TT: Almanac "The one Bach piece I learnt made me feel I was being repeatedly hit on the head with a teaspoon."...

Posted February 9, 2010

TT: By the sea with Mrs. T Taken at breakfast this morning in South Palm Beach:...

Posted February 8, 2010

TT: Reluctant to relocate I've been too busy to write much about it lately, but for the past few weeks Mrs. T and I...

Posted February 8, 2010

TT: Almanac "Do you know, I believe we should all behave quite differently if we lived in a warm, sunny climate all...

Posted February 8, 2010

TT: Your town, too Today's Wall Street Journal drama column is a double-barrelled rave in which I praise to the skies the third and...

Posted February 5, 2010

Everyone's a critic, or collector, or joiner, or... I'm in Maine at the moment, preparing for a week-long visit to Colby College to think about and talk about audiences and the arts. At conferences and other arts conversations, there's certainly a lot of talk about how audiences are...

Posted February 8, 2010

My Maine events I'll be in Waterville, Maine, most of next week, in residency (kinda) at Colby College, discussing issues of art, audience, and business with students, faculty, and cultural leaders. Should be an interesting visit, graciously hosted by the fabulous Lynne Conner,...

Posted February 5, 2010

The cumulative value of stories Social anthropologist and ''chief culture officer'' Grant McCracken has some great thoughts bubbling in his recent blog posts. He's wondering out loud about finding ways to capture and share the narratives and histories of the objects we wear, use, and...

Posted February 4, 2010

A useful question about nonprofit status I'm pleased to notice a new blogger among the ArtsJournal crew, James Undercofler, who recently joined the faculty at Drexel University's Arts Administration program after an illustrious career in symphonies, conservatories, and cultural nonprofits. His State of the Art blog...

Posted February 2, 2010

Rumination on ''expressive life'' I'll be blogging elsewhere on ArtsJournal this week, as part of the ''Expressive Life'' week-long blog discussion convened by Bill Ivey and featuring a ragtag bunch of big thinkers. Since his work as Chairman of the National Endowment for the...

Posted January 25, 2010

AVATAR EXCHANGE Image via WikipediaA friend writes: "The biggest puzzle that lingers for me after Avatar isthe message that young ones take away having seen the recruitment videos for the Marines and the Air Force before The Show.  I think of the militaristic characters...

Posted January 18, 2010

Hentoff http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/09/nyregion/09nyc.html?_r=3&ref=todayspaper...

Posted January 11, 2010

BOFFO POSTER SITE Or: How I Spent My Downtime: at cinemasterpieces. For more cheap thrills, go to http://images.google.com/advanced_image_search?hl=en, enter "http://www.cinemasterpieces.com" in the "results images from this site or domain" box, and then tweak your size option settings to "medium" or "large." Make sure to...

Posted January 11, 2010

A HOLE IN THE UNIVERSE "I've long known about Smith's recordings and his obsession with documenting what went on at the building where he lived and worked from the late 50s until the early 70s. One story, which has stuck with me since I first...

Posted January 8, 2010

BUST A MOVE Was it uplifting or depressing to see Young MC take down Up In the Air's cheezy corporate splash? Nelson George called it "the highlight," but I thought the one-hit wonder looked like Andre Braugher.This gets reviewed as a yuppie...

Posted January 6, 2010

Hidden in New Hampshire We know now that J.D Salinger was no recluse, despite what the headlines say. He shut the larger world out, but he did it with help from his neighbors: the people of his tiny New Hampshire town, who closed ranks...

Posted January 31, 2010

You Can't Get This at the iBookstore Last weekend, I was book browsing in Chelsea when an excited young man -- a friend of the shop, I gathered -- came in and said to the clerks at the front, "Guess who I just passed on the street."...

Posted January 28, 2010

Really In the stories we tell about ourselves, the temptation to lie -- to ourselves, to each other -- triumphs more often than it ought to. It happens in public life (see John Edwards), in pulp fiction masquerading as memoir...

Posted January 23, 2010

Bring on the Pay Wall Producing real journalism, good journalism, costs real money. Charging for frequent online access, as The New York Times plans to do beginning next year, is a step away from the cliff -- or, perhaps, a step toward scrambling back...

Posted January 20, 2010

RIP, Erich Segal and Robert B. Parker The drama in Massachusetts at the moment is all about the Senate race, but it's an unhappy day for Boston popular fiction as well: Erich Segal, the creator of Oliver Barrett IV and Jennifer Cavilleri, and Robert B. Parker,...

