newcritics

From U2 to the Wooster Group to the current Met Opera production of Doctor Atomic, performers have tried to integrate media technology into the theatrical experience. Somehow that collision between the immediacy of theater with looming electronic images and sounds never quite pays off. I recently saw a reworking of Samuel Beckett for the digital [...]

If Eleanor Grace Miller’s oil-on-board still life paintings of fabric and solid objects were photographs, the camera would have to be suspended in perpendicular alignment from the ceiling - and the lens would have to stay open for a long, long time. So dark and rich are Miller’s colors, that an almost surreal sense of [...]

I have struck a city - a real city - and they call it Chicago. . . . I urgently desire never to see it again. It is inhabited by savages.
Rudyard Kipling, 1891
Chicago is unique. It is the only completely corrupt city in America.
Charles Merriam, unsuccessful mayoral candidate in 1911
I think that’s how [...]

It’s been a week of certifiable madness.
Stock market insanity; bank and company failures on an epic scale; the dollar amount of 700 billion said with a straight face.
And now the maddening reality of the loss of Paul Newman, who embodied the sea change of generational sensibility that is rocking Don Draper’s world.
The gang at Sterling [...]

With a crowd of family in tow in a sea of bustling fine art tourism, I took in the astounding Joseph Mallord William Turner retrospective at the Met last week, jostling through the headphone-wearers to gaze at a few of the finer works at some small length. Turner was an artist of empire, a [...]