Or is it fear of more flying? I promise to get off this topic after today, but in anticipation of a return flight tomorrow that will take off in bad weather, I found myself thinking more about something I blogged about yesterday, how rarely you find contemporary art that’s concerned with the mundane experience of flying and airports. …
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Whiteyz With Attitude
Pity the poor white person. Held back to a mere 99% of Senate seats and claiming only three of five American Idol crowns, nowhere are we more oppressed than in the hip-hop world, where we must be content with the occasional token like Vanilla Ice or Eminem, occasionally leavened by the self-effacing white minstrelsy of a Weird Al
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Fear of Flying
A cross country trip this weekend made me wonder why artists have done so little with the common experience of flying. I don’t just mean pictures with planes in them. Gerhard Richter, James Rosenquist and Roy Lichtenstein have all done those, though all of them used warplanes. I mean the banal stuff of civilian aviation, the airports, …
Deja Vu All Over Again
I enjoyed Lee Rosenbaum’s recent piece in the Wall Street Journal about Boston’s new Institute for Contemporary Art, the one designed by Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio. Rosenbaum draws a connection between the ICA’s cantilevered upper story, which has a room descending at an angle from its underside, and the not so different …
You Ought to be in Pictures
Lately I’ve been reading Pictures of Nothing, a collection of the six A.W. Mellon Lectures delivered in 2003 by the late Kirk Varnedoe, who spent 12 years as chief curator of painting and sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art. Varnedoe’s topic is abstraction, and he can be wonderfully acute and lucid. He’s fascinating on the subject of …
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Farewell to The O.C., Bitch*
The brilliant-for-a-while teen soap The O.C. is officially departing after four seasons in February. I’m sad that the show, better than Beverly Hills 90210 or Dawson’s Creek, didn’t manage to last as long as either. I’m also glad, as the show proved the rule that no high-school drama should last longer than it takes to get through high
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Steal This Sitcom
A funny thing happened to my pick for best new fall show of 2006. It, uh, didn’t air in fall 2006. The suits at ABC decided to hold The Knights of Prosperity until January. The network said it held the show to give a promising series a launch time amid less new competition, but you could see how they might have thought that the show was,
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New Year's Irresolution
Oh, did I mention I was going on vacation? I could have sworn I had put up a post mentioning that I was going to be gone last week. Apologies to everyone who counted on Tuned In as a refuge from your alcohol-fueled, resentment-filled, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf family holiday get-togethers.
Today Tuned In returns to its regular
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