Posted January 19, 2010

Transcribing and Playing The Untranscribable Is untranscribable a word? Let me check...Ah, apparently, it is!Every now and then a group of musicians decide to transcribe and perform something that makes everyone who knows the particular piece or pieces at hand scratch their heads.The first time...

Posted February 9, 2010

What We're Up Against: The View from a School Reform Conference I've been sitting on the idea for this entry since October. I thought the slow news day today for education would be a good time to post. That's a joke, of course, have you seen the report about school districts...

Posted February 8, 2010

The USDOE Wants You: A Call for Panelists In what may just be the most competitive grant applications process ever, the USDOE has announced a call for peer reviewers for its $650 million Investing in Innovation Fund (i3). i3: The purpose of the program is to provide competitive grants to applicants...

Posted February 6, 2010

The School District Arts Czar: Mistaking the Piece for the Puzzle I was talking recently with a friend and colleague who expressed disappointment over how things turned out with the appointment of the arts education czar in her local school district. She spoke about how much effort went into advocating with...

Posted February 5, 2010

NEA Announces RFP for New Logo: Art Works As most of you know, the NEA, in this case the National Endowment for the Arts, not the National Education Association (for my education readers), has a new tag line: Arts Works.Today, the NEA has released an RFP for the...

Posted February 1, 2010

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

Can we talk? California Arts Advocates, of which I'm VP, begins a statewide visioning initiative with a first convening in Sacramento this week. We describe our goal this way:This convening is not so much about finding new language to better describe or market...

Posted January 10, 2010

Hillary Clinton Sings Our Song Two weeks ago Secretary of State Clinton spoke at Georgetown University about issues of Human Rights. The final question from the audience concerned the role the arts can play in advancing Human Rights. The Secretary's fantastic answer - and the...

Posted December 30, 2009

Music by, for, and of a Community I had the great good fortune of attending one of the LA Phil's last West Coast Left Coast concerts two weeks ago. It had the intimacy and ambiance of a community event unlike most orchestra concerts I attend. I came...

Posted December 20, 2009

Loving Where You Live is Important to the Economy A colleague shared this Soul of the Community Knight Foundation/Gallup Poll research with me. It has fantastic findings for arts and culture advocates. My two favorites are After interviewing close to 28,000 people in 26 communities over two years, the...

Posted November 12, 2009

Arts Education is a Social Justice Issue In just a few hours I will introduce the San Diego Youth Symphony and Conservatory's "Celebration of Music Education" concert. It is the one time in the year when all of our 500 students perform on a single concert. We...

Posted November 8, 2009

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

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

New is different than young Two weeks ago, Hilary and I went to LA so she could film The Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien. You can read all about how I didn't think her appearance would sell any albums here, and watch her performance on...

Posted February 4, 2010

"The way you hold your middle and index fingers separate from your ring and pinky fingers... ....the way we danced till three."via OperaChic, and I really don't know where she finds these things:EXCLUSIVE: Zachary Quinto (aka Spock & Sylar) Tunes Up For Spielberg's GershwinSince he dropped out of Harvey, Steven Spielberg's first project under the reconstituted...

Posted February 3, 2010

This is maybe too morbid? But a little funny, right? I was cruising around the Washington Post website the other day and saw this banner ad for life insurance:Naturally all I and everyone reads at first is "IF YOU DIED TODAY," because it includes the words "you" and "died" and...

Posted February 2, 2010

Some light stalking and Observ-ations Having read his music coverage on The Awl, which you should all be reading if you're not, and in The New York Observer, I decided that NY-based writer Zachary Woolfe would be the perfect person to pitch a Gabriel Kahane...

Posted January 27, 2010

Panel Disband Thanks to everyone who read and participated in our virtual panel last week! I'm sorry to report that you're back to Just Me now. Shoes over Schubert, if you will. If you find yourself missing my co-panelists, start reading Matthew's...

Posted January 24, 2010

The Orchestra Meets Jay-Z, Goes to Super Bowl XLIV Jay-Z and the voice of Rihanna opened Super Bowl XLIV with a remix of "Run This Town" featuring The Rutgers Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Kynan Johns (read up on that here). The tweet lines immediately lit up...

