Category: AJBlogs

People regularly complain that art criticism displays an off-putting insider-y tone, complete with jargon. But that’s not what I am about to talk about here.

Of course, it’s pure coincidence that the royal pregnancy of the Duchess of Sussex (you may know her as Meghan Markle) was announced only a little before the curtain went up on Nina Raine’s new play, Stories, at the National Theatre. But the news couldn’t be more apt.

Jon De Lucia Octet + Ted Brown, Live At The Drawing Room (Gut String Records)

Banksy’s stealth video of the bidding on Girl with Balloon at Sotheby’s and the sales job that preceded it adds yet another layer of satire to a subversive intervention that has a more serious subtext — a critique of self-sabotaging auction houses that have damaged their credibility as a transparent public marketplace where buyers can feel reasonably confident that they are paying fair market value, equitably arrived at, on a level playing field.

When your life is a perplexity — because your friends are needy-bossy, your cute boys aren’t quite right, your choices are urgent but confused — the last thing you need is balloons. Specifically, huge silver balloons bumping along behind you and reminding you how old you are.

Rightly or wrongly, I’ve come to think of everything that’s occurred since 9/11 as part of “the recent past.” Those events that predate the coming of the twenty-first century, on the other hand, all seem to me to have taken place “a long time ago.” What inspired this train of thought, strangely enough, was the announcement the other day of the bankruptcy of Sears, Roebuck.

Bruno Råberg Trio, Tailwind (Red Piano Records)

Hungry beyond myself, I come to a cartoon field of wet, glossy globes. Leaping into mud, I get on my knees and lean over, biting and choking to swallow one down. The way nightmares work, I see the lettuces, run, bend and chew — again and again. Then I wake up, blinking and faint.

Is a curtain – that fabric lodged in the fabric of the building – a prop? Usually, no; but Vicki Mortimer’s design for Wise Children – adapted from Angela Carter’s deliciously rorty final novel – includes mobile pictures of stage curtains of various sizes, from toy-theatre miniature to human-height-plus. Identical in all but scale, they present the very quintessence of curtain.

Michael Stephans, David Liebman, Marc Copland, Drew Gress: Quartette Oblique (Sunnyside)