Last night Christie’s hammered an impressive $31.7 million across 33 contemporary works in a charity auction organized by Leonardo DiCaprio. Thirteen new artist records were set, with many works doubling their pre-sale high estimates. The night had a total high estimate of just $18 million and most of the proceeds from the auction, titled the Read More

Occasionally, there is an almost uncanny parallel between a player and her role. The journey that actress Cicely Tyson is on at the moment—returning to Broadway after an intermission of three decades—is not so different from the one that her character, Carrie Watts, is attempting in The Trip to Bountiful—getting back to the nourishing roots from which she sprang. Read More

There was once a time—and 1949, when Clifford Odets’s The Big Knife premiered on Broadway, seems to have been that time—when an angry and politically inclined writer could meaningfully point out that Hollywood is both corrupt and corrupting, that movie stars make entertainment and not art, and that studio bosses are craven businessmen. In 2013, however, these notions are truisms, and that six-decade disconnect leaves Mr. Odets’s noir-tinged moralistic melodrama, which opened last night in a Roundabout Theatre Company production at the American Airlines Theatre, as empty as the once-idealistic matinee idol at its center. Read More

Being from the worst state in America (Connecticut), I’ve always struggled to understand the way that a New Yorker is supposed to relate to his or her geographic background. Some people seem to feel embarrassed about their home states the way I do, but others seem to have nice memories. You watch a college basketball game with these sorts of people (they’re often from the Midwest) in a bar and wonder what it must be like not to have to apologize every time someone asks you where you’re from. You also have to wonder if there isn’t a different kind of pride involved, the kind associated with having gotten out. Read More

Lawrence Weiner met Kathryn Bigelow at a party at Gordon Matta-Clark’s house in Soho in the early 1970s, when she was around 22. She was, in the words of a boyfriend from that time, “the most beautiful woman on God’s green Earth,” and Mr. Weiner, well, he was 10 years older. He was also already an artist of some note, and though he’d seen Ms. Bigelow around, he’d never spoken with her. He thought they might work together.
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Lawrence Wright’s new book on Scientology, Going Clear (Knopf, 448 pp., $28.95), was spun out of his 2011 story for The New Yorker about director Paul Haggis’s break with the church. Two magazine fact-checkers worked on the story full-time for four to six months of its yearlong inception, and close to publication they were joined by three more. Their first message to the church, verifying facts about its practices, the life of L. Ron Hubbard and the church’s current leader, David Miscavige, contained 971 questions. Peter Canby, head of the magazine’s fact-checking department, said it was the most “difficult and complicated” story he’s ever worked on in his 19 years at The New Yorker. Second place, he said, went to another piece by Mr. Wright, a profile of Ayman al-Zawahiri that came out in 2002, “when we probably knew more about al-Zawahiri than the CIA did.” Read More

A teacher at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop once asked his student Denis Johnson what he’d been reading in his spare time. “I only ever read one book,” he responded, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. Slackers love Denis Johnson and his cast of degenerates, so this Spicoli-style answer feels appropriate in tone. It’s also spot-on in content, since Volcano anticipates the author’s central theme. Like Lowry’s alcoholic protagonist, Mr. Johnson’s books circle around the idea that there is theological, extra-biblical knowledge to be gained from the embrace of chaos and waste. Take Bill Houston from Mr. Johnson’s first novel, Angels, who turns his lighter upside down and says, “The gas wants to go up, but then it has to go down before it can go up.” The lighter explodes in his hand, which punctuates an aside that feels right out of Lowry’s Gnostic book. Not to say that anyone has ever accused Denis Johnson of playing by someone else’s rules. Read More

Consider, for a moment, the appeal to be found in the Nazi assassination. The glee with which we enjoy the death of a Nazi goes far beyond the fact that it’s guilt-free, justified cruelty because they’re so evil—though, as Stieg Larrson’s torture scenes taught us, that’s certainly part of it. Nazi murder conjures not just grim satisfaction but a sense of elation, of “righteousness”-—the kind found in the Bible but also the kind found on a skate park in the 1990s. Read More