I admit it, I was wrong about Diane Paulus

Ta-da!  I have nothing new to say! Isn't that fabulous??? Photo: Michael J. Lutch.

For those of you have written in to ask, I did indeed go see Diane Paulus's production of Pippin at the A.R.T.  (I think it has closed by now; at any rate it sold out long ago.)

And I have to admit I was wrong about her.  

Yes!  (Bet you never thought you'd read that on the Hub Review, did you.)

You see - I thought Diane Paulus could direct Pippin.

And it turns out I was wrong.  Oh, so wrong.

Now I wonder if she can really direct anything.  I mean Pippin seemed so perfect for her!  PG-dirty, high-school-y, vaguely left-y, and with some lingering resonance as a cultural book-end for Hair, which Paulus made a solid (if not quite inspired) hit a few years back.  Indeed, Pippin is kind of the anti-Hair; back in the day, it was basically about the boomers withdrawing from their short-lived interest in political life, giving up on revolution, and settling down in the ex-urbs.

These days I'm not sure what it's about, and clearly neither is Diane.  Although to be fair, I can only really say that Paulus can't direct the first half (yes, I know in its premiere it was performed in one fell swoop - but the first half is probably the stronger half anyway).  You see I left at intermission. Sorry!  But I'm really ruthless when I've paid for my own ticket, and if a show is as empty as this one, I do NOT stick around - I have better things to do (like check out the chocolate at Burdick's).

Now, I know what you're thinking - it's not her fault: Pippin is bad.  And, okay. It's certainly not, well, good - but it's also not that bad.  I've seen it work (and honestly, it played for five years on Broadway for a reason). Of course Stephen Schwartz's score is terrible - and I mean DREADFUL - and the plot is, if anything, even worse.  The storyline is just whacked, utterly a-historical and ridiculous (there's even a resurrection), and the tone is relentlessly immature, basically because Pippin began its life as a college revue, and it has never entirely shaken off that undergraduate perspective - even though Bob Fosse tried his damnedest to transform it into a dark Brechtian fable for its Broadway run.

Now Fosse is one of the major cultural figures of the late twentieth century - and I'd argue he almost succeeded in making Pippin worthwhile.  Certainly for its day it seemed edgy, with orgies and Monty-Python-esque battles and an African-American "leading player" who all but begged for applause while hinting at a buried hostility behind his Mr.-Bo-Jangles mask.  No wonder Fosse banned Schwartz from rehearsals (tellingly, Paulus reportedly brought him back in); he was ruthlessly subverting Schwartz's schmaltz with a viciously cynical subtext.  

The trouble is, I think our familiarity with Fosse has made it hard to remember the sardonic, de-stabilizing atmosphere his work once breathed.  This whole show, with all its "ideals" and sentimental tropes, is just a kind of sexual sale, his trademarked moves whispered; I'm the pimp and you're the john. Any questions?

But Paulus's attempt to resuscitate Pippin's Fosse-ography falls bizarrely flat, because that sense of challenge is completely missing from her work (and maybe from her mind).  To be fair, perhaps any earnest pop faith in musical theatre is so far in the past that now half the Fosse equation is gone forever.  And don't get me wrong - as always, Paulus proves herself an apt pupil and a dedicated Harvard-level student.  She worked really, really hard on this, you can tell, and to many that means she deserves an A; and she's very open and honest about her lack of any fresh insight or angle on the material - she signals right up-front that she is bringing nothing original to the party.  Indeed, the show opens with a looming image of Fosse's shadow (and all but precisely apes a few of his most famous numbers).  

And yet somehow the whole thing is boring as hell, because Paulus is working at cross-purposes with herself, and doesn't understand Fosse's own conflicted attitude toward the hard sell - I mean honestly, how could she have brought Stephen Schwartz back to consult on the subversion of his own schtick? In the end, Fosse wanted the theatre to be more than high-end prostitution; I think actually he longed for innocence.  And let's be honest - Paulus doesn't.  She just wants to make the sale.  She quite desperately wants to make the sale.  That's all there is for her - the ka-ching.

And you know - that's okay, I guess; you can't really fault her morally because she just seems - well, kind of beyond morals.  I used to get upset with her dumbing-down of Shakespeare, or her slurs against Gershwin - but Pippin made me I understand those moves were just business as usual.  Even sleaze doesn't exist aesthetically for her; she doesn't get it.  She doesn't really understand what she herself is doing.

