The art of film

Last night on the lower east side, an incredible screening of underdog of a film called Billy The Kid - A Documentary. As with more aspects today than ever, how we look and feel is a function of what we see reflected in our environment. Online, 24/7 we are bombarded by image and video.

The casting director turned film director and producer has captured beautifully the solitude found in the halls of high school.

http://www.billythekiddocumentary.com/

Top Five Fall Shows

Fall is here, and museums and galleries herald the new season as surely as the changing leaves: out go the hodge-podge group shows and minor retrospectives (OK, Richard Serra is far from minor, but that was a summer anomaly!), in come the big guns. With the Biennale and Basel over, curators and gallerists nationwide again focus on wow-ing at home, rather then in the pavilions at Venice.

In the spirit of Nick Hornby's protagonist in "High Fidelity," here is my list of the Top Five Shows that I would love to catch in New York this season. It's a strong field, with showings from both old masters and contemporary trailblazers. Here's my path up Museum Mile:

1. The Age of Rembrandt: Dutch Paintings at the Met: With a collection of Rembrandt, Rubens, Hals, Vermeer and the like unrivaled outside of Europe, the Met will display all 228 of its Dutch paintings for the first time ever. Last year the Met lent out much of its Rembrandt collection to museums honoring the painter's 400th birthday; now, the collection is reunited in all its splendor. Following a larger trend of organizing museum shows in terms of how the works were collected (such as the Impressionist show "The Clark Brothers Collect" or "Cézanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avante-Garde"), the Met will display the works in the order that the museum acquired them - rather than thematically or chronologically. Thus, minor works will sit next to "masterpieces" - a delightful scavenger hunt for the spectator. All in all, it should offer a once-in-a-lifetime panorama of the Northern Renaissance.

2. Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love: Sexual, uncomfortable, and aggressive, Kara Walker's large-scale silhouette tableaux simultaneously evoke the Antebellum South and explore contemporary gender and race identity. In her first major mid-career retrospective, the Whitney unites Walker's trademark paper-cut outs with video installations and two-hundred works on paper. After Walker's epic installation "After the Deluge" - last year's Met exhibition responding to Hurricane Katrina, likening the Superdome to a slave ship - I can't wait to see Walker's work all in one place. Her razor-sharp and ever-relevant social commentary never upstages the fairytale/nightmare aesthetic of her work.

3. Foto: Modernity in Central Europe, 1918-1945: Off to the spiral of the Guggenheim now, to see the story of photography's phenomenal success in Germany, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Austria during a time of tremendous social and political upheaval. With a range of photographers - from photojournalists like Alfred Eisenstaedt to avant-garde photographers like László Moholy-Nagy and Hannah Höch - the topics also span from life and leisure in the modern metropolis to photomontage to war to the spread of surrealism. To see an image of modern leisure, like Eisenstaedt's "Ice Skating Waiter" in St. Moritz contrasted with Höch's sexual, anti-Fascist collages would be a trip. I would be especially eager to see the way that the curators treat the medium, as it emerged from a purely documentary tool into an art form.

4. Gustav Klimt: The Ronald Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collection: Sure, it's nothing groundbreaking, but I'd be hard-pressed to find a more visually stunning show than this. The Neue Gallerie is a jewel box of a museum - intimate and lovely. Each Klimt is like a Byzantine mosaic, with tiny facets of brilliant color and gold layered with delicately rendered faces and landscapes. Reigning over them all is the museum's grande dame, "Adele Bloch-Bauer I," the most expensive work of art ever sold, for $135 million in 2006. Klimt's works evoke the decadence and beauty of turn of the century Austria. In that spirit, I'd have to make a stop at Cafe Sabarsky, the Neue's phenomenal restaurant, for some coffee and Viennese Torte!

5. Willem de Kooning: The Last Beginning: Lastly, I'd bid farewell to Museum Mile and head to Chelsea - specifically to Gagosian's 21st Street Gallery for the survey of de Kooning's oeuvre from the 1980s. A sharp departure from the heavy impastos and thick surfaces of previous decades, these works are "luminous expanses of pastel-imbued whites, overlaid with ribbons of vivid color." Though de Kooning's paint-encrusted women if the 50s and 60s make me weak in the knees, I'm curious to see the arc of de Kooning's work. Gagosian will juxtapose de Kooning's early and later works to trace an evolution from the densely layered surfaces of the late seventies to the clean, crisp lines of the mid-eighties. After, I'd wander the smaller galleries of Chelsea, hoping to discover an undervalued artist with de Kooning's level of talent!

I still get the student rate at museums by flashing my (expired - shh!) Brown ID. If only plane fare to New York came that easily!

Of Art and Advertisements, Grafitti and Greed

In October, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art will mount a retrospective of Japanese Pop artist Takashi Murakami’s work – including a functioning Louis Vuitton boutique that will sell the brand’s popular handbags, emblazoned with Murakami’s lively cherries or flowers. According to the officials at MOCA, the exhibition “symbolizes the interweaving of high art, mass culture and commerce that has become essential to Murakami’s philosophy.”

But what happens when the interweaving of high art and commerce isn’t essential to an artist’s philosophy – or when such a fusion actually contradicts an artist’s supposed manifesto? This summer, the New York media seized on the story of “the Splasher” – a guerilla street artist (or artists) who threw paint on the murals and graffiti of street artists who had begun to design for commercial brands. Among other charges leveled by the Splasher, he derided the current state of street art as “a bourgeoisie-sponsored rebellion” that helped pave the way for gentrification, and called it “utterly impotent politically and fantastically lucrative for everyone involved.”

All of this high-minded idealism resonates in theory, but may be difficult in practice. Is it defensible that artists “need” to work for commercial causes to continue making their art? The photographer Howard Schatz thinks so: “The only way we can pay for all of this is through advertising jobs. I need to do one big advertising job every two or three weeks. I don’t want to do more than that. I don’t want to accumulate money. I want to spend all this money that we make through my work” (LensWork, No. 64, May-June 2006, p. 63).

Schatz has shot for everyone from Pepsi to McDonalds, many times maintaining (even, in the case of his Brizo faucet ads, at far right, duplicating identically) the unique fluid style that he characterize his fine art photographs, such as the one below. What are the implications of an artist lending his craft to commercial causes? How is the art compromised – or is it at all?

I am torn between denigrating artists like Schatz, and acknowledging the fact that everyone has a mortgage to pay. Perhaps I should be more sympathetic – after all, Toulouse-Lautrec made spectacular posters advertising the bars and dance halls of Paris to pay the rent in late nineteenth-century Paris when his pastels of world-weary prostitutes weren’t bringing home the bacon. I suppose that at the end of the day I just have a hard time equating the corporate spirit of a McDonalds with the Bohemian ethos of the fin de siècle Moulin Rouge.