Blog

Goading Kakutani

A few years back , novelist Leslie Epstein tried to goad New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani into reviewing his book by buying tiny text ads in the Times (“YOO-HOO! MY CUTE KAKUTANI!-Leib Goldkorn is calling” read one). It didn’t work. Indeed, Kakutani got the paper to stop running them. So now Epstein has a new book out and this week he got word that Kakutani was reviewing it…

American Museums Admit Art Looting

“Some of America’s most celebrated institutions — including Harvard’s Peabody, The Field Museum in Chicago and the American Museum of Natural History in New York — are indicating for the first time in reports to the U.S. government that they were more involved in the looting of Native American burial grounds than they have previously admitted. Those institutions now are in the process of returning hundreds of thousands of artifacts and human remains to tribal groups around the country.”

Leni Riefenstahl’s Packed 101 Years

“Her most perceptive critics paint a picture of Miss Riefenstahl as a female Faust, who made a pact with Hitler in order to fulfill professional ambitions. So spectacularly did she use slow-motion photography and telephoto lenses, so dramatically did she wed inspirational music to inspirational image, that Miss Riefenstahl created the grammar of the sports movie, influencing the way TV sports events and movies such as Chariots of Fire were framed and shot.”

Me-Too-itis

Books seem to arrive in flocks these days. “Name any high-profile subject and you can pretty much bet that if one house is publishing a book on it, another house won’t be far behind. Much of the time, competing titles on the same topic appear within weeks of each other.”

Dia:Beacon – Mindless Optimism?

Hilton Kramer doesn’t like much about the new Dia:Beacon building (or the art inside). “Most of the art in the Dia:Beacon collection requires huge amounts of space. Yet notwithstanding the gargantuan quantities of art that Dia:Beacon easily accommodates, so vast are its exhibition spaces that the place itself strikes the visitor as sterile and forlorn. Visitors wander about its endless interior with vacant stares and silent lips—not so much looking at the art as looking for it, even when they are in its immediate physical presence. Sooner or later, they are found huddling together for succor around the abundant wall texts, which, although easily read, tend to be even more confounding than the objects and spaces they are meant to illuminate.”

The Censorship Of Space

Kyle Gann writes that music criticism has been reduced to shorthand that renders it toothless. “We critics are told that it’s up to us to defend classical music in the public marketplace – but the newspapers have taken away our tanks, bazookas, and machine guns and left us armed with garbage can lids and pea shooters. The space crunch is everywhere, in every publication. It used to be, when I’d write for the New York Times, they’d ask me one of the sweetest questions a writer can hear: ‘How many words do you need?’ No longer. Articles that would have once garnered 2000 or 2500 words now get half that. And according to what editors tell me, this is true across the board.”

The “Neo” Blues

Like most labels, the term “neo-Romantic” is problematic and inaccurate. “The problem with words beginning with the prefix “neo-” is that there is an implication that what it signifies is somehow a regression to something that has previously existed and is a reversion back to a something that had been discarded and was forgotten. Of course, most composers who have been categorized as “neo-romantics,” both those who accept and reject the term, do not view their work as a reactionary anachronism but rather as an appropriate up-to-date sound world that is more contemporary-sounding than the now older modernist tradition they have been deemed apostates from.”