Hotel Ukraina was built in 1957 as one of Stalin’s Seven Sisters — seven skyscrapers meant to rival those of New York City. ARTINFO’s Vanessa Yurkevich speaks with the hotel’s manager about the iconic building’s storied past, and to find out how a recent overhaul, while updating it for the present, allows it to showcase art and other works from its Soviet past. Watch:

Initially low-key, despite the vibrant wit of co-hosts Tina Fey and Amy Poehler and President Clinton’s dignified cameo, last night’s Golden Globes blossomed into a genuinely emotional event that the Oscars will be lucky to match.

Jodie Foster’s emphatic acceptance speech for the Cecil B. DeMille Award amounted to a passionate self-portrait of what it’s like for a child-star-turned-A-lister to live in the spotlight for 47 years. It was also a heartfelt appeal for privacy and, somewhat contradictorily, a public coming-out, though Foster took delight in teasing the audience on that score with the decoy admission that she is… single. It was a great Hollywood moment, though one that has drawn skepticism as well as approval.

More controversial was the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s shunning of the two heavyweights, Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln” (seven nominations) and Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty” (four nominations) in the Best Drama and Best Director categories. “Argo” (five nominations) won in both cases, the highly surprised Ben Affleck taking home the director trophy.

“Lincoln”’s Daniel Day-Lewis won for Best Actor in a Drama. “Zero Dark Thirty”’s Jessica Chastain won for Best Actress in a Drama. They otherwise went unrewarded.

“Django Unchained” sprang two surprises, winning Best Supporting Actor for Christoph Waltz and Best Screenplay for its writer-director, Quentin Tarantino. Mark Boal’s screenplay for “Zero Dark Thirty” and Tony Kushner’s for “Lincoln” have been better fancied for their comparative sobriety and intricacy.

Comic scenes like the one in which Klan members argue about their hoods raise the question of whether “Django” is a drama or a dark satire that should have been nominated as Best Comedy or Musical. The latter category was won by Tom Hooper’s sprawling “Les Misérables,” which proved the top Globe winner with three awards. Anne Hathaway won as Best Supporting Actress and Hugh Jackman as Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical.

“Silver Linings Playbook” won one award from four nominations — Jennifer Lawrence being voted Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical. She was thus able to claim, “I beat Meryl!” The Best Actress Oscar remains one of the tightest to call. Although Chastain has the edge over Lawrence, the former’s chances could be dented by the political furore over Bigelow’s film. Lawrence is very popular, but Emmanuelle Riva– who will turn 86 on Oscar day – is hovering. Her performance and that of her co-star, Jean-Louis Trintignant, helped “Amour” to the Foreign-Language Globe last night. It was presented to director Michael Haneke by fellow Austrian Arnold Schwarzenegger and New Yorker Sylvester Stallone.

One might sum up the Globes’ ramifications for the Oscars with the phrase, “All bets are off.” “Lincoln”’s hegemony has been breached. “Zero Dark Thirty” is under a Washington cloud. “Argo” has moved front and center – yet Affleck, like Bigelow, has not been nominated as Best Director. The last film to win Best Picture but not Best Director was Paul Haggis’s “Crash” in 2005 – Ang Lee winning the director prize for “Brokeback Mountain.” There could be another split this year. Spielberg and “Lincoln” remain the favorites, but the only shoo-in is Day-Lewis.

Read a full list of Golden Globes winners here.

Not stars but constellations: Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer are archetypal figures who live on in permanent syndication and beyond, now in cyberspace.

Possibly I’m the last person in the media to learn about this but, for the past month or so, BuzzFeed sports editor Jack Moore and comedian Josh Gondelman have been using a Twitter account, Modern Seinfeld @SeinfeldToday, to address an ache in our collective soul that we never knew we had (“What if 'Seinfeld' was still on the air”), filling the vacuum by tweeting TV Guide-style synopses of  new "Seinfeld" episodes. It took four days for them to gather 160,000 followers — a number since more than doubled.

Here’s a tweet that cracked me up this weekend: “Kramer learns about Bin Laden's death from Zero Dark Thirty. ‘When did THIS happen?!’ George gets caught taking pictures of Snapchats.” (Nearly as funny: “Elaine's bf (Adam Scott) is too into astrology. George tells Jerry to wait at least an hour to respond to a woman's texts, she dumps him.”) The tweets, many but not all of which are based on the simple application of social networking protocols into Seinfeld's domain, are not only laugh-out-loud funny but uncanny in their ventriloquism. ("Kramer starts an offline dating 'site.' KRAMER: It's like online dating... but at a place. JERRY: You're describing a bar! That's a bar!") These guys not only have "Seinfeld" logic internalized, they are totally fluent in turning the most ritualized sitcom ever since the grand kabuki of “The Honeymooners” into a language.

