Monthly Archives: March 2010

By David Browne – NY Magazine

When Sharon Jones arrives at a midtown studio to record a song for a new album by soul legend Booker T., she gets a big hug from Questlove of the Roots, who will be playing drums. The 53-year-old Jones, packed tightly into jeans and a denim jacket, is singing a duet with Matt Berninger, of indie-rockers the National. She steps behind the mike, and after three tries, it’s plain to see who’s the veteran. While Berninger keeps tweaking the phrasing and redoing lines, Jones—her voice half-gospel shout, half–Soul Train silkiness—nails her part every time. “Wow—you sing three octaves,” Berninger tells her deferentially. After the last take, Booker T. and the engineers applaud. [Read More]

By Jerry Saltz – NY Magazine

If I were the New Museum, I’d have whiplash by now. Since opening its spiffy new Bowery building in 2007, the place has gone from being champion of the underdog and advocate of the experimental to starstruck promoter of A-list artists and international cool hunter. With “Skin Fruit: Selections From the Dakis Joannou Collection,” curated by the artist Jeff Koons, this much beloved yet deeply frustrating institution has crossed some invisible line, its already-thin credibility stretched to the breaking point. [Read More]

By Stephanie Murg – Unbeige

Tis the season for institutions of higher education to announce their commencement speakers, and Pratt Institute rarely disappoints. The art and design school has signed up musician and poet Patti Smith, whose Just Kids we’ve already read thrice, to speak at its 121st commencement, during which approximately 2,000 graduates will receive bachelor’s and master’s degrees.  [Read More]

By Stephanie Murg – Unbeige

Before Jeffrey Deitch officially takes over as director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art in June, his New York gallery Deitch Projects will go out with a bang—and by bang, we mean visual crack created by Shepard Fairey. [Read More]

By Ben Sisario – NewYork Times

The crowd was about 50 strong, dressed somewhere between postwork casual and preclub glam, when Nicole Atkins plugged in her guitar on Friday evening and began to play. She hawked her CDs between songs, and the sound system was run by a Knitting Factory employee — all pretty typical for Ms. Atkins, a New Jersey-bred songwriter who has reams of critical acclaim but is still struggling for her big break.

Yet this was far from a typical gig for her, or for the Knitting Factory. For one thing, she was not performing at that club, but rather in the cavernous, softly lighted atrium of Ohm, a gleaming new residential tower on 11th Avenue in Manhattan, the latest luxury outpost in the real-estate frontier between Chelsea and Clinton. Facing west as she played, she could watch the sunset through the glass walls of the building’s exercise room. [Read More]

By Hank Klibanoff – NewYork Times

ATLANTA — Charles Moore was a news photographer who became a photojournalist and died a visual journalist — not because he changed, but because the technology, nomenclature and just about everything else involving his profession did.

Shooting first for Montgomery newspapers in his home state of Alabama, then more famously for Life magazine, Mr. Moore was probably the most influential of a battalion of still photographers who swept across the South to capture, with compelling clarity, the dramatic collision of massive and passive resistance, black and white, right and wrong. [Read More]

By C.J. Hughes – NY Times

What is perhaps Manhattan’s best-known former house of worship will be reborn this spring as the Limelight Marketplace, with 35 upscale boutiques and restaurants within its lancet-windowed walls on Avenue of the Americas in Chelsea.

The marketplace, in the landmark 19th-century church that once housed the Limelight nightclub, will combine elements of holiday gift bazaars and department stores. Vendors will set up side by side in the 12,000-square-foot complex, some in tiny berths of 100 square feet, and shoppers can pay for their purchases at central checkout counters. It is the first foray into permanent retail spaces for a number of tenants, but available one-year leases will minimize the risk somewhat. [Read More]