Bentley Motors has just revealed their new 2012 Bentley Continental GTC. The luxury vehicle was presented for its first time at Qatar International Motor Show in Doha. The all new Bentley GTC Convertible includes even more spacious cabin, which...
Months after budget cuts prompted Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava to walk away from Denver International Airport’s South Terminal redevelopment project, DIA is still moving on without him. The airport unveiled a revision to Calatrava’s designs that is hewed down in both in size and cost, amended by Gensler Architects with Denver-based AndersonMasonDale Architects.
After the divorce proceedings last year — Calatrava’s firm described it as an “amicable” split — DIA kept the essentials of Calatrava’s plan: a 500-room Westin hotel and an RTD FasTracks commuter rail station. But the architect walked away with his signature flourishes, including his use of all-white steel and his customary delicate, birdlike frame.
The slimmed-down design, which is $150 million cheaper than Calatrava’s, has scant traces of his original plans. The façade retains a dip in the center, although it curves less dramatically. Much of the steel has been replaced with glass. The interior no longer feels like the insides of a ribcage, since the white arcs have been replaced with glass supported by scriss-crossing steel. The overall square footage has been cut, particularly in the train station, and an entire floor has been cut from the hotel.
Calatrava left after DIA pared down its budget last year from $650 million to $500 million — an amount, Calatrava’s representatives said, that would have hindered his vision for the project. (Although DIA had already paid Calatrava $12.9 million for his work and ultimately a further $800,000 to continue to use his designs.) Similarly, in 2006, Steven Holl parted ways with the city and pulled out of Denver's $358 million Justice Center project, citing dissatisfaction with the budget, according to the Denver Post. Denver is not, however, lacking starchitecture; it still touts Daniel Libeskind's Denver Art Museum extension, Michael Graves's Denver Central Library, David Adjaye's Museum of Contemporary Art, and Brad Cloepfil's Clyfford Still Museum.
Construction of the new airport terminal began in the fall of 2011. The hotel is scheduled to open in 2015.
To see more images of the Denver International Airport's South Terminal designs, before and after Calatrava's departure, click on the slide show.
IKEA is marketing its big annual sale with a line of clever furniture pieces made entirely out of the company’s very own flat pack furniture packaging! IKEA commissioned advertising agency AUGE Headquarter in Italy to make a big splash for their 40% sale...
Befitting proper Boston, Renzo Piano’s $114 million expansion of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum is discreet. There are no grand sculptural forms that vault above the buildings neighboring the nearby Fenway, and at the entrance you’ll find a passageway in glass and copper that leads to the main attraction, the 1903 structure in the style of a Venetian palazzo where the museum’s founder wanted her art collection to hang unchanged in perpetuity.
So far, perpetuity has been more than a century. Not bad, by American standards.
Bold in its restraint, Piano’s new building in glass and bronze is not the tail wagging the dog. Design-wise, the logic of the Gardner expansion is that it leaves the centerpiece of the museum — that is, the museum itself — alone. Piano knows that the Gardner’s charm, and its essence, is its quirkiness as a Venetian-inspired structure built to contain and preserve objects from the cultures treasured by Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840-1924). By placing the expansion's now-necessary accoutrements in a building alongside the historic museum, he contributes to that preservation without overbuilding the branded streamlined airiness that has made Piano the go-to guy among museum architects in this country, and almost everywhere else. One critic has already compared the new building to a science laboratory, and the Gardner has wisely chosen to keep the lab activities away from the art on the walls.
(Preservation of the museum's treasures has been a sore point at the Gardner ever since the 1990 robbery in which thieves seized seven paintings, among them a Vermeer and a Rembrandt. Even with the capture of Boston mob fugitive Whitey Bulger, who had long been assumed to know the thieves’ identity, no new arrests have been made.)
At the newly fortified Gardner, an added element of the gentle Piano-ization alongside a uniquely charming art museum is music performance, also part of Signora Gardner’s cultural mission. Piano has created a jewel of a place for it. In a corner of his new addition is a four-story square wood-lined concert hall, with two rows of seats on every side of three balconies. Going vertically, Piano has multiplied his volume without sacrificing intimacy, acoustics, or visibility, echoing the courtyard at the core of the Gardner palazzo. There’s no mimicking of a particular historic space, yet the hall evokes the intimacy of theaters in some ancien regime. Its lineage could be Venetian, like the museum itself, or it could a Gardner reverie inspired by Venice.
For Piano, the special challenge takes him outside a familiar vocabulary — there are no long metallic lines, no studied transparency (although a skylight sits atop the concert hall), no obvious radiance.