Granted, Modern Seinfeld is not as monumental an act of fan appreciation as Casey Pugh’s crowd-sourced shot-by-shot “Star Wars” remake, “Star Wars Uncut”. But its conceptual implications are even more resonant. Given the number of koans floating around the twitterverse, this is hardly the first time that tweeting has aspired to an art form. But, even given the true spectator sport of real time tele-tweeting, I’ve never seen the medium put to better use. Each is like a mini equivalent of Andy Warhol’s “Empire” — you don’t need to see it to get it.

As of this moment there have been 192 new episodes. This one came up even as I was writing: “George fakes an injury to get a seat on the subway, Kramer outs him. Jerry's ex does an unflattering story on him for This American Life.” This. American. Life: perfect.

On Saturday night, Tony Clifton barreled onto the stage of the former Manhattan strip club Westway in his trademark ruffled leisure suit and dark sunglasses, spitting obscenities and slugging Jack Daniels.

“Shut the f*ck up!” he shouted at a heckler who dared to interrupt his rendition of “Rhinestone Cowboy.” “Let me ask you something, is your ass jealous of your mouth because of all the sh*t that comes out of it?”

That’s one of the more publishable jokes that the burned-out Vegas lounge lizard told over the course of his set, staged as a tribute to the late performer Andy Kaufman, and a kick-off to the new exhibition, “On Creating Reality, by Andy Kaufman,” at Maccarone Gallery through February 16.

Kaufman invented the character Tony Clifton in 1969 "as a way to get girls and kind of throw down the gauntlet," according to Bob Zmuda, Kaufman’s longtime friend, collaborator, and frequent Clifton portrayer (Andy himself and his brother also played Clifton over the years). “Andy was a vegetarian, never smoked, never drank, but he had a black Cadillac that he only drove when he became Tony. It was him kind of healing himself after being bruised by Hollywood — because no one could touch Clifton.” 

The first in a series of upcoming Kaufman tributes, the Maccarone exhibition documents the entertainer’s brief, elusive life — he died of cancer at 35 — with a collection of ephemera, including photographs, hate mail, scripts, records, Elvis costumes, videos, and even his hand-scrawled will. Then, on February 12, Participant Inc. presents a two-day video series, “Andy Kaufman’s 99cent Tour,” while MoMA PS1 dedicates its February 17 “Sunday Session” to the New York debut of the film “Tony Clifton Plays Sunset Strip.” (And, for diehard fans, there’s a Tony Clifton album in the works featuring Sinatra-style duets with Billy Corgan, R.E.M., and others.)

Why is the art world taking notice now? Though Kaufman was largely regarded as a comedian during his lifetime (he starred as Latka Gravas on the TV hit “Taxi”), generations of fans have since reappraised his work as performance art. His varied output ranged from Elvis impersonations to wrestling matches with women to awkward TV spots in which he failed to tell any jokes at all. His work often maddened and confused audiences, which was all the more to his delight since, for him, it was never about getting laughs.

“I’d never heard the term ‘performance artist’ while Andy was alive, but as soon as he died, it was in all the obituaries,” said Andy’s brother, Michael Kaufman, at the opening. “It’s so great to see all these art people here. Andy would have been absolutely tickled.”

“Andy was performing for himself,” Zmuda added. “He turned the tables, so the audience became the performer and he sat back and became the audience. He was getting a kick out of watching them go through these emotional catharses. That’s why it didn’t matter if they loved him or hated him.”

Jonathan Berger, an artist and the Maccarone exhibition’s curator, attributes the renewed appreciation of Kaufman to his genre-bending practice. “He’s someone that existed outside the limitations of the worldview he was operating in,” he said. “As an artist, I feel really connected to him. I’m not interested in identifying myself in one way or another or in the hierarchies that exist, or even in participating in the art world or other cultural world structures. He really managed to do that for his whole career.”

Since Kaufman abhorred labels — he preferred “song-and-dance man” to “comedian” — Berger has eschewed traditional wall text in favor of hosting live, primary sources at the gallery. For each of the days during the month-long exhibition, Bill Boggs, Laurie Simmons, Lynne Margulies, Little Wendy, Carol Kane, Zmuda, and other friends and family members will be on hand to talk to visitors. “I wanted to make an exhibition that functioned more like an experimental biography or documentary,” Berger said.

Toward the end of the show’s opening, Michael Kaufman, who played Clifton at his brother’s landmark Carnegie Hall variety show, didn’t think he wanted to board the yellow school bus taking guests to the Westway performance. “Tony’s gotten more vile with age,” he explained. “He used to have a little vulnerability to him.”

