
PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at [email protected] and @pjgrisar on Twitter.
PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at [email protected] and @pjgrisar on Twitter.
After Anish Kapoor was awarded the 2017 Genesis Prize, he pledged to donate the $1 million that accompany the award to causes aiding refugees. But the sculptor, most famous for his Chicago work “Cloud Gate,” colloquially known as “The Bean,” is also planning to make a difference with his art. A new drawing by Kapoor…
There may be no hit more ubiquitous for the musical team of Rodgers and Hammerstein than “My Favorite Things.” Despite being written by two Jews and sung, in its original context, by an ex-nun to her charges during a thunderstorm in an Austrian summer estate, the tune from “The Sound of Music” developed an unshakable…
In a landmark move, London’s National Portrait Gallery has decided not to take money from the Sackler family — at least for now. The gallery and the Sackler Trust jointly announced Tuesday that a £1 million gift the Sacklers awarded the museum in 2016 for the development of the museum’s £35.5m “Inspiring People” project would…
Bernard-Henri Lévy is a man of ideas. A celebrity philosopher of the kind that has no equivalent this side of the Atlantic, he’s nonetheless picked the United States as the subject of his latest book, “The Empire and the Five Kings: America’s Abdication and the Fate of the World,” in which he lays out how…
Anish Kapoor is used to having ugliness added to his work. In 2018, Kapoor, the artist responsible for “Sky Mirror” and “Ark Nova,” sued the National Rifle Association for using his sculpture “Cloud Gate” in an advertisement accused of stoking fear and division. But while he succeeded in getting the NRA to remove the unauthorized…
To browse the stacks at the New York Public Library is to take a walk on the mild side. But as of March 15, when The Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center opened its Lou Reed Archive, that’s changed. The archive comprises over 600 hours of live recordings, demos and interviews of the…
Alison Klayman is an accomplished and decorated documentarian. Her filmography includes the award-winning “Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry” (2012), which followed the titular Chinese activist and artist, and “Take Your Pills” (2018), an expose on Adderall addiction. But none of her ambitious and intimate films could prepare her for her latest subject. In “The Brink,” which…
With the acquisition of Lucasfilm, the multi-billion dollar handshake that forged the Marvel-Disney partnership and an incipient deal with Fox, Mickey Mouse owns almost every brand worth having. This mass cultural monopolization has its benefits. For the first time in anyone’s lifetime a film could now, without breach of current copyright law, show stormtroopers from…
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