Interviewer Paul Holdengräber sat with writer Elena Oumano for the first in what will be a regular feature: The CityArts Interview. As part of our pledge to bring thinking back to the arts, these interviews will feature prominent doers in the arts, akin to what Boomers might recall from the old Dewar’s Scotch ads—this time with the intention of letting readers see what it is that makes the arts scene tick. Holdengräber’s impressive, eclectic array of featured guests for “LIVE from the NYPL” connects reading to thinking; it sustains the remix of high and pop culture to which CityArts is dedicated.
Calling himself “the curator of public curiosity,” Holdengräber sets an example art watchers can applaud. This week, his NYPL guest is Harry Belafonte, subject of a six-degrees bio doc on HBO called Sing Your Song. This film reveals Belafonte at the center of major moments in the second half of the 20th century. He’s connected—through passion and principle—to Paul Robeson, Marlon Brando, Eleanor Roosevelt, Coretta Scott King and so many others who set the standard for ethical conduct and principled artistry.
Pauline Kael Photograph © JillKrementz, all rights reserved.
It’s an astonishing view of Belafonte as a non-Zelig, a man devoted to his ethnic, humane, social and artistic identity, who could truly walk with crowds and keep his virtue, talk with kings and not lose the common touch and still give an unforgettable performance in Robert Altman’s 1996 Kansas City.
While watching Belafonte walk the walk in Sing Your Song, I remembered Paul Newman’s tribute at the 1997 New York Film Critics Circle Awards gala when he presented an acting prize to Belafonte for Kansas City and recalled “When I saw Harry in Carmen Jones, I said ‘This is competition.’” In Sing Your Song, Belafonte shows us how to compete against injustice; he demonstrates how art and career should be used.
Elsewhere in this issue, Barbara Braathen’s look at Eva Hesse’s stunning work on exhibit at the Brooklyn Museum rescues an obscure visionary and brings her striking imagery and vibrant sculpture to our attention. Rescue is also part of Valerie Gladstone’s mission in her report on Paris Blues Revisited—the Jazz at Lincoln Center exhibit of a Romare Bearden and Albert Murray collaboration that corrected the 1961 Hollywood film Paris Blues (Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier, Joanne Woodward, Diahann Carroll and Louis Armstrong expatriating under Martin Ritt’s baton). Sometimes truth and beauty will out.
About the cover: In 1980, Jill Krementz photographed Pauline Kael’s return to the fold, holding forth in her New Yorker office. It reminds us how Kael’s influence in the seminal period of the ’70s American renaissance produced unending resentment among film literati, who lacked the intellectual confidence to respect her distinctive point of view. A vengeful Village Voice coterie has since supplanted the very memory of Kael’s preeminence, encouraging hipster nihilism in everything from reviewing style to film festival curatorship.
We are obliged to follow Kael’s best instincts and oppose, as she did, the herd mentality and overweening hype that ignores and overlooks the actual content of art. I’m OK with appreciating Kael’s writing as literature, but I cling to it as thinking.