Indeed, that night Clifton targeted every minority, plus women, pedophiles, and dead babies, all in between grating covers of Les Miserables’s “I Dreamed a Dream” and R.E.M.’s “Man on the Moon.” But then, in a final tender moment, he dedicated his encore to Andy Kaufman, “the reason we’re all here,” he said. “At last, after 30 years, this great artist is finally being recognized.”

– Diego Rivera Turns Up on Antiques Roadshow: Spoiler alert! Among the highlights of the forthcoming 17th season of PBS's much-loved "Antiques Roadshow" is a visit to Corpus Christi, Texas, during which a local resident presents appraiser Colleene Fesko with what turns out to be a long-lost and historically significant 1904 oil painting by Diego Rivera. She estimates that it is worth between $800,000 and $1 million, the highest appraisal she will give during her multiple appearances this season. [ArtDaily]

– L.A. MOCA's Brain Drain Continues: Rebecca Morse is leaving her job as associate curator at the embattled L.A. MOCA for a post with the same title within LACMA's photography department. Her departure leaves only two curators at MOCA, down from a high of seven in early 2009. Morse has spent her entire career at MOCA, joining the museum in 1999 upon recieving her Master's. A rep from the museum said there are "no plans right now" to replace her. [LAT]

– Israeli Heritage Site Plan Causes Furor in Palestine: Israel is advancing a plan to invest in what it considers to be national heritage sites, including nine locations in the disputed West Bank. The announcement triggered an angry response from Palestinian leadership, which objected to Israel's plan to add handicapped access to the Tomb of the Patriarchs, a sacred site to both Jews and Muslims located in the city of Hebron. "The Tomb of the Patriarchs is a Palestinian site, and the Palestinian Authority is the only one in charge of making any changes to it," said a spokeswoman for the Palestinian Authority. [AP]

– Epic Indonesian Art Heist: More than 100 paintings by Indonesian modernist H. Widayat were stolen last week from the H. Widayat Museum in Central Java. Some suspect it may have been an inside job, possibly orchestrated by one of more of the late artist's 11 children, some of whom would like to see his works sold rather than held in a museum. "The paintings are not going to be easy to resell in the market, at least not at auction, " said Christie's contemporary art specialist Wang Zineng, "because international auction houses like Christie's consult the arts laws register as well an informal database of lost paintings to make sure that whatever comes are not stolen material with no proper legal ownership. In this case, these paintings are now in questionable ownership." [VOA News]

– Picasso Portrait Leads Sotheby's Impressionist Auction: Sotheby's has high hopes for its Impressionist and modern sale next month, which carries a total estimate of $165 million to $240 million. (That's up significantly from the lackluster total of last year's equivalent sale, which brought in $127 million.) The auction house's optimism may be due in part to its top lot, Pablo Picasso's 1932 portrait of muse Marie-Therese Walter, "Femme assise pres d'une fenetre," which is estimated to sell for between $40 million and $56 million. [Reuters]

– Speed Museum Renovation Gets Going: The Speed Art Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, has begun taking apart and storing its collection — including a room lined with wood panels dating back to the 1620s — as it prepares for a $50 million, three-year-long renovation and expansion project that will see it reopen in 2015. "You can't rush it, I'm amazed at this crew working on it from 8 to 5 everyday," said curator Scott Erbes. "The wood came out of a house in southwestern England, the carving is just extraordinary." [WDRB]

– Scottish Government Gives Culture a Boost: The government of Scotland is giving an additional £7 million ($11.2-million) to arts organizations over the next three years to help fund major projects. Among the beneficiaries are Creative Scotland, whose programming will be boosted from £15 million ($24.1 million) to £16.5 million ($26.5 million), and National Museums Scotland, for whom the additional £2 million ($3.2 million) will be used to address what the government referred to as the "most urgent elements" of its many long-overdue repair projects. [Scotsman]

– Auctioneer Sues for "Ten Commandments" Tablet Money: The Los Angeles auction house Profiles in History says it is still owed $60,000 that a buyer bid to acquire the prop tablets containing the ten commandments passed from God to Charlton Heston in the Cecil B. DeMille classic "The Ten Commandments." The auction house says the defendant, Albert Tapper, also owes $8,000 for his winning bid on a letter written by Clark Gable to his estranged father Will Gable. [Courthouse News]

– Middle Eastern Galleries in London Aim to Break Stereotypes: A slew of new galleries focusing on Middle Eastern art have popped up in London, and their goal is to show that there is more to Middle Eastern art than "calligraphy, calligraphy, calligraphy," in the words of Ayyam Gallery co-founder Khaled Samawi. Adds the director of P21 Gallery, Palestinian-Jordanian Yahya Zaloom: "When I studied art history at university in London, the only critic to engage with Arab culture was Edward Said. Everything about the Arab world was focused on politics and religion, not art." [FT] 

– Bashir Makhoul and Aissa Deebi to Rep Palestine in Venice: The multimedia artist pair have been selected to represent Palestine at this year's Venice Biennale. Their project, "Otherwise Occupied," will address their homeland's geopolitical identity. Makhoul is the head of the Winchester School of Art in England and Deebi is a founding member of ArteEast, a Brooklyn-based organization that supports Middle Eastern arts and culture. [Gallerist]

VIDEO OF THE DAY

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For more breaking art news throughout the day,
check ARTINFO's In the Air blog.

