Art's Great Good Place? Warhol's Silver Factory and Its Legacy

By Jeffrey Patrick Colgan

Andy Warhol is a famous artist. With his platinum blonde wig, cosmetic surgery, and cool gaze resting atop impossibly high cheekbones, his visage alone is known by almost every American. So too his art, with its repetition, immediacy, bold splotches of non-gradated color, and mass-culture subject matter. For many outside of the art world he alone represents 20th Century visual art. Within the art world, and the adjacent fields of art history and the philosophy of art, the biography and artistic output of Warhol—endlessly examined and discussed as it is—primarily repeats the same few narratives.

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Andy Warhol—From A to B and Back Again, Whitney Museum of American Art
November 12th, 2018 - March 31st, 2019

Arts & Culture, Postwar New York, ReviewsGuest UserJanuary 24, 2019Comment

Walking Harlem: An Interview with Karen Taborn

Today on the blog, Kate Papacosma talks to Karen Taborn about the process of developing her book, Walking Harlem: The Ultimate Guide to the Cultural Capital of Black America.

Arts & Culture, Interviews, Manhattan, Race & EthnicityGuest UserJanuary 17, 2019Comment

Heidi Waleson's Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America

Reviewed by Lily Kass

Heidi Waleson’s Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in Americatakes us behind the scenes at a long-beloved, and recently resurrected, New York cultural institution. The New York City Opera was founded in 1944 when the New York City Council and Mayor Fiorello H. LaGuardia inaugurated the City Center of Music and Drama. As one of the center’s constituent performance ensembles, the opera company’s original mission was to bring opera to the people through affordable ticket prices and popular repertoire. Waleson recounts the company’s struggle to survive through the decades as views changed about the importance of opera, both in New York City and around the country. Readers of the book are made constantly aware that City Opera, even from the start, was only barely cheating death and that its demise was preordained.

Arts & Culture, Contemporary Era, Reviews, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserJanuary 3, 2019Comment

“The Work Is Never Done:” Judson Dance Theater Transforms MoMA

By Joanna Steinberg

In 1968, Village Voice critic Jill Johnston proclaimed that between 1962 and 1964 a “revolution” had occurred at Judson Memorial Church. With its exhibition Judson Dance Theater: The Work is Never Done, MoMA brings visitors into this seminal moment when a collective of choreographers and downtown artists across disciplines came together to create and show new works in non-commercial spaces, works that transformed the definitions of art and how we experience it. MoMA pushes the boundaries and conventions of the museum space as well, beginning the exhibition in the Atrium, where a video installation and a series of live performances take place daily, showing the work of preeminent choreographers from Judson Dance Theater: Yvonne Rainer, Deborah Hay, David Gordon, Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton, and Tricia Brown. As the subtitle suggests, “the work is never done.” The performances embody the idea that experimentation is ongoing, as is the interpretation by both artists and audiences who come together in the present moment.

Arts & Culture, Postwar New York, ReviewsGuest UserDecember 18, 2018Comment

Ninth Street Women

Reviewed by Marjorie Heins

Mary Gabriel's group biography of five leading women artists in the Abstract Expressionist movement — Lee Krasner, Elaine de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Joan Mitchell, and Helen Frankenthaler — weighs in at 722 pages (892 if you count endnotes and bibliography), yet leaves the reader (or at least, this reader) hungry for what is left out. Gabriel spends almost as much time recycling well-known stories about the men these five "Ab Ex" stars married, bedded, or hung out with, as it does on the women themselves. In the process, it pays scant attention to dozens of other female artists of the time.

Arts & Culture, Gender & Sexuality, Postwar New York, ReviewsGuest UserDecember 6, 2018Comment

Mrs. Maisel is Indeed Marvelous — Mostly

By Stephen R. Duncan

Arts & Culture, Manhattan, Postwar New York, ReviewsGuest UserDecember 4, 2018Comment

Cutting Up the City in Crisis: Gordon Matta-Clark and the Urban Commons

By Jeffrey Patrick Colgan and Jeffrey Escoffier

The traditional narrative of twentieth century urban living has often concerned itself only with the antipodal philosophies and practices of urban planner Robert Moses and critic Jane Jacobs. This binary conception of American urban life contrasted Moses’ radical projects that aimed to remake New York to suit the automobile with Jacobs’ admonishments that quality of life required small, organic neighborhoods of diverse inhabitants and independent businesses. These philosophies, however, were both time and space-specific. Moses’ vision of the ideal city was prompted by the ascent of the automobile and the crumbling infrastructure of immigrant, tenement neighborhoods; he acknowledged a fundamental change in the modes of production and consumption and sought to drastically reorient urban life accordingly. Jacobs’ ideal, alternatively, reacted against the raze and rebuild, top-down approach of Moses. Yet she depended upon historical continuity and assumed an element of permanence in the neighborhoods she studied and strove to protect.

Arts & Culture, Built Environment, Urban Planning, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserNovember 29, 2018Comment

New York: Art and Culture Capital of the Gilded Age

Today on Gotham, coordinating editor Katie Uva speaks to Margaret R. Laster and Chelsea Bruner, editors of New York: Art and Culture Capital of the Gilded Age.

Arts & Culture, Gilded Age, Interviews, ManhattanGuest UserNovember 27, 2018Comment

Relics of the Underground: The Afterlife of Cultural Spaces

By Jeffrey Patrick Colgan & Jeffrey Escoffier

In early 1974, members of the punk band Television spotted a newly reopened yet unavoidably dingy lower Bowery bar on their way home from rehearsal. Returning soon after, they approached the owner Hilly Krystal and asked if he would host performances by bands that were playing a different kind of rock music. After an initial four-week residency by Television, CBGB & OMFUG (Country, Bluegrass, Blues & Other Music for Uplifting Gormandizers) continued to host countless bands and fostered the emerging punk and No-Wave music scenes of the 1970s and 1980s. Even after its role in any identifiable and burgeoning music scene came to an end in the 1990s, it still hosted performances until its ultimate demise in 2006 — its final sendoff facilitated by Blondie and Patti Smith. By 2008 the former venue was occupied by clothing designer John Varvatos, who kept some of the graffiti, stickers, and concert posters as accents to the calculated ‘subversiveness’ of the items on sale.

Arts & Culture, Manhattan, Reviews, Urban Decline & Fiscal CrisisGuest UserNovember 8, 2018Comment

The Rise of Billy Rose: An Interview with Mark Cohen

Today on Gotham, editor Katie Uva interviews Mark Cohen, author of Not Bad for Delancey Street: The Rise of Billy Rose about the legendary New York City showman and his legacy.

Arts & Culture, Interviews, Postwar New York, Race & Ethnicity, Religion, Great Depression & New DealGuest UserOctober 25, 2018Comment