One of the world’s most successful theater managers quotes the astronomical sum required to mount a Broadway musical and then puffs contemplatively on his pipe. “Unless you hang on to the big sources of funds—the record companies, the movie people—you’re in terrible trouble. You need the fat cats, but the way this year has gone I don’t know how much longer they’re going to be around,” he says. “What worries me is the audience—the unions have been outrageous for years, but we’ve lost the in-between audience: we’ve lost the young people and we’ve been losing them for a long time.”
It’s not the most recent Broadway season that so worried this manager, the late Max Allentuck, but that of 1967-68, the one chronicled by William Goldman in his classic book The Season. (more…)
By the East River in Queens, a rainstorm shrouded the view of New York City in a pale mist. The prolific artist Matthew Barney recently staged a non-public performance event here, in his new warehouse studio along the river. On the gate to his studio, a sign warned visitors of a secretive performance art event, which would include dangerous live animals and controversial content. The sign, the electric static of rain against pavement and the drum-beat on my umbrella set a mood of mystery before the show.
Famous for his enigmatic film series “The Cremaster Cycle”‑-which includes mythological goat creatures, plastic sculptures and a copious amount of Vaseline—Barney has also partnered with the elfin and otherworldly Icelandic pop star Bjork. Drawing Restraint 9, Bjork and Barney’s recent film, features the couple on a Japanese whaling ship as they undergo a metamorphosis into whales. (more…)
How do painters create feeling and expression from inanimate objects—mere paint and canvas? We tend to think of such animating magic in masks from Africa or Papua New Guinea, donned by shamanic figures in rituals and dances. But to paraphrase one of my art professors from undergraduate school: Even while looking at a genuinely moving Rembrandt painting, in the end, you’re just looking at colored dirt.
Maybe the key to seeing art, and indeed becoming an artist, lays hidden in childhood. Educational psychologists have shown that young children go through a developmental stage of animism. In their eyes, inanimate objects seem alive. Think of a time when you genuinely wondered if the man in the moon was real, and felt a hushed thrill watching the animated broomsticks in Disney’s Fantasia. (more…)
With acid-free paper, glass and wood frames, art lasts. When art doesn’t preserve itself, it’s usually a cautionary tale. Consider Leonardo’s experimental and ultimately ruinous paint recipe for the Battle of Anghiari—his lost and oft-lamented mural. But when do artists create pieces that aren’t meant to last? In the United States, only arcane examples come immediately to mind, such as the sculpture of Theodore Roosevelt at the steamy 1904 World’s Fair, made entirely out of butter. And there’s performance art, too; an artist once played a violin on a New York City street corner, wearing ice skates on melting blocks of ice. (more…)
Who says the glut of channels, media outlets and the good old Interweb are making our society more fragmented? United with millions of my countrymen, I dutifully flip on Fox every Tuesday and Wednesday night and spend an hour (or two) cringing at that ubiquitous Show of Shows, “American Idol.” Idol has been talked to death, but one of my favorite analyses of the auditions is the idea that each can be enjoyed as individual pieces of performance art. (more…)
