A gilt Mozartkugeln chocolate wrapper, a Tiger Balm ointment label and a yellow Chinese newspaper clipping do not immediately appear to be meaningful, or art. The collages of Deborah Berman and Donald Margulies create art from seemingly meaningless juxtapositions and give layers of meaning to layers of paper. Berman, the director of development and alumni affairs at the...
The same friend who introduced me to David Foster Wallace once mused that one way to appreciate an artistic work was to realize all the ways it could have been stupid but managed not to be. To my mind, DFW is an important example of how a writer, and specifically a writer from our own academic and cultural milieu, can avoid the particular pitfalls that we here are likely...
A small new exhibit at the Yale Center for British Art explores an 18th century art embarrassment. Three years ago, the Yale University Art Gallery, across the street from the British Art Center, loaned a Benjamin West painting to a fellow museum. Searching for a comparable piece among the 13 West paintings in Yale’s permanent collection to fill the space in the...
In presenting such a specific form of printmaking through such a narrow time period, “Grand Scale” struggles with the curse of repetition. Employing a two-room gallery space seems unnecessary for such a narrow genre and style of work. Indeed, the presentation of two different artistic renderings of the “View of Venice” detracts from the individual power of each...
After over 20 years of traveling the jungles of South America, noted nature photographer Frans Lanting brings his photography to the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History. Funded in part by the National Geographic Society, “Jungles: Photography by Frans Lanting” reads just like one of the society’s magazines: intensely deliberate close-ups of strange creatures and...
Just around the corner from Old Campus, a Hawaiian paradise awaits students looking for refuge from a rainy afternoon. The Yale University School of Architecture Gallery is — until Oct. 24 — housing an exhibit entitled “Hawaiian Modern: The Architecture of Vladimir Ossipoff.” The exhibition was designed and guest-curated by Dean Sakamoto, a man who is not only...
You walk through the entrance of the Whitney Humanities Center, you make a right into a virtually empty corridor, and you ask the friendly receptionist where the fine arts exhibit is taking place. “There,” she responds, gesturing across from her where the authentic pieces from Josef Albers’ “Interaction of Color” hang. Confused, you turn around only to see banal...
A devoted fan who had taken 10 or so years off from listening to Dar Williams would probably be disappointed by her newest album. Whereas Williams’s excellent first two releases, “The Honesty Room” (1993) and “Mortal City” (1996), offered compelling collections of funny, poignant, girl-with-her-guitar, lyrically driven songs, “Promised Land,” like her other...
Two student-curated exhibits on display at the Yale University Art Gallery until Sunday both feature photography, but that’s the extent of their similarities. “Everyday Monuments: The Photographs of Jerome Liebling” focuses on work by a single artist who captured subjects from orchards to cadavers with a remarkable attention to beauty. The second exhibit, “From...
Seeing great art can be a bit of a production these days. There’s the trip to the museum, the exhausting wanderings through endless halls of Oceanic tribal instruments and the inevitable reincarnation of your least favorite section asshole, now reborn as the vocal art snob always one painting over. There are pleasanter places to observe art, but smaller galleries...
