The uses of enchantment: A garden ornament at Caramoor. Photograph by Georgette Gouveia.
What is a holiday if not the meaning we ascribe to it beyond beaches and barbecues, retail and relaxation?
The Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts in Katonah marked the first official Juneteenth — and the opening of its acclaimed international summer music festival — with a concert of works by a composer, Duke Ellington, who understood emotionally and musically that we are one race, the human one.
Read MoreThe ad for my short story “The Glass Door,” updated to include the story’s selection for “Together apART: Creating During COVID,” at ArtsWestchester in White Plains, New York, May 7 through Aug. 1. Ad courtesy of WAG magazine.
The worlds of art and literature, while complementary and collaborative, are really quite different. That point was driven home to me as I took in a preview of ArtsWestchester’s exhibit “Together apART: Creating During COVID,” which opens Friday, May 7,, and runs through Aug. 1 at ArtsW’s Arts Exchange headquarters in White Plains., New York. It’s a provocative show, which I expected given the subject matter and other exhibits I’ve covered there. What I didn’t expect was how beautiful it is.
Read MorePrince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh (left), examines building models at the University of Salford in 1967. During a 70-year career as a working royal, he carried out more than 22,000 solo engagements in addition to being what Queen Elizabeth II called her “strength and stay.” Courtesy the University of Salford Press Office.
Among the photographs The New York Times used to commemorate Prince Philip, Duke of Edinburgh — who died on Friday, April 9, at Windsor Castle two months short of his 100th birthday and will be buried from there Saturday, April 17 — was a 2017 photo in which the natty duke faces the camera smiling amid a sea of red-garbed Canadian soldiers, who are virtually all facing right. It encapsulates Prince Philip, a part of and yet apart from the British monarchy, “the strength and stay” of Queen Elizabeth II (her words) through 73 years of marriage, the longest in British royal history, who served crown and country with a confounding mix of devotion, action, humility, crotchety humor and a patronizing snobbery that critics have called impolitic at best and prejudiced at worst.
Read MoreDiana, Princess of Wales, and tenor Luciano Pavarotti at the concert “Pavarotti and Friends for the Benefit of the Children of Bosnia” in his hometown of Modena, Italy, in September 1995. Cut loose from the royal family, she had by then developed the elegantly economical look that crystallized her last years and our sense of a woman in full.
Winter, as Charles Dickens knew, is the season of ghosts. The holidays bring memories of those who are no longer with us, reminders of those who cannot grace our tables — never more so than during the pandemic when the table is often a table set for just one.
TV, too, the great American unifier and divider, plays a role in this with sad but uplifting holiday fare and series that reopen old wounds while underscoring that the past is never really over, because it is part of the continuum that informs the present and the future.
“The Crown,” Netflix’s addictive-as-potato-chips series about the British royal family, is now in its fourth season, which brings us to the Diana years and a reappraisal of her, her legacy and what went so horribly wrong. Why does Diana, Princess of Wales, haunt us still? More to the point, why do we still haunt her — for it is the living who haunt the dead, not the other way around.
Read MoreChinese one-child policy propaganda from 1982. Photograph by Robert Schedwy.
I have to laugh at the Chinese government pressuring unmarried women to get hitched. A little background: In 1979, the government instituted a one-child policy to curb the population. Because Chinese tradition dictates that the oldest son cares for the parents in old age — and we wouldn’t want to mess with tradition, now would we? — couples opted to abort girl babies or put them up for overseas adoption. And now the policy, which ended in 2015, has bitten the government in its considerable butt. The gender selection chicken has come home to roost as the fewer females of marriageable age have the pick of the crop.
Read MoreThe Thomas Jefferson Memorial, seen from the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. at dusk, represents the neoclassical style that the Trump Administration wants federal buildings in the capital to adhere to. Photograph by Joe Ravi.
Far be it from me to agree with President Donald J. Trump on anything, but as the saying goes, even a broken clock is right twice a day.
Trump’s decision to MABGA — Make American Buildings Great Again — finds him decreeing in a new executive order that federal buildings in Washington, D.C. should be classical in style, rather than Modern.
The liberal media, Modernists and the art world are not taking this well — understandably. Everyone gets nervous when the federal government starts telling folks what to do, especially conservatives. And Modernism isn’t less a standard of beauty than classicism, Marion Smith, chairwoman of the National Civic Art Society, which is leading the anti-Modernist charge, notwithstanding. As the great composer-pianist Duke Ellington — who wrote jazz standards and classical works alike — observed, there are only two types of music, good and bad. So it is with all the arts.
But the Trump order is in keeping with a growing backlash against Modernism n art and design.
Read MorePhilippe I, duke of Orleans, in the robes he wore to his brother Louis XIV’s coronation in 1654, oil on canvas. Palace of Versailles. The Met’s “Camp” show would define the bisexual cross-dressing Monsieur as camp, but would he?
The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute’s exhibit, “Camp: Notes on Fashion” (through Sept. 9) was inspired by Susan Sontag’s seminal 1964 essay “Notes on ‘Camp’,” which she defined broadly as style over substance characterized by theatricality, irony, playfulness, masquerade and unselfconsciousness. It’s a definition and a show that cuts a wide swath, but in the end it turns out to be less about camp and more about identity — its mutability and its ownership.
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