Back in the palazzo, you take familiar steps toward familiar works of art. On the ground floor, "El Jaleo," John Singer Sargent’s shadowy 1882 vision of a gypsy dancer in a kinetic trance, is displayed under a stone arch in a cavern of a stone cloister. The Gardner location seems ideal for the scene that Sargent painted.
Two floors above, Titian’s "Rape of Europa" (1562) — the greatest painting in America, some say — holds its place on the wall to show Jupiter, disguised as a grinning bull in a garland of flowers, sweeping a maiden away.
The Gardner has ambitions to present contemporary shows among its temporary exhibitions, and to bring in contemporary artists for residences — a program that has been in practice for years.
There’s no doubt that the Gardner legacy is bending as the institution grows. If you compare the Gardner modernization to the Barnes Foundation’s clumsy transplant in Philadelphia — a comparison that Gardner director Anne Hawley often cites, without passing judgment — Signora Gardner is lying more peacefully in her grave than the collector Albert C. Barnes, whose will was overturned the name of building tourism in Philadelphia. Given the Barnes’s fate and what the Gardner makeover could have been, the Piano renovation is all the more welcome.
BLOUIN ARTINFO spoke to Renzo Piano about expanding a much-loved institution.
What was the greatest challenge of the Gardner project?
It’s probably that you are dealing with a building that is so beloved. I met people who could talk about going as a child, then going as a father, and then going as a grandfather. It’s a kind of institution that seemed to belong to the city. It’s a romantic idea, a Venetian palace in the middle of Boston, and the courtyard, which you know so well, is not just romantic. It’s extremely beautiful. When you have to deal with something like that, you are in trouble, because whatever you do, you may end up doing something that competes, or is wrong, out of scale, out of character. I call this the problem of having a big legacy. It’s not cultural, it’s affective — it’s about affection. Its not really practical, it’s not about money. You always have people trying to stop the job from happening, but the real problem was having a legacy like that to deal with.
In fact, our decision was not to compete at all. The decision was clear. The palace told a very interesting story one century ago. It was about beauty, it was about magic, it was about light, but it was somehow about introverted beauty, because the courtyard was inside, hidden from the city. What we have done here, instead of being introverted, is extroverted. We used a similar desire for lightness and transparency — instead of building inside, we’ve done it outside.
Were there elements of your design that you needed to persuade your client to accept?
Not really, although I can’t say that they just said “yes” to everything. You know that the will said that no work of art should leave the building. That’s why we made an umbilical chord — so that you can have a work of art move from the palace to the special exhibition space and then back, to sleep in the palace. I can’t remember who wanted to do what — in good teamwork, you always forget that. But, for example, when we wanted to do the concert hall in the beginning, I had to prove to the client that it was a good idea, because it’s quite a mad idea.
The verticality, with its intimacy, seems to extend the Gardner spirit, while it replicates the verticality of the original courtyard.
Yasuhita Toyota, the acoustician, is a very good guy. At the beginning, he kept saying that sound goes up, so it’s a kind of natural way to do this. Also, this is my third attempt to create a cubic space for sound, for music. The first one as 35 years ago here in Paris, with Pierre Boulez and John Cage and Luciano Berio, at the IRCAM [Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique]. That was also a cube, a bit bigger, but it was an attempt to play with sound. The second was Prometheus, for Luigi Nono, in a church [San Lorenzo] in Venice. It was a space like a ship, in wood, with people in the center, and we put the musicians around them. This is the third one. The advantage of this one is that it’s very compressed. The physical distance is compressed. I was listening to someone playing the flute the other evening, and you could hear the breathing. The can hear the sound of the instrument, the physical sound. If a singer is singing, you can hear the air going through the mouth. It’s a different sensation, coming from the fact that you are very close to the musician, and this is magic.
Generationally speaking, looking at institutions, we are looking at places where there is a perceived need to expand. At the Barnes Foundation, such a decision was made to move and replace a building that defined an institution, which many believe was the wrong decision. Did you submit a design for the Barnes?
No. I was called and asked, but no. I am not a museum architect, really. I don’t feel like one, in reality. You can’t do too many. Museums are very interesting places, so you have to put in a lot of energy. You cannot do one after the other. You have to metabolize each project. Speaking of generational expansion, I am working on another museum that is beloved, the Kimball in Fort Worth. There, like at the Gardner, it was not about growing or dying. When you make a palace like that in 1903 and you’re a lady like Isabella Gardner, you think about magic, you think about beauty and the fragility of beauty, so you do something that by nature is very fragile. And that fragility will survive maybe one century, but it will never survive two, three, four, five, or six centuries. This is something that people must understand. Museums are places of duration. They make works of art safe, forever. The Gardner was an endangered species, in a way. You couldn’t play music forever in its tapestry room, even if you could play for one century. You consume the tiles on the floor. The beauty of the palace is also its fragility.
