Times may be tough for New York’s museums, but that isn’t stopping the Metropolitan Museum of Art from mounting a major loan exhibition later this year. On December 19, the museum opens “The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini,” a blockbuster that will include about 160 works from more than 40 museums around the world. Read More
The curious and often contentious relationship between artists and critics has a long, if not always noble, history. That’s as it should be. Friction between practice and opinion is inevitable. Sometimes it can shed light; often it prompts comedy, intentional and otherwise. The critic has been the target of some deliciously caustic works of art. Read More
What’s wrong with The Da Vinci Code can be summed up in one word: everything!
Catholics scream “Heresy!” Methodists yawn. Jews roll their eyes and pass the matzo. And assorted monks, nuns, priests and albinos threaten boycotts on behalf of everyone else. Meanwhile, there’s a much more important reason to avoid this noisy and ludicrous Read More
Stephin Merritt, in a Magnetic Fields publicity shot
Runt, the party for short men and the men who enjoy them, is observed on Wednesday nights in a low-ceilinged half-basement on East Fourteenth Street, between First and Second Avenues, not far from the firehouse and the bike shop. It is a project of the pop Read More
Why is it that, nowadays, neither representational painters nor their admiring connoisseurs any longer characterize art of this mimetic persuasion as an “imitation of nature”? From ancient times until the dawn of the modern era, this was the traditional way of discussing what’s now called “realist” or “figurative” or “representational” painting, drawing and sculpture. Yet Read More
It has long been known that even under the most draconian regimes of 20th-century totalitarian terror, certain intrepid souls succeeded against all odds in creating memorable works of art and literature. Exactly how such feats of artistic rebellion and realization could be achieved in such circumstances is to most of us, I think, beyond the Read More
I’ve been critical of the Roundabout Theatre Company of late-to put it mildly. It’s a pleasure to report how right they’ve got it this time, however, with a first-rate revival of Athol Fugard’s shattering elegy to bigotry and a young man’s coming of age, Master Harold … and the Boys.
The emotional impact of the Read More
It’s with high expectations-indeed, the highest-that we go to an exhibition of drawings by Leonardo da Vinci. And the exhibition that Carmen C. Bambach has organized at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Leonardo da Vinci: Master Draftsman certainly meets those expectations with the requisite inventory of marvels. We expect genius; Leonardo’s draftsmanship turns out Read More
As celebrities and other flimsy public figures have broadcast their opinions on the question of war with Iraq, wise policymakers and commentators generally respond with silence. With good reason-these self-absorbed, self-important faux experts tend to be willfully ignorant and astonishingly naïve. That they have a platform is laughable; that some Americans actually pay attention is Read More
Dining à la Groucho Marx
At an East Village Southern Italian
“This way, please.” The friendly young maître’d at Frank in the East Village was standing on the sidewalk and motioned me inside.
Not so fast. A red-faced waiter charged out the door, brandishing a plate of spaghetti. I jumped aside in the Read More
