stage Heroes performed at their weekly gig at Canvas Cafe Restaurant Art Lounge....
Posted June 29, 2011

ListenGood
Focus on New Orleans. Jazz and Other Sounds

jeremy lin scores! (um, this isn't about music...) During Jeremy Lin's dizzying rise from obscurity to fame, before the New York Knick's promotion department had even printed the fan posters, the point guard had been held up as poster boy for a variety of things. Christian faithful...
Posted February 17, 2012

remembering sam rivers Like so many music lovers, I'm mourning the death of Sam Rivers. I heard Sam play a few times, late in his life. Never back in the day, at the RivBea loft, though. But I do have a very clear memory of...
Posted December 28, 2011

my long story on trombone shorty JAZZIZ MagazineCover Story, Winter 2011Out of New Orleans The remarkable rise of Trombone ShortyBy Larry Blumenfeld Click on Winter Issue to PreviewHurricane Irene bore down on New York City in late August. The forecasts sounded dire. An email from a Long Island...
Posted December 20, 2011

paul motian, 1931-2011 Aside from his prowess as a drummer, his restless need to invent on the bandstand and his compassionate embrace of musical partners young and old, famous and not, Paul Motian, who died very early this morning at 80, was...
Posted November 22, 2011

irene, irony & katrina Just a bit of reflection on hurtling balls of precipitation and anniversaries. A email on Thursday from Long Island's Stephen Talkhouse informed me that, with Irene (then still a bona fide hurricane) on its way, last weekend's shows by...
Posted August 29, 2011

On the Record
Exloring America's Orchestras with Henry Fogel

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

Overflow
Harvey Sachs on music, and various digressions

Trying to catch up Too much work, too much travel, preparations for the release of my new book, and a recurrent, annoying sinus infection are the main causes of my blog-negligence since early January.  It's impossible even to summarize, at this point, all of...
Posted May 29, 2010

The Met's new Carmen Well, well... Imagine a production of Carmen with almost nothing in it that makes you cringe, at least stage-wise: no cutie-pie touches, no unlikely-looking protagonists flinging themselves unconvincingly around the stage, no over-the-top local color, no excessive pulling out of the Fate...
Posted January 9, 2010

Hark: Herald Angels and Hoffmann Phew!  It's over for another ten months! Imagine an intergalactic visitor arriving on earth to study human beliefs and practices and entering a store, restaurant, train station, or airport in any U.S. city in December.  The poor ET would undoubtedly conflate...
Posted January 3, 2010

Monsieur B. Love of Berlioz originates, I think, in wonder at and delight in his musical imagination.  Of course, one wonders at and delights in the imagination of every creative artist whose work one loves, but there is something startling and forever...
Posted November 10, 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

PianoMorphosis
Bruce Brubaker on all things Piano

No fervor Hearing Liszt's "Feux follets" at Alice Tully Hall -- it crossed my mind that it was the most accomplished performance of the étude ever played! This solo recital was won by the pianist as part of a competition prize. Tully...
Posted August 22, 2011

Verismo During the recording sessions for Nico Muhly's Drones & Piano, sometimes the piano bench squeaked. "Bench was loud," I said, after a particularly squeaky take. Through my earbud, I heard the voice of engineer Paul Evans. "I rather like it,"...
Posted July 25, 2011

Quick Change Artist A distinguishing trait of Mozart's music is rapidly and frequently changing character, Affekt, or mood. He's a quick change artist. For the 21st-century listener, it's simplistic to hear only a single unvarying Affekt or character in an entire movement of...
Posted July 12, 2011

Padded Piano keys are made of wood that's weighted with metal, and faced with plastic in place of what used to be ivory. They are levers. How exactly a musician touches these sticks may or may not alter the physical sound...
Posted June 27, 2011

Repetition is a Form of Flattery Liking the smoked bluefish salad I had at an organically-sourced Brooklyn eatery, I made something like it at home. In preparation for shooting a video last week, I practiced again a piece that I practiced last year for summer concerts,...
Posted June 8, 2011

PostClassic
Kyle Gann on music after the fact

Language-Spinners and Image-Cutters I've been thinking about the style-and-narrative issue from a new angle, and as you know, my blog thinkpieces tend to come in groups of three anyway. During the semester I rain forth repertoire on my students, and sometimes when...
Posted January 6, 2011

Space Is the Place After a dry fall I have two big performances coming up within a week of each other. Steve Bodner, dynamic young conductor who gave the American premiere of my Sunken City, has his annual I/O Festival coming up Jan. 6-8 at Williams...
Posted January 5, 2011