Posted February 7, 2010

The Sound of Silence Well, we survived Snowpocalypse 2010 here in Charm City, and maybe the most striking thing about the weekend--aside from the 26" of snow, at least--is how silent it's been compared to our normal urban life. I mean that in...

Posted February 7, 2010

The Soundtrack of Our Lives Empty ear candy or the resonant soundtrack of our lives (even if some tunes make us want to claw mercilessly at our ears)? I'm thinking about this because even the classic rock that meant the most to my dad,...

Posted February 3, 2010

Got Quality? Despite the many adventures, sonic and otherwise, offered by the Grammy's on Sunday night, I think it was specifically a reference to the performance by "Italian opera star" Andrea Bocelli that truly had my hand smacking my forehead. It wasn't...

Posted February 1, 2010

Heard But Not Seen I know this is possibly ill-considered of me to admit, but I love video paired with live music performance primarily because I often find watching musicians themselves to be kind of distracting. "But Molly!" you may cry, if you're...

Posted January 25, 2010

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

Bohemians: they all do it  Two operas in a week and two odd, Anthony Powell-ish coincidences. Jonathan Miller's wonderful production of Così fan tutte is having its sixth revival at Covent Garden, and Sir Jonathan seems to have changed his mind again about how the story...

Posted February 6, 2010

Business as usual it ain't Enron has transferred to the Noel Coward Theatre after its beginnings at the Chichester Festival (where I saw it early last year) and then its run at the Royal Court. At the time I thought it was the best...

Posted January 27, 2010

No need for the Cliché-killer Late last year I had the good luck to be shown around the exhibition of Van Gogh's letters at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam by Ann Dumas, who is the curator of "The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and...

Posted January 25, 2010

Dramatic Memory Loss At every year's end there's a rush to nominate and then vote for the UK Critics' Circle Drama Awards, and every year I suffer from the same sudden memory failure. What and whom have I seen in 2009 that merits...

Posted December 23, 2009

Colours: Hodgkin, Kapoor and poor Tchaikovsky Tomorrow at the Gagosian Gallery at 17-19 Davies Street, London W1, my close friend Howard Hodgkin has a show of ]Seven New Paintings.  I saw some of them in his studio, small, vigorous, and fresh, and so recognisably, uniquely, by...

Posted December 4, 2009

Will The Staffordshire Hoard Remain At "Home"? It was just last July when the world was stunned (pleasantly) by the finding of more than 1,500 gold and silver 7th Century Anglo-Saxon treasures that are known as the Staffordshire Hoard. Because it is the largest and probably most important discovery in the U.K., Staffordshire --...

Posted February 9, 2010

Tampa Gets A New Museum: Happy Ending For A Cautionary Tale In its 31st birthday year, the Tampa Museum of Art opened a new building. That happened Saturday, and news accounts heralded it. The $32.8 million structure, designed by Stanley Saitowitz, has 66,000 sq.ft, including 26,000 sq. ft. of galleries, and is set in a sculpture garden and...

Posted February 8, 2010

Las Vegas Art Museum: A Cure Worse Than The Disease? It was just about a year ago, at the end of February 2009, that the Las Vegas Art Museum closed its doors. A metropolis of nearly 2 million people was left with no art museum -- generating not much more...

Posted February 7, 2010

Important White House Arts Appointments? Would That It Were True Late Friday afternoon: email arrrives from the White House Press Office, with subject line "President Obama Announces More Key Administration Posts." I open it up, with expectations. But the key appointments turned out to be six nominees to the President's...

Posted February 5, 2010

A Plains Tale: Anonymous Donor + Rosenquist = Mural Most of the time, Fargo, ND, isn't even on the art-world's map, but this week an anonymous donor put it there, with help from James Rosenquist (see him at work below). Rosenquist hails from Grand Forks, ND, and in 2005, when he visited...

Posted February 4, 2010

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

Let's See ... More About 'Jewish Bankers' Michael Kinsley gets it. He takes note of "Where Did the Vampire Squid Come From?", which pointed out that Matt Taibbi's description of Goldman Sachs -- "a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood...

Posted February 1, 2010

Another Reminder to Our Pipsqueak Leaders Martin Luther King Jr. was bold and beautiful for a reason. He seems a figure from a distant past. Is it because he died so prematurely, killed by an assassin's bullet, at 39? Or does he recede into history because...

