Copyright 2012 The New York Sun Tue, 22 May 2012 17:56:26 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Other Arts :: Stories from The New York Sun http://www.nysun.com/other-arts admin@nysun.net (Seth Lipsky) webmaster@nysun.com en-us FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-materiality-of-thinking/87749/ Tue, 20 Mar 2012 12:04:11 EST An exhibition of paintings and sculptures by Michael Canning starts today at Waterhouse & Dodd on Cork Street in London. "Michael’s work, whether painting, drawing or sculpture, often defies simple classification," says the gallery. "Neither truly landscape nor still life, they serve as evocations of more philosophical concerns. As Nicholas Usherwood states in his excellent introduction to the first exhibition catalogue we produced, 'there is a very strong sense of geography and history, memory... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/real-and-caporael/87741/ Tue, 13 Mar 2012 11:58:04 EST Two exhibitions open this Thursday at Ameringer McEnery Yohe. Both of them merit your attention and attendance. One of them features the work of Suzanne Caporael. "First and foremost, Caporael is a painter," says the gallery. "While maintaining a discrete distance from the art world in various rural havens, she has nonetheless earned herself a place in the field of contemporary painting. For nearly thirty years she has allowed her avid curiosity to guide her through a variety of disparate areas... Franklin Einspruch http://www.nysun.com/arts/masters-of-mercy-in-washington/87736/ Fri, 9 Mar 2012 13:59:29 EST Starting tomorrow at the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery of the Smithsonian, paintings by an important 19th century Japanese master appear in the United States for the first time. "In early 1854, just as American Commodore Matthew Perry's ships steamed into Edo Bay to persuade Japan to open its ports to the world, the esteemed painter Kano Kazunobu received a commission from a highly respected Buddhist temple located in the heart of Edo," says the museum. "His mission was to create 100 paintings on a... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/intimate-sketches-of-new-york-city/87660/ Thu, 19 Jan 2012 13:15:45 EST Readers of the New York Sun have a new opportunity to own a piece of the paper's history. Vernon Howe Bailey produced a series of pen and ink drawings depicting New York City and environs during the 1930s. For a time, they appeared daily in the New York Sun as "Intimate Sketches of New York City." These drawings were preserved by William T. Dewart, editor of the Sun when the paper shut down in 1950. "Bailey was a versatile artist who practiced painting, printmaking, and illustration," according... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/rembrandts-finest-student/87628/ Fri, 30 Dec 2011 15:17:29 EST An exhibition at the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute is exploring the affinities of two of the greatest painters of all time. "By examining Rembrandt’s work—and his prints in particular—Degas discovered an approach to portraiture and self-portraiture that emphasized the expressive and technical potential of the form, an approach that was not encouraged in Degas’s traditional early training," says the museum. "After enrolling briefly at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he soon began... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/too-great-a-nation-for-small-dreams/87622/ Mon, 26 Dec 2011 21:58:29 EST "When Ronald Reagan ran for president in 1980," says the National Portrait Gallery, "it was the conventional wisdom, after what was viewed as four failed presidencies, that the office had outgrown the individual and needed to be changed or perhaps held jointly. Within a short time after Reagan became president, however, whether one agreed with his policies or not, there was no doubt about his capacity and command of the office, and the discussion about the need to change the office of the... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/diego-rivera-keeps-up-the-fight/87619/ Fri, 23 Dec 2011 11:36:29 EST The exhibition "Diego Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art" reunites, for the first time in 80 years, five "portable murals," freestanding frescoes with bold images addressing the Mexican Revolution and Depression-era New York that Rivera created at the Museum for his 1931-32 MoMA exhibition. The murals, which are up to six feet by eight feet in size and weigh as much as 1,000 pounds, are made of frescoed plaster, concrete, and steel. Comprising five of the eight murals that were shown... