December 23, 2010 Fashion & Style Neiman Marcus Fantasy Gifts By Nicole Rudick In 1939, Neiman Marcus published their first Christmas book, a catalogue of extravagant, humorous, astonishing, and often jewel-encrusted gifts. Over the Top: 50 Years of Fantasy Gifts from the Neiman Marcus Christmas Book, recently published by Assouline, celebrates the Chinese junks, minisubs, urban windmills, bags of diamonds, sailplanes, animal-shaped desks, Warhol portraits, and Jack Nicklaus custom backyard golf courses that only the top 1 percent could comfortably afford. The first cover, in 1951, featured artwork by Saul Steinberg, with subsequent covers created by a host of notables, such as Robert Indiana, Ludwig Bemelmans, Al Hirschfeld, Victor Vassarely, Chuck Jones, and Ben Shahn. His & Hers gifts became a frequent staple of outrageous indulgence beginning in 1960 with His & Hers Beechcraft Airplanes ($176,000). Ensuing examples rivaled for the title of most ostentatious: His & Hers Camels (1967; $4,125), His & Hers Hot Air Balloons (1964; $6,850 each), His & Hers Authentic Mummy Cases (1971; $16,000), His & Hers Robots (2003; $400,000), and His & Hers Name Your Own Jewels (1985; $2,000,000). Read More
December 23, 2010 Fashion & Style The Windows of Bergdorf Goodman By Thessaly La Force A window featuring a Roberto Cavalli dress. On a recent winter afternoon, I sat down for tea with Linda Fargo and David Hoey of Bergdorf Goodman, on the top floor of the store, in the restaurant overlooking southern Central Park. Fargo, who has an immaculate silver bob, is clad in a black Balenciaga dress, capped with a furry Mongolian gilet by Vera Wang, her throat studded with a necklace by a designer named Grazia Bozza, whom she discovered while vacationing in Capri. Hoey is wearing a Band of Outsiders suit—“a journeyman’s vest,” he explains. “It’s a symbol of a real working man who rolls up his sleeves.” And roll up his sleeves he must, even at Fifth Avenue’s most refined department store. Hoey and Fargo are the masterminds behind Bergdorf’s window displays, and they had invited me to come talk with them about their work and their new book, a $550 lavender-sheathed tome (“Our signature color,” explains Fargo) published by Assouline. Titled Windows of Bergdorf Goodman, the book catalogs more than ten years of their work, interspersed with remarks and witty one-liners from some of Bergdorf’s closets friends (Bette Midler, Vogue editor Hamish Bowles, and street photographer Bill Cunningham, to name a few). Read More
December 21, 2010 Arts & Culture Pictorial Grammar By Dawn Chan Co-authored by Gabriel Greenberg. Think of the last time you looked for an apartment: Most likely, a good number of the listings that you encountered came with floor plans. And by looking at these diagrams, you probably had no trouble finding out all sorts of things about the living spaces being advertised: the rough shape of each room; the location of all windows and doors. But how exactly did you reach these conclusions? And how do you immediately understand the route you’re being shown, when a helpful stranger in a foreign country traces a path with their index finger over a subway map? Or how do you look at a courtroom sketch and know that the defendant was wearing suspenders? Whether they’re architectural renderings, Venn diagrams, or even the inkless images created by gestures, pictures can all be thought of as 2-D encodings of our 3-D world. We decipher these images so easily that we never even suspect we’re cracking a code of sorts; we recognize that a certain brushstroke represents an eyebrow, or certain lines forming a Y denote the corner of a cube. But what if someone could write out a codebook (so to speak) precise enough that even a machine, by consulting it, could draw and interpret drawings? Over the past few decades, philosophers, psychologists, and computer scientists have taken on this task, and found it less straightforward than one might think. Read More
December 15, 2010 Arts & Culture Dispatch from Stockholm: The Ceremony By Sergio Vilela Photograph courtesy of Scanpix Sweden. Mario Vargas Llosa enters his hotel after receiving the Nobel Prize. He’s left behind the post-prize official banquet, the pomp and ceremony of a dinner with the Swedish royal family and their 1,300 guests from all over the world. He’s tired but has the glow of an epic hero surveying his many accomplishments. A few friends and family are waiting at the Grand Hôtel, those who weren’t among the fourteen guests each Nobel Prize winner is entitled to invite to the dinner. Vargas Llosa walks through the hall, toward these familiar faces, and asks with real sincerity, “It came out nicely, didn’t it?” As he receives handshakes, applause, hugs, congratulations, praise, photos, and a burst of answers to his question, he takes a handkerchief from his pocket and blows his nose—he’s finally come home. He’s won a Nobel, but he’s the same—that appears to be the consensus among those who surround him. Vargas Llosa is hoarse, tired, and would like to change out of his tuxedo. So he spends no more than three minutes in the lobby, before saying good-bye to each of those who were waiting for him, as if it were all very ordinary. The winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature goes off to sleep to a round of applause. His friends and family stay awhile longer, to celebrate in his name. Read More
December 13, 2010 Arts & Culture Questions Without Answers for John Baldessari By David Salle John Baldessari, Portrait: (Self) #1 as Control + 11 Alterations by Retouching and Airbrushing, 1974. A major exhibition devoted to the mercurial conceptual work of John Baldessari is currently on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Here, on the occasion of that retrospective, the master painter David Salle puts some probing questions to Baldessari, his friend and former teacher. § I have always felt a deeply humanistic undertone in your work, despite its use of irony and obliqueness. But I am hard pressed to account for why I feel it and sometimes think it’s because I have known you for a long time. Where do you think it resides? Is a Conceptual artist different from any other kind of artist? A lot of ink has been spilled about art as the new religion, with the museum as its church. Do you agree with that view? Do you crave a spiritual dimension to art, or are you a pure materialist? Conceptualism is closest to: a) rationalism, b) romanticism, or c) symbolism? Where do you place yourself on that scale? (Hint: Romanticism insists on the primacy of the individual.) Here’s a fan question: How did you come up with the idea of singing LeWitt? I understand the desire to tweak the seriousness of Conceptual art, but how did you arrive at the idea of the singing? And did you rehearse? What’s the one thing an artist must never do? And, apart from questions like these, what is your definition of a bad art idea? Harold Brodkey once said that people don’t like to be outshone—they’ll kill you if it bothers them enough. How have you managed to avoid this in your work? John Baldessari, Noses & Ears, Etc.: Blood, Fist, and Head (with Nose and Ear), 2006. Read More
December 10, 2010 Arts & Culture Giacometti Painting in His Studio, 1965 By Ernst Scheidegger Credit: In Giacometti’s Studio, by Michael Peppiatt. Read More