Posted January 18, 2010

It's Nice to Think So This full-page ad in The New York Times, which ran today on page 29, marks the 40th anniversary of the WAR IS OVER! campaign launched by John Lennon and Yoko Ono on Dec. 15, 1969. Click the image or this...

Posted December 27, 2009

Patti Smith Still Believes A thought for the New Year ... Question: "Do you still believe that the people have the power?" Answer: "I'll always believe that. I think that they don't know that. I don't think that they believe that. And I understand...

Posted December 21, 2009

Season's Greetings This came over the transom. My sentiments precisely. Reminds me of Philip Larkin....

Posted December 18, 2009

Promise and dreck When a young choreographer has the bud of a beautiful language but only an intermittent sense of what to do with it, her promise is an open question; as a reviewer I tend to answer in the affirmative, in...

Posted January 31, 2010

A call out to choreographers: more mothers-in-law in ballet (revised Sat. 1/23/2010)** **Maybe I shouldn't even mention it, I revise so chronically after the initial post. I think it's an age thing. I know how a blog is supposed to work--that it's off the cuff, that you say one thing and then...

Posted January 22, 2010

New Tharp and old Balanchine: this week's ballet triumphs Writing on the Pacific Northwest Ballet's debut under the widely admired former New York City Ballet principal Peter Boal proved a challenge, in that I know that Boal is a very thoughtful curator of dances--that as artistic director he wants...

Posted January 9, 2010

Happy New Year and decade: what I hope for, this month and beyond (with some additions and revisions, 1/3 pm) (I know, you probably don't care--nor should you--but I revised, as of Sunday Jan 4 3ish pm the paragraphs on the downtown scene and on Performa--the first b/c I wanted to try to get right at least what I think...

Posted January 1, 2010

"The Good Dance": if only I found Reggie Wilson and Andreya Ouamba's dance, at BAM last week, maddening and, perhaps unwittingly, kinda rude. Its nonsensical combination of casualness and overweaning symbolism put pressure on the audience to get the work to cohere while also...

Posted December 22, 2009

Pick-Up Danish: Personal Indulgences No. 17 On Christmas morning last year, I walked the reservoir track in New York's Central Park, since the gym was, naturally, closed for you-know-who's birthday. Hundreds of people, most of them armed with cameras, were strolling around the loop in the...

Posted February 7, 2010

Do Not Pass Go New York City Ballet / David H. Koch Theater, Lincoln Center, NYC / November 24, 2009 - February 28, 2010 This story has a back story. Let me whisk you through it. Some two years before the New York City...

Posted January 27, 2010

Night Watch Noche Flamenca / Lucille Lortel Theatre, NYC / December 24, 2009 - January 16, 2010 What better way to spend New Year's Eve than watching Noche Flamenca? The Lucille Lortel Theatre, intimate in size, is dark and gloomy, the seats...

Posted January 17, 2010

The Ailey Looks Back and Forward Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater / City Center, NYC / December 2, 2009 - January 3, 2010 Judith Jamison, Artistic Director of the Alvin Ailey American Dance TheaterPhoto: Andrew Eccles Beginning with the opening night gala, I visited the Alvin...

Posted January 15, 2010

Pacific Northwest Ballet Presents a New Face to New York Pacific Northwest Ballet / Joyce Theater, NYC / January 5-10, 2010 Pacific Northwest Ballet, based in Seattle, is making its first New York appearance in 13 years with a program of four ballets, three of them new to our...

Posted January 8, 2010

Super Bowl -- Gay-Guy Version If an American guy says proudly that he's never watched a Super Bowl, the American imagination assumes he's either a professor who resents the moron sports-money his department isn't getting, or gay. He could be both, but American imaginations aren't...

Posted February 4, 2010

My Own Private Idaho Potato First, the Monokini Constant readers may have figured out that I spent most of November far from home. In fact, I was in Los Angeles, playing with and listening to this year's fierce and frolicsome USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Program Fellows....

Posted December 7, 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

Poor Confucius (II) Looks like Confucius is not going to whip any blue butt this movie season.  According to this latest report, the sage is not attracting enough business to justify keeping him on all the 2-D screens in China....

Posted January 30, 2010

Poor Confucius According to this brief item in today's New York Times, the Chinese government has yanked Avatar from the vast majority of that country's movie theaters in advance of the time it was scheduled to close - and replaced it with...