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/will-barnet-at-100/87595/ Tue, 6 Dec 2011 09:27:04 EST Will Barnet is still painting. The Beverly, MA native has long divided his time between New York and New England, and by “long,” I mean the last century. It’s fitting that his retrospective, Will Barnet at 100, traveled from the Portland Museum of Art to the National Academy Museum, where it runs through the end of the year. In the 1960s, Barnet swerved into a peculiar take on figuration, which he explored for the next 40 years. This is the work for which he is deservedly known. Barnet hit upon... Special to the Sun http://www.nysun.com/arts/architectural-apparitions/87589/ Sat, 3 Dec 2011 11:55:15 EST They say that the true love of the French painter Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres was to play the violin. So the expression “violin d’Ingres” emerged to connote the passion of an artist other than his profession. For violist David Zimbalist, the violin d’Ingres is the camera. After bowing his viola for the day, he shoulders his Nikon and scouts Manhattan, where he has been working on a series of photographs of architectural abstractions. Mr. Zimbalest was born in Brooklyn and educated at the... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-cubist-experiment/87583/ Tue, 29 Nov 2011 14:44:06 EST In September the Santa Barbara Museum of Art opened what it describes as "the first to unite many of the paintings and nearly all of the prints created by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque" during the two years that they worked alongside one another. "During the years 1910 through 1912, Picasso and Braque invented a new style that took the basics of traditional European art—modeling in light and shade to suggest roundedness, perspective lines to suggest space, indeed the very idea of making a... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/modern-antiquity/87576/ Tue, 22 Nov 2011 20:03:08 EST "Modern Antiquity," which opened this month at the Getty Villa, is exploring the effect of ancient art on early modernists. “Juxtaposing 20th-century works with ancient objects, this exhibition focuses on how four eminent artists reinvented and transformed the artistic legacy of antiquity,” according to the museum. “Classicizing creations such as Giorgio de Chirico's enigmatic piazzas, Pablo Picasso's postcubist women, Fernand Léger's mechanized nudes, and Francis Picabia's 'transparencies'... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/arrested-motion/87563/ Sat, 12 Nov 2011 17:23:04 EST Friedel Dzubas, in your author's opinion one of the neglected greats of Abstract Expressionism, is getting the sort of exhibition that we've come to rely on Loretta Howard to provide: focused, considered, and directed at under-explored facets of American modernism. One might call it museum-quality, except that the last major exhibition of Dzubas took place at the Hirshorn Museum in Washington, D.C. almost thirty years ago, suggesting instead that the museums should be aspiring to the level of... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/visceral-and-visual/87558/ Tue, 8 Nov 2011 14:48:27 EST "Richard Serra's large-scale steel sculptures have made him a crucial figure in contemporary art, but his work also takes another striking, lesser-known form: drawing," according to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which is exhibiting what the museum is calling "the first-ever critical overview of Serra's drawings." "This landmark traveling exhibition brings together roughly 70 works made over the course of some 40 years—including many of the artist's sketchbooks that have never been... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/high-and-low/87543/ Fri, 28 Oct 2011 11:04:40 EST I’d like to examine what happens when you look at an art object and perceive it to have excellence. Let’s say that an artist has made some beautiful thing. You look at it and say, Wow. You experience a pleasant feeling of joy or excitement. Your attention goes to it and lingers there. Also, “excellence,” as I said, implies superiority to other art objects. In the past you have looked at other objects and not perceived excellence in them. Now that you’re looking at this one, the pleasure you get... FRED KIRSHNIT http://www.nysun.com/arts/coucheron-siblings-soar-at-weill-echoing/87540/ Thu, 27 Oct 2011 09:22:51 EST One of the greatest joys of a music critic is looking back over a long career and remembering fondly those performers that, as young people, clearly would rise to the upper echelon of performers if indeed that was their wish. At Weill Recital Hall in 2000 I heard Janine Jansen make her American debut at 21, although looking all of 15. I wrote at the time that she was exceptional and on her way. Today she is a superstar and deservedly so. Not every wunderkind craves the limelight. The best young... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/refuge-from-turmoil-in-nature/87538/ Mon, 24 Oct 2011 22:40:01 EST "The collapse of the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) and subsequent conquest of China by semi-nomadic Manchu tribesmen from northeast of the Great Wall comprised some of the most traumatic events in Chinese history," according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose exhibition, "The Art of Dissent in 17th-Century China," explores the turbulent era. "This wrenching era also spurred an enormous outpouring of creative energy as many former Ming subjects turned to the arts to express their loyalty to the... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/degas-revealed/87529/ Wed, 19 Oct 2011 10:50:13 EST “'Degas and the Nude' will be a revelation for our visitors," says Malcolm Rogers, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. "It will offer a number of surprises—for instance, we’ll reunite several of Degas’s black-and-white monotypes with the corresponding pastel ‘twins’ for the first time since they left the artist’s studio. Visitors will see the progression of his nudes and the very heart of Degas’s fascination with the body and its range of emotion and movement. He pursued that... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/reinventing-tradition/87510/ Thu, 6 Oct 2011 11:43:27 EST "Drawing was Picasso's primary medium for thinking, problem solving, invention, and personal expression," according to the Frick Collection, whose exhibition of Picasso's drawings opened on Tuesday. "It was the link that connected his work in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, printmaking, theater design, and ceramics, and was a direct tie to his predecessors. Picasso’s diverse body of original work on paper broke new ground, while also consciously incorporating aspects of the... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-master-of-tenth-street/87500/ Thu, 29 Sep 2011 08:12:36 EST The Museum of Modern Art has mounted a retrospective of the works of Willem de Kooning that has had the art world in a state of anticipation for several months. According to John Elderfield, Chief Curator Emeritus at MoMA, "The importance of Willem de Kooning as one of the very foremost artists of the New York School is widely accepted, as is his revolutionary importance to modern art as a whole. Far less well understood is what his artistic career actually comprised in its almost seven decades... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-indispensible-fairfield-porter/87451/ Fri, 12 Aug 2011 08:19:37 EST Fairfield Porter’s elegant paintings were the subject of a 1983 retrospective at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston that at once permanently elevated his reputation and ensconced him into a period of modernist figuration that curators have been neglecting, in one form or another, for decades. Fairfield Porter: Raw at the Middlebury College Museum of Art afforded an unusual opportunity to see his work assembled in a serious way. Subtitled The Creative Process of an American Master, the exhibition... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/sweethearts-smokers-and-merrymakers/87439/ Fri, 29 Jul 2011 18:41:11 EST The Metropolitan Museum of Art has mounted an exhibition around eleven signed works of Frans Hals, considered by many to be the greatest master of Dutch art after Rembrandt. "Several of the Museum's paintings by Hals are famous, especially the early Merrymakers at Shrovetide and the so-called Yonker Ramp and His Sweetheart," according to the museum. "The Metropolitan Museum has two genre scenes by Hals, as well as seven fine portraits dating from the 1620s through the 1650s. Also included in... Franklin Einspruch http://www.nysun.com/arts/lucian-freud-1922-2011/87435/ Fri, 22 Jul 2011 10:08:54 EST Lucian Freud has died. Not to minimize the sadness this must cause his survivors, his passing has hit a segment of the art world quite hard. "I always wished I could paint like him," says the upstate New York painter Tracy Helgeson, summing up the feelings of many of us who admired his work. Freud had a simple method, which was to arrange for models to pose in his studio for hundreds of hours while he rendered them with a loaded brush. His stroke was planar, slow, and decisive. Flake white... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-self-taught-outsider-artist/87392/ Wed, 15 Jun 2011 07:30:59 EST Several years ago, in Miami, I had lunch with a fellow artist and a local museum curator. The curator asked us to suggest exhibitions, perhaps something a little off the beaten path for the museum. "Claudio Bravo," I said. In unison they turned to me and replied, "Ecch." If it surprises you that Bravo's work would elicit that reaction, you may be unfamiliar with the extent to which contemporary art tricycles assiduously around its cul-de-sac among the avenues of human culture. Bravo, who passed... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/unearthly-proportions/87347/ Mon, 16 May 2011 07:14:43 EST "Torben Giehler is known for his geometric abstractions, influenced by futuristic universes, and finished with mathematical precision," according to Leo Koenig, which is showing his fifth solo exhibition. "In a departure from the vibrant color palette and electrified vortex of his previous paintings, these new works extend a Zen-like calm, alchemically fusing the synapses of the human brain to the grids and networks of digitized technology. Giehler’s new work streamlines the frenetic energy of... FRANKLIN EINSPRUCH http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-gold-feathered-bird-sings-in-the-palm/87279/ Wed, 30 Mar 2011 09:31:49 EST Starting from automatist