Category: AJBlogs

While Banksy’s prank has become the talk of the art world, there’s no consensus about what to make of it. People’s interpretations of the deeper significance (or lack thereof) of Banksy’s provocation are colored by how they regard the perpetrator, the art market in general and the auction market in particular.

What would classical music be like, after it’s reborn as a contemporary art? When it involves people far more diverse than what we see now? Here’s part one of an answer.

The Metropolitan Museum has just announced that its next Costume Institute extravaganza will be Camp: Notes on Fashion, May 9-Sept. 8, 2019. (Rest in Peace, Susan Sontag.) But Cher, with a show about to open on Broadway, doesn’t seem to be involved, and how can the Costume Institute have a show like this with none of the gowns Bob Mackie designed for her?

Last time I shared some thoughts about the status of community engagement in the nonprofit arts industry. Today I want to offer a few observations about the needs of our field with respect to community engagement.

Banksy’s elaborately orchestrated send-up of the auction market — contriving to have his $1.4-million Girl with Balloon self-mutilate at the fall of the hammer on Friday at Sotheby’s London — is the subversive gift that keeps on giving.

It was a weird evening at Carnegie Hall. Rarely have I listened to an orchestra with such discomfort. Never have I responded to a tenor with such gratitude.

I thought I knew what opera is. Well, the definition didn’t change. But The Mile-Long Opera, performed last week on New York’s High Line, changed the boundaries of opera, theater and artistic expression, and in ways that I couldn’t have imagined before taking the elevator up three floors and then trudging from 14th to 34th Street.

The private museum owned and operated by Mitchell and Emily Wei Rales opened to the public on Oct. 4, and in many ways it is an excellent example of a private museum. So what’s wrong? There is one problem that can be fixed – and maybe a fix is already in the works.

John Scofield, Combo 66 (Verve)
“I Can’t Dance,” guitarist Scofield proclaims by way of his new album’s opening track. It may be the rare listener, however, who won’t be moved by his quartet’s rhythmic blandishments.

None of us can control how we’re remembered, though we may try to live in ways that minimize the dancing on our graves. Yet a special place should be made for those who are memorialized not for how they lived, but how they died. Their daily voices, their quirks and smiles, their plain ambitions and ordinary loves risk being overwhelmed by the drama of their end.