But like I said, she works hard.  What an effective manager!  And she has certainly built a gigantic whirligig of a production; it will no doubt seem the most dazzling iteration yet of the New-York-Vegas-tourist-theatre-trap when it opens on Broadway this spring (yes, this was always really a commercial show; Paulus just took advantage of the Massachusetts taxpayer for its try-out).  Indeed, sometimes it seemed that every single corner of the Loeb stage had been diligently filled with meaningless spectacle.  Paulus enlisted "Les 7 Doigts de la Main," the millennial Montreal circus troupe, to bring some Cirque-du-Soleil va-va-voom to Fosse's traveling-players conceit, and they did add spectacle, and how - so much so that they all but overwhelmed the slim spine of the musical.  

But if you've seen Les Doigts before (they've been through town three times by now), you've already seen all their best bits, and somehow their virtuosic chill is more bracing in their own work.  If you're from Topeka, of course, you'll be thrilled.  (Or from Harvard, I might add - as I left the lobby, I heard one Harvard blue-hair commenting, "Who are these young acrobats?  They're just wonderful!"  Which is why they call life at Harvard "island living.")

I will say the show had Andrea Martin (who actually gets up on the trapeze!).  We will always love Andrea Martin.  So there's that.  And the great Charlotte d'Amboise, alone among the performers, brought some real sizzle to her Fosse.  But Pippin and his Leading Player were just blanks - talented blanks, but blanks - and if you ain't got them, and you ain't got a director, well . . .

At least the Burdick's fudge was really good.

Now why exactly did the state just hand Harvard $150,000 to upgrade the ART's lighting?

More cultural funding down the toilet.

Sometimes you don't know whether to laugh or cry at the way this benighted state doles out its support for the arts.

A case i point: is there any fatter cat than Harvard University around, you might ask?  I can't think of one offhand - nevertheless, the state's MassDevelopment agency, under the stewardship of Marty Jones, has just seen fit to hand Harvard's ART $150,000 to upgrade its lighting and projection system.

I guess that's so Diane Paulus will be able to launch her next Broadway-bound money machine  (a reboot of Pippin, btw) with something like precisely the technical resources she can expect on the island of Manhattan (where it will inevitably land, with top ticket prices in the hundreds of dollars).

And thank God!  We were all so worried. I mean it's so irritating having to spend all that extra time in tech, when you could be off striking your next deal with the Gershwin estate!

I do wonder whether the lighting booth at the Loeb is really among the Commonwealth's top funding priorities, though.  I mean, I hadn't noticed that the Loeb's projection systems are noticeably below Boston standards!  But even if they are, I wonder whether other resources might have been available for their upgrade . . .

After all, Harvard is sitting on an endowment that even now is floating, after the economic tragedy of 2008 (which was, ironically enough, brought about in part by so many B-school grads, and the theories they were taught) at around $32 billion.  From which (I note) Harvard drew revenue of $1.2 billion last year.

$1.2 billion (pretty much tax-free, btw - a savings of something like, what, $180 million? - although I know Harvard tosses a few million to Cambridge and Boston as a consolation prize).  That's twice the size of Boston College's entire operating budget, and one-and-half times the size of Northeastern's.  It's a lotta clams.  Indeed, the $150,000 the state handed the A.R.T. is only a little more than one-hundredth of one percent of that total.  Wasn't there room in the budget of the greatest university in the world for a single lighting upgrade?

Apparently not.  So let's put it this way.  Harvard couldn't be bothered spending one-hundredth of one percent of its endowment revenue on this project.  Yet the Commonwealth of Massachusetts somehow thinks it's worth funding anyway.  With your money.

Hmmmm.  I think we just saw the 1% once again feathering its own nest.  I mean, it feels a little bit like MassDevelopment just remodeled Ned and Abby Johnson's TV room.  Only I think the shows are better over at Ned and Abby's place!

So what do we do as Harvard makes itself ridiculous?

Sigh. We'd already adjusted to the news that Harvard had opened a disco (and bar), the better to, um, mount another franchise of ART Artistic Director Diane Paulus's The Donkey Show (at left). Now comes word that the world's self-proclaimed "greatest university" is also launching a Ralph-Laurenesque clothing line (sorry, "men's collection," at right). Gee, I guess that endowment must really be hurtin' - Harvard's now hawking drinks and doing patchwork to make ends meet! I suppose at this point I'm supposed to say something like "What next?" But I don't really want to know what's next.

