As the Fall Arts season gears up, it’s possible to forget what it’s really about amidst the excitement of new shows, discoveries and controversies. This issue of CityArts surveys the season’s landscape, including Roulette’s jazz hub in Brooklyn, a Balanchine revival in Manhattan and the lingering, puzzling national success of The Help. These are compass points where audiences use art to understand their place in the larger culture.
We’re not simply aesthetes, but are trying to make sense of our feelings. That’s what links Robert Schwartz’s art to Stephen King’s persistent denial of artistry (misusing TCM same as his judgmental former perch at a weakly entertainment magazine). This week’s CityArts finds the right connections to correct the fallacies that arise in the cultural tumult.
On the cover: The Grimaces (Les grimaces), from the series Recueil de Grimaces (Collection of Grimaces) Lithograph, lithographed by Delpech, 13 1/8 x 10 in. (33.3 x 25.4 cm) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1959
Emma Lockridge brings journalistic shrewdness and personal passion to scrutinizing The Help, a cultural embarrassment to America’s Civil Rights history—and present. The feel-good white supremacy of The Help continues to gain traction. Just three years after a plebiscite where America indulged “post-racial” fantasies, it’s like a snowball in an avalanche: the bigger The Help gets, the lower and faster we descend. I had sought a bigger picture in my own New York Press review, but Lockridge deals with the rhetoric of condescension that has grown around its fabrications and misconceptions. The Help phenomenon has gotten worse, but Lockridge gets it right.
As arts journalism informs and critiques, it also has to correct. And that correction has lots to do with recognizing the amount of cultural gate-keeping that sets the agenda of any arts season. It can be found in the Chicago jazz influence at Roulette, as well as in the new Pop Art of “Ode to the Bouncer”—an uncanny depiction of the velvet rope aspect of cultural life.
Sometimes even adventurous culture-seekers face limited choices. Warner Bros.’ new Blu-Ray version of Citizen Kane is a welcome refurbishing, but the package’s real lure is the bonus disc of Orson Welles’ magnificent The Magnificent Ambersons which, alas, is only available at a certain web store. Fortunately, Henry Jaglom’s egalitarian Eating is revived on DVD, a 20-year anniversary that needs—and deserves—the scrupulous critique it receives in these pages.
Readers should jump to www.CityArtsNYC.com and enjoy an exclusive CityArts FORUM where critics Gregory Solman and John Demetry join me in assessing the recent Straw Dogs remake as a moment signifying the state of art appreciation: Is Peckinpah’s unnerving original Art or Pop? Does remake mania lead to critical complaisance or collusion?
About the cover: One of the season’s highlights is Infinite Jest at the Metropolitan Museum, a show on the history of caricature from the 15th century to the present. Bouilly’s humorous/cautionary “Grimaces” graces our cover because it holds a mirror up to what every contemporary art lover feels in the cultural hubbub—it’s how honest viewers will no doubt respond to Money Pitt—or is it Brad Ball? Art allows us to see through hype and see ourselves in others.