Nicholas Kirkwood exploded onto the women's footwear scene in recent years with a distinct and cutting-edge aesthetic, anchored in the abstraction of geometry and its various applications. Yet the architectural elements in his designs aren't as obvious as Pierre Hardy's blocks, nor are his signatures as in-your-face as Christian Louboutin's scarlet soles. What Kirkwood does is blend his shapes in a way that creates an instantly recognizable pump, most often so with bladed recessed platforms. It's a formula that has been wildly successful in both retail and editorial circuits alike.

Over the course of the London men's collections last week, Kirkwood debuted his first, and highly anticipated, men's capsule collection. When asked how long it had been in the pipeline, Kirkwood (via mobile phone from London) laughs, "I started making men's shoes for myself before women's." Indeed, there's an inherent masculinity in his women's offerings, in the sense that they're robust and not by any means delicate. "But it's been about a year since we've had the launch in development," he adds. "It was a matter of looking for the right factory."

Footwear manufacturing is no doubt a tricky arena. Kirkwood's sculptural, ornate detailing (see Alexa Chung at last year's British Fashion Awards) requires the highest quality of production processes. From the look of it, his men's line meets the threshold — think classic derby shapes, but with "applications that are mutated," he says. Gold-studded chevrons adorn an otherwise black pair of wingtips, likewise a chukka boot. For those into fancier footwork, Kirkwood showed a series of slip-ons in tangerine and blood-orange zigzags, with the rest of the lineup rendered in a metallic sheen. "The [shoes are] a bit classic," he says, "but with materials playing together." 

Kirkwood has also often collaborated with clothing labels for their respective catwalk shows, most notably creating Rodarte's candle-wax heels of yester-season. He's hinted at doing the same with a men's label, saying he's been approached by a couple, though he wouldn't reveal who. 

When questioned about his sources of inspiration, Kirkwood remains obtuse. "It's more about the line, and how the lines intersect with each other." Above all, though, the designer isn't keen to rest on his laurels. "I want it to be interesting, and I want to keep challenging myself." 

Aaron Swartz took his own life last week. The 26-year-old computer prodigy and free culture activist had been under investigation for having attempted to make scholarly documents from JSTOR publicly available, and was facing up to 35 years in prison. This ridiculously harsh punishment meant, as one commentator put it, that “sharing knowledge is a greater crime than bringing down the economy,” in the government's eyes at least. The death of this talented young man has touched a nerve with the public. As a form of protest in solidarity with Swartz, academics have been posting links to free versions of their research. 

Swartz’s accomplishments are well known. He was a co-founder of the sprawling and influential Internet community Reddit, and was one of the inventors of the RSS feed. Tributes from those who know him describe his interests as multifaceted. And I think that a lesser-known project that he worked on — from when he dipped his toe into the world of art — is worth mentioning as testament to his inspiring intellectual curiosity.

Last year, Swartz was one of the figures invited by curator Lauren Cornell to take part in Rhizome.org’s “Seven on Seven” event at the New Museum, which pairs technologists with contemporary artists to brainstorm productive collaborations. Of the various pairings, Swartz’s work with photo-conceptualist Taryn Simon was particularly impressive. In fact, in a blog post, I dubbed it “The Coolest Art-Tech Project From This Weekend’s Seven on Seven Conference.” 

What it amounted to was a prototype for “Image Atlas,” a website that ran simultaneous searches on locally preferred engines in a variety of nations around the world, and displayed the results side by side. Thus, you could compare what images represented “freedom,” or “death,” or “America” in different countries — a simple and surprisingly effective device to make the point of how our local contexts shape our view of the world.

Introducing the results of their 12-hour brainstorming session onstage, Swartz explained the impulse behind it in a way that suggests the moral vision behind the project:

"One of the things that people are paying more attention to… is the way that these sort of neutral tools like Facebook and Google and so on, which claim to present an almost unmediated view of the world, through statistics and algorithms and analyses, in fact are programmed and are programming us. So we wanted to find a way to visualize that, to expose some of the value judgments that get made."

