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WHITNEY'S TEPID BIENNIAL

Sleet spattered over VIPs queuing outside for the opening of the Whitney Biennial on February 23rd. We suffered in silence, in darkness, our conversations drowned by the monastic groaning of an outdoor installation that cast an eerie blue hue. Dumpling trucks prowled and rogue cameramen interviewed some on a scrap of red carpet. We inched along as the storm intensified, sentries sifting us into various purgatories.

Once inside, past menacing squads of security officers and Blackberry-wielding event planners, we were rewarded with heat, light, DJed electronica, crowds, food, wine and, eventually, art. We began our tallying for our respective cost-benefit analyses: was it worth the wait?

The Biennial spans three floors—more when counting "Collecting Biennials", a nearly year-long show of permanent-collection works by artists featured in Biennials past, in celebration of the show’s 75th year. Francesco Bonami, this year’s co-curator, broke it down for us: floor four is “spectacle”, three is “video” (the first Biennial to devote an entire floor to the medium) and two is “creepy”. We are meant to choose our own path, but the most convenient approach is to take the elevator to the fourth floor and walk down.  read more »

THE FEED: MAR 10TH

What we're reading:

A demolition of Hank Paulson's memoir

A critic huffs that Paulson sounds tough but was in fact all too weak (New Republic)

RIP: The novel

A book that defends plagiarism, champions faked memoirs and declares fiction dead has the literary world up in arms (Salon)

Variety's "economic reality"

The trade paper fires its two top critics, moving to freelance reviews (Los Angeles Times)

Merce Cunningham's final bow

The late choreographer's dance company embarks on a final tour before disbanding (Wall Street Journal)

Today's quote:

"[T]his poor sap of a show feels as eager to be walloped as a clown in a carnival dunking booth."

~ Ben Brantley on "Love Never Dies", Andrew Lloyd Webber's sequal to "The Phantom of the Opera", "Same Phantom, different spirit" (New York Times)

(Via The Economist)

Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

FRITZ LANG'S HAUNTING PRESCIENCE

"There can be no understanding between the hand and the brain unless the heart acts as mediator," declares Maria to her underground followers in "Metropolis". When Fritz Lang's apocalyptic silent film premiered in Berlin in 1927, it was the most expensive German film ever made. It was also a commercial and critical flop. Paramount Pictures swiftly acquired the film, trimming its length and simplifying its plot to appeal to an American market. It didn't work: the film bombed in America, too, and the original cut was presumed to be lost forever.

In the meantime, Lang's stylish vision of a grim future has become a cult relic, fascinating cineastes and inspiring directors such as Ridley Scott and Stanley Kubrick. Now, over 80 years later, the film recently enjoyed another world premiere, again in Berlin—this time as the director's cut.

Set in the year of 2026, "Metropolis" features lowly, expendable labourers toiling in polluted darkness to support the wealthy few. Lang's imagery is bizarre and haunting, full of grinding machinery, a mad scientist and a fembot villain. It also boasts a plot full of weird gaps and confusing transitions. In 2008 a previously unknown copy of "Metropolis" was found in a museum archive in Buenos Aires, complete with missing scenes. This "sensational discovery", according to Rainer Rother, the head of the Berlin film museum Deutsche Kinematik, has filled in some of the more mystifying parts of the story. Smaller characters are fleshed out; bigger characters are better motivated.  read more »

THE FEED: MAR 8TH

Today's links:

Extraordinary intelligence may not be genetic (Salon)

The problem with a new biography of Nina Simone is the woman herself (Washington Times)

Is a "Best Actress" award sexist? No (Los Angeles Times)

It's time for Russian writers to engage with the country's dodgy past (New York Times)

Today's quote:

"Well, the time has come."

~ Barbara Streisand, presenting the best director Oscar to Katherine Bigelow, the first woman to win; in Roger Ebert's Oscar round-up "No Pain for 'Hurt Locker,' Bigelow" (Chicago Sun-Times)

(Via The Economist)

Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

THE Q&A: JOHN SUSSEX, AUTHOR, TRADER

Scene: ground floor of the Royal Exchange, London, 1983, 8:30 am. The bell sounds, prompting a roar from hundreds of men wearing orange, red and blue jackets, shouting orders for all manner of financial contracts. Phones ring, clerks scribble instructions from clients and rush into the pits shouting the order and dealer's name. By noon, thousands of trades have been made; millions of dollars have been won or lost.

