Several new exhibitions celebrate the art of textiles, from tapestries to sculpture

By Laura Jacobs

Faced with the test of threading a sewing machine, in ninth-grade Home Ec, I still remember my fear. I knew the thread’s path through the various guides and levers but dreaded the last passage—poking it through the slit eye of that vertical exclamation point, the needle. So much emotion focused on such a small act. But was it small? Threading a needle, darning a sock, finessing a French braid or playing cat’s cradle, mastering scout’s and sailor’s knots, learning to knit, sew, and smock … All these little tests and games, these early encounters with hair, string, and skein, are early exercises of the hand-eye coordination that makes us human. For some, the thread unspools into the labyrinth of art. READ ON

By Michael Sragow

Walt Disney’s seven-part paean to classical music, Fantasia, opened in 1940 to calamitous box office. While reviews were mixed, few cartoon features have been as galvanizingly influential over Pop art and high art. This audiovisual smorgasbord animates eight basic repertory pieces—including The Rite of Spring—with fanciful stories, picturesque scenes, and abstract designs. On the high side, it gave American audiences their first chance to experience The Nutcracker as intoxicating dance. Decades later, after a smash 1969 re-release as a “trip” movie, it catalyzed a new genre: the classical-music video. READ ON

By Matthew Gurewitsch

To followers of Richard Wagner, the none-too-enthralling Bavarian market town of Bayreuth is the navel of the world, for that is where the master built his “theater of the future,” the Festspielhaus, specially designed for his 17-hour, four-evening epic, “Der Ring des Nibelungen.” Things might have turned out otherwise; for a time, when money was tighter than usual, the spendthrift megalomaniac considered pulling up stakes for greener pastures in Minnesota. One wonders how many of the crowned heads, fellow composers, and other glitterati who assembled for the inaugural three-“Ring” circus in August 1876 would have followed him there. Maybe not even Dom Pedro II of Brazil? READ ON

With disequilibrium the order of the day, some podcasts make smart, entertaining sense of it all

By James Wolcott

You never forget your first impeachment crisis, and I remember mine like a lingering melody. It all began that sultry night of June 17, 1972, when a bungling team of burglars got nabbed red-handed breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Hotel and office complex. It proved to be perhaps the most fateful act of numbskullery in our history. What was originally pooh-poohed by the White House as “a third-rate burglary” triggered a string of mousetraps that would eventually bring down the president.

The discovery of the Plumbers unit, the thuggish henchmen-ry of Charles Colson and READ ON

The retro grandeur of Soviet-era metro stations

By Christopher Herwig

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The British pantomime is noisy, camp, and a complete hoot

By John Lahr

In Great Britain this year, the Christmas pantomime season has coincided with the general election, which means that the politicians have been busy being Santa Claus and the panto stars busy being Fairies.

To Americans, the word “pantomime” conjures a foreigner in white face and white gloves silently building an imaginary wall; but there is no mime in British pantomime—a noisy, gender-bending slapstick holiday from normality, a call to the infantile, to vulgarity, to bad manners, and, naturally, to bad acting. In panto’s world-turned-upside-down, travesty rules, and license is the name of the game: The audience is free to READ ON

By Neal Goren

Need a breather from December’s unrelenting holiday cheer, not to mention sugarplums? The Metropolitan Opera offers an ideal respite with its new production of Alban Berg’s Wozzeck, which premieres this coming week. A new Wozzeck is a highlight on any cultural calendar, and this iteration is designed and directed by the celebrated South African artist William Kentridge, whose recent work at the Met has included lively, image-soaked productions of two other 20th-century operatic cornerstones, Berg’s Lulu and Dmitri Shostakovich’s The Nose.

Running concurrently at the Neue Galerie, just across Central Park, is an essential exhibition of work by the German Expressionist painter Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. READ ON

By Paul Elie

The “Annunciation” refers to the moment in the New Testament when an angel pays a visit to a young woman of Nazareth and “announces” that she will give birth to the child of God. The angel is Gabriel. The child is Jesus. The woman is Mary, or Maria, or Miriam. Greeks call her Theotokos, or “God-bearer.” Muslims recognize Maryam, for the episode is recorded in the Koran. Generations of Catholic schoolchildren, hastily praying the Hail Mary, called her “Holy-Mary-Mother-of-God”—and the words of the prayer, murmured in church or declaimed over the school P.A. system, are the ones Gabriel is said to have uttered 2,000 years ago: “Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee.” READ ON