So, making the addition wasn’t really making it bigger. It was releasing pressure on the palace, it was about providing a good instrument for playing music, it was about providing more space for education, it was about providing a room where you can show works of art in rotation. It was about more than growing, it was about making the place better, and saving it.
In Italy, you are standing on Estruscan and Roman culture, and on centuries and centuries of culture and history after those foundations. As an Italian, how you view an American attachment to an institution that’s barely a century old?
I feel very much a part of your country, including the fact that I have an office in New York, I live partially in New York from time to time, and I have a son who was born in the States. He tells me that I was born in the States. I have a great love for America. Especially the music — John Cage and Pierre Boulez proved that America was a place of freedom. I’m in love with all the writers of the Beat Generation, from Jack Kerouac to everybody else. But I also encounter in America a romantic kitsch interpretation of European culture — what we normally call Beaux Arts buildings. But there are a few miracles. For me, the Isabella Stewart Gardner courtyard is one of those miracles. This lady, she had money, but she also had desire — maybe an exaggerated desire — and she had taste, and she also had help from Bernard Berenson. She was able to make a miracle. In some way, the courtyard of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum escaped being kitsch. It’s sublime, because of the light, because of the beauty of the collection. In this case, the tragedy of kitsch didn’t happen.
The courtyard is romantic, it’s even sentimental, but it reaches the intensity of art. I can give you another example, on the site of the new art museums of Harvard, on which I am working now. In the middle of the Fogg there is a courtyard, a copy of the Montepulciano Palace. Again, that’s also well done. It’s an odd manipulation — very romantic, also very funny, because they took the façade of the palace and they repeated it four times to create the courtyard. If you tell this to Italian people, they will tell you, “That’s ridiculous.” But it was done so well, and the stone was selected from the right quarry. I know that, because we’re looking for that quarry, since we’re doing some repairs on the site. It was done with a kind of precision, a kind of adherence to the truth, to reality. It was not a stupid interpretation. It was done scientifically, and with love. I see these manifestations of romanticism in a different way. Sometimes it’s pure kitsch, and I know that. But sometimes, and I am thinking of these two examples, it was done very well.
Sometimes this romantic approach was done to express trustability at universities. In the States, very often, the style was Gothic or roman or Greek. The reproduction was done, not to make kitsch, but to express trustability. Trust me, I’m old, I’m historic. It’s a complex matter, not wrong or right. Of course, It’s wrong when it’s stupid. But the truth is that time makes things beautiful. And history makes things beautiful. At the Gardner, though, before judging from superiority you can say, “My God, this is great.”
The men’s fashion shows that debuted in Milan on January 14, wrapped in Paris on January 22. Here are the highlights of fall/winter 2012, from the good (Burberry Prorsum’s use of classic silhouettes and contemporary colors, Kenzo’s hip comeback) to the bad (Bernard Wilhelm’s bandannas that declared “I <3 Black Cock,” Thom Browne’s bizarre quirky psycho killer aesthetic).
Click on the photo gallery to see highlights from the the fall/winter 2012 men's shows.
Having been nominated for 11 Academy Awards this morning, “Hugo” leads the Oscar race numerically, but only by one nomination. The black and white, mostly silent French comedy-drama “The Artist,” which was nominated for ten Oscars, remains the favorite to win Best Picture — as it has been since the awards season began.
Several other films were heavily nominated: “Moneyball” and “War Horse” each received six nods; “The Descendants” and “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” five apiece; and “The Help,” four.
All of these, except “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo,” were nominated for Best Picture. So, too, were “The Tree of Life,” “Midnight in Paris,” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” the latter a surprise inclusion. This is the first year in which the Academy was permitted to choose between five and ten nominees; nine have made the cut.
“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”s David Fincher missed out on a director nomination, as did “War Horse”’s Steven Spielberg. The nominees in this category are Michal Hazanavicius (“The Artist”), Alexander Payne (“The Descendants”), Martin Scorsese (“Hugo”), Terrence Malick (“The Tree of Life”), and Woody Allen (“Midnight in Paris”). Allen hasn’t been feted much by other awards-givers, but he is an Academy favorite and has a particularly strong shot at the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for what has proven his most commercially successful film.
There were surprises in the actor nominations. Tilda Swinton (“We Need to Talk About Kevin”) and Charlize Theron (“Young Adult”) were omitted as Best Actress. Meryl Streep earned her 17th nomination in this category and is the favorite to win her third Oscar. Viola Davis (“The Help”) and Michelle Willliams (“My Week With Marilyn”) are her strongest contenders; Rooney Mara (“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo”) takes the ingenue’s slot and Glenn Close (“Alfred Nobbs”) is an intriguing outsider.
