The Metropolitan Museum of Art (August 3, 2023) – A virtual tour of Tree & Serpent: Early Buddhist Art in India, 200 BCE–400 CE. Featuring more than 140 objects dating from 200 BCE to 400 CE, the exhibition presents a series of evocative and interlocking themes to reveal both the pre-Buddhist origins of figurative sculpture in India and the early narrative traditions that were central to this formative moment in early Indian art.
With major loans from a dozen lenders across India, as well as from the United Kingdom, Europe, and the United States, it transports visitors into the world of early Buddhist imagery that gave expression to this new religion as it grew from a core set of ethical teachings into one of the world’s great religions. Objects associated with Indo-Roman exchange reveal India’s place in early global trade.
The exhibition showcases objects in various media, including limestone sculptures, gold, silver, bronze, rock crystal, and ivory. Highlights include spectacular sculptures from southern India—newly discovered and never before publicly exhibited masterpieces—that add to the world canon of early Buddhist art. On view: July 21st–November 13th, 2023
Literary Review – August 2023 Issue: How Sugar Became King; Oil, Resin, Vinegar & Paint – “Albrecht Dürer: Art and Autobiography” By David Ekserdjian; Shopping & Plucking – “How to Be a Renaissance Woman: The Untold History of Beauty and Female Creativity” By Jill Burke and more…
Albrecht Dürer: Art and Autobiography By David Ekserdjian
Dürer’s Lost Masterpiece: Art and Society at the Dawn of a Global World By Ulinka Rublack
The German Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528) was fortunate in his initials. The stylised ‘AD’ that he routinely inserted into his paintings and engravings, and even the preparatory drawings, seemed to imbue his productions with an almost divine stamp of approval. Most German painters of the era did not sign their work, but Dürer was eager to assert creative ownership of his productions, obtaining legal protection of his sole right to the trademark monogram.
The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, and Environment over 2,000 Years By Ulbe Bosma
There was a time when commodity histories were everywhere. They tended to focus on consumption and trade over very long distances. Ulbe Bosma’s TheWorld of Sugar is much more than this sort of book. It is one of the most accomplished longue durée case studies in the history of capitalism that we have, concerned not just with trade and consumption but with production also. At every turn it subverts both critiques and celebrations of capitalism, and our understanding of much else besides. It is an extraordinary achievement.
The Booker Prize (August 1, 2023) – The longlist has been announced! It features work from four continents, four Irish writers, four debut novelists – and ten authors who are recognized by the Booker Prize for the first time.
As the founder of Adventures with Purpose, Jared Leisek carved a lucrative niche in the YouTube sleuthing community. Then the sleuths came for him, Rachel Monroe writes.
On this week’s cover, we feature biographies of composers Arnold Schoenberg and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart that emphasize the extent to which each was a singular genius attuned to his culture and times; our reviews are by Anthony Tommasini (formerly The Times’s chief classical music critic) and the composer John Adams.
In Patrick Mackie’s “Mozart in Motion,” the socially observant composer embraces modernity.
Musicians tend to be wary of ascribing specific meanings to music or making too much of a piece’s extra-musical associations. In one of his Norton Lectures at Harvard in 1973, turning to Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony, Leonard Bernstein asked the audience to forget all about “birds and brooks and rustic pleasures” and instead concentrate on “pure” music. He then demonstrated how every phrase of the entire first movement is derived from little motifs of notes and rhythms in the first four bars of the score.
John Adams reviews “Schoenberg: Why He Matters,” in which Harvey Sachs explores the artistic, academic and spiritual life of a 20th-century cultural giant.
In 1955 Henry Pleasants, a critic of both popular and classical music, issued a cranky screed of a book, “The Agony of Modern Music,” which opened with the implacable verdict that “serious music is a dead art.” Pleasants’s thesis was that the traditional forms of classical music — opera, oratorio, orchestral and chamber music, all constructions of a bygone era — no longer related to the experience of our modern lives. Composers had lost touch with the currents of popular taste, and popular music,
LA Review of Books (Summer 2023) – In this elemental issue of LARB Quarterly, no. 38: Earth, we found new ways of looking at the planet. Writers were free to take up the theme casually or catastrophically, studying the earth beneath their fingernails or the planet from hundreds of thousands of miles away. We imagined being sealed outside, dreaming of coming home.
