Artdaily - The First Art Newspaper on the Net

He's music's Mr. Adjacent, connecting minimalism to disco
NEW YORK, NY.- For 45 years, Peter Gordon has held onto a reel-to-reel tape of a show he performed in 1979 at the Mudd Club in New York City with a trio called the Blue Horn File. Gordon, violinist Laurie Anderson and percussionist David Van Tieghem — a group of new music all-stars — did a short set with the playful and unshackled feel of cartoon music. It was one of only three shows the Blue Horn File played. Gordon, a saxophonist, composer and bandleader who has been a mainstay of downtown music for decades, has recorded for several different labels. But he decided to take a different path with these tapes: This week, he is releasing “The Blue Horn File at Mudd Club” as one of the first titles on Adjacent Records, his new digital-only label. “It eliminates the middleman,” he said. “With record companies, people second ... More

Michael Cuscuna, who unearthed hidden jazz gems, dies at 75
NEW YORK, NY.- Michael Cuscuna, who brought an artist’s level of devotion and a scientist’s attention to detail to the work of exhuming and producing archival jazz recordings — work that vastly expanded access to the buried treasures of American music’s past — died Saturday at his home in Stamford, Connecticut. He was 75. Singer and songwriter Billy Vera, a friend of more than 60 years, said the cause was complications of esophageal cancer. Cuscuna may have been the most prolific archival record producer in history. Starting in an era when midcentury jazz experienced a resurgence of interest, his name showed up in the fine print on more than 2,600 albums, most of them reissues, many of which included his painstaking liner notes. The Mosaic label, which he founded with music business veteran Charlie Lourie 41 years ago, has become ... More

'So Far From Ukraine': A princely dancer finds a home in Miami
MIAMI, FLA.- “Imagine you’ve been rushing through the forest for hours,” choreographer Alexei Ratmansky called out to Stanislav Olshanskyi as he ran across an airy ballet studio in Miami Beach. Olshanskyi, playing a prince, was searching for the woman he has been duped into betraying. “You are just now realizing the consequences of what you’ve done,” Ratmansky said. “How does it feel?” Outside, visible through large windows, people passed by, dressed for the beach. Inside, the willowy, delicate-featured Olshanskyi — a prince out of a fairy tale — gathered his thoughts and tried his entrance again, this time conveying the requisite urgency, verging on panic. It was a week before the opening of Miami City Ballet’s “Swan Lake,” which the company performs in a critically ac ... More

A very famous model stars in a very pixelated book of wigs
NEW YORK, NY.- Guido Palau was sitting in an airport lounge in Miami, on his way to New York. Kaia Gerber was sitting in a car in Los Angeles, on her way to the airport. “This is exactly what our life is like,” Palau said on their group call. “Story of our life,” Gerber echoed. Still, at the end of 2022, they found a day off to “play together,” Palau said. He made some wigs. Gerber modeled them. Palau and his assistants filmed her on their iPhones, then took screenshots from their videos. Those screenshots became images in Palau’s latest book, “Hidden Identities,” to be released May 4 by Idea. “We live in a world where so many of the images we’re seeing are high-definition and curated,” Gerber said — unlike the pixelated and blurry images of “Hidden Identities,” which Palau has described as banal and amateurish. ... More

Carrie Robbins, costume designer for dozens of Broadway shows, dies at 81
NEW YORK, NY.- Carrie Robbins, a meticulous and resourceful costume designer who worked on more than 30 Broadway shows from the 1960s to the 2000s, died April 12 in New York City. She was 81. Her death, at a hospital, was confirmed by Daniel Neiden, a friend, who said her health had declined after she fell and broke her hip in December. In 1972, when she was just 29 years old, Robbins began “emerging as one of the hottest costume designers in show business,” as syndicated fashion columnist Patricia Shelton put it, thanks to her work that year on the original Broadway production of “Grease,” six years before it was turned into a hit movie. Robbins was given a budget of only $4,000 (the equivalent of about $30,000 today). For the character Frenchy, she dyed a wig bright red using a Magic Marker and fashioned a pink ... More

'Orlando' review: A Virginia Woolf fantasy that plays with gender
NEW YORK, NY.- There’s a slight pause and a knowingly raised eyebrow — enough to provoke laughter from the audience — when the title character of “Orlando” begins to introduce himself with this line: “He — for there could be no doubt of his sex.” But the play is set in a universe in which there is, in fact, doubt. And this Orlando is played by protean writer and performer Taylor Mac, who delivers the line while cutting a resplendent androgynous figure in shiny red boots and white, vaguely Elizabethan garb. Sarah Ruhl’s play, in a revival that opened Sunday at Signature Theater, is an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s fantasy of the same title. Published in 1928, the book has traversed the decades as seemingly unscathed by time as its protagonist. When it starts, Orlando is a 16-year-old boy during Queen Elizabeth I’s reign. About ... More