Gambling Tips for Smart Performers I want to draw attention to Allan Kozinn's thinkpiece about the vagaries of new-music performance in yesterday's Times (tried to post then, got caught in a holding pattern involving site changes), which is pitch-perfect in talking about why, how, and with what expectations...
Posted January 3, 2011

Resisting the Narrative One of the things I love about Richard Taruskin's Oxford History of Western Music is its emphasis on how an evolving public narrative privileges some composers and marginalizes others. For instance, he writes about how when Ligeti came to...
Posted December 24, 2010

Doing the Wave Without a Sound OK, you really do have to watch the video of Cage Against the Machine recording 4'33". Its good-natured absurdity would have made a joyful climax to my book, had I not already finished it....
Posted December 20, 2010

Rifftides
Doug Ramsey on Jazz and other matters...

Frishberg, Wellstood And Sullivan, Restored The Rifftides staff discovered, by chance, that an essential element in a two-and-a-half-year-old entry about Dick Wellstood and two other pianists had suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous YouTube fortune. The video of Wellstood playing was removed by...
Posted March 4, 2011

Webb City I'm still tucking in the frayed ends of daily life after extended duty in the trenches of extracurricular writing. Soon, there will be a new batch of Doug's Picks as the blogging routine returns to normal, whatever that is. I...
Posted March 2, 2011

Sonny Rollins Among NEA Honorees Today at the White House, President Obama will present the National Medal of Arts to ten creative Americans, including Sonny Rollins and Quincy Jones. From the announcement by the National Endowment for the Arts, here is the complete list of...
Posted March 2, 2011

Progress Report In my Modern Jazz Quartet project, I'm roundin' third and headin' home (for mystified readers in Brussels or Bangkok, that's a baseball metaphor). I hope to be back to more or less regular blogging early this week. In the next...
Posted February 28, 2011

Ron Hudson, Photographer The fine jazz photographer Ron Hudson died at his Seattle home on Tuesday. He was 71. For more than 30 years, Hudson captured memorable images of Ella Fitzgerald, Miles Davis, Woody Herman, Milt Jackson, Bud Shank and dozens more of...
Posted February 25, 2011

Sandow
Greg Sandow on the future of classical music

Going fishing I'm going on vacation, and won't blog again till after Labor Day. Or, more evocatively, I'm going to treat myself to some time in my private art colony, aka my country home in Warwick, NY. Where I'll relaunch my book...
Posted August 17, 2011

One look at the future I'm delighted -- amazed, thrilled, just over the moon -- about next season's programs at the Brooklyn Philharmonic, the first season under the orchestra's new conductor, Alan Pierson. Talk about the future of classical music! Pierson, an indie classical musician...
Posted August 3, 2011

Arresting data I'm a little bemused at the debates that still seem to rage about whether classical music -- as an activity in our culture -- has declined. Seems to me that the only way you can think it hasn't is...
Posted August 1, 2011

Intermezzo As I've tweeted, and posted on Facebook -- here's a sound I just love. Is it an animal, singing? Is it music from some other culture? No, it's an escalator at the Archives stop on the Washington DC Metro. Somehow...
Posted July 26, 2011

The culture I've seen Orchestra culture, I mean. A few years ago, I was visiting a friend, who also had another visitor -- the concertmaster of a Group 1 orchestra (referring to the League of American Orchestras classification of orchestras by budget size, in which...
Posted July 20, 2011

Slipped Disc
Norman Lebrecht

Rebel concert in Rio: first report Here's an account of the concert given by the sacked musicians of the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra, reported by retired oboist, Harold Emert:Forget the wedding of the century Friday in London!Those of us who were lucky enough to pack the acoustically-perfect...
Posted May 1, 2011

Nastiest opera ever - first pictures Prepare to be disappointed.The press shots from the premiere of Georg Friedrish Haas's Bluthaus at the Schwetzinger Festival, an opera whose title and pre-publicity announced that it would 'wallow in blood', are about as sanguinary as an Anglican vicar's office...
Posted May 1, 2011

Happy birthday, Zubin He's 75 today.Who knew?Not many men are recognised the world over by their first name....
Posted April 29, 2011

The case of the missing Master Far be it from this space to cavil at the power and the glory that was the Royal Wedding. The event was immaculate and uplifting, every component came in on cue, the chorus and musicians were outstanding and no-one left the...
Posted April 29, 2011

