Vik Muniz’s Oscar-nominated “Waste Land” on PBS Tonight
“Waste Land,” a film about the Brooklyn-based, Brazilian-born artist Vik Muniz, which recounts a celebrated artist using his work as an instrument to promote social justice.
The documentary accompanies Muniz to Brazil, where he plans to harvest garbage from one the world’s largest landfills and use it to assemble portraits of people who scavenge the dump for their livelihoods. Expecting to be met with hostility, he and an assistant visit the site and discover instead a community of amiable and well-mannered workers. Rather than proceed on his own, he decides to collaborate with the workers on their “garbage” portraits and to return proceeds from sale of the artworks to improve their lives.
At the Met Opera, Balancing Novelty and Tradition
The Metropolitan Opera’s 2011-12 season brings seven new productions along with the revamped “Ring,” not to mention a world premiere. The current season’s new productions of La Traviata and Don Pasquale were terrific.
Geoffrey Rush as Gogol’s Madman: A Night of Virtuoso Shtick
Geoffrey Rush, past winner of Oscar, Tony, and Emmy awards, in a stage adaptaion of Gogol’s Diary of a Madman, gives an astonishing bravura performance that sold out the month-long run that ends at Brooklyn Academy of Music this weekend. But his over-the-top comedic interpretation of the tragic protagonist, while wildly entertaining, leaves the audience emotionally unmoved.
John the Baptist’s Tooth is in Baltimore
John the Baptist’s tooth, the arm of Saint George and the head of Saint Sebastian are currently at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore as part of “Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics and Devotion in Medieval Europe,” a rich exhibition on view until May 15 that brings together 130 golden sculptures, jewel-encrusted and enameled boxes and crosses, paintings and illuminated manuscripts.
Patti Smith’s “Memoir” Paints her Youth with Mythic Brush
Whether a memoir or an act of romantic self-mythologization, Patti Smith’s book is a sensitive evocation of her and Robert Mapplethorpe’s entwined histories in the sixties and seventies as they struggled to make their way as artists. The Bildungsroman seems destined for the screen.
A Dutch Masterpiece Visits the National Gallery
The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC has borrowed the painting “Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene, 1625,” a religious scene by the Dutch artist Hendrick ter Brugghen, from the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College, to show alongside the gallery’s own ter Brugghen, “Bagpipe Player, 1624,” a major recent museum purchase.
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