Category: AJBlogs

The pineapple icebucket in Home, I’m Darling; toothbrushes in Home; the doll’s house in Aristocrats; nothing in Pericles.

Allison Miller and Carmen Staaf, Science Fair (Sunnyside)

As part of a Wall Street Journal column, Terry Teachout considers what it means to have 3D reproductions of Van Gogh paintings in the mall.

Can we ever hear the real Rachmaninoff?

Wait, what? Yes: “The Met hopes to decamp from the Whitney Museum’s former flagship building in 2020. The Frick would become the new temporary tenant to 2023.”

In preparing for my recent interview with Max Hollein, the Metropolitan Museum’s tech-savvy new director, I decided to revisit the museum’s app, much ballyhooed four years ago, but disappointing when I recently applied it in the galleries. To my surprise, I discovered that the app’s been zapped.

This is the birthday of Monica Zetterlund (1937-2005). It may have been too long since you have seen the Swedish singer performing one of Bill Evans’ most beloved songs. We can help.

Rachmaninoff’s impromptu solo-piano rendering of his Symphonic Dances documents roaring cataracts of sound, massive chording, and pounding accents powered by a demonic thrust the likes of which no studio environment has ever fostered. Rachmaninoff’s humbling presence, re-encountered, is gigantic, cyclopean.

Here’s a typical example of a classical group’s description of the program it’s performing, alongside some (rough) equivalents from popular music (the arty branch of it), and what the former might learn from the latter.

A great number of Americans have “moved on.” Their lives are fine, and the Great Recession is just a bad, dimly recalled memory, like a really bad winter flu from years ago. But for a number of us, it was one of the defining events of our lives.