Poignant appeal by eminent soloist to the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra As I reported yesterday, the RLPO management are going ahead with a concert conducted by Roberto Minczuk, who has sacked half the musicians in the Brazilian Symphony Orchestra, describing some of them as 'amateurs'.Tomorrow, the distinguished pianist Cristina Ortiz will...
Posted April 29, 2011

PUBLISHING

book/daddy
Jerome Weeks on books

Or: Stanley Kowalski with a collection of first editions It's taken me awhile to get around to this -- busy, busy, busy -- but Katie Roiphe wrote an essay, "The Naked and Conflicted," for the cover of last Sunday's New York Times Book Review. It's an essay that's generated...
Posted January 7, 2010

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

Quick Study
Scott McLemee on books, ideas, trash-culture ephemera

One Struggle, One Fight / Pumpkins of the World, Unite! When I think of October, two things come up: Halloween and Bolshevism. So it's like Trish Kahle (with her mad carving skills) is reading my mind....Borrowed by permission from Trish's Facebook page. See also her excellently named blog....
Posted October 29, 2010

Weekend Update People begin arriving in DC today for the Jon Stewart/Stephen Colbert event on Saturday, which I discussed in a column that has since been reprinted (is that really the right word for when something appears on a different website?) elsewhere....
Posted October 29, 2010

So You Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities There have been a few thousand hits for this post, which clearly struck a nerve. The following clip lacks the saving grace of brevity, but I'll recommend it anyway:...
Posted October 27, 2010

Love and Death It seems time for a new edition of The Mass Psychology of Fascism by Wilhelm Reich, and I would like to suggest the cover art:Part of an astounding set of images of the French demonstrations, from the Boston Globe....
Posted October 24, 2010

Merchants of Culture Via Brainiac, an image of state-of-the-art book-niche marketing: Another phenomenon that makes more sense after reading John Thompson's book....
Posted October 22, 2010

THEATRE

Drama Queen
Wendy Rosenfield: drama, onstage and off

Jekyll and Hyde: The Editor Since it's making the rounds and I've received multiple queries asking what exactly went down, here's my take on the whole Media Theatre thing. And it was so calm around here for a while. Yes, Media artistic director Jesse Cline attempted...
Posted October 21, 2010

ATCA 2010: Onward Christian Bloggers Inside the 2010 American Theatre Critics Association conference there was a lot of what's going on outside the conference: hand-wringing about the future of theater criticism. Back in 1999, when I attended my first ATCA confab--conveniently located in Philadelphia--the room...
Posted July 21, 2010

Seven Minutes in Hell If you can stand any more of this, here are seven minutes from the American Theatre Critics Association's panel on new media, during which Clyde Fitch Report founder Leonard Jacobs, Sarasota Herald-Tribune critic Jay Handelman and I run down the...
Posted July 21, 2010

Post Your Comment Several of my colleagues--including this year's KCACTF winner Mark Costello--have already begun the two-week-long O'Neill Critics Institute (OCI), and I'm very excited to be headed up there in the morning. This year, from July 14-18, the American Theatre Critics Association...
Posted July 13, 2010

No Love Lost There's been some controversy over a show I reviewed this week, Megan Gogerty's Love Jerry. But before that, there was a censorship controversy over an ad for the show, which Philly.com, the Philadelphia Inquirer's online umbrella, refused to run. Controversy...
Posted June 9, 2010

lies like truth
Chloe Veltman on how culture will save the world

On Skiving Off There's something enormously satisfying about experiencing impromptu art, whether it's coming across a flash mob performance in a shopping mall or shirking off an afternoon in the office to experience a matinee concert at the Symphony.I relished doing the latter...
Posted February 25, 2011

Two Kinds of Publicists There's nothing quite like a good PR manager. The best of my colleagues in public relations make my job so much easier. They inspire ideas for articles, help connect me with the people I need to speak to to do...
Posted February 24, 2011

Art & Age The way in which different arts events attract audiences of different age demographics occasionally strikes me as odd. It's no surprise that a gig at a club featuring several DJs, a couple of live bands, live painting displays, breakdancing demonstrations...
Posted February 22, 2011

Faith in Fables Collaborations between local youth choirs and established professional performing arts companies seem to be all the rage these days in the Bay Area, in part I'm guessing as a result of special funding opportunities for these kinds of projects. There...
Posted February 21, 2011

Eating Opaque As a person who enjoys food as a hobby and writes critically about the performing arts professionally, I love culinary experiences that are also dramatic.I experienced one of the most theatrical meals on Monday night at Opaque, a basement restaurant...
Posted February 16, 2011

