"Celluloid condoms between the audience and the immediate gratification of understanding."

"More like watching Playboy TV than having sex."

Hyperbolic outbursts are not uncommon in opera, but rarely were they so concentrated or, um, vivid.

What riled opera so?

Supertitles. Translations usually projected above the stage have driven directors to issue bomb threats. No less than James Levine rashly stated he would rather die than acquiesce.

Three decades after they were invented by the Canadian Opera Company in Toronto, what was once an anathema's anathema is now recognized, even if grudgingly by...

"William Wegman: He Took Two Pictures. One Came Out," an exhibition of the artist's text-based black-and-white photographs from the 1970s, is on view at Marc Selwyn Fine Art through July 6.

So you have a new show of your old work.

Yes, and it's new old work. The bulk of it is work that I came across relatively recently. I was going to move to New York temporarily from L.A., Santa Monica. I was there from '70 to '72 and a half. When I moved temporarily, I gave my studio to John Baldessari with the thought that I would come back. I never came back, and I was in the middle of these photographs...

Surprisingly, little has changed at the Eames House since 1949, when Charles and Ray Eames designed their Pacific Palisades home and studio as a model of affordable modern living. Most of the objects they lived with remain in place at the two-part, rectangular structure on a bluff overlooking the ocean.

Charles died in 1978; his wife and professional partner passed away 10 years later. But they are remembered for their creative use of materials and innovative design of architecture, furniture and industrial products.

Ray's colorfully patterned dishes, place mats and napkins are stacked in...

Vincent Kartheiser will swap his sharp suits for ruffles and coattails. The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis announced that the “Mad Men” star will play Mr. Darcy in its summer production of “Pride and Prejudice.”

The adaptation by Simon Reade will begin previews July 6, with an official opening July 12. The limited engagement will run through Aug. 31.

Guthrie leader Joe Dowling will direct; no additional casting has been announced.

PHOTOS: Hollywood stars on stage

Kartheiser, best known for playing unpopular adman Pete Campbell, has a long history with the Guthrie. The...

What do we do with the Duke? He was, most agree, the greatest jazz composer who ever lived. And more.

Duke Ellington was the soul of American music. David Schiff has just written a brilliantly illuminating book, "The Ellington Century," that places the Duke at the center of it all. Academic Ellington studies are extensive. Terry Teachout has an Ellington biography on the way.

And yet Ellington remains an outsider. A handful of his compositions are standards. But his large-scale symphonic works, his opera, his this and his that — he broke boundaries — are significant rarities....

The Museum of Contemporary Art released a statement Friday saying it has moved back the opening date of its show about contemporary Los Angeles architecture, part of the Getty's "Pacific Standard Time Presents" initiative, by two weeks, to June 16.

The guest curator, Christopher Mount, had raised concerns about the show earlier this month, saying it would not be ready to open on schedule and wondering if it might be canceled. It had been scheduled to open June 2.

"MOCA will present its exhibition on contemporary architecture from Southern California, 'A New Sculpturalism,' opening June 16,...

Carole King seems to have fans in high places: The singer-songwriter's life will be staged with an eye toward Broadway, and next week her oeuvre will be honored at the White House.

Officials announced Friday that President Obama will host a star-studded show for King, the first woman to receive the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song.

King is to receive the award during a concert Wednesday, with performances by Gloria Estefan, Billy Joel, Jesse McCartney, Emeli Sande, James Taylor, Trisha Yearwood and King herself.

PHOTOS: Hollywood stars on stage

The concert, an "In...

Talk about taking issues into your own hands.

National Review writer Kevin Williamson did just that Wednesday night, in what’s now become either an infamous public outburst or a heroic arts effort.

During a performance of the musical “Natasha, Pierre and the Great Comet of 1812” at the New York pop-up bar and performance space Kazino, Williamson hurled a nearby woman’s cellphone across the room when she refused to stop texting. 

“I had a genuinely new experience at the theater tonight,” Williamson wrote that night on the National Review’s website....

No Entropic school of art has announced itself as such, but the concept seems to animate a good deal of drawn and painted work of the past decade or more -- images of intense and unpredictable energy, change and disorder.

Julie Mehretu might be considered a chief practitioner. The speed and unwieldiness of the information age is one clear source for the vocabulary of charged, global fluidity; a post-9/11 tenor of physical and political uncertainty is likely another.

The increasingly volatile collision of nature and culture, in the form of large-scale natural disasters, is yet another catalyst...

Here we get the almost through-sung U.K. version (Richard Nelson’s book is virtually interjections). This favors the show’s enduring asset: Benny Andersson, Björn Ulvaeus and Tim Rice’s soaring, wailing score.

Director Tim Dang stylishly maneuvers his stalwart, multicultural players around set designer Adam Flemming’s levels and arches, aided by Flemming’s...

"Dialogues in Time" at Jancar skips between past and present in Ilene Segalove's life and work, looking at each through the lens of the other. It's a small show, but a poignant romp: at once blunt, wry, endearing and revealing.

The recent work deals mainly with slippage between now and then, between the real and the ostensibly ideal. In "Whatever Happened to My Future" (2012), the 60-year-old  Segalove video-chats with her 20-year-old self, thanks to some doctored old reel-to-reel footage. Characteristic of the artist's work over four decades, the exchange spans the personal (What happened to...

Marco Breuer practices photography in a sculptural, performative sense, redefining the medium as physical and primal through embossing, scratching and scraping, burning, scoring and sanding.

Diane Rosenstein included the New York-based artist in the gallery's inaugural group show earlier this year, and follows up now with a stunning career survey of nearly 50 works from the mid-'90s to the present.

Breuer uses many of the raw ingredients of conventional photography (light-sensitive paper, time, light itself), but typically bypasses others, such as cameras, lens and negatives. What he creates...