Moreintelligentlife.com is the website of Intelligent Life magazine. Articles about Arts, Lifestyle, Travels, and Ideas

~ Posted by Robert Butler, May 3rd 2012

They thought it might go for $80m. But last night in New York, Munch's "The Scream" went for $107m—the highest price paid for a work of art at an auction. If you couldn't get there, you could always watch it online. Sotheby’s said they were streaming the sale live from 7pm, or midnight BST. At 11.45 last night, the live stream was a shot of an empty podium and the tops of people's heads as they walked past, no ambient sound, and no sign when that might arrive. Twitter was doing a better job. Someone tweeted a picture of the queue. Someone tweeted the photo of their press pass. Someone tweeted the view from a hotel foyer: "The #Carlyle is swimming with art barons, vampires and 300 yr. old women."

At midnight a smooth-looking man in black tie stepped forward. The sound came on and went off again. Was that deliberate? Soon the twitter stream was announcing "#Sothebys live stream dead." The problem was too many people wanted to watch. My computer was getting snatches of audio and video, stuttering and jumping, but the numbers on the screen were out of synch with the audio.  read more »

~ Posted by Hazel Sheffield, February 17th 2012

This Sunday an opera by the singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright opens in New York. It's five years since it was commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center Theater, but "Prima Donna" won't be premiering at either of those venues. There are several reasons for this, but the glaring one is that Wainwright, who was raised in Montreal by his mother, the late folk singer Kate McGarrigle, decided to write his opera in French.

It fell to a British company, Opera North, to premiere "Prima Donna" in Manchester in 2009. It comes to New York courtesy of the New York City Opera and Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), an organisation whose stated aim is to be "adventurous"—though it might surprise some that an opera written in the language of Bizet and Debussy qualifies as such. The rival ambition, to stage new operas that are American in character, is not limited to the Met. Last month, the Washington National Opera announced an ambitious programme to invest in "New American Works".  read more »

A man, naked, his pale flesh splotched with blood, hangs from a rope tied around his waist. His body is bent double; hands tied to feet that are secured to the wood platform on which he stands. Beside him a fully dressed fellow in jolly striped trousers slowly tightens the screws of this torture device. The pour soul will die before he is torn in two. This is only one of the gruesome horrors perpetrated in “The Torture of the Maccabean Brothers”, painted in Cologne in the early 16th century. It is one of 22 late medieval and mainly German paintings in a selling exhibition now at the Richard Feigen gallery in New York, which opened earlier this month. The works belong to Sam Fogg, a London dealer; his gallery isn’t big enough to house them. At Feigen the walls have been painted a deep, rich blue which nicely sets off the gold in a number of the works. The effect is handsome, but it cannot disguise the fact these are not paintings for the faint-hearted.  read more »

There are certain precautions memoirists can take to inoculate themselves against the genre’s hazards. Writing about a famous friend is a good way to air out an autobiography’s inevitable claustrophobia, just as revealing the dirty secrets of an industry pans the POV up from the navel and out onto the social scene. Memoirists are safe so long as they appear to be eulogising someone or something other than just themselves. Of all the strategies employed to avoid narcissism, rhapsodising about a place is perhaps the most popular. New York City—because it is contained, catalysing and attractive to young people—is where many writers begin their careers: fielding freelance assignments, slumming it in roach-infested walk-ups and assembling a makeshift family out of like-minded confidants.

Whether a book or an essay, the New York memoir is its own sub-genre, with discrete conventions and repeating motifs. There’s the memory of impossibly low rents (Luc Sante paid $150/month in 1978) and the thrill that comes with what E.B. White refers to as the “nearness of giants”. Everyone writes about their secret New York haunts, their special detours, their favourite bar. But then, of course, there’s the disillusionment and the dulling: the rents go up, those giants end up being jerks, and the favourite bar goes out of business, the haunt gets paved over.  read more »

In “Chinglish”, a new Broadway play by David Henry Hwang, an American businessman goes to China to rustle up business for his family's ailing sign-making company. The title of the play refers to those famously kooky translations found in China, where a mundane phrase in English such as "Please keep off the grass" is translated into "I like your smile, but unlike you put your shoes on my face."

Set in Guiyang, a “small” city of 4.3m in south-west China, Mr Hwang’s shrewdly funny play, directed by Leigh Silverman, is performed in English and Mandarin with English supertitles, and features plenty of faux pas and intrigue. But what is surprising is just how well Mr Hwang, a Chinese-American playwright, manages to capture the nuances of rapidly changing China and a shifting global order. He also conveys the skewed expectations that Westerners and Chinese have of each other—and themselves. 

Now 54, Mr Hwang pioneered plays with Asian and Asian-American themes in the 1980s. Since then he has worked on a variety of projects, including co-writing the libretto for Elton John’s Broadway musical “Aida”. He is best known for his 1988 play “M. Butterfly”, about a French diplomat who has a 20-year affair with a Chinese singer who turns out to be a man, which won a Tony award and was a Pulitzer-prize finalist. At the time Mr Hwang’s plays were, as he recalls, “exotic ethnic theatre”. But now that China plays a bigger role on the world stage, the country is becoming more visible on a theatrical one.  read more »

Diego Rivera (1886-1957) was several people in one. A political partisan and rebellious spirit, he was also a painter, illustrator, architect, draughtsman, costume designer and sculptor. His private life was a whirlwind: Frida Kahlo was wife No 3, and 4 (they married, divorced and remarried). But Rivera’s real love affair was with the wall. Bursting with colour, packed with detail and full of fantasy, his murals are mind-boggling. Like meaty scenes from an epic novel, they are magical storyboards that find their way deep into the imagination. 