How Marjorie garbles the issue of art in the academy

A few weeks ago an article in the Globe's "Ideas" section by Harvard's Marjorie Garber (looking nobly far-sighted at left) caught my eye - and I'm sure a few others in the Boston area; yet I've read little discussion of it since. Titled "Higher Art," the piece dealt with the question of how universities could, or should, integrate the arts into their curricula - and thus, at a slight rhetorical remove, with the local question of how Harvard might further address this issue in its own curriculum, by even, perhaps, finally establishing a School for the Arts (a need that's often been discussed in this blog). Thus the piece was probably scanned with interest by those Bostonians wondering if and how Harvard might make its big move.

But alas, the article gave at least this reader great cause for concern. I've read Professor Garber's writing with interest before (and even attended a class or two of hers), but I have to say on this question she exhibited little of the intelligence or insight she has routinely displayed in her field of expertise. One wonders, based at least on these few tea leaves, what rude beast might even now be slouching toward Allston/Brighton to be born.

For while I think it's only appropriate to expect that an article subtitled "Universities should become society's great patrons of the arts" might present some sort of argument backing up said claim, Garber offers really nothing in the way of argument, but only a series of gently pretentious proclamations. She begins with the observation that today it's the "visual intellectuals" like Jeff Koons (self-portrait with former wife, above left) who are the big draws at Harvard, rather than dead literary has-beens like Jacques Derrida and boring old T.S. Eliot (at right). Yet the work of these new celebrities, Garber notes, "has not reached a comparable importance in the curriculum," an apparent injustice which leads her to wonder aloud, "what should the role of art be in the modern university?"

A heady question, surely - and it's at least possible that the answer might be that the role of the arts should be reduced in the university. But Garber doesn't ponder her query too long; only a short paragraph later, she's suggesting that "it may be that the time has come for the university to become a patron of the arts, embracing and funding the actual making of art on a new scale . . . [and] integrating the arts into the main intellectual mission of the school."

Yeah, but maybe that time hasn't come, Professor. Maybe instead the time has come to make such a case rather than blithely assume it. But why bother with a knotty debate when one can breathlessly opine that "the making of art . . . belongs in the university . . . nothing could be more central to the life of the university"? Indeed, Garber's not even fazed by the fact that what she's proposing is "a rethinking of what constitutes academic work."

In the tired old traditional definition, of course, "academic work" had to do with something called "truth," and was generally construed as research into an empirically defined subject, to reveal something physically verifiable, or historically valid, or at least logically sound. Of course a school for the arts can meet most of those criteria via instruction in technique or repertoire, with contemporary artists prominently featured as visiting or adjunct professors. That's pretty much the conservatory model. But that's not what Garber has in mind.

And here's where things get interesting, because Garber begins to balance a project of truly epic scale on thin, or even non-existent, pretexts. She tiptoes around the issue of actual tenure for practicing artists - mentioning that "the arts do not lend themselves easily to tenurable standards" - yet also suggests that universities should bring to bear on the arts their "institutional traditions of judgment, peer review, and freedom of ideas" and should give artists "a home during the prime of their careers." To me, that says something a lot like "tenure," but Garber never quite utters the fateful word. In an artful dodge, she instead asserts that "In thinking about how universities can take a more ambitious approach to the arts, we can find a useful model in how society approaches science."

Yes, Garber is calling for a "Big Art" establishment to match the "Big Science" establishment, with its "big staffs, big budgets, big priorities, and big place within the intellectual and fiscal economy of the university." Surely such a false analogy between art and science could only be proposed by someone who doesn't, really, understand science, and sure enough, Garber is soon babbling that "As with scientists, artists' work is theory in practice, marked by repetition, experiment, the exploration and testing of materials and technology, and the imaginative as well as the actual configuration of time and space." Re-reading that, I don't know whether to laugh or cry - "the imaginative as well as actual configuration of time and space"! Could this woman sound more silly?

Still, it's worth noting that despite its big staffs and big budgets, "Big Art" is apparently supposed to be institutionalized sans tenure. And here perhaps is Garber's one bow to the the actual intellectual justifications of "Big Science." Because the salient difference between art and science, of course, is that artistic "experiments" aren't really experiments in any rigorous sense at all; they have no hypotheses, and there are no externally verifiable results. The fact that we call so much art "experimental" is simply in deference to artists' desire for the prestige that long ago attached to science as its methods proved so fruitful. But there is no corresponding "method" to art, and thus no chain of discovery or systemic theoretical development - and hence any "knowledge" derived from artistic "experiments" is essentially chimerical (or at least political). Therefore while pretensions to tenure for purely artistic work may satisfy postmodern literary and critical desires, they simultaneously undermine the very arguments for academic freedom on which the concept of tenure rests. And in practical terms, it seems unlikely that tenure would benefit the arts, given that the vast majority of tenured professors, as surveys routinely show, actually produce little controversial or cutting-edge work, and the tenure process itself leads to paralyzing group-think. (Certainly in Harvard's case, its recent record in new architecture and public art gives one little faith in its ability as a patron.) In short, tenure would probably be bad for both the university and the arts. Artists should not - and must not - be tenured, at least if you want the arts to remain at least as interesting and free as they currently are.

