Essential Arts & Culture: Days of Rage, art and inequity in Boyle Heights, ‘West Side Story’ refreshed
Concerts. Ballet. Important museum acquisitions. And a bevy of stories that deal with the ways in which animosity manifests itself in the arts. I’m Carolina A. Miranda, staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, and this is your guide to the week’s top culture stories:
At a time of protest and division, when a niche media landscape can surround us with news tailored to our tastes, The Times is pausing to take a deep, collective look at the ways in which anger is shaping the myriad corners of our culture. “Our predilections both in popular culture and politics have increasingly turned tribal,” writes Jeffrey Fleishman in his introductory piece, “as if a once-common language has broken into coded dialects that separate us from the other.”
Among the essays included in the package:
— Senior writer Lorraine Ali looks at how a wave of television programs explores the anger of women in ways that are “reasonable, warranted and central to the story line” — and not in a manner that dwells on shrill stereotypes.
— Times theater critic Charles McNulty writes that the conditions are right for a theater that more effectively raises hackles: “Why should our political theater be tamer than our political reality?”
— And, lastly, I consider Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” hat as a design object — getting legendary graphic designer George Lois (of Esquire magazine fame) to weigh in on what makes it so effective. Says Lois: “It’s infuriatingly good.”
Art and gentrification in Boyle Heights
As galleries have mushroomed in the Boyle Heights industrial zone, along the banks of the Los Angeles River, tensions have risen between new art spaces and longtime residents harboring concerns about displacement. At a testy community meeting on Tuesday night, an activist group called Defend Boyle Heights, along with a coalition called Boyle Heights Alliance Against Artwashing and Displacement, demanded that galleries leave the neighborhood. “The galleries are here to help,” cried one gallery owner. “We’re not the enemy!” L.A. Weekly.
Some of the pushback, reports Julia Wick, is because of the neighborhood’s long history facing issues of poverty, crime, environmental degradation and urban planning that carved up the area with freeways. “Los Angeles,” she writes, “is deep in the grips of an affordable housing crisis, and residents in a place like Boyle Heights are especially vulnerable to displacement.” LAist
Gustavo Dudamel and the L.A. Philharmonic are doing a semi-staging of Leonard Bernstein’s classic musical “West Side Story” at the Hollywood Bowl. Times critic Mark Swed writes that the show is inspired — and it couldn’t possibly be more relevant. “Dudamel’s great accomplishment is to make all of ‘West Side Story’ sound inevitable: The racial hatred, the violence that somehow erupts as if by spontaneous generation when weapons are handy, and the inextinguishable power of love and sorrow to suggest, if not actually produce, hope,” he writes. Los Angeles Times
Swed also wrote two pieces this week that showed the power of music to heal. At the Hollywood Bowl, not quite a week after the Dallas shootings that left five police officers dead, the pianist Lang Lang performed a program that Swed said was an essential emotional release. And in his Sunday essay on anger in culture, Swed wrote how classical music can console in troubling times. Los Angeles Times
The glorious decay of “Grey Gardens”
“Grey Gardens,” the musical inspired by the Maysles brothers’ documentary about fallen socialite Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter “Little” Edie, inhabiting a decaying Long Island mansion, landed at the Ahmanson Theatre this week — with Betty Buckley and Rachel York in the starring roles. Times theater critic Charles McNulty writes that while the results are mixed, “this is a revival that no musical lover will want to miss.” Los Angeles Times
LACMA acquires major print works
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has acquired 39 works by the famed L.A. printmaking studio Gemini G.E.L. that include pieces by Roy Lichtenstein, Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari. The donation, reports Deborah Vankin, comes in advance of an exhibition devoted to Gemini G.E.L. at the museum in the fall. Los Angeles Times
And as we reported last week, one of Gemini G.E.L.’s founders, Elyse Grinstein, died. Her memorial reception, held at the home she shared for decades with her late husband and Gemini G.E.L. co-founder, Stanley Grinstein, was a reunion for more than 500 from the art world — Frank Gehry, Chuck Arnoldi, Lita Albuquerque, Laddie John Dill, Eli and Edythe Broad among them. Deborah Vankin captured the scene. Los Angeles Times
American Ballet Theatre — and its star ballerina, Misty Copeland — recently enjoyed a run at L.A.’s Music Center. And while the performances, such as Igor Stravinsky’s “The Firebird,” were intriguing, writes dance critic Lewis Segal, he also notes that choreographer Alexei Ratmansky too often left his high-profile dancer on the sidelines “with nothing to do but pluck her feathers like some neglected parrot.” Los Angeles Times
A new biennial for Los Angeles
L.A.’s Department of Cultural Affairs, with the support of a grant from Bloomberg Philanthropies, is debuting a new biennial this weekend that will be all about free public art. “Current: LA Water,” as the show is called, has commissioned site-specific works from a range of artists in locations around L.A. exploring the issue of water in our drought-stricken city. New York Times
The Independent Shakespeare Co. is reimagining “Richard III” for the Griffith Park Free Shakespeare Festival, with rock music and a title character, played by David Melville, who makes for “a gleeful, gloating, perfectly despicable Richard.” Los Angeles Times
In other news…
— Legendary art-dealing dynasty the Wildensteins, known for their business in old masters, are facing financial catastrophe as the French government demands payment of $496 million in back taxes. Highly intriguing. Bloomberg
— Google has deleted a blog and novel in progress by avant-garde writer and artist Dennis Cooper. Many in the art community fear censorship. The Guardian
— Sotheby’s will be selling works from the art collection of David Bowie in November, which includes pieces by Jean-Michel Basquiat and Damien Hirst. Artnet
— Vincent Van Gogh painted three versions of the tight quarters he inhabited in Arles, France, in the late 19th century. One of these will go on view at the Norton Simon in Pasadena in December. Los Angeles Times
— Speaking of Van Gogh, new evidence from his doctor shows that the artist likely did cut off his whole ear. The documentation will go on view in a new exhibition in Amsterdam. New York Times
— A remarkable video tour of John Lautner’s 1963 Sheats-Goldstein house from owner James Goldstein himself. Epic. L.A. Weekly
— Architecture for Humanity, the now-defunct nonprofit focused on humanitarian design projects, is the target of a lawsuit alleging that funds were mismanaged. Curbed
— Cirque du Soleil’s latest acrobatics show, reports David Ng, takes a cue from Hollywood — namely James Cameron’s sci-fi flick “Avatar.” Los Angeles Times
And last but not least…
With California set to vote on the legalization of recreational marijuana use in November, it seems like the right time to revisit the how-to-smoke-a-joint scene in Milos Forman’s farcical 1971 film “Taking Off.” Take the impulse and move with it.
Find me on Twitter @cmonstah.
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