Strongly influenced by the Mexican revolution, Rivera believed in art for all. He wanted his work to be accessible, on public walls, not just gallery ones. In 1931, the Museum of Modern Art in New York offered him a big solo show. Arriving six weeks early, he was given an empty gallery to create eight portable murals. Eighty years later, five of them are back where they began. 

They appear alongside a selection of drawings, watercolours and prints plus Rivera’s controversial designs for the Rockefeller Centre, begun while in residence at MoMA. “Frozen Assets” is the most surprising mural on show. It’s American, not Mexican, and shows New York’s jagged skyline, an unemployment shelter and a bank vault. It’s a gutsy statement to make mid-Depression. When Rivera arrived in New York, almost a quarter of all Americans were unemployed. His work asked big questions. During a global crisis, how could art tackle social and economic problems? If only we had the answer.

~ OLIVIA WEINBERG 

Diego Rivera: Murals for the Museum of Modern Art  MoMA, New York, November 13th to May 14th 

For well over a century the most piercing satire of one of the most widely read works of American fiction, Joseph Smith’s “The Book of Mormon”, could be found in Mark Twain’s 1872 book “Roughing It”. That changed this year, when the populous but still fringe religion made a surprise splash on the Great White Way.

The Broadway musical titled “The Book of Mormon” uses song and dance (and some raunchy language that might turn Twain as white as his suits) to convey the absurdities of Smith’s epic. Despite its frank depiction of religious hypocrisy, the show has wildly defied George S. Kaufman’s famous stage adage that “satire is what closes on Saturday night” and is a runaway box office hit. (The Economist reviews it here.)

When “The Book of Mormon” swept the 2011 Tony awards over the summer it also swept Robert Lopez into the annals of Broadway history. By winning his second Tony award for best score, Mr Lopez joined an illustrious crowd of composers: Richard Rodgers (of Rodgers & Hammerstein), Jerry Herman (“Hello, Dolly!” and “La Cage aux Follies”) and Tim Rice (“Evita” and “Aida”). Cole Porter and Kurt Weill each won the award only once.  read more »

"Kaddish (or The Key in the Window)” opens with the figure of the poet crouching, physically twisted in the attempt to recover a tormented past. For its 50th anniversary, Allen Ginsberg’s searing narrative poem has been reimagined as a memory play by Donnie Mather and his director, Kim Weild. Mr Mather looks nothing like the young Ginsberg, but his possession of the poem is so astonishing that the shadow he casts against the whitewashed brick wall of the stage uncannily resembles the poet. The play consists of almost all of “Kaddish”, and the production manages to integrate the eternal cast of poetry with the ephemeral nature of theatre. 

After years of crises, suicide attempts, hospitalizations and insulin electroshock treatments that ended in a prefrontal lobotomy, Ginsberg’s mother Naomi died of a stroke in Pilgrim State Hospital on June 9th 1956. Having found some measure of happiness and stability living in Berkeley with Peter Orlovsky, Ginsberg was told of her death in a telegram. Over the next few years he travelled and planned his “Kaddish or the Sea Poem, irregular lines each perfect. Now all is changed for me, as all is changed for thee, Naomi.” He ended with the charge to himself: “Write Kaddish.” Back in New York City in November 1958, under the guidance of William Carlos Williams and influenced by Whitman, Shelley, Blake and Hart Crane, Ginsberg sat and wrote for 36 hours, fuelled by coffee, boiled eggs, morphine and methamphetamine, and completed most of what Robert Lowell called “his terrible masterpiece.”  read more »

A sudden chill in the air means that the new Broadway season is nearly under way. In addition to Stephen Sondheim's acclaimed musical “Follies”, a revival of which opened in September (starring Bernadette Peters), curtains will rise on 16 new productions before the end of the year. Some beloved stage stars will be making their way back to Broadway in the process, such as Patti LuPone and Mandy Patinkin. With the season poised to burst into full bloom, we asked a dozen of the biggest names on Broadway—from seasoned directors to Tony-award winners to incoming stars—for their "must see" recommendations. 

Michael Cerveris
(Tony award for best featured actor in a musical for ASSASSINS; will perform in the EVITA revival in 2012) 

Must see: DETROIT, a new play by Lisa D'Amour, which premiered at Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 2010 
"I've seen [Ms D'Amour]'s previous grassroots and experimental work and am eager to see how her smart, poetic and lyric voice makes the transition to a more traditional theatrical environment. Add to that the visceral acting style of Steppenwolf Theatre and the soulfulness of director Austin Pendleton, and you have the makings of a very exciting new American play." 

Josh Gad
(Now performing in THE BOOK OF MORMON, which won the 2011 Tony for best new musical)   read more »

The New Yorker Festival, now in its 12th year, is rather like a New York sandwich bar. There’s so much choice, it’s almost oppressive. 

On opening night, you had to choose between Steve Martin talking about art, Frank Gehry giving a tour of his new skyscraper, Joyce Carol Oates contemplating the dark side, Roland Emmerich screening his new film about Shakespeare, and a debate about war fiction. I put in for Gehry, with no luck; trust a magazine to be tight with the press tickets. So I settled for “Tales out of School: a New Yorker Night with the Moth”. This was fine, because the true star of this three-day extravaganza is not an actor or an architect or a novelist, it’s the New Yorker itself. 

The Moth is an organisation that puts on evenings of storytelling, which may be the new stand-up comedy. Five people from the New Yorker, all male, followed its format, speaking for ten minutes each without notes. The humourist (dread word) Andy Borowitz told the tale of his second and last reporting assignment: waiting ages to grab an interview at a book signing with Sarah, Duchess of York. She uttered one sentence, which was then shot down by the magazine’s near-legendary fact-checkers, who featured in almost every story. Like the dementors in "Harry Potter", they are agents of chaos and misery.  read more »