But that still leaves open the question of "Big Art" - or at least what exactly makes "Big Art" different from what universities do already. Sometimes, in fact, Garber's proposals sound surprisingly modest - at one point she says, "Universities would create open spaces for art-making, with natural light, high ceilings, flexible flooring (for dance and other performance activities), and acoustic sophistication." Uh - does she mean a studio? This is about Harvard building some studios?

Elsewhere, however, Garber makes it clear that the facilities of a mere "conservatory" just won't do; instead, she announces that "Big Art" should involve "world-changing projects" that are "international in scope" and depend on "expensive, delicate and complicated tools and equipment." Really, I'm not making this up; Garber is actually calling for tens, or maybe hundreds, of millions of dollars to be invested in huge, international projects that will result in - well, who knows, but whatever it is, it will be BIG, and the artists will no doubt agree that it's great, and that it constitutes "progress." Celebrities will no doubt be involved, and perhaps the professors who mix with them will even become celebrities themselves! (Above left, more from Garber's favorite "visual intellectual," just because I get a kick out of thinking how big his "art" could get with a few million from Harvard.)

Most of this, of course, is simply the same kind of air-headed rhetoric used to promote movies and TV shows. But beneath the afflatus, the kernel of Garber's proposal seems to be something like this: universities should hire artists to produce sponsored work on a grand scale. She argues for this proposal by vague, and often false, analogy: art is like science (wrong), or at least like applied science (wrong again), or at the very least "gives pleasure, and provokes thought" (okay) and is "cross-disciplinary" and "advanced" and "collaborative" and other good stuff.

But Garber never honestly tackles the real questions at the heart of her proposal. If, for example, artists aren't really "tenurable," if their work actually cannot be evaluated by academic standards, then under what rubric should they become "academics" anyhow? And if they are not hired as academics, but as applied practitioners, like, say, the employees of MIT's Lincoln Lab, or the Broad Institute, or other redoubts of "Big Science," then how, precisely, should their work be rewarded, or evaluated? The investment in these institutions was justified practically, by actual technological and economic advance. Art has no such standards, and Garber offers no blueprint for developing them. And she never begins to ponder the circular aspects of an academy which studies a culture which it itself is producing. It's likewise hard to believe that vague prophesies of "progress" will cut the mustard in a funding environment facing the restrictions of the coming recession. Put all these issues together, and somehow I think the proponents of "Big Art" will need a more thoughtful spokesperson than Marjorie Garber.

The Harvard gap

As I gathered my thoughts about the role of the academic theatre in Boston, I found myself pondering again a certain fact that's rarely spoken aloud along the banks of the Charles, but which I call "the Harvard gap."

Egad, you say, dear sir, Harvard has no gaps! It is a perfectly smooth edifice of perfection! Uh-huh. I admit, the place is dazzling, but anyone can see said edifice isn't perfectly smooth - there's at least one gaping hole where the School of the Arts is supposed to be. Now there's nothing wrong with that per se, I suppose. Does a great university have to have a School of the Arts? Perhaps not.

Still, Harvard acts as if it had such a school, and everybody else around here acts as if it did, too. And for a long time that charade worked pretty well, because - and here's what's interesting - a lot of great artists happened to go to Harvard, all the way down from such titans of nineteenth-century American culture as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry James to post-war giants like Norman Mailer, Leonard Bernstein, and John Ashbery.

But for some reason, great artists don't go to Harvard any more. I'm not sure why, really, but it's obvious no major artistic figure has emerged from the college in what, thirty years? Indeed, the career of Peter Sellars - who was supposed to be a bearer of the Harvard arts flame, but who obviously lacked the genuine chops - perhaps marked the death knell of the whole phenomenon. As far as theatre goes, you might have to go all the way back to Arthur Kopit for the last Harvard man of any real significance. And it's telling that one of the last Harvard composers, Elliott Carter, has in recent years been lionized locally almost beyond belief. It's almost as if they know he's the last one.