drawings in pastel, Jennifer Riley works up crisp arrangements of colored lines, cannily manipulated so that they appear to enclose a looping white stripe. This stripe delimits shapes filled in with a joyful selection of hues, and the resulting oil paintings have considerable graphic power. Pleasingly noodly and loaded with allusive speed, they take a surprising gestural approach to geometric abstraction. Jennifer Riley: Fire-Fangled Feathers borrows its title from the... SETH LIPSKY http://www.nysun.com/arts/jack-levine-redoubtable-american-realist-is-dead/87133/ Tue, 9 Nov 2010 23:58:08 EST One of the regrets of my newspaper life is that in the rush of things I failed to make the acquaintance of the painter Jack Levine, who died November 8 at the age of 95. For I came to love his paintings and to be intrigued by the fact that a left-of-center, secular figure such as Levine could have conjured so beautifully on canvas what the great Jewish sages of long ago might have looked like. The first time I saw one of his paintings was in the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary. My... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/punchinello-hits-the-gym/87096/ Tue, 28 Sep 2010 14:24:23 EST "Punchinello as Other" is Patrick Webb's fifth New York solo exhibition since 1993 to be devoted to imagined contemporary scenes involving characters from the Commedia dell'Arte. Also on view, in the project room, are paintings by Caren Canier. The Painting Center is at 547 West 27th Street, Suite 500, between 10th and 11th avenues, New York City, (212) 343-1060... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/away-games/87090/ Wed, 22 Sep 2010 21:59:26 EST For his latest show at Lori Bookstein, John Dubrow has taken to painting in other artists' studios -- or at least to painting images of their studios -- as subjects have come to include artists in their workspaces, There's veteran still life and landscape painter Ruth Miller in a dashing pair of green snow boots, William Bailey looking pensive amidst his canvases, poet Mark Strand astride a glass table on which is spread an almost neoplastic arrangement of primary-colored volumes, and a home... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-life-in-paint-and-other-materials/87083/ Sun, 19 Sep 2010 11:20:55 EST The veteran abstractionist Joan Snyder has been showing in New York since the early 1970s. Her latest show, at Betty Cuningham, recalls those early works in their painterly abundance. Ms. Snyder's show is one among four exhibitions whose merits or otherwise are to be the subject of debate at The Review Panel in its first installment of the new season at the National Academy Museum. Moderator David Cohen, who is Publisher/Editor of artcritical.com, is joined on next Friday, September 24, by Wall... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/a-subject-of-fuss/87078/ Wed, 15 Sep 2010 12:17:54 EST Until October 23 at 547 West 25th Street... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/skyscraper-painting-amidst-exhibition-sprawl/87072/ Tue, 7 Sep 2010 14:21:34 EST Martha Diamond's 1994 painting, Black, White, Gray Cityscape #3, was last seen in New York at the artist’s 2004 retrospective survey at the New York Studio School, an exhibition I organized as gallery director of that institution. From Thursday it is back on their walls as part of a sprawling exhibition the School generously allowed me to pull together as my parting shot: after nine years on the job I bid them farewell this month. This is a kind of "greatest hits" show with a work from each... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/when-exposure-required-composure/87061/ Sat, 28 Aug 2010 23:41:56 EST The great romantic sculptor enlisted a number of photographers not merely to document his oeuvre but to mythologize his creativity. American Edward Steichen rose to the challenge, employing chiaroscuro and and double exposure to abut creator and creation in this double portrait of the archetypal thinker. The Original Copy: Photography of Sculpture, 1839 to Today is an audacious show at The Museum of Modern Art until November 1 that explores in all its diversity how the oldest artistic medium... SETH LIPSKY http://www.nysun.com/arts/winslow-homer-and-poetics-of-place-get/87039/ Thu, 12 Aug 2010 17:06:06 EST One of our favorite stories about painting concerns an amateur who, alone on a desolate stretch of coast, was working at a French easel, trying to capture the surf, when he became aware of someone behind him. He turned around and the stranger asked whether the painter would mind whether he watched. The painter had no objection and promptly became lost again in his work. When, an hour later, he turned around, the stranger was gone. Back at his hotel, the painter put the painting he was working... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/modernism-under-the-radar/87037/ Fri, 6 Aug 2010 13:58:36 EST One of the Hampton’s quietest—and classiest—arts organizations is the Ayn Foundation’s Sagaponack, NY outpost. A chapel-like white cube within a barn across the road from a vineyard, the Ayn is a perfect home for the work of painter Joa Baldinger, who is the subject of her second show in this space in successive summers. Baldinger is an under-the-radar modernist masquerading as a new image painter. Superficial resemblances to Elizabeth Peyton or Fairfield Porter give way to a sense of... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-world-on-his-own-terms/87031/ Fri, 23 Jul 2010 19:24:04 EST This is the summer for Rackstraw Downes. A trifecta of exhibitions to savor in the Tristate area include a survey of drawings on view at Betty Cuningham Gallery through July 30; Onsite Paintings, 1972-2008, is at the Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY through August 8; and Under the Westside Highway, a didactic show that brings together sketchbooks, drawings, small oil studies and a completed, multipaneled work, is at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut through... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/founding-father/87019/ Sun, 4 Jul 2010 16:08:24 EST Our Independence Day image is a 1969 photograph by Bill Beckley (very proto-Cindy Sherman). A survey of Mr. Beckley's work, ranging from conceptual text and image polyptychs to sumptuously ethereal Cibachrome nature studies, remains on view at Chelsea's Tony Shafrazi Gallery through July 30... BRENDAN BERNHARD http://www.nysun.com/arts/stieg-larssons-millennium-final-volume-due-out/86955/ Thu, 13 May 2010 11:37:32 EST The first question about “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” the final volume of Stieg Larsson’s immensely popular “Millennium Trilogy,” which is being brought out this month by Knopf (576 pages, $27.95), is why the hornet of the American title should be singular as opposed to the buzzing swarm suggested by the plural “Hornets’ Nest” (note the position of the apostrophe) in the British edition. For neither this volume nor its mega-selling predecessors (“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,”... WILL FRIEDWALD http://www.nysun.com/arts/lena-horne-last-of-the-goddesses-a-brief-memoir/86949/ Mon, 10 May 2010 11:46:55 EST Lena Horne walking into a room was like the sun coming out. I had that experience only once: in May 1998, she agreed to do a test session as a favor to two old friends. Bruce Lundvall, the head of Blue Note records (for whom she had done several albums), wanted to produce Horne in a duet with Tony Bennett in a track to be used as a movie title theme. The project ultimately never got any further than this one rehearsal, but it was an amazing thing to be there, one of many reasons for which I'll... DAVID COHEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/avigdor-arikha-1929-2010/86935/ Tue, 4 May 2010 01:01:37 EST The exquisite poise and quiet understatement of the work of Avigdor Arikha belies in style its passionate author, who died in Paris last week at 81. His paintings and pastels, infused with light and light in touch, were executed from direct observation and alla prima – in a single session. His character, on the other hand, was forged in darkness. Arikha was the supreme marvel of Israeli art, despite having only ever lived in the promised land for five years, in his youth. A survivor of Nazi... JAY AKASIE http://www.nysun.com/arts/modern-art-on-an-ancestral-estate/86806/ Tue, 30 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST British aristocrats opening their estates to the public is nothing new. But credit the Duke of Devonshire with using the grounds of his stately home to host what's become a staple of the autumn art scene in Europe. The Duke, an art patron and aficionado who sits on Sotheby's board of directors, is using the landscaped grounds around Chatsworth, his 105-acre ancestral estate, for an extraordinary exhibition of Modern and Contemporary sculpture. It's not difficult to see why "Beyond Limits" has... SHIRA LEVINE http://www.nysun.com/arts/atlantic-antic-lives/86757/ Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Those relying on the Boerum Hill section of Atlantic Avenue for antique gems soon will have to take their hunting to eBay. The stretch of the avenue between Hoyt and Bond streets known as Antique Row for more than 30 years is history. Over the last 15 years, interest has waned, and the avenue has morphed into a shopping boulevard of home furnishings, boutiques, coffee joints, pastry shops, restaurants, bars, and nightclubs. "Twenty-five years ago it was a heavily antique district with 30 or 40... KATE TAYLOR http://www.nysun.com/arts/laying-claim-to-an-outsiders-art/86769/ Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST The term "outsider artist" is out of fashion these days, replaced by the more strictly factual "self-taught artist." But in some cases the older phrase still seems more fitting, such as when describing someone who not only worked outside the established art world but also lived outside of mainstream society. Henry Darger, whose thousands of drawings and watercolors were discovered by his landlord only at his death in 1973, was that kind of outsider. So was Martín