Search Salon

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Salon Columnists
Follow these links for the most recent column by:
Susie Bright
Robert Burton, M.D.
Joe Conason
Sean Elder
David Horowitz
Garrison Keillor
Anne Lamott
Greil Marcus
Joyce Millman
Camille Paglia
Amy Reiter
Mary Roach
Scott Rosenberg
Ruth Shalit
Michael Sragow
Virginia Vitzthum
Sarah Vowell
Cintra Wilson
Burt Wolf

+ Columnists' schedule

- - - - - - - - - - - -

Recently in Salon Arts & Entertainment

Music Review
Sharps & Flats
Post-punk good ol' gal Kelly Hogan has a smoky alto that can effortlessly waltz between an uptown cabaret and a country roadhouse.
By Don McLeese
[03/29/00]

Movie Interview
Love and death in Chicago
"Waking the Dead" director Keith Gordon on passion, compromise and working for the man.
By Jeff Stark
[03/28/00]

Music Review
Sharps & Flats
Aqua's radio confections match pomo knowingness with sugar-shocked swells. The insidious result: Pop that eats itself.
By Michelle Goldberg
[03/28/00]

Movie Review
"Buddy Boy"
First-time director Mark Hanlon may have watched "Eraserhead" too many times, but he sure knows how to sustain a mood.
By Andrew O'Hehir
[03/28/00]

Movies
Oscars 2000
Untethered hooters! Suave cocksmiths! But even Billy Crystal and Hilary Swank couldn't save a crushingly boring show.
By Cintra Wilson
[03/27/00]

Complete archives for Arts & Entertainment

- - - - - - - - - - - -

- - - - - - - - - - - -

The delight of seeing Cruise flail around only underlines the biennial's misfortune. Opening four days before the Academy Awards, which, for the first time in recent memory, honor an embarrassment of film riches, the exhibit makes one wonder if this is simply a season of moving pictures, not hanging ones. Except that 15 blocks north of the Whitney, the Smithsonian's Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum is hosting its first triennial, "Design Culture Now." Where the biennial seems pointless and stale, the triennial is full of surprises. If painting and sculpture seem to be enduring some kind of crisis, advertising, housewares, graphics and industrial design seem to be flourishing at fine art's expense. Both shows demonstrate how current visual practitioners play with, and are indebted to, art history. But the utilitarian designers have something over the artists-for-art's-sake, and that is utility itself.

Much has been made of the Whitney's inclusion, for the first time, of Internet art in its biennial. Including such art seems like a good idea until one enters the chosen sites. John F. Simon Jr.'s Web site, "Every Icon," for example, is a grid containing 32-by-32 black and white squares programmed to move around through every possible geometric configuration. According to the museum, "On an average home computer, it will take several hundred trillion years for the process to conclude, when every square is black." Watching it for five minutes feels like a trillion years. "Every Icon" might be a sly attack on abstraction's critics, pointing out that geometric compositions have endless prospects, but it doesn't come off sly -- only endless. By comparison, Kate Spade's crisp "Vertical Bucket Handbag" in the design show -- a cotton striped purse with multicolored, horizontal lines -- exudes a similar devotion to straight lines, but at least is handy enough to hold lipstick and gum.

"Design Culture Now" affords examples of how the ideas of artists can trickle down into everyday objects. Pablo Picasso's 1943 sculpture "Bull's Head," in which the animal's head is suggested by a bicycle seat and its horns are formed by bike handlebars, is given loving tribute in the "Picasso Internet Radio." Designed by Paul Pierce and Dennis Erber for Thomson Consumer Electronics, the radio is shaped like the Picasso bull, but its "horns" transmit sound like an old-time Victrola. It is a playful thing, a sculpture that is both tool and toy.

Next page | Johns' famous flags doing fine on their own