So in a way Harvard ends up looking like a rarefied trade school (leading to its premier adjuncts, the Schools of Business, Law and Medicine), with, of course, a brilliant program in pure science as well, and a highly developed critical and analytic culture - but with little in the way of actual artistic ferment or presence. (This, to me, is clearly reflected in the stance of the A.R.T., but more on that later.)

Has Harvard come to terms with that reality, however? I'd argue no, and of course few people in the local area have the cojones to call the $40 billion elephant in the room to account. We still reflexively grant them the prestige of a hegemony they long ago lost. But some adjustment in the university's self-image may finally be in the offing. President Drew Faust recently called a task force together to review "the place of the arts at Harvard." Apparently someone realized the arts actually didn't have much of a place at Harvard, given the size, scope, and influence of the institution. But can Harvard ever re-attract artistic genius to its halls? It's an open question - and an interesting problem.

What does Harvard want?

It's a question worthy of Freud, of course, particularly when it comes to the A.R.T. As everyone knows, that theatre company is still looking for an artistic director. But has anyone really said aloud that the two candidates so far approached - James Lapine and Anna D. Shapiro - are both unusual choices, and rather strangely opposed? Both are essentially from the commercial theatre, with some academic connections - very slight for Lapine, true, but Shapiro is a professor at Northwestern (she teaches Graduate Directing there). Lapine is a librettist and director of classic Broadway musicals, and closely associated with Stephen Sondheim and William Finn, while Shapiro is known for psychological realism, and directing several premieres at Steppenwolf (the latest of which, August:Osage County, is now a hit on Broadway). Both, of course, are very talented and highly accomplished people; but it's hard to imagine a job profile which would encompass both. You could argue that the two choices do indicate Harvard's interest in returning to some contact with the world of successful, commercial theatre, and rejecting the insular "avant-garde" clique of Anne Bogart (who for a time was a candidate), Peter Sellars, and their ilk. But beyond this, judging from Lapine and Shapiro, the field is essentially wide open. Perhaps that's as it should be, but, then again, perhaps that's not as it should be - particularly given that, not to put too fine a point on it, both candidates turned the job down. I'd hazard a guess that one reason both said no is that the search committee - and Harvard itself - has no clear idea of what they want in the job; and until that gets straightened out, something tells me the post may remain unfilled. In the meantime, who's planning the next season at the A.R.T.? Gideon Lester?

From my mouth to Drew's ears . . .?

Yes, you - the critic in the back!

Just weeks after my dust-up with Caldwell Titcomb on The Arts Fuse over Harvard's lack of support for theatre, and the arts in general, it turns out that none other than Drew Faust (above) seems to agree with me. How else to parse the news that she is organizing a task force to "examine the place of the arts at Harvard"? You can read the press release here. Maybe Caldwell would like to give her a piece of his mind, too.

More on public art

What can I say? After the debacle with Star Anna Simpson at Logan Airport a few days back, I was mightily pleased to see the reputation of my alma mater so gloriously redeemed!

Is there a cure for Ty Burr?

Getting cranky at Zabriskie Point!

After apparently reading my earlier post, "Never trust anyone under thirty," Ty Burr (at left) picks up the gauntlet on his Globe-blog (Something of an oxymoron, no? Aren't blogs supposed to be an alternative to, rather than a brand-extension of, dead-tree journalism?) with the following:

. . . ex-Globie Thomas Garvey takes my own Sunday piece on Bergman and Antonioni to task on his HubReview blog for not insisting on their greatness strongly enough and for cutting the MySpace generation slack for not knowing their movie history (or worse, not caring to know). He makes some excellent points, but his dismissal of a younger generation's tastes is awfully broad, bordering on plain cranky.

I just came from talking to a classroom full of Harvard journalism students, none of them hardcore cineastes and none of whom had heard of Bergman before last week's obituaries. This is ignorance, as Garvey says, but it's not willful: They're 20. They're still finding things out. This is how they find things out, especially when you're talking about a filmmaker who hadn't released a new theatrical film during their lifetime. It's worth noting that Bergman has been at the top of the IMDb Starmeter -- meaning he's the most searched person on the site -- for a week now. But, yeah, Zac Efron is #2.