Ramírez. A Mexican immigrant... BENJAMIN SECHER http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-world-of-warhol-tv/86759/ Mon, 29 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST 'I can work anywhere: big places or small places," David Hockney says in a rare American television interview from 1981. "I do the watercolors in small rooms and the large paintings in large rooms." His interviewer sits out of sight, saying nothing in response to these banalities. "Very occasionally," the British artist says, as if compelled to fill the silence, "I'll do a large painting in a small room." As he speaks, the camera roves like a restless eye across his outfit, picking out... Associated Press http://www.nysun.com/arts/busta-rhymes-denied-entry-into-britain/86621/ Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Rapper Busta Rhymes was briefly detained at a London airport Thursday by immigration officers who said he should not be allowed into the country, a concert promoter said. He was released, however, after a High Court judge ruled that the rapper was entitled to either bail or immediate release while he formulated a defense. Justice Julian Flaux said it was "difficult to see upon what basis" Rhymes had been detained. Mr. Flaux ordered a hearing for the rapper's legal challenge to the government's... Bloomberg News http://www.nysun.com/arts/hirst-to-launch-art-retail-shop/86623/ Fri, 26 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Three weeks after Damien Hirst's $206 million auction at Sotheby's, the artist will open a shop next door to the auction house in London. The retail arm of Other Criteria, Mr. Hirst's publishing and merchandising company, will start business at 36 New Bond St. on October 6, said Robyn Katkhuda, projects director, in an e-mail. Passersby will notice the black-painted façade of the shop to the left of Sotheby's, where the "Beautiful Inside My Head Forever" auction was held. "It's a 'soft' opening... ERICA ORDEN http://www.nysun.com/arts/graffiti-adorns-new-gallery/86607/ Thu, 25 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST The dealer who represents the infamous British artist Banksy is opening his first gallery in New York. Steve Lazarides, who owns Lazarides Gallery, which has four outposts in and around London, will open a pop-up gallery in a former restaurant-supply store on the corner of Bowery and Houston Street beginning tomorrow. The show, "The Outsiders," which will be open for two weeks, features new work from Mr. Lazarides's stable of provocative artists, including a portrait of President Bush made out... Associated Press http://www.nysun.com/arts/study-97-of-teenagers-are-gamers/86349/ Tue, 23 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST Who plays video games? Just about everybody — if they're ages 12-17. According to a new survey by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, 97% of youths in that age group (99% of boys, 94% of girls) play computer, console, or portable games. The most popular genres among teens are racing ("Mario Kart," "Burnout Paradise"), puzzle ("Bejeweled," "Solitaire"), and sports ("Madden NFL," "FIFA"). "Madden" also scored as the third-most popular franchise, following "Guitar Hero" and "Halo" — all... Associated Press http://www.nysun.com/arts/baldwin-book-rails-against-family-court-system/86413/ Tue, 23 Sep 2008 11:06:04 EST SAN FRANCISCO — Alec Baldwin blamed the bitter custody battle between him and ex-wife Kim Basinger in part for the anger and frustration he was feeling when he berated his daughter in a phone message leaked to the media last year. In the message, Mr. Baldwin called the 11-year-old a "rude, thoughtless little pig." He was apparently upset that she had missed his phone call. "I'm disappointed, I'm ashamed to say this: You get angry," the 50-year-old actor told a crowd of about 120 people... CARYN ROUSSEAU http://www.nysun.com/arts/macarthur-foundation-awards-genius-grants/86416/ Tue, 23 Sep 2008 12:55:15 EST CHICAGO — An evolutionary geneticist in Germany, a Nigerian-born writer, and an architectural historian who studies ancient bridges are among 25 recipients of this year's MacArthur Foundation "genius grants." The $500,000 fellowships were announced today by the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Recipients may use the money however they wish. A plant evolutionary geneticist at Tuebingen, Germany, Kirsten Bomblies, 34, said the money will allow her to expand her... NICHOLAS WAPSHOTT http://www.nysun.com/arts/the-view-from-the-clark-institute/86279/ Mon, 22 Sep 2008 00:00:00 EST New Yorkers who enjoy a leafy journey north to the Hudson Valley and the Berkshires have a welcome addition to their array of attractions: the new extension of the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute in Williamstown. The Stone Hill Center is set a little distance from the core of the collection, up the hill from the art museum and nestling in trees. It is the new building's location almost as much as its unusual design, by the Japanese autodidact architect Tadao Ando, that sparks the...