Demián Bechir, nominated as Best Actor for the little-seen “A Better Life,” was on few people’s radar before the nominations were announced by Academy president Tom Sherak and actress Jennifer Lawrence. The 48-year-old Mexican Actor announced that he was “overwhelmed.” He will be up against George Clooney (“The Descendants”); Gary Oldman (“Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy), whose nomination will be very popular; Jean Dujardin (“The Artist”), and Brad Pitt (“Moneyball”). Overlooked were Leonardo DiCaprio (“J. Edgar”), Michael Fassbender (“Shame”), and Ryan Gosling (“The Ides of March”).
Gosling’s “Drive” co-star Albert Brooks was an eye-opening omission from the Best Supporting Actor nominees as he looked like the probable winner a month ago. The favorite in this category is now Christopher Plummer (“Beginners”), who’s now locked in a fascinating competition with fellow 82-year-old Max von Sydow (“Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”). Nick Nolte (“Warrior”) has emerged from nowhere to contest the award and complete his post-DUI rehabilitation. Kenneth Branagh (“My Week With Marilyn”) and Jonah Hill (“Moneyball”) are the other nominees.
In the Best Supporting Actress group, "Gilmore Girls" alum Melissa McCarthy (“Bridesmaids”) will compete with her friend, Golden Globe-winner Octavia Spencer, who, like Jessica Chastain, was nominated for “The Help.” “The Artist’s” Bérénice Bejo and “Alfred Nobbs”’s Janet McTeer were also nominated. Shailene Woodley (“The Descendants”) can consider herself unlucky to be omitted.
In another shock, Steven Spielberg’s “The Adventures of Tintin” failed to receive a nomination for Best Animated Film, a category it won at the Globes. “Chico and Rita” and “A Cat in Paris” are surprise choices.
The Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi has been nominated as writer of the Best Original Screenplay for “A Separation,” which is also the shoo-in for Best Foreign Language Film. Not only has it received rave reviews and critics prizes, it is much better known than the other nominees in the category.
In the Best Adapted Screenplay category, there was a posthumous nomination for Bridget O'Connor, who co-wrote “Tinker Tailor” with her husband Peter Straughan. The award-winning author and playwright died from cancer at the age of 49 in September 2010.
The Academy Awards will be given out at the Kodak Theater in Hollywood on February 26.
THE NOMINATIONS
BEST PICTURE
The Artist
War Horse
The Descendants
Moneyball
The Tree of Life
Midnight in Paris
The Help
Hugo
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
BEST DIRECTOR
Michel Hazanavicius, The Artist
Alexander Payne, The Descendants
Martin Scorsese, Hugo
Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris
Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life
BEST ACTOR
Demián Bichir, A Better Life
George Clooney, The Descendants
Jean Dujardin, The Artist
Gary Oldman, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
Brad Pitt, Moneyball
BEST ACTRESS
Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs
Viola Davis, The Help
Rooney Mara, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady
Michelle Williams, My Week With Marilyn
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Jonah Hill, Moneyball
Kenneth Branagh, My Week With Marilyn
Max von Sydow, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Nick Nolte, Warrior
Christopher Plummer, Beginners
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Berenice Bejo, The Artist
Jessica Chastain, The Help
Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids
Janet McTeer, Albert Nobbs
Octavia Spencer, The Help
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
The Artist
Bridesmaids
Margin Call
Midnight in Paris
A Separation
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
The Descendants
Hugo
The Ides of March
Moneyball
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
A Cat in Paris
Chico and Rita
Kung Fu Panda 2
Puss in Boots
Rango
BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
A Separation
Footnote
In Darkness
Bullhead
Monsieur Lahzar
BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
Pina
Hell and Back Again
If A Tree Falls: The Story of the Earth Liberation Front
Paradise Lost 3
Undefeated
BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
The Artist
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Hugo
The Tree of Life
War Horse
BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
The Adventures of Tintin
The Artist
Hugo
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
War Horse
BEST ORIGINAL SONG
"Man or Muppet" from The Muppets
"Real in Rio" from Rio
BEST EDITING
The Artist
The Descendants
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Hugo
Moneyball
BEST ART DIRECTION
The Artist
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
Hugo
Midnight in Paris
War Horse
BEST COSTUME DESIGN
Anonymous
The Artist
Hugo
Jane Eyre
W.E.