By Emily Gordon

As he was founding the Ballets Russes, Sergey Diaghilev had an aesthetic and political problem to solve: which Russia to present to an international audience? More than a century later, there remains a distinction between artists who intend their work for a Russian audience and those with an eye on the rest of the world. The contemporary painter Andrey Remnev knows this history well, and is unafraid to plant his brush in the former category. READ ON

By Yona Zeldis McDonough

Peer into the miniaturized splendor of any of the Thorne Rooms and I dare you not to swoon. The near-hypnotic lure of these mini mundi comes from their magical intersection of scale and skill. When shrunk, even the most quotidian object—a vase, a lamp, a copper pot—is transformed into a precious talisman that inspires fascination and awe. READ ON

Now in its 23rd year, this American city is ready for its close-up—as is its surprise builder!

By Bridget Arsenault

British rock singer Rod Stewart has over the years earned a reputation for extreme openness: he’s spoken candidly about his colossal cocaine use in the 70s and losing his virginity to a rotund woman in a beer tent, and righted wrongs surrounding a much-whispered rumor involving a crew of sailors, a gay bar in San Diego, and an emergency stomach pump. When it comes to his model-train collection, though, Stewart has stayed decidedly mum.

It turns out that over the past 23 years—during which Stewart released 13 studio albums and toured 19 times—he’s also been at work on a READ ON

A new book pulls back the curtain on London’s
most beautiful theaters

By Simon Callow

“When Derry came to me with his innocent invitation to write little introductions to his photographs of the theatres,” the beloved British actor and author Simon Callow confesses in the introduction to London’s Great Theatres, “he unwittingly touched a nerve of some magnitude.” It didn’t help that Derry Moore “was producing ravishing photographs of the theatres with indecent speed and brilliance.” The resulting photos find their equal in Callow’s delicate, charming essays, which combine his own passion with riveting histories of the British capital’s widely varying theaters.

By Matthew Gurewitsch

When Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the music director of the Metropolitan Opera and an occasional pianist, proposed teaming up for Franz Schubert’s 70-minute Winterreise (Winter Journey), the mezzo-soprano superstar Joyce DiDonato had her doubts. Each of the cycle’s 24 songs is in its own way a station on a jilted lover’s descent into alienation. Again and again, he finds his state of mind reflected in images of wintry desolation: a weathervane whipped around in the wind, one last leaf trembling on a branch, a crow winging overhead. Not once does the poet Wilhelm Müller—a minor romantic who but for Schubert would be forgotten—abandon the wayfarer’s point of view. But what went wrong with his love affair? READ ON

By Lewis Jacobsen

Once the haunt of the avant-garde, installation art has matured into a 21st-century mass-culture phenomenon. There is no better evidence of this evolution than the immense popularity of Yayoi Kusama’s mirrored “infinity rooms.” READ ON

With Nutcracker season in full swing, an exploration of the meaning of the ballet, and the story behind it, intensifies the mystery of the Christmas tree

By Laura Jacobs

“The Nutcracker,” the choreographer George Balanchine said repeatedly, ”is the tree.” The Christmas tree, of course. But what, exactly, does that mean? I’ve been a dance critic for decades, have seen countless Nutcrackers, and still I ponder the score, the scenario, and the new interpretations introduced by new stagings of the ballet. Viewed as child’s play, The Nutcracker, which premiered in 1892, is deemed a cultural toy—akin to one of Herr Drosselmeier’s magical automatons—to be enjoyed during the holidays and then put back in a cabinet. But the more you listen to it, and the more you read and think about it, the deeper the questions. READ ON

There were many drinking clubs in Soho in the 50s. But the habitués of the Colony were of a more stellar quality, with a higher degree of loucheness

By Michael Lindsay-Hogg

Standing at the bar of the Colony, Francis Bacon said, “I’d like to kiss you, Bang.”

He was holding a glass of champagne; I, a vodka-and-tonic. I was at Oxford. He was a painter.

Perhaps I should explain a bit.

