Copyright 2008 The New York Sun Thu, 25 Sep 2008 21:41:58 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss James Gardner :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/authors/James+Gardner istoll@nysun.com (Ira Stoll) webmaster@nysun.com en-us JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/redesigning-the-piazza-san-marco/84764/ Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Venice, Italy — Surely it will sound like sacrilege to propose that Venice's Piazza San Marco, the "drawing-room of Europe," as Napoleon famously called it, could stand improvement. But Americans abroad have never been known for their modesty, and it is in that spirit that I offer my services to the Most Serene Republic, with a suggestion that could have far-reaching urbanistic implications for its famous civic center. Before coming to Venice recently, I was in Rome, where I was struck by a... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/modular-modernism-reborn/86650/ Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Two weeks ago, I wrote in this column about 100 Park Ave., a 60-year-old building that has been splendidly reclad and fundamentally reconceived by the relatively little-known firm of Moed de Armas & Shannon. But the activities of the firm are even more extensive than I understood at the time. It turns out that this team has displayed equally exquisite judgment in recladding several other Midtown structures, and best of all, they have created an entirely new office tower from scratch, 510... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/bring-back-the-venetian-lollipops/86550/ Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST The reclad, reconfigured, and reconceived 2 Columbus Circle, formerly the Huntington Hartford Museum and now the Museum of Arts and Design, fully bears out the suspicions of its many detractors. The problem is not so much that the new design is bad, as that it is emphatically not good. Its entrenched mediocrity represents so thorough a depletion of the imaginative faculty that one wonders how it won the trustees' approval in the first place. The New Museum's new home on the Bowery, which opened... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/van-gogh-in-a-new-light/86079/ Thu, 18 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Vincent van Gogh was such a good painter that it is worth putting on a show of his work even when there is no particular reason to do so. A case in point: "Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night," which is set to open on Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art, with 23 paintings, 10 works on paper, and sundry illustrated letters in the artist's own hand. The show's stated subject, van Gogh's interest in nocturnal scenes, is a little less compelling than the curators at MoMA and at the Van Gogh Museum... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/rem-koolhaass-lou-costello-tower/85901/ Tue, 16 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST And it shall be known as the Peek-a-boo Building. That, at any rate, seems to be the consensus, in the initial print articles and on the Web, concerning the building that Rem Koolhaas has just designed at 23 E. 22nd St., renderings for which were officially made public last week. The reason for the odd moniker is the way this 22-story structure, configured in a stepped succession of cantilevered floor plates, seems to peer out sneakily from behind the back of the much taller One Madison Square... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/fantastical-form-in-tribeca-herzog-de-meurons-56/85827/ Mon, 15 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST At first glance, Herzog & de Meuron's 56 Leonard St. looks for all the world like the sort of high-concept, radical design that is often planned in New York and never built: In the renderings, its tower reads as a warped honeycomb bristling with dense clusters of windows and cantilevered balconies. It will not be this Swiss firm's first completed building in Manhattan. Last year saw the opening of their residential development at 40 Bond St., a very different affair from this latest project... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-park-avenue-tower-stands-corrected/85694/ Fri, 12 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Radiantly reborn, 100 Park Ave. presents lovers of architecture with a curious aesthetic conundrum. Is this sleek and gleaming tower a new building, or is it simply an old building reclad? In the most flatfooted and literal sense of the term, it is surely the latter, since it was built back in 1949 by the once eminent firm of Kahn & Jacobs, and so has been standing there in plain view for the past 60 years. But because this 36-story structure, rising over the ghost of the Murray Hill Hotel... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/taking-it-from-the-streets/85596/ Thu, 11 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST As we enter the last days of summer, life in the big city begins its seasonal retreat from the sidewalk to the interior spaces. That the Bronx Museum of the Arts should choose this moment to open a new exhibition, "Street Art, Street Life From the 1950s to Now," is, then, perhaps fitting. Curated by Lydia Yee, from London's Barbican Art Gallery, this exhibition casts a wide net, aspiring as it does to account for a variety of practices that differently engage the life of the street, often but... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/when-the-virtual-trumps-reality-the-prayer-book/85149/ Thu, 4 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Without meaning to do so, the Morgan Library has created a triumph of conceptual art: the smallest art exhibition in the world. "The Prayer Book of Claude de France," as the exhibition is called, consists of nothing other than "The Prayer Book of Claude de France." At 2 3/4 by 2 inches, the exhibition and the book are both so small that they can fit in the palm of your hand. That may not sound like much until you realize that this illuminated miniature contains 132 scenes from the lives of... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/at-150-central-park-is-a-perfectly-balanced/84957/ Tue, 2 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST This year, with surprisingly little fanfare, Central Park is celebrating its 150th birthday. Five years ago, there were fireworks and daylong festivities to mark the sesquicentennial of the city's decision, in 1853, to build a great urban park in the middle of Manhattan. But it was in 1858 that the municipality finally decided upon the so-called Greensward plan of Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, and it was in that year as well that the great work began. I know serious students of... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/weird-for-weirds-sake-momas-wunderkammer/84760/ Thu, 28 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST By reshuffling the extensive deck of its permanent collection, the Museum of Modern Art has come up with "Wunderkammer: A Century of Curiosities." The title of this show invokes those princely cabinets whose collections of corals, pearls, and two-headed calves were the original seedlings of the museum as we know it today. Curated by Sarah Suzuki, an assistant curator in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books, MoMA's new show contains 130 drawings, sculptures, multiples, photographs, and... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/hercules-hits-the-metropolitan/84340/ Thu, 21 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Pure fortuity has brought two artists named Cornelis into the same gallery of the Metropolitan Museum and into the same column of The New York Sun. They are Cornelis Cornelisz van Haarlem (Haarlem, 1562-1638) and Cornelis van Poelenburch (Utrecht, 1594-1667). "Hercules and Achelous" (1590), by the former, and "A Rocky Landscape with Nymphs and Satyrs near Ruins" (1630-35), by the latter, are now up at the Met on short-term loan. As such, these two works underscore a delightful, if unsung... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/new-york-vs-hong-kong-at-skyscraper-museum/83644/ Tue, 12 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST For many tourists, the first order of business on their maiden visit to Manhattan is to overcome a slight sense of disappointment. Rather than seeing the endless avenues of ultra-modern skyscrapers that they were promised, they are greeted by old-fashioned neighborhoods of unremarkable height, whose size and rhythms have more in common with the Old World than with that mechanized metropolis that haunted the dreams of the modernists. There is, however, one city, literally on the other side of... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/an-allegory-to-vindicate-arcimboldo/83326/ Thu, 7 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Giuseppe Arcimboldo painted many interesting works, but few really good ones. That is one of the reasons for which this 16th-century Lombard master is held in scant regard by the more discerning critics of Old Master painting. Another reason, to be frank, is that people who don't like painting often like Arcimboldo. Their affection is a consequence of the defining weirdness of his career — his fashioning of human portraits from such extravagant composites as fruits, books, timber, and eels. Nor... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/dramatic-beguiling/83161/ Tue, 5 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Three years ago, the Lucida was little more than a notion. Six months ago it was a mere skeleton, and now, fully fleshed out, it surveys the southeast corner of Lexington Avenue as one of the more notable residential structures to rise in Manhattan in some time. The Lucida is not like most of the residential buildings that have arisen in Manhattan in recent years. A massive undertaking that occupies fully half of the block that stretches between Lexington and Third avenues and between 86th and... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/oases-of-color/83047/ Fri, 1 Aug 2008 00:00:00 EST Some big gods appear in a small form in a new exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "Early Buddhist Manuscript Painting: The Palm-Leaf Tradition." Unlike contemporaneous Islamic art, which generally abhorred the depiction of any living thing, let alone a deity, the indigenous traditions of India, Nepal, and Tibet saw nothing at all amiss in placing their idols on a surface scarcely larger than a postage stamp. But Prince Hamlet once famously opined that "I could be bounded in a nutshell... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-fresh-view-of-vitruvius/82921/ Thu, 31 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Recently, a series of eight drawings, dating to the middle of the 16th century and illustrating the text of Vitruvius, came up for sale at a small auction house at Oxford. These were promptly purchased by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and are now on view in the galleries. The curators of the Met are confident, on the basis of drawing style and handwriting, that these works derive from the Sangallo circle, a dynasty of Florentine architects who also built elsewhere in Italy in the first half... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/neo-gothic-nobility/82796/ Tue, 29 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST More than six years after a five-alarm fire scarred much of its interior, the nave of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine has just reopened on Amsterdam Avenue and 112th Street, following a two-year, $16.5 million cleaning and renovation. The splendid restoration, unveiled even as work continues in other damaged areas of the church, raises an issue that, at this late date, is all too easy to ignore: the issue of ecclesiastical architecture. These days, most successful architectural... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/chaos-and-danger-in-architectural-design/82534/ Thu, 24 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST In the evolution of the 20th-century city, New York played a crucial role. Gotham haunted the imagination of everyone from John Dos Passos and H.G. Wells to Le Corbusier and the German Expressionist director Fritz Lang. A man-made colossus, it embodied in its concrete grid and in the tidal migrations of its pedestrians the very spirit and rhythm of the modern age. By now, that affinity is so well known as to seem platitudinous. Less well known is that, half a century later, with the dawn of... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/antiques/colors-that-last-forever/82464/ Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST This Friday, the Enamels Room at the Frick Collection will reopen to the public, after several months of refurbishing. Included among its bronzes, Limoges dishes, and paintings by Duccio, Piero della Francesca, and others will be an entirely new addition: a splendid majolica charger that once belonged to Baron Adolphe de Rothschild and that has now been donated to the museum by Dianne Modestini, in memory of her late husband, Mario. To an eminent degree, this work exhibits one of the great... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-switch-building-a-lower-east-side/82332/ Tue, 22 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Manhattan is a land of narcissists, or so it often seems, with each citizen hell-bent on winning the fullest measure of attention through his or her wardrobe and personal comportment. And so you might think that our architectural stock would exhibit a similar excess, a similar individualism at all costs. But in fact, more often than not, the borough of Manhattan has been defined by an ineradicable architectural conservatism and banality. Perhaps it is the grid plan itself, promulgated in 1811... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/an-architecture-show-thats-better-than-the-book/82046/ Thu, 17 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Most architectural exhibitions are not worth seeing. In general, they consist of little more than panels whose text and illustrations are already available in book form or on the Web. Which is also to say that they are typically text-heavy. And because text is best consumed by a reader sitting with a book in hand, there is often something laborious, even backbreaking, about having to consume an abstruse argument while standing for an hour or more in front of walls of diagrams, renderings, and... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/dark-tower-a-daring-design-over-madison-square/81865/ Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Though few people, if any, have seen a single rendering, there is palpable excitement in New York's architectural circles over a 22-story tower designed by Rem Koolhaas for One Madison Park, on the southeast corner of Madison Square Park. Given the buzz that has surrounded it in the press and on the Web, you would hardly know that another building in the same development is nearly completed and all of 50 stories tall. It is this tall, slender tower that has recently, and rather startlingly... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/jess-an-act-of-surrender-a-leap-of-faith/81566/ Thu, 10 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST What exactly Burgess Collins, known to the world simply as Jess, thought he was up to in his "Translations" series — those faithful appropriations of black-and-white images, mostly from the 19th century, that he transformed into thickly impastoed, full-color paintings — is difficult to say. The result, in any case, is a form of beauty as weird and memorable as any American artist has achieved in the past half-century. To appreciate these works, several of which are now on view at Tibor de Nagy... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/palladio-architectures-virgil/81373/ Tue, 8 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST Given the nearly total absence of fanfare, you could be excused for not knowing that this was the quincentenary of Andrea Palladio's birth. Generally it is a kind of condescension to treat the great cultural figures of the past as though, in some sense, they were, or needed to be, our contemporaries. And yet a respectable case could be made that, of all the architects who lived before the 20th century, few were as influential as Palladio (1508-80) or came closer, in the arc of their reputation... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/vermeers-afternoon-delights/81288/ Mon, 7 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST The notion of the painter of genius toiling away in needy anonymity may be a central myth of modernism, but it had precious little to do with the old masters. To a remarkable degree, the Italian artists whom Giorgio Vasari admired are the same artists we admire today, in nearly the same ranking and degree. And one could say as much for the French, Dutch, and Spanish schools. One of the rare exceptions to this rule is Johannes Vermeer of Delft (1632-75). Only in the middle of the 19th century... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/painting-for-eternity-pietre-dure-at-the-met/81182/ Thu, 3 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST There is nothing quite like those two little words, "decorative arts," to send all but the most committed museumgoers heading for the exit. Unless the commodity in question is jewelry whose knockoffs can be sold in the museum store, any attempt to entice viewers with largely anonymous heirlooms from the ancien regime is probably a fool's errand. To date, the Metropolitan Museum has had only one notable popular success in this regard, the gorgeous two-part tapestry show that occupied its... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/robert-sterns-brompton-is-pre-war-elegance-newly/80989/ Tue, 1 Jul 2008 00:00:00 EST The Brompton, which is approaching completion on the southeast corner of Third Avenue and 86th Street, may very well be a better building than its neighborhood deserves. If this is not the case, it is only because the area is getting decidedly better, thanks to this new arrival, designed by Robert Stern, and to the Lucida, also nearing completion one block west on Lexington Avenue. For the longest time (that is to say, living memory), 86th Street between Lexington Avenue and Second Avenue has... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/at-one-bryant-park-scale-changes-everything/80783/ Fri, 27 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST One of the biggest banks to open in Manhattan in many years will be the Bank of America flagship that is promised for the all but completed One Bryant Park, a massive skyscraper designed by the firm of Cook + Fox. The building will also be known as the Bank of America Tower, in honor of its foremost tenant. Already the offices of the bank have been installed in this pale, Deconstructivist tower, and though we are still some months away from the project's completion, it is sufficiently far along... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/revivifying-yales-brutalist-pile/80261/ Thu, 19 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST More than any other American building, the home of the Yale School of Architecture holds a special, numinous place in the hearts of architects throughout the world. Recently, in the final stages of its being overhauled, journalists and critics were taken on a hard-hat tour of the premises by the school's current dean, Robert A.M. Stern, and by Charles Gwathmey, who has designed its new annex. Paul Rudolph's imposing Art and Architecture Building is nothing less than the physical embodiment of... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/on-the-grid-again/79863/ Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST If anyone doubted the Museum of Modern Art's consummate excellence in fulfilling its mandate as custodian of the Modern movement, a new show in a new gallery, "Geo/Metric: Prints and Drawings from the Collection," attests to how wisely and how well its curators have chosen during the past eight decades. Just by rummaging in a few drawers, they have come up with a substantial narrative of the role of geometric abstraction over a span of very nearly 100 years, from the Synthetic Cubism of Picasso... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/tiepolo-at-the-met-like-father-sort-of-like-son/79816/ Thu, 12 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST 'Tiepolo," the title of a new exhibition in the Robert Lehman Wing of the Metropolitan Museum, is at once scrupulously accurate and entirely deceptive. For the show gives us two Tiepolos, Giambattista and Giandomenico, father and son, respectively, represented by about 65 drawings that belong to the Lehman Collection. But the distribution is hardly equitable. By my count, the son's contributions outnumber the father's by about two to one. And since the father was surely the greater draftsman as... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/stepping-up-at-the-metropolitan/79182/ Tue, 3 Jun 2008 00:00:00 EST This column is best read as an open letter to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, calling upon that august institution to drop everything and stop what it is doing. Anyone who has visited the museum in the past few weeks will have noticed that most of the steps leading up to the main entrance on Fifth Avenue have been cordoned off with white linen fencing. According to the press department, this is in preparation for cleaning, restoring, and "rethermalizing" the steps. There is nothing wrong with... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/joseph-wright-of-derbys-liverpool-sojourn/78812/ Thu, 29 May 2008 00:00:00 EST At a certain moment near the midpoint of the 18th century, British culture began to grow weary of its own augustness. After two generations, the eternal sunshine of Alexander Pope, the enlightened wit of Henry Fielding, and the disabused cynicism of William Hogarth moved certain sensitive souls to yearn for something other, and something more. The halation of mystery, of shadowy, unseen things began hesitantly to haunt the poems of Thomas Gray and Edward Young, as well as the drawings of... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/from-domenichinos-brush-the-mets-latest-masterwork/78813/ Thu, 29 May 2008 00:00:00 EST When the great art collections of the Gilded Age were being amassed — the very ones that went on to form the core of the Metropolitan Museum of Art — everyone wanted to invest in Renaissance Italy and 17th-century Holland, but few collectors showed any interest in the Italian Baroque. For that reason, to this day, the Met's holdings of the Bolognese, Roman, and Neapolitan schools are somewhat spottier than other areas of Old Masters painting. In recent years, however, some respectable additions... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/cooper-square-in-flight/76703/ Tue, 20 May 2008 00:00:00 EST In certain architects, the personal computer has engendered the bizarre delusion that anything is possible — that the laws of gravity have been repealed and the immemorial compacts of nature have been rendered null and void. Rather than the drably Newtonian right angles of the Modern movement, this new architecture professes to swivel and swerve on a dime, thanks to some logarithm that empowers computers to join titanium plates and much besides in ways unimagined by the builders of the past. In... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/frank-gehrys-miss-brooklyn-renamed-reconsidered/76176/ Fri, 9 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Forest City Ratner has this week released the latest plans for its contentious development of the Atlantic Yards in Brooklyn, more specifically for the parcel of its 22 acres that faces the southwest, looking past the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan. In an architectural context that tends, over time, to drag all things down in the direction of safe and unassuming mediocrity, these plans, from the studio of Frank Gehry, have the distinction of being even bolder than the initial ones and, in some... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/real-estate/timber-beams-and-exposed-brick/76100/ Thu, 8 May 2008 00:00:00 EST For nearly a century, up until about a decade ago, upward mobility in New York City flowed across the Brooklyn Bridge and into Manhattan. Doubtless it is still that way for some. But for the self-styled demimonde, Brooklyn has become the preferred precinct of gritty authenticity. But in one of the paradoxes of modern life, money is drawn to the haunts of artists, drives up prices, and inadvertently, but predictably, pushes the artists out. But in an equally predictable development, the new... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/different-shades-of-drawings-spectrum/76088/ Thu, 8 May 2008 00:00:00 EST Of the artists included in the Museum of Modern Art's "Glossolalia: Languages of Drawing," half are professionals, while half are outsider artists. Other than the fact that all 100 works on view are drawings and that they belong to MoMA, they share little in the way of a unifying theme. Some of these artists are long dead while others are still quite young, and they come from all, or almost all, corners of the world. The curators would contend, however, that this pluralism is itself a common... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/late-work-of-an-early-bloomer/75654/ Thu, 1 May 2008 00:00:00 EST When people think of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner today, it is usually in the context of his early work from the beginning of the 20th century. It was then, in 1905, that he founded Die Brücke, together with Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Fritz Bleyl, and Erich Heckel. This was the movement that kicked off German Expressionism and was of crucial importance in developing the dazzling chromatic and compositional mayhem that Gauguin and then Matisse had introduced into the history of art a few years before... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/olympic-landscape/75479/ Tue, 29 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST When it comes to dreaming up grand architectural visions, repressive authoritarian regimes are clearly the way to go. There are none of those nettlesome obstructions that beset the urban planners of New York City: community boards and concerned citizens, good-government types and the dithering dysfunctionality of a score of agencies. Well known to all are the hurdles that developers and architects have encountered recently at ground zero and the Atlantic Yards, the acrimony that has beset... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/no-puppy-love-for-jeff-koons/75239/ Thu, 24 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Like the public in general, critics have largely been disarmed by the art of Jeff Koons. To question his achievement is tantamount to attacking puppies, geraniums, and Cheez Whiz, all of which have figured prominently in his work over the past 20 years. Clearly one would need a heart of flint to attempt it. Let us begin. Since 1987, one of Gotham's more pleasant harbingers of warm weather has been the re-opening, in springtime, of the Metropolitan Museum's Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Roof Garden... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/message-in-the-medium/74872/ Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Whoever wrote the wall texts for the Metropolitan Museum of Art's "Photography on Photography: Reflections on the Medium Since 1960" must be a profoundly unhappy person. One after another, these labels are almost terminally depressive. Sherrie Levine's photographs, we learn, "tell the story of our perpetually dashed hopes to create meaning." Richard Prince "deploys an array of strategies … to undermine the seeming naturalness and inevitability of the generic mass-cultural image, revealing it to... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/missing-the-marble-at-2-columbus-circle/74723/ Tue, 15 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST The wraps are starting to come off 2 Columbus Circle, which will be reborn this fall as the Museum of Art and Design. Although it remains within the dimensions and footprint of the original, the structure, formerly home to the Huntington Hartford Museum, has been fundamentally changed inside and out — and the city is much the poorer for that. Since its inauguration in 1964, this beleaguered building has been one of the most enduringly divisive structures in the city, if not the world. No sooner... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/sanaas-supernatural-designs/73932/ Tue, 1 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST Devotees of Saturday Night Live will doubtless recall Nooni and Nuni Schoener, the ultra-effete couple played to perfection by Fred Armisen and Maya Rudolph. They come from some unspecified place in Europe, but they might as well hail from Mars, given how viscerally weird they are. Specifically, this goofy pair incarnates a certain strain of European defined by its passion for hyper-aestheticized, high-concept living. Each chair, each lamp, each ashtray in the Schoener home has some exorbitant... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/blast-from-the-past/73700/ Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Entering the rotting, slumping former tenement at 156 Rivington St. feels like traveling back in time. Since 1980, this building has been the home of an alternative arts organization, ABC No Rio, and in "Ides of March 2008," an exhibition that has taken over the entire building, the spirit of the early 1980s, of the legendary Times Square Show and the long-defunct "East Village scene," lives on. Once a squatters' dwelling, this structure was officially given over in 1998 to the artists'... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/commanding-respect/73436/ Fri, 21 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Americans tend to like lacquer more than they respect it. Conceptually, there is a fairly rigid wall of demarcation between art and craft, between canvas, marble, and bronze on the one hand and paper, wood, and everything else on the other. The latter may be pleasant, but the former is sublime. It is, for us, the big leagues, the highest reach of man's aspiring. Such thoughtless and anesthetized notions should be left at the door as you enter Japan Society, where a new exhibition, "The Genius... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/neo-mod-idiom-on-the-high-line/73270/ Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Even before its completion, Chelsea's High Line Park is having as catalytic an effect on its neighborhood as Central Park has had, over the past 150 years, on the Upper East and West sides of Manhattan. This year, in celebrating the sesquicentennial of that greatest of urban parks, we can appreciate the foresight of the magistrates who predicted that it would lead to the logarithmic development of the surrounding area. A similar building boom is on in Chelsea, not least in the areas directly in... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/no-heaven-for-milton/73342/ Thu, 20 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST Surely something is wrong with the world when the New York Public Library sees fit to devote thousands of square feet to an exhibition about Jack Kerouac, while shunting John Milton, on the 400th anniversary of his birth, into a one-room side gallery. "Oh, how unlike the place from whence he fell!" as the poet of "Paradise Lost" once wrote in a different context. Clearly, the age of Miltonolatry is past. The sublime cadences of his music were no proof against those guns of August that... JAMES GARDNER http://www.nysun.com/arts/giving-the-ancients-glorious-context/73139/ Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST The myth of Jason held powerful dominion over the minds of the ancient Greeks. The voyage of the Argonauts — from the Aegean Sea, through the narrow waters of the Hellespont, to the Black Sea and into the hinterland — represented the archetypal passage from the relative safety of the known world into a perilous land of mystery and incantation. It was the transition from civilization, from reason itself, into something akin to barbarism and savagery. A tingling sense of what was at stake can be...