Last August, the work was launched on the New Museum’s website as part of its “First Look” series of Internet art. It remains online, now serving the added purpose of standing as a tribute to Swartz’s sensitive and critical mind.

“Watching him program was akin to watching a magician in speed and ability,” Taryn Simon wrote in an email today. “I’ve never witnessed anything like it. It looked like a court stenographer, but he wasn't recording something, he was constructing and creating.”

Curator Lauren Cornell described Swartz as “a wonderful collaborator, warm and enthusiastic, excited at every aspect of participating in the event, and at every step of realizing the project in the months afterwards.” She described herself as “devastated by the loss.”

Aaron Swartz’s work, Cornell said, “represents incredibly important values and goals that are urgent in our time.”

Seven on Seven 2012: Aaron Swartz and Taryn Simon from Rhizome on Vimeo.

“This is not a Velvet Underground revisit,” John Cale immediately blurted out. The Los Angeles-based singer was discussing his return to New York for a pair of shows at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this week, a collision of the past and present. The first, “Life Along the Borderline,” is a tribute to Nico, the marble-mouthed chanteuse whom Cale played alongside in the Velvet Underground and collaborated with as producer and musician during her run of solo albums in the 1970s. The idea for a tribute first came to Cale in 2008, right around the time Nico would have turned 70 and on the 20th anniversary of her tragic death.

“When we first started doing this I was amazed at how many young female singer-songwriters loved Nico for her songwriting,” Cale, 70, told ARTINFO in a phone interview. “Up until then I thought that was a niche. All of a sudden the floodgates opened and there were all these young artists who really loved what she did and wanted to participate.”

New York, as it turns out, is an appropriate place to stage the tribute. Cale first met Nico here, after she had arrived from Europe and began hanging out with Andy Warhol, who at the time was managing the Velvet Underground. Warhol thought making Nico the frontwoman of the band would give them some much needed stage presence, much to the chagrin of singer/songwriter Lou Reed. After a heated battle, it was Cale who eventually convinced Reed to accept Nico as part of their group. Even after her death, Cale would go on to collaborate with Nico’s former lover, the filmmaker Philippe Garrel, on music that, at times, evoked the sound of his former collaborator.

In Brooklyn, Cale will step to the background, joined by artists as diverse as Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth, Peaches, and Sharon Van Etten, to perform reinterpretations of Nico’s songs. It’s a comfortable role for Cale, and a common one in his relationship with Nico, whom, he said, was “like a ray of sunshine every time we started recording.”

The second show, later on in the week, will see Cale performing his classic album “Paris 1919” in full, accompanied by the Wordless Music Orchestra. It’s a task the singer was hesitant to take on at first. “Maybe Sting can do it with an orchestra, but John Cale can’t do it with an orchestra,” he laughed, describing the first conversations about the show. Cale is being cheeky, of course: an accomplished musician, he studied classical composition at the University of London and at Tanglewood with Aaron Copeland before falling under the spell of avant-garde visionaries LaMonte Young and John Cage and is, certainly, well qualified to play with an orchestra. He’s even played BAM before, with Lou Reed in the 1990 “Songs for Drella,” a tribute to Warhol, their mentor. But other problems still remained.

“You know, the album is only 35 minutes,” he said. “You can’t really do a whole evening like that, so we started doing the second half [of the show] with the band, and it didn’t feel right to me so I just started adding more material.” For a startlingly original artist like Cale, who in his solo work over three decades has made it a mission to take chances and not dwell on the past, the back end of the show seems the most exciting, and most important, part of the evening.

“This is not a rock ’n’ roll concert, so the space is perfect for it,” Cale said. “‘Paris’ remains what it is. You know, people expect ‘Paris’ to be ‘Paris,’ and that’s fine. But the other stuff, there’s leeway. That’s where the fooling around comes in.”

It’s not just your face and body that need exfoliation. Your hands are in equal need of a regular scrub, especially in the winter...

You might have heard us talk about Maxine Leonard before. She's a makeup artist extraordinaire and often accompanies us on beauty shoots both in London and to far flung destinations. Yes, you might have guessed, we're big fans!

If you’ve ever stood courtside before an NBA game, you know the feeling. What grips you isn’t speed, strength, agility, or shooting touch, but simply scale. It’s something — a feeling simultaneously humbling and inspiring — to be close to a team of towering figures.

The Jazz Masters assembled at Dizzy’s, the nightclub within Manhattan’s Jazz at Lincoln Center complex, were mostly sitting and mainly between the ages of 70 and 90 on Monday night at the annual National Endowment for the Arts ceremony and concert in their honor, but I got that same feeling. Up close, together, these figures seem ever more towering.