Posted January 20, 2010

Where Cameron Got the Idea In case you missed it, this parody promo reveals the many parallels between Avatar and a semi-forgotten animation feature, Fern Gully, released from Fox in 1992.  Same company, same theme, as you will see.  I still like Avatar better, because...

Posted January 5, 2010

Sinking "Titanic"? The biggest box office success of the year is unfolding with Avatar, not just in the US but around the world.  Indeed, this new special-effects extravaganza from James Cameron may be the film to break the all-time record of his...

Posted January 2, 2010

Under the Tree This cartoon says it all.  Hope your holidays are warm & mellow in spite of the cold & tense mood of the country and world.  More movie postings soon....

Posted December 26, 2009

Can we talk? I heard a wonderful concert by The Cleveland Orchestra a few weeks ago. Soloist Richard Goode performed Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto on a program that included Carl Maria von Weber's Overture to Der Freischütz and Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony. Goode was...

Posted December 29, 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

AACM pianist & singer give away CD at NYC show Steve Colson, pianist/composer and band leader, with vocalist Iqua Colson --  a couple  members of American experimental music's cutting edge AACM for some 35 years --  give a rare performance quartet Saturday night (Feb 6) at NYC's Thalia theater in Symphony Space. Everyone who...

Posted February 5, 2010

NEA Jazz Masters as New Yorkers Are all Jazz Masters in/of NYC? Most, yes -- but can that last? My new City Arts column. See photos that demonstrate the thesis....

Posted February 1, 2010

Saxes & percussion, Boulez & Symphony Last weekend the World Saxophone Quartet and percussion ensemble M'Boom blasted 21st century conventions at Birdland -- this weekend Pierre Boulez conducts the Chicago Symphony Orchestra through Bartok's two piano & percussion concerto and Stravinsky's "The Firebird" at Carnegie Hall....

Posted January 29, 2010

Asheville's grassroots musicians' benefit for Haiti Mark Guest, guitarist, has organized a grassroots "Jazz and Blues for Haiti" benefit for Doctors Without Borders on Monday Jan 26 Jan 25 at Curras Nuevo Cuisine in Asheville, NC, a town he says "doesn't to my knowledge have an immediate Haitian connection."...

Posted January 20, 2010

Predictions, dreams, fears & fancies for music 2010 What might happen in jazz and new music this year? I've no idea but speculate anyway in my CityArts column . . ....

Posted January 19, 2010

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

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

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

Rise "You were teaching that pianist like she was a college student" -- the complaint of an observer of one of the masterclasses I gave in Jerusalem. In my defense, the student pianist was 18 (I learned later), and playing one...

Posted February 8, 2010

Kindest Cuts In big conservatories, there are competitions to select student soloists for particular piano concertos each concert season. The music is chosen far in advance by the piano faculty. Our normal procedure at New England Conservatory -- and we did the...

Posted February 1, 2010

Costly Imitation As I listen to others play the piano, as I eat, or walk down the sidewalk -- all I think of is the passage of music I struggled with yesterday, a passage I have been playing at least for 25...

Posted January 25, 2010

Tract Taupe. Dull ocher. Light gray. These are the exterior colors available in a new housing development I passed in the outer suburbs of Des Moines. The houses are attached and identically sized. There are slight, symmetrically-occurring variations in the facades....

Posted January 11, 2010

Drunk Many of the scions of American piano playing had trouble with alcohol. At school, I remember hidden bottles and little bars inside the official closets. Piano playing is a solitary occupation, and often makes for a solitary life. As much...

Posted January 5, 2010

Internalizing Absurdity My CD of The Planets has arrived. One friend has already received the copy he ordered directly from Meyer Media. You can hear some excerpts there, and I've left two movements up on my web site as teasers: Venus and Uranus. And I thought...

Posted February 8, 2010

Erasing the Timeline Thus spake Bob Ashley:  We have recently - about fifty years ago - come upon a new idea in thinking about music, but I think it is not even approached in theory. This new idea does not use the timeline score.... By...

Posted February 7, 2010

How to Read Being of an age, and begging the indulgence of my seniors among my readers, I'm going to step into professorial mode for a moment and give a little lecture on reading comprehension. I suppressed a few negative responses I...

Posted February 6, 2010

Saturn, Bringer of Delay About a year ago I wrote that my suite The Planets would receive its full world premiere with the Relache ensemble in May of 2009. By May I was announcing that it would be September, and the performance was postponed...

