Lee Rosenbaum, who blogs under the name Culturegrrl, has an interesting post about her experience last weekend at a symposium of museum professionals. During a question period she asked MoMA Director Glenn Lowry about the fund financed by a few MoMA trustees that quietly paid him several million dollars in addition to his salary over a …
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How to Fix the Oscars (Yeah, Right)
The premise of this post is flawed. Because it’s pretty clear that the Academy doesn’t want to fix the Oscars, isn’t it? It wants them to run for three hours and 52 minutes. It wants them to be dull and self-indulgent. And it wants you to shut up and sit there and remember how much you love the movies, dammit, before rushing out the next …
Playing Hooky
Or is it hookie? Either way, I have today off — my magazine has some strange ideas about when to celebrate President’s Day weekend. I had thought of doing a brief blogpost anyway about my visit yesterday to preview the Armory Show at Pier 94 on the West Side of Manhattan, one of seven — count ’em, seven — art fairs going on …
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Dead Tree Alert: Yep, She's Mainstream
In the print edition of Time, my Culture Complex column is on America’s love affair, or at least its like affair, with lesbian talk-show hosts. Is it a landmark, or entirely unremarkable, that Ellen DeGeneres is uncontroversially hosting the biggest mass-media event besides the Super Bowl? Or is it a landmark because it’s so …
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When You Love Someone, and Nielsen Doesn't Love Them Back
UPN’s Gary & Mike
In the Tom-Sawyer, I’ll-let-you-whitewash-my-fence-if-you-pay-me-a-dollar spirit of modern business, here’s another post lifted straight from an idea in the Comments, where filmex identifies him/herself as a fan of short-lived series Significant Others, The Lyon’s Den, That Was Then and Related. I watch TV for a living, …
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Lostwatch: Jack's on Vacation, and So Am I
SPECIAL LOSTWATCH NOTE: Since I’m still not officially on the company clock, I’m going to keep this brief. You want detailed analysis, you’ll need to pay a special premium fee. Put a quarter in the slot on your computer, and the Internet will send it to me.
* A bit of a blah, going-nowhere episode, presumably meant to set up a …
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I Don't Wanna Hurt Anymore: The Great American Idol Song-Retirement List
This year American Idol is holding its first songwriting contest, to choose new songs for the finalists. But what American Idol really needs is a competition among the old songs. Some of them need to be voted off. Last night, Mrs. Tuned In and I brainstormed the beginnings of an American Idol Retirement List–overused, battered warhorses …
Andy Warhol: 8/6/28 – 2/22/87
It was twenty years ago today — apologies to the Beatles — that Andy Warhol died in his sleep of a heart attack following gall bladder surgery. Taking his cues from the readymades of Marcel Duchamp, Warhol’s chief intuition was that art could do more than merely describe and satirize the banality of the 20th century. It could embody …
The Rape of the Sabine Women
Eve Sussman’s 80-minute video The Rape of the Sabine Women has its New York premiere tonight. Three years ago Sussman had everybody’s favorite piece at an otherwise negligible Whitney Biennial, 89 Seconds at Alcazar, a kind of “making of” video for the Velazquez canvas Las Meninas. For 12 murmurous minutes, we spy on members of the …
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Cramming 30 Seconds of Comedy into a Half Hour
Finally caught up with The 1/2 Hour News Hour, Fox News’ experiment in conservative political comedy produced by Joel Surnow, executive producer of laff riot 24. And while I wasn’t surprised to see that the show was as limp as the YouTube leaked clips suggested, I was surprised that it was as dated as most of it was. I mean, jokes about …
Brand New Dia?
The Dia Art Foundation has finally chosen a new director. He’s Jeffrey Weiss, head of the department of modern and contemporary art at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The appointment comes not a moment too soon. The Dia, which operates the immense Dia:Beacon museum on the Hudson River north of New York City and …
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Heroeswatch: Creature of Light, Creature of Darkness
Still on vacation, but I was watching Heroes and had to tell this to someone: the bit with the guy killing the grass radiating around him in a concentric circle? Totally ripped off from Carnivale, no? (Look around the 7:00 mark on that clip.) Granted, it doesn’t seem like the grim-looking dude in question is planning on healing anyone, …
Makes You Wanna Holler, Throw Up Both Your Hands
A couple of oddments on a holiday weekend.
The British paper The Guardian has a piece about the 1994 theft of Edvard Munch’s The Scream from the Munch Museum in Oslo. It’s somewhat overlong but fascinating all the same for it’s two main points.
To begin with, the painting may have been stolen not for its own sake, but to draw off …