August 2011
20 posts
9 tags
I bought the hype for “Watch the Throne,” the much-publicized album by Jay-Z and Kanye West. I mean, I loved the hype. I ran to the “Watch the Throne” pop-up store in SoHo, although by the time I got there, two days after the opening, it was already over. The custom-desecrated Maybach from the “Otis” video was gone. All that was left inside was a...
7 tags
There’s a small exhibit of photographs at Peter Blum from atomic bomb tests the United States conducted in the 1940’s and 1950’s. Only one photograph captures the low, geometric mushroom shape we’re used to seeing. Instead the clouds here evoke, dreamily, a flying saucer, a jellyfish, a foam, a flower, a head of cauliflower. Some are slender plumes, as high as 700...
9 tags
People who hover about the fashion industry — writers, buyers, and hangers-on — tend to be larger-than-life characters, for whom drawing attention to themselves is part of the game. The runway shows and seasonal trends are merely backdrops for their own fluttery, fashionable selves. Andre Leon Talley, Polly Mellon, and Diana Vreeland all fit the bill. For a long time I thought of...
7 tags
As it is with life, it is with museums. Running from one important exhibit to the next I stumbled upon something infinitely more engaging. In a first floor hallway, stretched between gift stalls, a temporary installation of modern artworks that take their inspiration from African masks. There are the predictable pieces — like Man Ray’s “Noire et Blanche” — and...
10 tags
I saw U2 twice, once in high school when they were touring for “The Unforgettable Fire,” and then again a few years ago at Madison Square Garden, when they were touring for “How to Dismantle an Atomic Bomb.” In between I did not pay attention. Then last weekend, while out with high school friends at an Irish bar, I spotted a U2 poster on the wall and it sent me back,...
6 tags
Ten years after the World Trade Center (WTC) attacks, we’re still waiting to see what the site will be. The city has done some powerful PR to make up for the sluggish construction. There’s a glossy website, WTCProgress, and detailed previews (here and here) of the memorial, which is scheduled to open on September 11. And the twelve-foot-high scaffolding around the main blocks...
7 tags
There are painters whose work lies on the surface (like Vermeer), and painters whose work lies in the subject (like Rembrandt). I can’t figure out if Franz Hals is the former or the latter. Walking into the Franz Hals exhibit at the Met, aptly called “Style and Substance,” the brushwork is what struck me first. There’s a freedom in it and an understanding, almost...
7 tags
In 1992 the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) unrolled a project called “Poetry in Motion,” and started slipping placards with poems in between the advertising panels that line subway cars. It’s always a nice surprise to find oneself, standing in a rush hour car, facing a scrap of Robert Frost instead of an ad for storage space or teeth whitening, especially if the...
8 tags
What’s going on? Our train stations look like shopping malls, and our art museums look like office lobbies. The new glassy wing for American art at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Boston, by the great English architect Norman Foster, which opened last year, is rendered in the kind of blandly handsome corporate architecture that’s become de rigeur for museums who want to tart...
8 tags
Walking down the most rarified stretch of Madison Avenue last night, between 79th and 68th Streets, I caught sight of these shoes on a small, spinning platform in the window at Christian Louboutin and stopped in my tracks. Amid storefronts peddling paintings, antique furniture, designer gowns, jewelry, and other massively expensive stuff, this pair had a hot, supernatural glow.
The Lady Peeps,...
3 tags
A few years ago I saw a Broadway revival of “Sunday in the Park with George,” and the first act, set inside the painting, was the most magical act of theater I’ve ever seen. So when the second act, set in contemporary London, started up, I wanted to raise my hand and shout, “Put me back in the first act!” It’s akin to how I felt rereading the great American...
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I have a lower-than-average tolerance for art films, particularly foreign ones. With very few exceptions, I cannot sit back and enjoy the black and white masterworks of directors like Godard, Bergman and Satyajit Ray. I appreciate the formal beauty, the thematic depths, and the emotional clarities, but I just can’t get involved in the goings-on. So I’m surprised that I fell so...
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The American photographer Phyllis Galembo is especially interested in costumes. She’s traveled through West Africa, Brazil and the Caribbean to document people dressed for ceremonies and celebrations. And she collects vintage American Halloween costumes. Her new book, “Maske,” surveys work from the past twenty-five years. At first glance the color photographs fall somewhere...
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The New York Times used their hallowed Op Ed page on Sunday to endorse the new Apple Store planned for the mezzanine in Grand Central Station. Some have been concerned about the crowds, and about locating such a brazenly commercial endeavor in the grand old station. In fact the Station is already terribly crowded, and already filled with shops, including Duane Reade, Starbucks, and an...
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A crucial element of good product design is not letting the design get in the way. Look at Karim Rashid’s designs — they’re stunning formally, but so idiosyncratic and expressive, so “Karim,” that it’s unlikely they’d find a comfortable place in your home. The best product design is egoless, and the best-designed products, however precious, fall right...
6 tags
Is a great subject all that it takes to make a great portrait? That’s what I wonder after seeing the Malick Sidibe show at Jack Shanmain, which closes today. The exhibit ranges from small formal portraits to larger, documentary photographs by the celebrated Malian photographer. The real stunners are the studio portraits of young men and women. They’re not to commemorate any...
6 tags
The keffiyeh might be the perfect summertime scarf, large, lightweight and light-colored. I love mine, purchased at Camden Market for two quid, and carry it with me through the week. It’s easy to forget that the scarf is part of the traditional Arab headware for men and sometimes associated, negatively, with Yasser Arafat and the PLO. Balenciaga made a high fashion version in 2007, with...
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Just before the explosion and shootings in Oslo, I went to see “North by New York: New Scandinavian Art” at Scandinavia House. I went with immense curiosity, wanting to know more about what this part of the world was like, to round out what I’d imagined from watching Ingmar Bergman and reading Henning Mankell. But the exhibit didn’t really congeal — the paintings...
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Nicholas de Monchaux, an architect and academic who’s written a book on the Apollo spacesuits, wrote a bittersweet farewell to the American space program in the Times. He sees it as the inevitable end to an arm of the industrial-military complex that’s outserved its purpose. But he’s nostalgic about the Apollo missions which, although pointedly political, embodied genuine...
5 tags
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) is once again playing with their graphics. The agency is testing updated platform signs that list the stops along each subway route. The previous graphic was an 11x17 black and white sheet that looked as if it had been designed and printed at an MTA worker’s cubicle. The new ones are finer graphically but unnecessary. What confuses...
