I penned the bulk of this review on the back of conversations with friends when we watched the film after it came to Hulu in the summer of 2023. But I sat on it, convinced that no one in the broader public had seen Chevalier — or ever would.
That paintings are to be “looked at” seems hardly worth saying, until you go to the Museum of Modern Art and find that very few of its six-million- visitors-a-year are looking at anything, or — God forbid you should pause in front of something — you get “moved along” by the guards, who may's well be muttering “nothing to see here” while they do it, like cops at a crime scene waving gawkers on.
“I’m not fit to be a mother. There’s something else I’d have to do first — to change myself from a doll to a real human being.” With these words, Nora Helmer (Sarah Wharton) leaves her husband Torvald (Stephen Dexter) at the end of Royston Coppeneger’s new translation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House (2024).
That paintings are to be “looked at” seems hardly worth saying, until you go to the Museum of Modern Art and find that very few of its six-million- visitors-a-year are looking at anything, or — God forbid you should pause in front of something — you get “moved along” by the guards, who may's well be muttering “nothing to see here” while they do it, like cops at a crime scene waving gawkers on.
The composer La Monte Young remarked that if he doesn't transport his listeners to heaven, he's not doing his job. How many artists today work by such ambitious standards, let alone do their job? What do critics then do when artists go on a disorganized anti-art strike?
There’s something pathetic about contemporary attempts to paint the present as an opportunity for art. Too late! If all it takes to “change” art is a change in the American president, there’s not much there to change. This is indeed an opportunity, but it is a shallow opportunity. If change might so easily be had, why was this opportunity not posed in 2020? Better yet, 2016?
I penned the bulk of this review on the back of conversations with friends when we watched the film after it came to Hulu in the summer of 2023. But I sat on it, convinced that no one in the broader public had seen Chevalier — or ever would.
“I’m not fit to be a mother. There’s something else I’d have to do first — to change myself from a doll to a real human being.” With these words, Nora Helmer (Sarah Wharton) leaves her husband Torvald (Stephen Dexter) at the end of Royston Coppeneger’s new translation of Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll House (2024).
Often, you'll hear a painter mutter enviously while looking at a painting something along the lines of ”Damn. He just did whatever the hell he wanted.” Variations of this phrase were doubtlessly uttered many times over the last month throughout the adjoining galleries of David Zwirner’s 19th Street location, where Raoul de Keyser’s paintings hang on the walls, their apparent haphazardness inoffensively contrasting with the sky-lit gallery space.
Bret Schneider delves into everything from Indian ragas to Bach’s recreation of the mind with composer and pianist Michael Harrison.
Bret Schneider speaks with composer Katrina Krimsky about her career spanning half a century.
Politically, melancholia may be more destructive than idealism, but aesthetically, doesn’t melancholia, as a kind of negative idealism, seem almost natural?
Victor Cova introduces a 1941 exchange between Claude Lévi-Strauss and André Breton.
Gilberto Perez’s commentary on history as seen through the lens of the filmmaker duo Straub-Huillet.
“It’s the stark-open when / the sky disappears into the lake without aid”
Bret Schneider delves into everything from Indian ragas to Bach’s recreation of the mind with composer and pianist Michael Harrison.
A vision of the grotesque, our morbid fascination with violence, and the aestheticization of war…
Failure of failures. Gluck and Vika’s adventure comes to an end…for now!
Gluck turns a corner and encounters a challenge he’d never anticipated, revealing the true scale of his conflict. Will he give up…or find new strength?
Breaking out of jail is something of a specialty for Gluck. Finding his way around an unfamiliar city isn’t hard either. What does Gluck struggle with? I’m glad you asked!
“Film is, for me, an art of composition.”