ON AN UNUSUALLY rainy evening in Los Angeles this March, at the Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades, two investigative reporters from Germany gave a talk about a financial scandal known as “cum-ex.” Against the backdrop of a mid-century modern terrace, its polished cement looking dull and gray in the storm, the pair flashed through a series of slides about international tax embezzlement.
A relatively small drip of funds from the German cultural ministry sometimes supports talks like these in the name of Mann’s legacy. When the capital of German literary life was exiled to Los Angeles around the Second World War, the author built a home that now still hosts salons in the name of democratic cultural exchange.
THE YEAR WAS 1971, the place Łódź. Journalist Hanna Krall was interviewing a pioneering heart surgeon named Jan Moll. The good doctor, apparently unhappy with the outcome of previous interviews, told Krall that everything journalists ever wrote about medicine was nonsense. So, if she wanted to avoid doing the same, he strongly suggested she have her article vetted by a certain cardiologist, a Dr. Edelman, who, said Moll, would correct her mistakes. Krall agreed and arranged a meeting. She sat down with Marek Edelman in the Grand Hotel café, where it took 15 minutes for him to read through her article.
The New Yorker – July 31, 2023 issue: The ‘rich and famous’ above the law, a small-town newspaper lands ‘Big Stories’, how Larry Gagosian reshaped the art world, and more…
With a common touch that appeals to juries and a client list that includes Elon Musk, Jay-Z, and Megan Thee Stallion, he’s on a winning streak that makes his rivals seethe.
In the summer of 2018, four years before he bought Twitter, the entrepreneur Elon Musk was facing legal consequences for two of his more reckless forays on the social-media platform. A boys’ soccer team in Thailand had been trapped in a flooded cave for more than two weeks, and a caver involved in the rescue said on CNN that a bespoke submarine Musk had sent to save the children was a “PR stunt.” Infuriated, Musk told his twenty-two million Twitter followers, without basis in fact, that the caver, Vernon Unsworth, was a “pedo guy.” The tweet went viral, and Unsworth’s attorney threatened to sue Musk for defamation.
It was the Friday afternoon of Memorial Day weekend on Further Lane, the best street in Amagansett, the best town in the Hamptons, and the art dealer Larry Gagosian was bumming around his eleven-thousand-square-foot modernist beach mansion, looking pretty relaxed for a man who, the next day, would host a party for a hundred and forty people. A pair of French bulldogs, Baby and Humphrey, waddled about, and Gagosian’s butler, Eddie, a slim man with a ponytail and an air of informal professionalism, handed him a sparkling water.
Audain Art Museum, Whistler, British Columbia, Canada (July 22, 2023) – Manabu Ikeda: Flowers from the Wreckage features Ikeda’s meticulously detailed pen-and-ink drawings that are filled with astonishing images.
This Japanese artist seeks inspiration from his surroundings to bring attention and awe to viewers, as a way of sending warnings about the painful reality of environmental disasters. Central to his practice are metaphors of grief and the undeniable aspects of life that are often beyond society’s control, including the fundamental forces of Mother Nature. Ikeda’s drawings also reveal human resilience and the ability to rise above devastating situations when it appears impossible.
Curated by Kiriko Watanabe, the Audain Art Museum’s Gail & Stephen A. Jarislowsky Curator, this is Ikeda’s first solo retrospective in North America showcasing over sixty works from national and international collections. Flowers from the Wreckage includes Foretoken (2008), Meltdown (2013) and Rebirth (2013-16), a selection of Ikeda’s large-scale drawings that relate to the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake; the most devastating earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power disaster in the country’s recorded history.
Manabu Ikeda: Flowers from the Wreckage will be on display in the AAM’s Tom and Teresa Gautreau Galleries from June 24 to October 9, 2023. A full colour exhibition catalogue featuring essays by Kiriko Watanabe and comments by Manabu Ikeda will be available for purchase in the Museum Shop.
Manabu Ikeda, “Territory,” 2004
pen and acrylic ink on paper, mounted on board, 17″ x 23″ (Takahashi Ryutaro Collection, courtesy the Audain Art Museum, Whistler, B.C.)
Manabu Ikeda Studio Gallery
A studio has been set up in the Museum’s architecturally stunning Upper Galleries, where visitors have the opportunity to observe the process of Ikeda drawing his latest work and interact with him during open studio hours.
Manabu will be in studio on Thursdays, Fridays, and Saturdays, from 3:00pm to 4:30pm until August 30. Museum guests are encouraged to come and witness the Artist’s incredible talent and learn more about his techniques. The studio will be open for viewing Thursday through Monday until September 4.
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