VISUAL

Aesthetic Grounds
Public Art, Public Space

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

Another Bouncing Ball
Regina Hackett takes her Art to Go

Wrong is right - the shock of the flaw That old grade-school test question - Which of these does not belong? - offers a key to the aesthetics of the expressively hot, as opposed to the classically cool. The hint of crazy within the solid citizen, the blood in...
Posted February 9, 2011

Recently in Seattle If human history were underwater, Alwyn O'Brien's ceramic vessels could serve as the bleached bones of the Ancien Regime, the decorative drained and dead on a dark sea floor. 4 Descending Notes 2010 Manganese Clay and Glaze 9" x 7"...
Posted February 7, 2011

Picasso's flesh world Collectors who hire experts to solve problems that don't exist till help arrives are responsible for the equivalent of bad face lifts on old masters. What the artists intended too frequently recedes under an abrasive cleaning or a deadening layer...
Posted December 23, 2010

Welcome back, David Wojnarowicz Nice to see David Wojnarowicz (wana-row-vitch) back in the news, making the monkeys dance. It's no surprise that the usual people want to use their deliberate misunderstanding of his work to rally their frightened base. It's also no surprise that...
Posted December 10, 2010

Image Transfer - Remix Culture at the Henry Humans see, humans do: After the first horse drawn on the first cave and the first pot incised with a decorative line, everything became imitation. You don't need a weatherman to know which way that wind blows, or that in...
Posted December 7, 2010

Artopia
John Perreault's art diary

Summer Special: Art Cops Double Feature While John Perreault is enjoying the beach on Long Island, the art cops try their hand at art criticism, above...and then, in the second video below, solve an art-world mystery: Why does the art world leave New York City...
Posted August 14, 2011

The Art Cops: Art School Confidential On his Paris Biennial website, Jean-Baptiste Farkas claims over one trillion new artworks have been made since October 2009. And the clock keeps ticking: 1,685,740 new artworks per day.  Click here for counter. What are we going to do...
Posted June 28, 2011

Gustav Metzger: The Remix   Gustav Metzger: Historic Photograph No.1: Liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto, April 19-28, 1943, 1995/2009/2011     Metzger Rescued from the Footnotes of Art History   Gustav Metzger's first U.S. exhibition ever, the thought-provoking "Historic Photographs," is now at...
Posted June 6, 2011

The Art Cops: Return from L.A. --- The Writing on the Wall         MOCA-LA             Banksy            Graffiti Art     KEITH HARING       Jeffrey Deitch                         ...
Posted May 24, 2011

Richard Serra, Drawing                                                                         After Minimalism   Richard...
Posted May 9, 2011


CultureGrrl
Lee Rosenbaum's Cultural Commentary

CultureGrrl Q&A with Incoming Getty Museum Director Timothy Potts---Part I The Getty Center, Los AngelesMy comments on last night's KCRW public radio segment, analyzing the designation of Timothy Potts as the J. Paul Getty Museum's next director (effective Sept. 1), were informed by a detailed discussion that Timothy and I...
Posted February 21, 2012

Hear Us Now: Getty/Potts Commentary By Cuno, Felch and Me on "Which Way, L.A.?" Here is the audio for the "Which Way, L.A.?" segment, hosted by Warren Olney, about Timothy Potts' appointment to the directorship of the J. Paul Getty Museum, effective Sept.1. (It aired tonight at 7 p.m., LA time, on KCRW, Southern...
Posted February 20, 2012

Coming Soon: My Getty/Potts Commentary on "Which Way, L.A.?" UPDATED Warren Olney, host of "Which Way L.A."[UPDATE: The show has now aired, but I managed to give you the wrong link for listening live. But (if you can overlook your annoyance at being misdirected) you can soon hear the program's...
Posted February 20, 2012

Fisk/Stieglitz BlogBack: Hope for New Perspective on University’s "Terrific Collection" CultureGrrl reader Marilyn Hollman responds to Fisk's President, Hazel O'Leary, to Retire: New Hope for the Stieglitz Collection?:I am so happy to hear about a possible new view of the wonderful Fisk collection. Even when I visited 10 or so...
Posted February 19, 2012

Fisk’s President, Hazel O’Leary, to Retire: New Hope for the Stieglitz Collection? As it came to pass in Waltham, MA, so may it also happen in Nashville.A change of president at Brandeis University brought about a new commitment to retaining the endangered Rose Art Museum and its important collection.of contemporary art, which...
Posted February 18, 2012


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