Posted February 4, 2010

The Curse of the Recital The immediate future of my blog may well be excerpts from MusikTexte's new volume of Robert Ashley's writings, Outside of Time: Ideas about Music. Damn, he's a great writer. This one's about the conservative reaction that followed the demise of...

Posted February 3, 2010

Keep An Ear Out For Gadi Lehavi With fairness, it could be charged that Rifftides has been too concerned lately with the old and the dead. Well, certain observances and acknowledgements needed to be made. But let's move on. David Liebman wrote with an antidote. Here's his...

Posted February 8, 2010

Compatible Quotes: Youth The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently.--Friedrich Nietzsche It is all that the young can do for the old, to shock them...

Posted February 8, 2010

The Willis Conover Facebook Page What three administrations in the White House have refused to do, the people have done. They have recognized Willis Conover, the Voice of America broadcaster who may have been America's greatest cultural diplomat of the Cold War. He now has...

Posted February 7, 2010

John Dankworth, RIP Sad news from London that Johnny Dankworth --Sir John Dankworth-- has died at 82. The alto saxophonist, composer and band leader and his wife, the singer Cleo Laine, have been pillars of jazz in England since the early 1950s. To...

Posted February 6, 2010

Weekend Extra: Woody Herman's Second Herd Browsing YouTube, I came across what must be among the rarest pieces of jazz film, a sequence of Woody Herman's Second Herd, the celebrated Four Brothers band. We hear Herman's vocal and a bit of Stan Getz's tenor saxophone on...

Posted February 6, 2010

Help! I love where the solutions idea is taking us. And I'm serious about collecting the responses in a sidebar to the blog, in the "Resources" section on the right. But I'm a little overwhelmed by the work involved. No need...

Posted February 8, 2010

Dismaying On Saturday afternoon I went to see the Met's streaming Simon Boccanegra in a multiplex in Rockaway, NJ. The audience was old -- dismayingly old. I know I've written quite a bit about the aging audience, but this time I...

Posted February 8, 2010

Solutions III Here's another success story, about new ways to promote what otherwise was a standard (though evidently quite wonderful) classical performance. This was a semi-staged production of Gluck's opera Armide, done by Opera Lafayette in Washington and New York, and reviewed...

Posted February 5, 2010

Solutions II I love the reactions to my "Solutions" post. Just as I'd hoped -- people posting comments, telling us about their own solutions, their own new ways of presenting classical music. In Britain, the Netherlands, and the US. Keep them coming!I'll...

Posted February 5, 2010

Solutions I think it's time to emphasize solutions on my blog. I've made so many criticisms of the classical music world -- justified criticisms, I don't hesitate to say. And I love the theoretical discussions we get into, which I'm often...

Posted February 4, 2010

Last composer standing - more shocks and spills Two more publishers, Faber Music and Universal Edition, have just submitted their most performed works of the century's first decade, and you won't believe what they are. UE, the benchmark label of modernism, has lost many of its big names -...

Posted February 5, 2010

So who took an axe to your piano? A friend who is writing a play about a parent who resents his child's musical talent wonders if there is any known instance of an adult actually destroying an instrument because he or she cannot bear the child moving in...

Posted February 5, 2010

Promises, promises... and a prospect of Bliss Three publishers in London and New York are working day and night to supply me with audited figures of their most performed 21st century works in response to yesterday's post. Or so they swear. I will pass the information on as soon as it hits...

Posted February 4, 2010

Last composer standing - who is really the most performed? Three months ago I kicked off a public conversation here as to which living composers are most likely to last the test of time. You can read the results here. The discussion, which spread into several languages, prompted soul searching...

Posted February 3, 2010

New twist on classical record stats This just in from Eric Dingman, president of EMI Classics:   I'd like to add some points for the discussion...   Perhaps useful to remember that the % swings dramatically in years when major Classic releases happen because of the...

Posted February 2, 2010

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

This Just In: General Franco is Still Dead My column about Howard Zinn has drawn a protest from Ron Radosh, who claims that I called him a fascist and accuses me of McCarthyism. (It is the ninth comment on said column, just pointed out to me by a...

Posted February 3, 2010

The Economy of Attention My column last week was an interview with Nicholas Laughlin, who is, among other things, the editor of The Caribbean Review of Books.  We used the news from Haiti as the occasion for a discussion of how the crisis is...

