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Vandal in a Red Armchair
Something has been pestering me about the news coverage of Uriel Landeros, the alleged “artist†who last year defaced Picasso’s Woman in a Red Armchair at The Menil Collection. I’d forgotten about him until last week, when Whitney Radley covered his guilty plea for Culturemap. She wrote an excellent brief story, probably what I would…
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A Town Without Critics
Many years ago in Cambridge, I had the pleasure of meeting the esteemed former New York Times dance critic Anna Kisselgoff. The lecture she’d delivered that night at Harvard was so inspiring that I decided I was going to become a critic as well. In a hopelessly naïve gesture, I went up to her after…
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à la recherche d’une musique perdue
Every so often, a pianist comes along who changes my life. This happened in D.C., when I listened to Peter Serkin juxtapose Beethoven and Stefan Wolpe. It happened one night in a faded Victorian living room in Hartford, when Edmund Niemann played John Adams’ Phrygian Gates, only a few years after the piece had premiered in San Francisco. It…
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Looking Up in Texas
“Looking up suggests hope, and hope has no significance on stage except as a function of narrative.†Choreographer Deborah Hay in Houston.