Jackson Arn
By Jackson Arn
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Culture The one thing critics, directors and film nerds get wrong about Stanley Kubrick
Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker by David Mikics Yale University Press, 248 pp, $26.00 When cinephiles compare Stanley Kubrick to God, they mean the fire-and-brimstone, all-knowing, all-powerful version. To me, he seems more like H.L Mencken’s God, a comedian performing for an audience too scared to laugh. Better yet, a drill sergeant performing insult comedy for…
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Culture How Woodstock revolutionized art — a story that has nothing to do with a music festival
At the end of the 60s, for reasons that had nothing to do with Jimi Hendrix, the town of Woodstock, N.Y. changed the course of American culture. By the first day of the Woodstock Music & Art Festival — which didn’t even take place in the town it’s named for, and was more retrospect than…
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Culture The extremely problematic and incredibly harsh impact of Coronavirus on art
Most art is unfinished — quietly, unglamorously, pointlessly. Two and a half chapters of a novel yellowing in a bottom drawer; sets for a play nobody bothers to produce; a pilot never aired; a melody never resolved; a canvas never covered. That’s just the physical evidence — for every half-finished work, there are thousands that…
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Culture Why Christo didn’t matter — and why that matters
Christo, who passed away last month at the age of 84, had a lot in common with some other famous one-namers. Like Ozymandias, he’s remembered for building big, eye-catching things that don’t exist anymore. Like Cher, he was around for most of the back half of the 20th century and a good chunk of 21st,…
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Culture Why Mort Drucker mattered
If Andy Warhol was a great artist, so was Mort Drucker, the MAD Magazine cartoonist who died last month at the age of 91. Like Warhol, Drucker was a prolific draftsman with an unmistakable line (as thin and brisk as Warhol’s was fat and blotted). His great themes were the gleaming Warholian trinity of Hollywood,…
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Culture In a masterful novel of fascism, harrowing lessons for today
Marrow and Bone By Walter Kempowski, translated from the German by Charlotte Collins New York Review Books, 208 pages, $16.95 Predictions are difficult right now. But here is what will probably happen. Officials will continue abusing and degrading their offices. The major institutions will do what they were designed to do: provide good service, efficiently,…
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Culture The 37 unknown roles of Peter Sellers
. The original occasion for this article was a Peter Sellers retrospective at the Quad Cinema in Manhattan that was supposed to run from March 20 to March 26. For obvious reasons, that retrospective was canceled. This was frustrating, if strangely appropriate — Sellers himself was rudely “canceled” by one final heart attack, just as…
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Art The radical transformation of Madame D’Ora
Can an art show be fascinating without containing a single truly fascinating artwork? The Dora Kallmus exhibit at the Neue Galerie in Manhattan is full of competent, uneccentric photographs of eccentric geniuses from the early 20th century: Gustav Klimt, Colette, Josephine Baker, Picasso. Just as the show seems to be running out of famous faces,…
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