Posted February 2, 2010

Volk Lore From Phil Nugent:Note [South Carolina Lieutenant Governor Andre Bauer]'s confidence that anything that oozes from his mouth will be taken for folk wisdom so long as he makes clear that he is extrapolating from the teachings of his grandmother, who,...

Posted January 27, 2010

Argh! My review of a newly translated book by Cornelius Castoriadis is up at Bookforum, with certain changes that are causing my teeth to grind. The word "obscure" in the first line is not mine; I said "small," which is another...

Posted January 26, 2010

Sometimes Feelings of Inadequacy Contain Useful Information I spent nine hours on Saturday in a conference room in New York with fellow members of the board of directors of the National Book Critics Circle, discussing last year's titles and voting on the lists of finalists. It was...

Posted January 25, 2010

Everyone's a Critic, Season 2: And the Winner Is... The 2010 Region II Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival O'Neill Critics Institute winner is...Villanova University graduate Student Mark J. Costello (From now on, he'd like to be referred to by his professional name, "SarcMark").Our alternate is Muhlenberg College freshman...

Posted January 17, 2010

Everyone's a Critic, Season 2: The Reviews Are In This is it. The KCACTF2 OCI critics, on very, very little sleep, focused the last of their remaining energies on a previous review, crossed their fingers and hit "send." I'm reading through these all day and announcing a winner at IUP...

Posted January 16, 2010

Everyone's a Critic, Season 2: Get a Load of these Ledes Today's assignment is a quick hit: write just the lede for a review of Keuka College's production of Christopher Durang's Miss Witherspoon. Seems simple enough, one opening paragraph, done and done. Well, it's not. Here's the thing: several of the...

Posted January 15, 2010

Everyone's a Critic, Season 2: Frog and Toad... And the Holocaust My Critics Institute students got a real challenge yesterday: review Indiana University of Pennsylvania's production of the charming family show A Year with Frog and Toad, and then review Stockton College's A Comb and a Prayer Book, a first-person account...

Posted January 14, 2010

Everyone's a Critic, Season 2: Strike Out or Home Run? Today was the critics' first day of critic class and I felt it was important to make one thing abundantly clear before we even met: critics aren't just critics anymore. That's why, upon entering our classroom, each student opened a...

Posted January 13, 2010

My Kind of Monday Night It's official: Monday is the new Saturday and last night's escapades in San Francisco are proof of this fact.The evening kicked off with some delicious Brazilian food and then a concert at the Conservatory of Music dedicated to celebrating the...

Posted February 9, 2010

Anniversary Blues Why are arts organizations so obsessed with anniversaries? Every day it seems, some museum, presenter, dance troupe, alternative arts space or theater company is celebrating a milestone birthday, be it 25, 50 or 75 years with a retrospective or special...

Posted February 8, 2010

The Art Installation That Never Was The world is full of madcap ideas that don't come to fruition. But thankfully there's always a place to talk about them, even if they end up not getting realized.Here's a concept for an art installation which I came up...

Posted February 5, 2010

A Barrio Oedipus Do classic plays always lend themselves to adaptation into different cultural idioms? What makes a certain story resonate in particular with a particular setting? Luis Alfaro's Oedipus el Rey, currently receiving its world premiere production at the Magic Theatre in...

Posted February 4, 2010

The Lost Art of the Picture Frame When I was growing up, I used to think it strange that the mother of a close friend of mine had empty antique picture frames covering almost every spare bit of wall in the entrance hall of her Victorian townhouse....

Posted February 3, 2010

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

Will Rogan - Happy Valentine's Day Some couples stay together by pretending the rest of the world does not exist.Will Rogan...

Posted February 9, 2010

Isabelle Pauwels - a rumination prior to a review Washington Post classical music critic Anne Midgette recently asked if it's fair to give an audience something it hasn't shown any signs of wanting: Many of us who love music share a vague idea that audiences should be open to...

Posted February 9, 2010

Efrain Almeida - Happy Valentine's Day From Efrain Almeida's world view.The few get lucky.The rest keep a record of their tears....

Posted February 8, 2010

Dan Webb - the wonder years Unring the Bell at Cornish College surveys the early work of Cornish grad (1991) Dan Webb, curated by Jess Van Nostrand. Because the show is about getting started, its catalog (drawn by Kelly Martin) is a comic book, which...

