London’s Barbican Center marks the 50th anniversary of James Bond—the longest running and most successful film franchise of …
Looking Around
Disney’s Fantastic Voyage
The kids are the go-to demographic on the Fantasy, the newest vessel in Disney’s fleet of floating theme parks
All Blogs Must Pass
“All blogs must pass away.”
Okay, apologies to the spirit of George Harrison for that one, but it sums up the purpose of today’s post — to lay “Looking Around” to rest.
Tim Burton at MoMA
The director Tim Burton doesn’t just make enchantingly loony movies like Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, Batman and The Nightmare Before Christmas. He also makes enchantingly loony paintings and drawings, which he’s been scribbling away at since his suitably alienated childhood in Burbank, California.
This week the Museum of Modern …
Toyo Ito in Berkeley — No Go
They tell us the Great Recession is in retreat, though it may not feel that way if you’re unemployed. Even if it is, on the way out the door it took down a project I was looking forward to. Earlier this week the University of California at Berkeley announced that it was giving up on its plan to build a new home for the Berkeley Art …
Jeanne-Claude: 1935-2009
We got news this morning of the death of Jeanne-Claude, the artist and creative partner of Christo. They are of course the husband-and-wife team who wrapped the Reichstag in Berlin, ran a vast curtain fence for miles across the northern California landscape and created the completely enchanting New York City project called The Gates. …
Raymond Carver: Another Kind of Minimalism
Actually, the writer Raymond Carver never cared for the word “Minimalism” as the way to describe his taut, tight-lipped short stories. But that was the term they came to be known by in the late 1970s and ’80s, when he was at the height of his influence in American fiction. In this week’s Time I took a detour from my art and architecture …
Bauhaus: The Movie
Okay, not the movie — but the podcast!
Mussorgsky’s “Pictures At An Exhibition” — Plus More Pictures
Last Friday, at the damp tail end of a very wet week in New York, I made it over to Alice Tully Hall to catch a collaboration between the Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes and the Berlin-based, South African artist Robin Rhode. Rhode is best known for short films and videos that owe an (acknowledged) debt to the low-tech animations …
The Bauhaus at MoMA
The Museum of Modern Art in New York has a big new show devoted to the Bauhaus, the great 20th-century forcing ground of modernism in architecture and design. So I reviewed it in the new issue of Time.
NuMu Boo Boo?
The New Museum in New York is getting spanked quite a bit lately for its upcoming show devoted to the contemporary art collection of one of its own trustees, the Greek billionaire Dakis Joannou.
A Talk With: Thom Mayne
Not long ago, in connection with a story I’ll be posting soon on Time.com, I had a conversation with Thom Mayne, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect who heads the Santa Monica-based firm Morphosis. This fall New York got its first building by Mayne, a really compelling project in the East Village that holds offices, laboratories and …
The Dia Comes Home to New York
The Dia Art Foundation is a unique thing, a non-profit that collects a limited roster of artists in depth, especially Minimalists and Conceptual artists, and gives them the kind of long term exhibition space their work requires. This can get tricky when you’re talking about something like Walter de Maria’s New York Earth Room, a big …