The "Handle With Care" Edition

Dec 11, 2022

Dear Subscribers,

It looks to me like it is officially the Holiday Season. A quick trip to the dentist was not so quick, by dint of a midtown tourist crush and a plethora of trees and tinsel. It’s also college finals and trip planning. In fact, next Sunday is my last in NYC for the year before the holiday hiatus. So I’m beatin’ it outta town. But if you are here in the City or comin’ here and looking for something to do besides freeze your ass off or pay $350.00/ticket for The Nutcracker, here’s a quick classic museum Art Roundup:

The Whitney: Edward Hopper. This show got raves all over. My opinion: it was good. Like, hard to argue with. It’s Edward Hopper. Famous! Best thing they pointed out was how he saw the City horizontally rather than vertically which is how we’re used to seeing the Cityscape when artists and photographers and filmmakers present it. Or when we are ourselves awestruck. Look more broadly, Hopper is saying. Like I say, it was good! OTOH it was real crowded. Also, I got a bizarre case of majorly old fashioned hives and had to leave. Also, btw, our pet bunny, R.I.P., was named Edward Hopper so we will always have positive associations with Mr. Hopper, despite the crowds, semi-boringly hung show, and the hives.

The MoMA: A fabulous triple whammy! 1) My opinion: the Wolfgang Tillmans show is fantastic. This photographer seems to have shot every person doing every kind of thing in the entire world, in every format. Instead of being overwhelming, though, it was hung smartly and whimsically and decreased the overwhelmingness. The crowd was young and energetic, I hear tell because he shot the semi-recent Frank Ocean album art and those youths came out to support! 2) The JAM exhibit — A celebration of Linda Goode Bryant’s historic JAM gallery, the outlet for great Black art and artists, the first of its kind, disrupting the 57th St lock on galleries and what was assumed it took to be a “gallerist.” 3) Barbara Krueger’s superb, site-specific installation that amazes with changing perspectives delivered by a clever, perspective-shifting installation, a wonderama of words and meanings. I happened to see it last year at LACMA and it was great there and even greater here

The Met: If you read this note last week, I raved about both the Nan Goldin documentary “The Beauty and The Bloodshed” and the Patrick Radden Keefe book “Empire Of Pain,” both of which are about the twisted Purdue Pharma/Sackler rise and fall. The climax of the book is the stripping of the names off the scores of wings, rooms, and entire buildings of various schools and museums and other institutions. None was more significant than the Sackler Wing of the Met, which housed the Temple of Dendur, among other antiquities. So it was very eerie, and satisfying, to finally walk through and *not* see the plaque. But that’s not why we were there. En route to the thing we were there to see, The Tudors exhibit, we happened across a pair of exhibits which are destination-worthy themselves.

The sophisticated ceramics of pre-Civil War Black potters and artisans, was an actual wow, for me. It was mirrored on the other side of an atrium (named by some other patron who hasn’t yet been canceled) by an exhibition called Fictions of Emancipation: Carpeaux Recast. I am pretty undereducated about all things actual art, so I most certainly had to look up both potter David Drake, who headlined the ceramics exhibit, and also Monsieur Carpeaux, sculptor and artist of the early to mid 19th century in Napoleon’s France. Of course both the exhibits are about art and artistry. But they oppose the relationship of white Western artists to Black subjects and Black artists to white enslavers. It was a powerful juxtaposition and the art was amazing! It’s my Pic(k) of the Week, below.

The Tudors exhibit, don’t you worry, was also fabulous. It was one of those exhibits that was 100% traditional and 100% successful. Amazing, even though you kind of know much of what you’re going to see, what with King Henry VIII and his voracious appetites, those Queens whose heads were chopped off, the original bad-assery of powerful Queen Elizabeth, plus the armour and the tapestries, the illuminated manuscripts and jewelry. It was really stunning.

So here is your curated gallery—and yes, I had to pay to have my name on it! Patent office and a ridiculous amount of lawyers for a money-losing enterprise. It is a galleryof works of reporting, an art to be sure, about, by, and for women in the news., Every Sunday, a digestible compendium of politics, business, media, science, health, crime, the arts and pop culture. Plus maybe one or two things to amuse you.

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See you next Sunday, when we will have found out who shall live and who shall perish in tonight’s White Lotus finale. Email me with your guesses!

See you next week — and fair warning— there may be a substantial hiatus in the LZSP, so get it while you can!