Posted February 8, 2010

Justin R. Lytle - the chords between us Woody Allen's Interiors opens In a New York apartment that has been designed to death. It could be a window display of a chilly boutique, except a young couple lives in it. The only object that hints at their occupation...

Posted February 8, 2010

Who's Afraid of Eli Broad?                                                   Historic button produced by employees of the Corcoran Museum in D.C. when the "elusive"  Walter...

Posted February 1, 2010

How the West Was Won: Finish Fetish   Craig Kauffman: Three Untitled Wall Reliefs, 1968. Vacuum formed Plexiglas Larry Bell: Untitled, 1969. Mineral coated glass De Wain Valentine: Triple Disk Red Metal Flake - Black Edge, 1966.  Fiberglass              reinforced polyester       Primarily Atmospheric    ...

Posted January 18, 2010

Fakes: Have Replicas Replaced Art?                                           Antoine Pevsner,Portrait of Marcel Duchamp, 1926. Cellulose nitrate on copper with iron, 65.4 x 94.0 cm (25 3/4 x...

Posted January 3, 2010

Cenophobia: Roni Horn, Gabriel Orozco, Dan Flavin                                         Roni Horn: Paired Gold Mats for Ross and Felix, 1994-95.      Beauty Needs Its Own Space   In...

Posted December 21, 2009

Man Ray: Name Dropping                                                                          Man Ray, La Fortune, 1938.                                               Sherrie Levine: La Fortune (After Man...

Posted December 6, 2009

My Q&A with Marc Wilson of the Nelson-Atkins: "Getting Back to the Core" Marc Wilson, director of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, in his office in the museum's Steven Holl-designed additionThe Nelson-Atkins Museum's recent announcement of 75 donors' gifts of 400 artworks in honor of the Kansas City museum's 75th anniversary and its...

Posted February 9, 2010

Flood Toll: Rebuilding the University of Iowa Museum of Art University of Iowa Museum of Art's "Mural," 1943, by Jackson Pollock, as installed at the Figge Art Museum, Davenport, IAThe "Envisioning Committee," appointed last year by the University of Iowa's president, Sally Mason, to brainstorm about a new facility to...

Posted February 8, 2010

Onside Kick: A Winning Strategy in the CultureGrrl Playbook UPDATE My e-mail inbox tells me that getting your exhibitions (or other art-related announcements) on CultureGrrl is the goal of many readers. But few of you will make it to the end zone: Although I'm swarmed by by galleries seeking publicity,...

Posted February 7, 2010

Chuck Close, Five Others, Nominated for President’s Committee on Arts and Humanities Chuck Close, Self-Portrait, 1997, Museum of Modern Art© 2010 Chuck Close I don't have a link to this yet, but the list of President Obama's six new nominees to the President's Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH) just...

Posted February 5, 2010

Gehry Golf Clubhouse Planned for Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island Rendering of Frank Gehry's planned Abu Dhabi golf clubhouseA 19th hole by Frank Gehry?Apparently the architect is having such a good time on Saadiyat Island, where his Guggenheim Abu Dhabi is to supposed to open in late 2013, that he's...

Posted February 5, 2010

Focusing on what John Yau said about Koons, Saltz Perhaps because New York magazine art critic Jerry Saltz has been having an interesting couple of months, John Yau's Brooklyn Rail essay on Jeff Koons' Puppy and Saltz's fawning reaction to it seems to have been mostly presented and considered...

Posted February 9, 2010

All those power lines... I was substantially disappointed by the traveling, partial reprise of the seminal New Topographics exhibition, but there was one point of commonality across the photographers' work that caught my eye: Power lines. Every single New Topos photographer of the West...

Posted February 8, 2010

Weekend roundup The New Orleans Museum of Art won its Super Bowl bet with the Indianapolis Museum of Art. This JMW Turner is going to New Orleans!In the NYT, Dorothy Spears profiles Luc Tuymans and in so doing reminds us that the...

Posted February 8, 2010

Snowpocalypse II incoming Word is that Washington will be socked with up to 26 inches of wet, heavy snow over the next two days, so I'm going grocery shopping. In celebration of the pending weather, enjoy two of my favorite winter paintings: Gilbert...

Posted February 5, 2010

'California minimalism' contextualized (or not) "California minimalism" is a peculiar phrase, one I'd never really heard before January 8, when this show opened at Chelsea's David Zwirner Gallery. It's a phrase not much in the literature about minimalism, either because the Californians are rarely considered...

Posted February 4, 2010