Garvey's trashing of current film -- "Trust me, little intern - you can skip ALL that shit - Grindhouse, The Darjeeling Limited, The Host/D-Games, Once - none of them are really worth your time" -- is just obnoxious, even if you agree with him. Tom, these are the movies, or movies like them, that speak to a kid, just as "Persona" once spoke to you and still does. Maybe that's a horrible thing, maybe the standards of serious cinema have fallen precipitously, but you'll never get a college junior from Point A to point B by being a hardliner. You sound like Bosley Crowther upon being presented with "Bonnie and Clyde," unwilling to concede meaning where you see none. (Of course, I could regularly be accused of the same. I hated "Aqua Teen Hunger Force," which one normally sane critic likened to Bunuel. Let us together shriek as one, Mr. Garvey). Still, is there a movie made in the last 15 years of which you approve?

Well, hose me down and call me cranky! Heavens to Betsy - far be it from me to criticize Harvard journalism students; I will point out, however, that in the past few years I've heard one Harvard grad wonder aloud just when, exactly, William the Conqueror invaded Angleterre ("I'm pretty sure it was 1086, Tom," she concluded with a confident nod), while others have insisted you didn't really have to hear Beethoven in the concert hall (what with today's totally awesome ear buds), and still others informed me that Shakespeare (like Bergman?), had no "relevance" today because of his "obvious racism and sexism." Given this evidence of the best education money can buy, I'm hardly shocked to learn that none of this latest crop of Ivy Leaguers has heard of a film director who hasn't released a theatrical film in their lifetime - I mean, seriously, could anything important have happened prior to their lifetime? "They're still finding things out" about William the Conqueror and things of that nature, okay? Cut them some slack!

Sorry, no. Too much slack is what they have already been cut. Harvard students should at least have HEARD of Ingmar Bergman - or if they haven't, they should have the temerity to shut up and listen when he's mentioned. If it's "obnoxious" to insist on that, so be it. Small price to pay, etc. As for my "trashing of current film," here Burr is being dishonest - I'm only trashing his intern's ideas about current film. In my prior piece, I cited several recent films which belonged, if not in the Bergman/Antonioni pantheon, then certainly in their shadow - the films of Michael Haneke (whose Benny's Video and 71 Fragments of a Chronology of Chance just came out on DVD), Kyoshi Kurosawa, Abbas Kiarostami, and especially Krzysztof Kieslowski, to name a few. But do you think Burr's Harvard students know these filmmakers either? I'd bet you they don't.

And therein lies the rub. Burr's kids don't know the great filmmakers of today, either - and for him to pretend that the giants of current film are Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson is simply flattery of their immature, self-centered taste. As for his argument that film is just bustin' out all over - strange, then, that our recent crop of great auteurs has seen so little glory, in fact is generally in a constant battle with obscurity. If Burr's forgiving thesis were anywhere near true, wouldn't at least Kieslowski (whose Decalogue - image above - may be the greatest film achievement of the last quarter century) be a name as well known as Bergman's or Antonioni's? But it's not.

So sorry, but I won't be coming to Burr's "Come Dressed as the Hip Soul of Harvard" party. I'll keep sticking to my obnoxious guns - guns which Burr himself, who clearly is no intellectual slouch, has long since set aside. For it's obvious Burr knows better than to imagine Wes Anderson is anywhere near the stature of Bergman or Antonioni - but simply put, his job depends (or at least he thinks it depends) on pretending otherwise.

Guess what . . .

This isn't a genuine Jackson Pollock! Harvard actually had to analyze the pigments (some of which, it turned out, hadn't been developed until the seventies - or even the nineties) to come to that conclusion. Funny, it seems obvious once you compare it to a real - or at any rate a good - Pollock (below, "Lavender Mist:No. 1"). You can read all about the Harvard analysis here; the backers of the painting's authenticity reply here, as well as announce that this and a cache of other fakes (okay, "maybes") will be shown at Boston College's McMullen Museum of Art this fall. Then try your own hand at fooling the McMullen here.

Gone, baby, gone

It's fairly obvious that the break between Robert Woodruff and the A.R.T. has been rancorous - he was pushed, he didn't jump; or he jumped before he was pushed. Today we learn that Gideon Lester will serve as Interim Artistic Director - starting immediately; i.e., Woodruff (whom I assume is still directing Britannicus) won't handle the artistic directorship even until the end of the year.

So who pushed Woodruff? Rumors continue to fly that it was "old money" Harvard, but this seems tailored to serve a certain middlebrow-baby-boomer mythos at large in the Hub. Progressive rocker overthrown by old money! To the barricades, everybody - but first, meet at the Middle East! Sigh. I've been meaning to post about this attitude (it seems to have come to a head around the Dresden Dolls debacle), so now is probably the time to collect my thoughts. More to come.