Newest Features
BILL T. JONES/ARNIE ZANE DANCE CO: ANOTHER EVENING: SERENADE/THE PROPOSITION By Chelsey Philpot February 2009 will mark the bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth. Celebratory volumes singing the sixteenth president’s praises — new biographies, Civil War history hard covers, and children’s books — are already hitting bookstores. However, more attention does not equate greater understanding; much of what we know about Lincoln we do not know at all. Was he a war hawk? Was he gay? Was he depressed? As we approach the New Year and more commemorative events, we should ask if…
RACHEL WHITEREAD @ THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON By James Nadeau “The house, even more than the landscape, is a ‘psychic state,’ and even when reproduced as it appears from the outside, it bespeaks intimacy.” – Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space There comes a moment when experiencing Rachel Whiteread’s installation Place (Village) at the Museum of Fine Arts where one’s mind shifts away from the art moment and instead begins to reminisce about one’s home. This is unavoidable. Place consists of over 200 dollhouses collected by the artist. They are placed…
KARSH 100 @ THE MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON By Kat Kiernan Walking into Karsh 100: A Biography in Images, an exhibition of Yosurf Karsh’s photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, I found myself face-to-face with Winston Churchill. Not the real Winston Churchill of course, but rather a large black and white portrait of his stern face staring at mine with disapproval. My first reaction was to look away, a symptom of my own non-confrontational nature, but clearly evidence that the expression rendered in the photograph had an effect on me. As…
A REPORT FROM THE PHANTOM ZONE By Steve Aishman Night of the Living Dead (1968) Halloween (1978) Dawn of the Dead (1978) A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) Day of the Dead (1985) Creepshow 2 (1987) Monkey Shines (1988) They Live (1988) Village of the Damned (1995) Land of the Dead (2005) Etc. Etc. Etc. My wife and I have an extensive collection of horror movies. Horror movies are fantastic. And anyone who says they can’t be serious as well does not watch them. The social commentary in the original Night of…
SPINNING RHETORICAL WHEELS IN RHETORIC: AN ESSAY ON THE ESSAY By Christian Holland Every piece published on Big RED and Shiny is an essay in some form or another. The following is an attempt, an ‘essay’ if you will, to describe the essay. Essays are the best devices for communicating ideas. There is no other form of composition better suited for the transfer of opinion or knowledge, whether true, false or merely perceived. An ironic quality of the essay, and probably its second most significant quality, is the fact that it is…
SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL @ MUSéE D’ART CONTEMPORAIN DE MONTRéAL By Megan Driscoll The Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal is featuring an exciting traveling exhibition devised by Dominic Molon, curator of Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art. Sympathy for the Devil: Art and Rock and Roll Since 1967 documents the relationship between art and rock music, featuring experimental art from the past four decades as well as contemporary pieces inspired by the rock and roll legacy. The show features over 130 pieces by more than 60 different artists from around the world and…
A CONVERSATION WITH POSTERBOY By Jason Dean I first saw Posterboy’s work on the subway platform a month or so ago. It was a reworked ad poster for the show Date My Ex, only someone had replaced the heads of these ridiculous LA models sitting at a table on a date with the heads from Hellboy and Brendon Frasier in The Mummy. It was simple, it parodied advertising – the whole culture of image with it’s own vocabulary, and it was hilarious. I located Posterboy’s Flickr page and saw not only could they…
Today Harvard announced the gift from class of 1936 alumna Emily Rauh Pulitzer, a former curator at HUAM and wife of the late Joseph Pulitzer Jr. The gift is part of the Pulitzer family’s ongoing philanthropy in support of the arts. The complete list of bequeathals: 1. Emile-Antoine Bourdelle, Mask of Beethoven, c. 1905. Bronze with brown patina, partially gilded, hollow mask form (sand cast); 42.1 x 29.8 x 15.2 cm. 2. Constantin Brancusi, Sleeping Muse II, 1926. Polished bronze, 16.5 x 19.1 x 29.2 cm. 3. Constantin Brancusi, Torso, 1909. Plaster,…