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Vincent "Buddy" Cianci, via Recent links of note: The Humbling of the West
Jaap van Zweden. Image by Hans van der Woerd, courtesy IMG Artists. I have heard some people say, “Congrats, Jaap!” They are referring to Jaap van Zweden, who has just been named the next music director of the New York Philharmonic. I’m more inclined to say, “Congrats, Phil.”—you got Jaap. And you chose well. This decision reaffirms the Philharmonic’s commitment to being a serious orchestra. I don’t know what Jaap van Zweden brings you “politically.” But he is an excellent and potentially great conductor. On purely musical grounds, this is a wonderful choice. by James Panero
Timed to its annual conference, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters recently came to town and with it a "convergence of a dozen major performing arts industry forums and public festivals," which it called "January In NYC." These showcase performances ran the gamut from opera to chamber music to jazz. For those who follow dance, the Joyce Theater organized the first of what it promised would be an annual "American Dance Platform,” sponsored by the Harkness Foundation for Dance, this year curated by Paul King and Walter Jaffe of Portland's White Bird dance festival. The Critic's Notebook for January 25, 2016
Ernest Hemingway, Milan, 1918. Ernest Hemingway Photograph Collection. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum
Outsider art at the Metropolitan Pavilion by Andrew Shea
Andy Dixon, Sailing, 2015, acrylic, house paint, and oil pastel on canvas, 57 x 70 inches/Photo Courtesy: The Outsider Art Fair Running from Thursday through Sunday at the Metropolitan Pavilion on 18th Street, the 2016 Outsider Art Fair devotes 24,000 square feet of exhibition space to the uneducated, the mentally ill, and the provincial. The Fair’s press release uses Jean Dubuffet, the original champion of art brut, to draw its boundaries: “works produced by persons unscathed by artistic culture, where mimicry plays little or no part (contrary to the activities of intellectuals).”
João Glama Ströberle, Allegory of the 1755 Earthquake, 18th Century, Museu Nacional de Arte Antiga, Lisbon Recent links of note: The Enigma of Germany "Painting Tranquility," at Scandinavia House
Vilhelm Hammershøi, Amalienborg Palace Square, Copenhagen, 1896, Courtesy of the National Gallery of Denmark Artists betray their amateurishness with promiscuous use of color more than any other lapse of taste. The reasoning goes: I love color, I shall use all available in great intensities. In practice it ends in disaster. One might as well express one’s love of sex by trying to have it with everybody. The Critic's Notebook for January 19, 2016
Thornton Willis, The Congregation, 2012, Oil on canvas, 70 x 50 inches
by Walker Mimms
I recently wrote about a book that puts too much faith in the growing digitization of English departments (exempli gratia). And I’ve just finished another book that gets it right. A curious new volume by Brad Pasanek at the University of Virginia purports to be a study of eighteenth-century writers and poetry but is really about its own radical methodology, which, for better and worse, is probably what most scholarship will look like a hundred years from now.[1] by James Bowman
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About ArmaVirumque
( AHR-mah wih-ROOM-kweh)
In the Aeneid, the Roman poet Virgil sang of "arms and a man" (Arma virumque cano). Month in and month out, The New Criterion expounds with great clarity and wit on the art, culture, and political controversies of our times. With postings of reviews, essays, links, recs, and news, Armavirumque seeks to continue this mission in accordance with the timetable of the digital age.
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