“My mom told me this story – or was it a dream?” It makes sense that it might take another painter to make a masterly, even painterly film about a painter. In both of these scenes from the 1996 film, director Julian Schnabel conveys an idiosyncratic ingenuousness in Jeffrey Wright‘s Jean-Michel Basquiat that mixes with […]
Politics and Art
Vladimir Nabokov did not like the novel of ideas. Artists often have their idiosyncratic dislikes, contrary expressions of the unique aesthetic vision that drives their own work. Particularly, Nabokov did not like the work of those monuments of great-idea novels, Dostoyevsky and Mann, though there is no reason his distaste should have excluded the novels […]
Making it Modern
“Art is a private thing, the artist makes it for himself; a comprehensible work is the product of a journalist.” Tristan Tzara, “Dada Manifesto,” March 23, 1918 “Literature is news that stays news.” Ezra Pound, ABC of Reading (1934) Serge Diaghilev, at the composer’s studio, on hearing the first few minutes of Igor Stravinsky’s The […]
Christopher Al-Aswad Prize
Chris Al-Aswad was many things, writer, artist, editor, and his own kind of community organizer, as a builder of community through the generosity of his spirit and personality, through social media, and through the extraordinary online journal that is his legacy. When he died just weeks ago at the profoundly sad age of 31, the […]
The Holocaust Revisited
Reports Haaretz, Australian Jewish artist Jane Korman filmed her three children and her father, 89-year-old Holocaust survivor Adolk, in the video clip “I Will Survive: Dancing Auschwitz.” Originally released in December 2009, the video has been the source of some controversy. Dancing at Auschwitz and other memorialized sites of the Holocaust? How profane. But it […]