Archives for 2017

“In my spare times at Bath I’ve been reading Jane Austen and the more I read the more I admire and respect and do reverence. What are your views? When she looks straight at a man or a woman she is greater than those who were alive with her—by a whole head. Greater than Charles [Dickens]; greater than Walter [Scott]—with a more delicate hand and a keener scalpel.”

Rudyard Kipling, letter to C.R.L. Fletcher (April 10, 1915)

In this week’s “Sightings” column, which appeas in the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal, I take a look at Edward Albee’s art collection, which is being auctioned off next week. Here’s an excerpt.

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If art is important to you, then you’ll probably have succumbed at one time or another to the comforting illusion that good taste is a virtue. No such luck. Not only has it been proved that listening to Mozart doesn’t really make you smarter, but the history books are full of bad men to whom the fine arts were vitally important (Adolf Hitler loved the operas of Wagner) and great ones to whom they meant nothing (Franklin Roosevelt’s favorite song was “Home on the Range”).

In fact, genuine aesthetic taste isn’t a proxy for anything else, virtue least of all. In part it’s an expression of personality, but not a simple or obvious one, and it has a way of popping up in unexpected places. I recently read an airline-magazine interview with George W. Bush, who became an amateur artist after leaving the White House and who recently published “Portraits of Courage,” a folio of his paintings of U.S. veterans. “Now that you paint—and go to museums—who are you in awe of?” the interviewer asked. He immediately cited four modern artists, Lucian Freud, Edward Hopper, David Hockney and Fairfield Porter. Nobody focus-grouped that reply…

A few days after I read that interview, Sotheby’s announced that it is auctioning off a hundred-odd pieces from the art collection of Edward Albee. Unlike President Bush, the author of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” was well known for his love of modern art, and his success as a playwright allowed him to do something about it. Mr. Albee’s collection, which is currently on view in Manhattan and goes on the block Sept. 26, is expected to bring in between $8 million and $12 million, all of which will benefit the Edward F. Albee Foundation, which funds residencies for artists and writers. That’s a tidy sum for a man who wrote plays in which the American dream is portrayed as a snare and a delusion.

I’m not here, however, to tease Mr. Albee’s ghost (well, maybe just a little). I’m more interested in this question: What, if anything, can we learn about him from the art that he hung on his walls?…

One thing that’s clear is that the collection, like President Bush’s top-four list, reflects its owner’s taste, not that of a high-priced art consultant. Rather than “buying signatures” or hewing to the dictates of fashion, Mr. Albee collected artists who were respected but comparatively little known to the public at large….

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Read the whole thing here.

Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) in The Wall Street Journal when they opened. For more information, click on the title.

BROADWAY:
• Dear Evan Hansen (musical, PG-13, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Hamilton (musical, PG-13, Broadway transfer of off-Broadway production, all shows sold out last week, reviewed here)
• Prince of Broadway (musical revue, PG-13, many shows sold out last week, reviewed here)

IN NIAGARA-ON-THE-LAKE, ONTARIO:
• Dancing at Lughnasa (drama, G/PG-13, closes Oct. 15, reviewed here)
• The Madness of George III (drama, G/PG-13, closes Oct. 15, reviewed here)

IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:
• A View from the Bridge (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 22, reviewed here)

CLOSING SOON IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:
• Cyrano de Bergerac (verse drama, G/PG-13, closes Oct. 6, reviewed here)
• A Flea in Her Ear (farce, PG-13/R, closes Oct. 7, reviewed here)
• The Maids (drama, PG-13, closes Oct. 5, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN SPRING GREEN, WISCONSIN:
• Pericles, Prince of Tyre (Shakespeare, G/PG-13, closes Sept. 29, reviewed here)

CLOSING NEXT WEEK IN MADISON, N.J.:
• What the Butler Saw (farce, R, closes Oct. 1, reviewed here)

CLOSING WEDNESDAY IN EAST HADDAM, CONN.:
• Oklahoma! (musical, G/PG-13, reviewed here)

“In life, there is no end to getting well.”

Cary Grant (quoted in Becoming Cary Grant)

Dana Andrews appears as the guest on I’ve Got a Secret, originally telecast by CBS on June 4, 1958. Garry Moore is the host and the panelists are Bill Cullen, Jayne Meadows, Henry Morgan, and Betsy Palmer:

(This is the latest in a series of arts-related videos that appear in this space each Monday, Wednesday, and Friday)

“Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures.”

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths” (trans. Donald A. Yates)

From 2004:

I can’t count the hours I spent haunting big-city libraries as a young man. During the decade I spent working on The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken I had access to the closed stacks of the main branch of the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore, and I checked out books by the bagful.

Alas, I no longer go to Baltimore each week, nor do I have access to the stacks of a university library, and the branch of the New York Public Library located in my neighborhood is roughly the size of the one in Smalltown, U.S.A., on which I cut my teeth forty years ago. When I need information, I now look first to the Web, then to my personal library, which is small but choice. Should those alternatives fail to satisfy me, I walk two blocks to a very large Barnes & Noble and explore its shelves. If that doesn’t do it, I do without, or order a used copy of the book in question from amazon.com.

I wonder how common my experience is….

Read the whole thing here.

“The critics of each generation confine themselves to maintaining the direct opposite of the truths admitted by their predecessors.”

Marcel Proust, The Guermantes Way