The Radiant City Achille Bonito Oliva The interest shown by art in the city and its ever more complex development has been one of themain themes of the 20th century. It was toward the end of the eighties thatartists began to pay particular attention to urban space, seen above all asa disjointed landscape, into which […]

Odyssey Of A Cockroach Yoko Ono Twentieth Centurywas a century in which human experiment in cruelty reached its height. In othercenturies, we still had an excuse to kill each other either for self-defenseor for our survival. In the twentieth century, we as the human race were wiseenough to not have to be cruel. Still, the […]

Barb�s, Paris, France. David Bellos Behind the “Garedu Nord”, north railway station you go up to the « Place du Tertre», at Montmartre, which is for painters, musicians, and visual artistsa beloved hill shelter. Django Reinhart and many other jazz musicians used toplay in tiny cafés in the forties and the fifties and they tamed […]

“Jump” Deshant Paul Imagine this: youare young, you are intelligent, and you are gorgeous. Not too hard, is it? Nowimagine you have a cause worth fighting for. This is a little more difficult,no? Now imagine you have a place to go where there are other young, intelligent,beautiful people talking about the same concerns and fighting […]

“Put Me Down With People” Kim Carpenter Mention famouswomen photographers of the early and mid twentieth century, and most frequentlynames such as Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott and Margaret Bourke-White cometo mind. Yet one of the most prolific and talented photojournalists of that generationbarely registers with most people – even those who have a passion […]

Staged Rave: Batsheva Dance Company’s Anaphaza Lori Ortiz Ohad Naharin’s1993 Anaphaza is a frenetically paced birthday party celebrating the ordinaryaudience member. Naharin, choreographer, chose Anaphaza for the festival becauseit is a festive dance. In rehearsal, as in Jewish custom after the death of a loved one, mirrors are covered to avert the gaze from the […]

Danced Paintings: The Rite of Spring/Folding Lori Ortiz  Several largegestural abstractions on canvas hang in the lobby of the LaGuardia concert hall.The calligraphic action paintings were created — and danced — by Shen-Weiwith a wide brush in his studio, to Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. The blackstrokes are almost calligraphic notations of the movement of his […]

Ballett Frankfurt: Order, Chaos & Evolution L.P. Streitfeld  The prolongedstanding ovation resounding through the Brooklyn Academy of Music Howard GilmanOpera House on Tuesday, the final opening night for Ballett Frankfurt in NewYork, was a tribute to the man who challenged all artistic expression by hisdaring. William Forsythe succeeded in stripping movement down to the fundamentals– […]

Threads of Consciousness: Kelly Heaton’s Live Pelt@ Ronald Feldman Fine Art Anitra Haendel  Kelly Heatondescribes her multi-media installation Live Pelt as a documentary of contemporaryAmerican culture, tracking our progression through new media with the scent oftimes past.” Fascinated by theAmerican obsession for the Tickle-Me-Elmo doll, she investigates as a scientist(with a Masters from MIT and […]

Turning Point: Toward A Second Modernism Carla Subrizi  The potentialfor a second Modernism emerges through the way recent art both destroys and rethinksart of the first Modernism. The concepts of Charles Baudelaire and later WalterBenjamin were the soil into which the 20th century laid its roots. Contradictionand intuition regarding identity (individual and social), history, and […]