Darned if it didn't come down to a tie.Half the people I met yesterday along the parade route (all of them blocking the view) said Super Tuesday's vote was the most important event of the day. The other half, also blocking the view, said no, the Super Bowl/Eli/Strahan/ Tyree/Go Giants/Oh-my-God-it's-the-Vince Lombardi trophy/18–1!/Super Parade was clearly the bigger deal.
The Ghanain-born sculptor El Anatsui was at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Monday morning to install his sculptural work, “Between Earth and Heaven,” in the museum’s African galleries. The Met acquired the piece in 2006, and it will be the centerpiece of an exhibition, beginning in September, of classical African textiles and contemporary artwork inspired by them.
Out & About Goes to the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute Gala
Oscar de la Renta's gowns are often in the spotlight at New York galas, but rarely is the designer himself. An exception is the Queen Sofia Spanish Institute fund-raiser. As chairman of the institute, Mr. de la Renta presided this year over an elegant affair honoring Penelope Cruz and President Clinton (whom Mr. de la Renta considers a good friend).
In this program, Out & About columnist Amanda Gordon recaps the funny and insightful remarks of all three of this powerful personalities -- including Mr. de la Renta's indication of which presidential candidate he expects to win in 2008. Fittingly, the Queen of Spain gets the final word.
A Modest Proposal
Where do you go these days to find simple, basic, non-skanky clothing for preteen and teen girls? Well, if you live in New York, look no further than the custom-made Courtney Vaughan line. Created by two Upper East Side mothers who were tired of constantly coming across whorish outfits while shopping with their daughters for clothes, they decided to take matters into their own hands and bring back the classic Upper East Side ladies look for young girls.
Instead of sending your girls to school looking like they should be attending some sort of pole dancing class, there is the option to send them looking like a modern version of the 1950s old-fashioned school girl. This comes, however, at a New York price.
Contractors working to develop a $17 million triplex in a historic TriBeCa building have brought to light a forgotten work by the artist Keith Haring.
The triplex, in the American Thread Building, served as an art exhibition space in 1979, when Haring painted a piece of the ceiling and wall with a pattern of black-and-white line figures and designs. As the years passed and the space became a restaurant and then a dusty storage area, the painting was forgotten.
On December 13th, a 500-pound numeral-8 sign made its way through the Manhattan subway system to Times Square, where it will anchor the 2008 sign that illuminates at the stroke of midnight on January 1. The sign's journey started at 9:30 a.m. on the no. 6 train in the Bronx, transferred to the N/R line at 59th Street, and arrived just after 11 a.m. in Times Square.
Return of a Classic
A sleeker, more uptown version of the 2nd Avenue Deli had its first family-and-friends lunch, and is on track to open to the public on Monday December 17th in Murray Hill.
Go on an outer borough cultural adventure. Long Island City is blessed with a dozen cultural institutions, of which you can visit several in a day. Start at the Socrates Sculpture Park, which sculptor Mark di Suvero founded to give artists a place to build large-scale, site-specific sculpture. Check out the Noguchi Museum, which holds several hundred of Isamu Noguchi’s works. The Fisher Landau Center for Art displays the private collection of Emily Fisher Landau, including works by Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, and Agnes Martin. Finish your day at P.S. 1, enjoying the sunset from James Turrell’s Skyspace. www.LICarts.org
Glass Blowing
The glass masters at OneSixtyGlass in Williamsburg teach you how to make your own holiday ornaments. The Sun’s video crew watches a class blow, sculpt, and temper ornaments and vases.
The Nutcracker at New York City Ballet
Tchaikovsky's ballet music for "The Nutcracker" is in the unusual position of being both overplayed and underappreciated. The composer extracted eight numbers from the score and incorporated them into "The Nutcracker Suite"; the most famous of those portions are often abusively employed in television commercials, movies, and, worse yet, cell phone ringtones. As a result, it is not unusual for the well-exposed ear to perceive this music as juvenile, even trite. But listening to the complete score can counter that.
In this exclusive video, New York City Ballet's conductor, Fayçal Karoui, and pianist, Cameron Grant, explain why Tchaikovsky's score is challenging and innovative. The video includes a backstage visit during a rehearsal of New York City Ballet's orchestra, as well as performance footage.
The artist Kara Walker has been celebrated for works that tackle the issue of racism and racial oppression in surprising, and almost always uncomfortable, ways. Her retrospective, "Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love," which runs at the Whitney Museum of American Art until February 3, includes many of her most disturbing images, like black babies being skewered by swords, or a shadow play of a lynched man receiving oral sex from a pickaninny.
Walker's supporters -- and she has many powerful ones -- say that she is using her own imagination, and her wicked sense of humor, to stake a claim of ownership on painful historical territory, and to reveal racial stereotypes for the primitive fantasies that they are. But because Walker has appropriated stereotypes, and shown what her critics call "negative" images of African-Americans, her work has been swept up in a larger debate within the African-American community about how to represent themselves, both among themselves and to a white audience. One African-American artist who is critical of Walker argues that her work has been embraced by the white art establishment because she deals with the subject of racial identity in a way that is kinky and titillating.
But shouldn't art raise difficult questions, and push our buttons? Watch this video to see what questions Walker's art provokes for you.
WARNING:This video contains graphic racial and sexual imagery that viewers may find disturbing or offensive. Parental discretion is advised.
The Art Scene on the Lower East Side
The geographical center of the New York art world is always moving. In the 1980s and early 1990s, the hub of the gallery scene was in Soho. In the late 1990s, as Soho was taken over by Banana Republics and Armani Exchanges, the scene shifted uptown to Chelsea.
Today, with real estate values in Chelsea rising sharply, more galleries are staking out a place on the Lower East Side. The new New Museum of Contemporary Art, which will open December 1 on Houston and the Bowery, provides an anchor for the burgeoning scene, and a growing number of trendy hotels, bars, and restaurants make what was once a gritty neighborhood freshly chic.
Damien Hirst's Shark at the Met
This fall, the Metropolitan Museum of Art will present one of the most arresting works of art by the British artist Damien Hirst: "The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living." Originally created in 1991, the piece consists of a preserved shark in a tank of formaldehyde. But the shark that will appear at the Met is the second version of this work: The first began to decompose within the tank. Mr. Hirst then recreated the work with a second shark, a 13-foot tiger shark preserved professionally for the future.
Mr. Hirst's shark — on a three-year loan from its owner, Steven A. Cohen — raises question about death and life, but its history also poses issues about the permanence of art. Can a work be so easily reproduced? And if so, what happens to its value?