Though never distant, not in the least. “There’s nobody you’d rather hang with than jazz musicians,” A. B. Spellman, former NEA deputy chairman, said from the podium. He’s right, of course. Above all else, this annual event was a potent and spirited hang. In past years the event was held at Rose Hall, JALC’s more formal theater. The move to the club, which may have stemmed from a budgetary matter, turned out to be a great innovation befitting jazz’s original and essential audience context as well as its contemporary one. While it’s great and necessary that jazz gets played in concert halls, the music has always thrived best in clubs. The black-tie crowd and planned all-star performances were a far cry from the all-night Harlem jam sessions saxophonistLou Donaldson would later recall from the stage, yet the vibe was intimate enough for jokes to be cracked and properly gotten, and for audience members to share appreciation in real time as opposed to politely scheduled applause. Meanwhile, six cameras hovered, serving the online viewing audience that constitutes the art form’s main marketing challenge. The event was broadcast live on SiriusXM and WBGO 88.3 FM as well as at the NEA’s website, where it can still be viewed.

At the start came brief video segments including old footage and new interviews with the four new Jazz Masters: pianist and bandleader Eddie Palmieri, who exemplifies the best of jazz and Afro-Latin traditions and the grandest union of both; alto saxophonist Lou Donaldson, among the most soulful, bluesy, and groove-aware players in jazz; Mose Allison, a singer, songwriter, and pianist whose wry lyrics, knowing delivery, and subtle swing defy easy genre names; and Lorraine Gordon, owner and proprietor of Manhattan’s storied Village Vanguard, the first club owner (and first woman) to be honored in the relatively new category for “jazz advocacy.”

“A couple of years ago, all you’d hear was ‘jazz is dead,’” Gordon remarked with characteristic directness during her video segment, and then went on: “I said, ‘Really, when’s the funeral?’ All these people are still coming to the club. Hardly.” Gordon, who is 90, missed the event due to illness. But her main point was amplified by her fellow inductees and the 24 other Jazz Masters in attendance, some of who performed with evident fire and youthful joy. The Jazz Masters program itself — which since 1982 has honored 128 men and women — nearly died in 2011, but was quickly resuscitated by Congressional directive (these are federally appropriated funds). That’s a good thing. Joan Shigekawa, acting NEA chairman, declared early on Monday night, “The Jazz Masters represents the highest honor our nation bestows on jazz musicians and advocates,” and explained its three practical elements: a $25,000 stipend; a commissioned formal portrait; and an interview for inclusion in the Smithsonian Institution’s oral history archive.

If there was existential angst in evidence, it was of more sophisticated variety. Performing her “Sheila’s Blues,” which amounts to an autobiography via jazz hookups set to blues, Sheila Jordan (Jazz Masters class of 2012) sang, “If it wasn’t for jazz I wouldn’t be alive.” After accepting his award, Mose Allison played piano while his daughter Amy sang his composition, “Was,” one lyric of which asks: 

Will there be someone around

With essentially my kinda sound

When am turns to was and now is back when 

Individuality and influence across generations, twins that form the conundrum within jazz’s aesthetic, were important themes on Monday. Both Allison and Donaldson claimed Louis Armstrong as their earliest spark of inspiration. Allison, who played trumpet as a boy, said in his video that he heard in Armstrong “an ambivalent streak” with which he could identify. Donaldson recalled being excited by an Armstrong album, the only one the deejay had on the only jazz show aired on his childhood local country-music radio station. Spellman, who presented Gordon’s award to her daughter Deborah, talked about how Gordon had championed Thelonious Monk’s music early on, when his idiosyncratic brilliance was widely dismissed as simply weirdness.

Palmieri, who grew up in the Bronx and quickly mastered Afro-Latin musical styles, accepted his award from pianist McCoy Tyner (class of 2002) with a long, tight embrace. He then explained how trombonist Barry Rogers, who helped him gain an interest in jazz in the first place, brought him to Birdland nearly a half-century ago to hear John Coltrane’s quartet. “Everything was going great,” Palmieri said, “and then Coltrane put down his horn to let McCoy Tyner take a solo.” He described how “the tension and release in his playing reached such a climax” — the sort of epiphany that sets great talents like his off. Moments later, he sat alone at the piano, playing “Iraida,” a wide-ranging original composition named for his wife that at moments rang out with chord voicings overtly nodding Tyner’s way.