The Colony Room was a drinking club at 41 Dean Street, Soho, London. In the days when pubs closed at 2:30 in the afternoon, drinking clubs were licensed to accommodate those who couldn’t last, or just wanted to go on chatting, a drink at hand, until the pubs opened again at 5:30. (They could stay open until the pubs closed, at 10:30.) A drinking club should not be mistaken for the grand, posh, men-only redoubts, like White’s, that occupied mansions in St. James’s. READ ON

By Apollinaire Scherr

As American an art form as the blues, modern dance was once also a protest art surreptitiously and pleasurably swathed in sensuality. For nascent feminism, there was Isadora Duncan flouncing about in Grecian drapery, and for anti-war sentiment Martha Graham offered an Amazon “specter” who gathered and dispensed trouble in the volumes of her skirt. In the early heat of the civil-rights movement, Alvin Ailey took up the political mantle simply by putting black experience onstage, replacing the prevailing cartoonish stereotypes with dances of unpronounced dignity, hard-won optimism, and pantherine power. READ ON

By Jeffrey Gantz

As one of the Great American Novels, though a commercial failure in its time, Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick has been adapted often—most famously as the 1956 film directed by John Huston, featuring a screenplay Huston co-wrote with Ray Bradbury, and starring Gregory Peck as peg-legged Captain Ahab and Richard Basehart as the narrator, Ishmael. The novel has been made into comic books and a cantata; Bob Dylan cited it upon winning the 2017 Nobel Prize. Now it’s about to be a musical. READ ON

The work of photographer Rodney Smith is frequently described as surreal, which is funny, because Smith, who died in 2016 at 68, used no filters, retouching, or postproduction trickery of any kind. His pictures come by their surreality honestly.

The son of a domineering fashion executive, Smith rebelled by earning a master’s of divinity from Yale. But he kept one foot in this world, minoring in photography under Walker Evans, who was then a professor at the school. Beginning in the 1980s, Smith found success in advertising—his blue-chip clients included Heinz and Northrop—and fashion, both editorial (Vanity Fair, W, READ ON

By Laura de Gunzburg

Art Basel Miami Beach—also known as a classy excuse for some time at the beach, plus champagne and night life—is now in its 18th year. Luxury brands are knee deep in it all, and the fairs are usually busiest towards the end of their days. Art Basel, although the most prominent event, is just one of the many fairs going on in Miami around the same time. There’s also Design Miami, Untitled, Context Art Miami, NADA, Scope, and Pulse, to name a few. This year, Art Basel is adding a new section—Meridians—to its already extensive fair; Meridians is presenting 34 large-scale works curated by Magalí Arriola, director of the Museo Tamayo in Mexico City (it opens to VIPs on Tuesday, December 3 , 4–7 p.m.). READ ON

By Jackson Arn

“Possibly a great artist,” a critic said of David Bomberg. It was an apt way of summing up the British painter’s wobbling reputation. Born in Birmingham in 1890 to Polish-Jewish immigrants, Bomberg was admitted to the prestigious Slade School of Fine Art in 1911, only to be expelled in 1913 for being too aesthetically radical. He developed a precise, muscular style of abstraction during the war years, only to scrap it after the Armistice of 1918. He befriended two pillars of modernism, Wyndham Lewis and Filippo Marinetti, only to lose both when they drifted toward Fascism. He died in 1957, flat broke and half forgotten. Today, he seems like a strong candidate for the greatest British painter between Turner and Bacon. READ ON

By Bruce Handy

What aspect of contemporary life haven’t cars impacted? Industrial design and manufacturing. Fine art and popular culture. Mating and work habits. The ways we define our present and grapple with the future. The very pace and rootlessness of life as it has been lived by the three or four most mobile generations in human history. There are tire tracks everywhere. READ ON

Gallery displays of performance materials walk a line between highlighting and fetishizing, documenting and memorializing, but in a thoughtful new exhibition—the first ever on the acclaimed experimental theater troupe, The Wooster Group—the objects that once appeared onstage, in performance, are compelling in their own right. “It’s a balance between context and aesthetics,” says Carriage Trade gallery curator Peter Scott, “but this is unapologetically an art show.”

How are stage props works of art? Founded in the 1970s, The Wooster Group is a legendary downtown-New York theater outfit, with a revolving cast of actors (Willem Dafoe, Kate Valk, and Steve Buscemi READ ON

New York gets dressy around the holidays, especially its store windows, where retailers light up the avenues with over-the-top displays. For those who like their holidays with more personal glitter, the annual December jewelry auctions are a highly anticipated New York tradition. READ ON