John Adams' 'El Niño' arrives at the Met in lush glory
NEW YORK, NY.- On Tuesday night, the Metropolitan Opera continued to play a bit of catch-up with American composer John Adams. As a Minimalist of striking imagination and moral probity, Adams has developed a distinct musical style and point of view that have earned him a firm place in the pantheon of American art music over the past 40 years or so. His operas, though, didn’t make it to the Met stage until 2008, when “Doctor Atomic” had its East Coast premiere. “Nixon in China” followed in 2011 and “The Death of Klinghoffer” in 2014, decades after they were written. These are Adams’ so-called CNN operas, with subject matter ripped from headlines and history books. But “El Niño,” a hybrid opera-oratorio from 2000 that had its Met premiere on Tuesday, is a different animal. Created with the librettist and director Peter Sellars, ... More

A living Chinese artist bonds with a 19th-century French poet
NEW YORK, NY.- As a teenager, Chinese artist Tao Siqi was fascinated by the words of Charles Baudelaire, the French poet who was not exactly known for imagery of sweeping landscapes and cities in the rain. But it was not until a few years ago, when she reread his erotic and often bleak “Les Fleurs du Mal” (“The Flowers of Evil”), that she decided to translate his searing words onto canvas. Nine of those paintings will be on display at Frieze New York at Capsule Shanghai’s booth, more than likely turning heads with their almost fluorescent colors on canvases as large as 3 feet by 4 feet. “The first time I came across Baudelaire’s poetry was in middle school or high school, since my father had a copy of ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’ in our home,” Tao, 29, said in a recent video interview. “When I first started painting, I wasn’t inspired by his poems, ... More

A new 'Great Gatsby' leads with comedy and romance
NEW YORK, NY.- Jay Gatsby — self-made enigma, party host extraordinaire and talk of the summer season in West Egg, Long Island — doesn’t carry his insecurities lightly. The facade of his wealth-drenched life is a grand and precarious creation, and propping it up requires constant vigilance. His is new money, so he has to prove his worth to the snobberati. Thus his pathetic habit of showing that photo of himself in his Oxford days to people he has barely met. Or, more endearingly, his over-the-top insistence on glamming up the humble cottage of his neighbor, Nick Carraway, when the lost love of Gatsby’s life, the fabled Daisy Fay Buchanan, is coming over for tea. In the new musical “The Great Gatsby,” which opened Thursday night at the Broadway Theater, the grass outside the cottage is groomed, flowers are everywhere, and ... More

In 'Mother Play,' Paula Vogel unboxes a family story
NEW YORK, NY.- In the first scene of “Mother Play: A Play in Five Evictions,” Paula Vogel’s antic, mournful new drama, Martha, a character modeled on the playwright, offers a version of Ecclesiastes. “There is a season for packing,” Martha (Celia Keenan-Bolger) says as she slits open a cardboard box. “And a season for unpacking.” Vogel, 72, has spent the majority of her career unpacking. Her work is not strictly autobiographical, but as in the plays of Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee or Adrienne Kennedy, she has a canny way of rearranging the emotional furniture of her lived experience into tragicomedy. Here, at Broadway’s Helen Hayes Theater, that furniture includes a mother, Phyllis (Jessica Lange), and a brother, Carl (Jim Parsons), named for Vogel’s own family. The story begins in 1964 with the family moving into a basement apartment in a Washington, D.C., suburb; Carl is 1 ... More

How postwar Paris changed the expat artists
NEW YORK, NY.- Most people looking to make it as artists today are advised to follow a hyperprofessionalized path, beginning with enrollment at one of a select group of MFA programs. But as a new exhibition reminds us, it wasn’t always this way. “Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946-1962,” at the Grey Art Museum at New York University, celebrates the convivial, informal and often self-directed education of expatriates in the French capital after World War II. “Americans in Paris” inaugurates the university’s relocated and renamed art space; it has moved from Washington Square, where it was known as the Grey Art Gallery, several blocks east, to Cooper Square. The show devotes a lot of scholarly attention to a slice of art history — abstract painting in Western Europe in the 1950s and ’60s — that is not ... More