When outsiders observed the London Futures Exchange (LIFFE) from the balcony above, they likened the scene to a gladiator's pit or a bullring. It was a roiling, sweating, shouting and laughing manifestation of global capitalism, the market made flesh. All eyes—hundreds of them—were glued to the ticking movements of prices on the screen above the floor. Nicknamed "Maggie's boys", these traders thrived in Margaret Thatcher's England, a time when a certain rough-and-tumble entrepreneurial spirit challenged the City’s elitist status quo. They are the subject of "Day One Trader", John Sussex’s colourful book about life in the pits of the exchange in the 1980s and 1990s, before electronic trading put these men out of business. A former trader himself, Sussex was on the floor when LIFFE started in 1982, and continued on 20 years later, when the exchange was sold to Euronext and the open outcry method gave way to computerised trading. The result is a somewhat wistful account (with help from Joe Morgan, a journalist) about an era and a group of men who now seem anachronistic. On March 1st Frankfurt's stock exchange—Germany's largest—announced it would also end its traditional floor trading and move to an electronic system.  read more »

THE FEED: MAR 5TH

Today's links:

Nostalgia for bookshelves, already (Globe and Mail)

Not even an Oscar boosts box-office sales for documentaries and foreign films (Los Angeles Times)

Ostrich eggs used in stone-age communication (Discovery News)

Know the name St Clair McKelway (New York Times Book Review)

Today's quote:

"Surrealism isn't surreal anymore. It doesn't shock or jolt. It isn't confusing or upsetting. If anything, the works of Surrealism have taken on a quaint charm. This would surely have annoyed its practitioners."

~ Morgan Meis, "Say 'Fromage!': Photography's surprising impact on the Surrealists" (Smart Set)

(Via The Economist)

Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

GO EAST, YOUNG WOMAN

When reading Elif Batuman’s "The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them", her debut book of essays, it’s easy to feel as though you are witnessing a love affair. “Half understanding” is how she describes her infatuation with Russian literature. She adores the way reading Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, et al, involves oscillating between visceral resonance and terrified confusion. The result is an intellectual thrill—both for her and her readers.

Batuman’s “fascination with Russianness” began casually. As a child, a first-generation Turkish-American in New Jersey, she found herself bewildered by the eccentric mannerisms of her Russian piano teacher. Mystification becomes bewitchment after she discovers an old copy of "Anna Karenina" as a teenager at her grandmother’s apartment in Ankara.

“How had any human being ever managed to write something simultaneously so big and so small—so serious and so light—so strange and so natural?” What Batuman loved about the novel is what she would later love about Russian literature in general: these seemingly irreconcilable paradoxes. For her "Anna Karenina" is “a prefect book, with an otherworldly perfection; unthinkable, monolithic, occupying a supercharged grey zone between nature and culture.” Indeed, the book's contrast echo Russia itself, that sprawling country peppered with weird little villages.  read more »

THE FEED: MAR 4TH

Today's links:

When children's books go gay (New Republic)

Public-service ads that rely on shame don't work (Ad Age)

The rise of the sombre musical (New York Times)

Ryszard Kapuscinski was a great story-teller, but how much was fiction? (Guardian)

Today's quote:

"We all of us change and develop as we pass into adulthood and beyond, and there is no reason to suppose that a child who murders should be exempt from this inevitability."

~ Brian Masters, "Jon Venables is no longer the guilty boy who killed James Bulger" (Telegraph)

(Via The Economist)

Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com

ART, ILLUSION AND MAGIC

Every image is essentially an illusion—a representation of a thing, never the thing itself. For many artists the illusion is itself the art. From early trompe l’oeil paintings to Juan Munoz's close-up photographs of sleight-of-hand card tricks, artists have long shown an affinity for the ploys of grandstanding stage magicians.

"Magic Show", a newly published catalogue to accompany a travelling exhibition of the same name, explores the relationship between art and magic. Written by Jonathan Allen and Sally O'Reilly, who co-curated the show for London's Hayward Gallery, the book discerns the connection between "lowbrow" trickery and loftier manipulations.

Many of the 24 contemporary artists featured (in both the show and the book) borrow directly from iconic magic tricks. Sinta Werner's "Disjunction" plays on the idea of a disappearing act, but in this case it is the viewer who vanishes; the site-specific installation creates the effect of approaching a mirror without a reflection. Susan Hiller's "Homage to Yves Klein" is a more upbeat take on his rather dark photo-montage, "Leap into the Void" (1960). The result is a charming play on the trick of levitation.  read more »

THE FEED: MAR 2ND

Today's links:

Boys read as much as girls, just simpler books (Independent)

Chile's earthquake may have shortened days on earth (Space.com)

How much should an e-book cost? (New York Times)

The healing power of music (Los Angeles Times)

Today's quote:

"Traditionally people say you have to study the bad films to know how good films are made. But I think watching a bad movie is a qualitatively different experience than watching a good movie. I think we enjoy bad films more intensively than we enjoy good ones."

~ Lance Duerfahrd in Rex Huppke's "Finding treasure in trash films" (Chicago Tribune)

(Via The Economist)

Picture credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com