Wynton Marsalis, Jazz at Lincoln Center’s artistic director and among the 2012 Jazz Master class, took the stage only briefly, as a deferential host. The NEA program, he said, “reinforces the values of jazz in our collective consciousness,” which he listed as “individuality, shared responsibility, preparation, and improvisation.” These values were amply demonstrated when pianist Kenny Barron (class of 2010) deconstructed the melody of Dave Brubeck’s “In Your Own Sweet Way” and, a minute later, as drummer Jimmy Cobb (2009) slipped in a crafty counter-rhythm while bassist Ron Carter (1998) soloed. The three served as what Marsalis called “a house band to end all house bands.” At one point, Barron gave over the piano chair to Randy Weston (2001), who mined the simple theme and flexible groove of his signature tune, “Hi Fly,” in extended and rewarding fashion. His improvised exchanges with Carter weren’t traded phrases; they overlapped and fed each other more like a conversation between old friends. Jimmy Heath (2003) dedicated “Sweet Lorraine” to Lorraine Gordon, from him and his storied brothers. Now 86, he played with timeless grace and, here and there, a fiery spark. Lou Donaldson spoke from the podium as if delivering a standup routine at one of the “circuit clubs” he’d reminisced about from his early days, “where you could play all kinds of music.” Now also 86, he shared three medical breakthroughs for longevity: Viagra, Cialis, and Levitra. But when he took center stage, he was all business. His playing, confident and wise, acknowledged the formative influences he’d cited: There was a trace of Johnny Hodges’s tone and manner of slurring notes; hints of Charlie Parker’s movement through chord changes; and, as Donaldson dropped the spiritual “Wade in the Water” into the middle of his own composition “Blues Walk,” the church music of his childhood. When David Liebman (class of 2011), on soprano sax, and Paquito D’Rivera (class of 2005), playing clarinet, joined the house trio to end the show with “All Blues,” the Miles Davis composition ubiquitous to modern jazz was enlivened by both the contrasts of their styles and their ability to fall into purposeful collective improvisation.

Accepting her mother’s award with the Village Vanguard’s stalwart staffer Jed Eisenman at her side, Deborah Gordon spoke of how Lorraine, when told of her award, expressed “how lucky she feels to a be a part of this community of musicians and music lovers.”

I seconded that emotion as I sat at a table across from D’Rivera. Next to him was saxophonist Lee Konitz (class of 2009), who, at 85, remains among jazz’s most distinctive and daring players, challenging himself regularly in both high-end joints with his contemporaries as well as with promising players closer to one-third his age at, say, last weekend’s Winter Jazz Festival. On my left was Joanne Robinson Hill, the widow of pianist Andrew Hill (class of 2008), who forever changed my ideas about structure within a jazz composition. To my right, Maxine Gordon, widow of saxophonist Dexter Gordon, whose music my older brother turned me on to before I knew the word “jazz.”

Had I leaned back too far in my chair, I’d have disturbed pianist Muhal Richard Abrams, who was key to the formation of Chicago’s influential Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians in the mid-1960s, and who I hold within my own small pantheon of composers that reveal the true promise of modern music, apart from category. During Palmieri’s riveting performance, I fixed on Abrams, right behind me, cocking one ear when Palmieri’s tune grew spare and abstract, lightly clapping his hands when broken chords coalesced into densely percussive clusters, nudging his wife gently to attention when, from what seemed like underneath all that, a swinging montuno emerged.

“He does it his own way, that’s for sure,” Abrams said.

They all do. We didn’t come here dressed so fine just to eat dinner.

After years of ill health, the filmmaker Nagisa Oshima died of pneumonia Tuesday at a hospital near Fujisawa, south of Tokyo. He was 80.

The second most famous Japanese auteur after Akira Kurosawa in the 1960s and ’70s, noted for his stylistic experiments, Oshima was a taboo-breaking controversialist on par with Pier-Paolo Pasolini and Bernardo Bertolucci then, and Lars Von Trier now. He is best known for politicizing destructive sexual love “In the Realm of the Senses” (1976) and its companion piece “Empire of Passion” (1978), for which he won the Best Director award at Cannes.

Oshima also had Charlotte Rampling play a diplomat’s wife in Paris who takes a chimpanzee as her lover in “Max, Mon Amour” – a Buñuelian satire of bourgeois mores and manners that Leos Carax paid homage to in the penultimate scene of “Holy Motors.” When I saw “Max” at Cannes in 1986, I was initially underwhelmed by the flatness of its compositions, subsequently recognizing that they serve the commonplaceness with which Max is integrated into his mistress’s life.

Three years before, Oshima had depicted the tragic love of a Japanese POW camp officer (Ryuichi Sakamoto) for a brightly blond British major (David Bowie) in his charge in “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence.” He was still investigating the theme of illicit erotic desire in 1999’s “Taboo” (“Gohatto”), about a trainee whose beauty inflames other men at an elite samurai police school.

