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It Takes a Woman
One of the founders of the Impressionist movement, Edgar Degas, is attributed with saying that "Art is not what you see, but what you make others see." In 1995, when Gregory Maguire published Wicked:...
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Pure Pleasure Exhibit at Merry Karnowsky Gallery
Photo courtesy of Victor Castillo Studio 2014 Some of the greatest artists that ever lived had an urgency to make a political, social, or cultural statement in their artwork as a civic duty to...
View ArticleDavos Syndrome at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
Thomas Campbell -- director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art -- arrived in Davos last week with an unambiguous message for the World Economic Forum. In discussions about "Reshaping the World," the...
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Dave Hickey in Los Angeles: Pirate vs. Farmers
Pretty much any epithet used to describe the art critic and MacArthur Award laureate Dave Hickey is doomed to fail. His last four decades as an art critic earned him the title "the enfant terrible of...
View ArticleMajor Collection of Allen Ginsberg Photos Donated to University of Toronto
The University of Toronto is home to the world's largest collection of photographs by the late beat poet, Allen Ginsberg, thanks to a donation by the Larry & Cookie Rossy Family Foundation. The...
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NCCA Kronstadt: After Malevich
59.99233° N / 29.78160° E February 6th 2014 19° F / -7° C Just across the waters of the Baltic Sea from where I sit now writing this, the art world was changed forever. In 1915, The Last Futurist...
View ArticleThe Beatles' Humor
This year brings an unavoidable refocus on the Beatles, with TV specials celebrating the 50th anniversary of their arrival in America. But amidst yet another look back at the start of American...
View ArticleThe Art of Conceptual Poetry: Interview With Geoffrey Gatza
Geoffrey Gatza is an award-winning poet and editor. He is the author many books of poetry, including Secrets of my Prison House (BlazeVOX 2010), Kenmore: Poem Unlimited (Casa Menendez 2009), and...
View ArticleFirst Nighter: 'Bronx Bombers' Fields Yogi Berra Well Enough
Eric Simonson, who gets his kicks writing plays about sports figures, is jumping the gun on Valentine's Day by sending a lavish Broadway card to now 88-year-old Yogi Berra. Bronx Bombers is what he...
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6 Life Lessons from Laura Ingalls Wilder
The Little House on the Prairie books are so widely known, it's hard to believe that the real-life Laura Ingalls Wilder has been gone for nearly 60 years. Born in Pepin, Wisconsin, she would have...
View ArticleErotica That Puts You in Charge
The Fifty Shades phenomenon marked an interesting sea-change in the history of erotica -- the quiet death of shame about reading rumpy-pumpy, at least for middle-class women. Helped along by the...
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'Childhood Is Not a Geographical Place': Arwad's Samer Najari and Dominique...
Ramzi Choukair and Fanny Mallette in scene from Arwad Last week, I received an email from a publicist friend telling me that I simply had to watch the film Arwad, which screened at the recent...
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The Past
Asghar Farhadi's The Past, currently playing at Film Forum, is a cinematic short story. While some films have the breadth of the novel, this tale of an Iranian Ahmad (Ali Mosaffa) who returns to France...
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Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg Introduces 'Rita' by Donizetti, February 12-16
"We have programmed the most politically incorrect opera in the most politically correct area of the country!" said music director Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, referring to the New Century Chamber...
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Why I Paint Guernica
Guernica for me is a modern template, just as the Madonna and Child is an ancient template. There are many templates in art, shells upon which the artist forges a vision, contributing to a shared...
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Artistic Creativity Can Be Continuous or Discrete
In 1905, a year before his death, 66-year-old Paul Cézanne wrote to the younger painter Emile Bernard that "I believe I have in fact made some more progress, rather slow, in the last studies which you...
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Choreographer Brock Clawson -- In the 'Right Place'
Choreographer Brock Clawson Brock Clawson is an interesting mix -- both a choreographer and a landscape designer. His work with dancers can be seen in the Joffrey's upcoming Contemporary...
View Article12 Years A Slave
Despite its unquestionable power, I left this movie troubled as much by what I felt to be a false note as by its indictment of the cruelties of slavery, whose dreadful heritage still haunts the...
View ArticleSexism in Architecture: The Path Still Taken?
Equal pay for equal work is thick in the air these days. Especially with President Obama saying in the State of the Union "it is time to do away with policies that belong in a Mad Men episode." When I...
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"The Death of Bessie Smith" in a Brooklyn Hospital Speaks to Limited Health...
In a hospital in Brooklyn, you might hear the voice of Bessie Smith. That's because the New Brooklyn Theater has set a rare production of Edward Albee's 1959 play, The Death of Bessie Smith, inside...
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