Looking Around

Toyo Ito in Berkeley — No Go

Richard Lacayo — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 18:51:38 +0000

They tell us the Great Recession is in retreat, though it may not feel that way if you're unemployed. Even if it is, on the way out the door it took down a project I was looking forward to. Earlier this week the University of California at Berkeley announced that it was giving [...]

Jeanne-Claude: 1935-2009

Richard Lacayo — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:03:37 +0000

We got news this morning of the death of Jeanne-Claude, the artist and creative partner of Christo. They are of course the husband-and-wife team who wrapped the Reichstag in Berlin, ran a vast curtain fence for miles across the northern California landscape and created the completely enchanting New York City project called The Gates. [...]

Raymond Carver: Another Kind of Minimalism

Richard Lacayo — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 21:30:47 +0000

Actually, the writer Raymond Carver never cared for the word "Minimalism" as the way to describe his taut, tight-lipped short stories. But that was the term they came to be known by in the late 1970s and '80s, when he was at the height of his influence in American fiction. In this week's Time [...]

Bauhaus: The Movie

Richard Lacayo — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 22:25:28 +0000

Okay, not the movie — but the podcast!

Mussorgsky's "Pictures At An Exhibition" — Plus More Pictures

Richard Lacayo — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 20:43:00 +0000

Last Friday, at the damp tail end of a very wet week in New York, I made it over to Alice Tully Hall to catch a collaboration between the Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes and the Berlin-based, South African artist Robin Rhode. Rhode is best known for short films and videos that owe [...]

The Bauhaus at MoMA

Richard Lacayo — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 22:17:45 +0000

The Museum of Modern Art in New York has a big new show devoted to the Bauhaus, the great 20th-century forcing ground of modernism in architecture and design. So I reviewed it in the new issue of Time.

NuMu Boo Boo?

Richard Lacayo — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 22:47:34 +0000

The New Museum in New York is getting spanked quite a bit lately for its upcoming show devoted to the contemporary art collection of one of its own trustees, the Greek billionaire Dakis Joannou. Tyler Green on his blog Modern Art Notes has been out there aggressively over the last few weeks attacking the [...]

A Talk With: Thom Mayne

Richard Lacayo — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 22:10:53 +0000

Not long ago, in connection with a story I'll be posting soon on Time.com, I had a conversation with Thom Mayne, the Pritzker Prize-winning architect who heads the Santa Monica-based firm Morphosis. This fall New York got its first building by Mayne, a really compelling project in the East Village that holds offices, laboratories [...]

The Dia Comes Home to New York

Richard Lacayo — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 03:02:34 +0000

The Dia Art Foundation is a unique thing, a non-profit that collects a limited roster of artists in depth, especially Minimalists and Conceptual artists, and gives them the kind of long term exhibition space their work requires. This can get tricky when you're talking about something like Walter de Maria's New York Earth Room, [...]

The Obamas Return a Painting

Richard Lacayo — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 18:24:50 +0000

Last month we learned what artworks the Obamas had chosen for the family quarters of the White House and the West and East Wing offices. One of the pictures that caught everybody's attention was Watusi (Hard Edge) by Alma Thomas, a lesser known Washington, D.C. area artist who died in 1978. But now [...]