The widely censored “In the Realm of the Senses,” though, remained Oshima’s most controversially graphic film – and perhaps his most beautiful. It was based on the 1936 case of Sada Abe, a sometime geisha, prostitute, and restaurant worker who after days of sex involving erotic asphyxiation strangled her lover and severed his penis and testicles. 

Both an examination of sexual morbidity and sexuality as an escape from repressive Japanese society, it was also a critique of authoritarianism. It was shot against the backdrop of rising militant imperialism and the 1936 army coup against the government that led to the assassination of three elderly leaders and triggered the resignation of Prime Minister Keisuke Okada and his cabinet. Read Donald Richie’s analysis of the film here.

Sakamoto’s Captain Yonoi in “Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence” was a contemporary of the “Shining Young Officers” of 1936. Posted to Manchuria, he did not participate in the coup and was thus not executed along with his colleagues. His lasting regret over this aligns him with Bowie’s Celliers, whose guilty secret concerns his early betrayal of his brother. When Celliers breaks ranks and kisses Yonoi on the cheek during a parade ground showdown between the prisoners and the captives, the conflicted Yonoi faints. Their affinity is cemented by Celliers subsequent execution by burial and Tonoi’s unseen death later in the war.

Born on March 31, 1932, the scion of a well-off family with samurai ancestry, Oshima was raised in Kyoto by his mother after his father died when he was 6. He entered the law school at Kyoto University where he was a radical student leader. After working as an apprentice at the Shochiku studio (having allegedly cheated his way to the head of 2,000 applicants) and also as a film critic, he started directing youth films.

Influenced by the French New Wave, particularly Godard, Oshima directed the 1960 neorealist “Night and Fog in Japan,” its title echoing Alain Resnais’s Auschwitz documentary. A scathing indictment of the divisiveness of the Japanese left, comprising just 43 shots, it was pulled from theaters after three days. Marginalized by the Japanese studio system, Oshima founded his own independent production company with his actress wife, Akiko Koyama.

Subsequent Oshima films addressed racist brutality (“The Catch,” 1961, and the Brechtian “Death by Hanging,” 1968), sex crimes (“Violence at Noon,” 1966), sexual liberation’s equation with revolution (“Diary of a Shinjuku Thief,” 1968), and youth crime and the dysfunctional family (“Boy,” 1969). His 1969 “Ceremony” told the post-war history of Japan in less than flattering terms.

Oshima, whose career involved a stint as a talk show host, is survived by his wife. 

HONG KONG — Though Art Basel Hong Kong is still a few months off, the city is already basking in the effects of its glamour. On Tuesday, the fair announced the gallery lineup for its first Hong Kong edition and, with 245 exhibitors, promises to meet the Miami Beach edition in size, significance, and glitz.

How well the four-day fair succeeds will reflect the maturity of the Asia art market, and may potentially cement Hong Kong’s position as the art hub for the region. 

But Marc Spiegler, the director of Art Basel, warns Hong Kong against congratulating itself too much too early. “The history of cities who have grown culturally complacent is never a good one,” he says.

But, he adds, “I don’t think there can be any complacency in the art world, because the art world is too dynamic. I don’t even believe Art Basel can be complacent in Basel. As much as it’s globalized, as much as it’s more international, the art world is a relatively small group of people and it can still move very quickly from one place to another.” 

So how can Hong Kong — already the world’s third-largest art market by auction sales — continue to prove itself the center of Asia’s art world during the fair? It's already won some points for drumming up enthusiasm. More than 600 galleries applied, including a number of younger exhibitors, with slightly less than half accepted in order to keep the experience at a high quality. The final total is close to the 257 that attended Art Basel Miami Beach last December, if slightly less than the number at the final iteration of ART HK last year (266).

Regardless, it already dwarfs the region’s other top fairs, such as Art Stage Singapore’s 130 exhibitors and Shanghai Contemporary’s 90.

The fair will also have a Hong Kong personality. With more than 50 percent of the galleries coming from Asia Pacific, the region itself is well-represented. But only 28 exhibitors have actual art galleries in the city, meaning that the event will create a high level of global exposure. Its mix of regional representation is intended to reflect a meeting of East and West.

Hong Kong’s political climate also puts it at an advantage. Spiegler notes that Art Basel chose Hong Kong over Singapore and Shanghai because both cities “have a history of censoring artists and galleries. For Art Basel to be in an area where there is a high risk of censorship would be unacceptable.” 

But what some of us really want to know is, will Hong Kong be able to put on as great a party as Miami Beach?

“That’s setting a very high bar,” says Spiegler.“We’re not a party-throwing organization. Glamour is not our core business; art is our core business.”

But, he adds, “Hong Kong is also a city that never sleeps. There are some cities where you come off a long flight and you feel like you’re still running a marathon. It’s very stimulating. It’s like the air is caffeinated.”