Art

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Art, Museums/Galleries

Capering Calders

November 7, 2011

In a perfect world, I’d have lots of money, a non-stop supply of peanut M/M’s and a house with an Alexander Calder sculpture in every room. Long shots all, but the third is close enough to touch, at least until the 23rd of December: Calder 1941 focuses on a pivotal year in the life of…

Architecture, Art, History, Museums/Galleries, New York

Opening Doors, on Fifth Avenue and in Harlem

September 17, 2011

It’s the comeback of the year. Pardon my exaggeration, but the National Academy Museum has always held a fond place in my heart since I first visited in the mid 1990s. A block or so north of the Guggenheim, it’s one of those unsung jewels that, because of its size, tends to get overlooked on…

Art, Vespers

Lucian Freud, Searing Portraitist, 1922-2011

July 22, 2011

Art, Music, Vespers

Alexander Steinweiss, Inventor of the Album Cover 1917-2011

July 20, 2011

When Alexander Steinweiss pitched the idea of using original art on covers used to house vinyl records back in 1937, it revolutionized Columbia Records. Sales soared, and other companies followed suit. Album covers are all but dead now, miniaturized into jewel cases for CDs (whose death knell peals with the advent of MP3s), but some…

Art, Vespers

Cy Twombly 1928-2011

July 6, 2011

A modern master. Read Jerry Saltz’s consideration of this great artist here. RIP

Art, Current Affairs, Gay, My back pages, Politics, Travel, Writing

Another Page

July 2, 2011

Live from New York: this morning as a family of starlings chirped me into cognizance, I thought, the past is present again. Funny—it remembered the first day of my Woodstock residency almost a month ago, less evocative of home than a clue to the sheer volume and diversity of bird stock in that neck of…

Art, My back pages, Writing

Retrieving My Enthusiasms

June 7, 2011

It’s a chipmunk world, and I’m just living in it. At the Byrdcliffe Colony in Woodstock where I’m doing a month-long residency, the animals have it: with their rust-colored coats, those cute chipmunks ripple through the grass like glints of bright copper; cats (domestics named Celeste and Bob) strut across the lawn at night, their…

Art, Current Affairs, Museums/Galleries, My back pages, Photography, Short Cuts

Regular People Picking Pictures

May 21, 2011

The leaving is the hardest part. Call me complacent, or merely a homebody—whether departing for Rome, Beijing or even upstate New York, a mourning state comes over me whenever I must leave Manhattan. Maybe it’s always hard because I can’t forget that this was where my life truly began, which means that all its signposts—its…

Art, Gay, New York, Photography, Short Cuts

Twilight world from a distance, and up close

May 2, 2011

Alvin Baltrop took the long view. I relish his head-spinning panoramas of places that no longer exist; Baltrop’s camera captured the looming gilders inside abandoned hangars and the wide expanses of wooden piers along the Hudson in the West Village, ones that hadn’t seen a ship’s arrival in many a moon. But look closely, and…

Art, Gay, New York, Race, Short Cuts

At the Whitney and Artists Space, Art by Boys Who Like Boys

April 28, 2011

Glenn Ligon, Malcolm X Like Stonewall, the art revolution of the 1980s was a coming out as explosive as the times required. Many of the artists who broke out were gay: Mapplethorpe, David Wojnarowicz, Peter Hujur, Catherine Opie and Keith Haring marched into our consciousness with forceful works that expressed an era’s glittery…