BEST MAKEUP
Albert Nobbs
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
The Iron Lady
BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2
Hugo
Real Steel
Rise of the Planet of the Apes
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
BEST SOUND MIXING
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Moneyball
Hugo
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
War Horse
BEST SOUND EDITING
Drive
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Hugo
Transformers: Dark of the Moon
War Horse
BEST ANIMATED SHORT
Dimanche/Sunday
The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore
La Luna
A Morning Stroll
Wild Life
BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT
Pentecost
Raju
The Shore
Time Freak
Tuba Atlantic
BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT
The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement
God Is the Bigger Elvis
Incident in New Baghdad
Saving Face
The Tsunami and the Cherry Blossom
Tonight, the Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli is turning Paris's Palais de l’Iéna, a Modernist landmark designed by Auguste Perret, into a 24-hour museum of collaged celebrities, classic Greco-Roman statues, and a neon-splashed disco party, all in a décor provided by Rem Koolhaas’s think-tank OMA and sponsored by Prada. It will open at 9 p.m. Paris time with an exclusive dinner party that will last into the night, to be followed by a press conference, tours for schoolchilden, and then a public opening.
Somewhere between decadence and discourse, pretension and pondering, cash and culture, Vezzoli’s project will question the art world’s sources of beauty and museum freedom — as the champagne flows. The result will be either shrewd critique or a conceptual fail. And after 24 hours and a sweep-up, the Palais will return to its daily duties as the seat of France’s Economic, Social, and Environmental Council.
BLOUIN ARTINFO caught up with Vezzoli as he was putting the finishing touches to the show.
Where did you get the idea for a 24-hour museum?
With Ms. Prada, we had long wanted to do something, but a real project, not just an exhibition — and it had to be a special occasion. Prada had an agreement with the Palais de l’Iéna, so we decided to conceptualize a social ritual, or a baroque feast, turning it into an artwork. And I thought, wow, when will I ever get another chance to play with such a magnificent building? Artists are very greedy, not financially, but greedy for excellence. You have this monument to Modernism and all you want to do is bring in the people from Rem Koolhaas's studio and make a big crazy Brazilian tropicalia mess.
What are the key elements of the 24-hour Museum ? It has three sections: "Historic," "Contemporary,"and "Forgotten."
It’s a handy tripartition to simplify the project. The main element is the Grande Salle, which we’ve turned into something churchlike. It’s almost 4,000 square meters and we’ve upholstered the whole room in perfumery pink neon, covered by metal netting, like Dan Flavin caged up by Bruce Nauman. We then installed sculptures that light up. I haven’t seen the final results but the atmosphere should be one of a discotheque meeting the Louvre.
The Louvre itself has had some envelope-pushing performances in recent years, from artistic shadow boxers to interventions by contemporary artists, soon to include Wim Delvoye. But nothing has come close to what you’re doing here.
Some will see it as institutional critique. We discussed this, internally, and said, “Let’s not take ourselves too seriously.” On this occasion, we feel that we are just playing a big game. It’s like going to the Queen’s house and putting on her whig, wearing her jewelry, but just for one night — and then putting everything back in place. Some people will be upset or think it kitsch. The only thing I don’t want is to have the project seem elitist. I’m actually more curious about the reaction of the man on the street than that of the art and fashion worlds, where people know my language. I want a person, who is used to seeing the Palais de l’Iéna in a certain way, to go inside and find this kind of pink Xanadu with Olivia Newton-John on rollerskates.
That speaks to the Facebook element of this project, where people can upload their own portraits into a gilded frame....
I will almost put more emphasis, intellectually, on the Web site. It’s a provocation, of course: “Don’t be fooled by the fact that I know some celebrities, that I use them as symbols of our time and put them into my moving portraits.” But the key to the project is that it’s for everybody — and the day after the party, everybody can come and look at the madness.
The exhibition puts the faces of celebrities on the bodies of classic Greco-Roman sculptures. How do you see the relationship, or the conversation, between the two?
It’s an observation that has been growing in me. Recently, the Louvre loaned the Borghese collection to the Galleria Borghese, putting the pieces back where they were 500 years ago. Seeing them and comparing them to Canova's Pauline Borghese [the semi-nude neo-Classical sculpture known as the Venus Victrix], you realize how much these sculptures were charged with desire, lust, and passion. In such a serious collection, you find these aspects of beauty and sensuality, words almost unmentionable in contemporary art. We don’t find these aspects, in any straightforward way, in contemporary art, but rather in cinema, in actresses, in advertising. This was the reason for the juxtaposition. But every one of the sculptures also wears a mask with my mother’s eyes. I wanted to pay homage to her for inspiring, in me, a love for all women. In the end, when you’re given such a big project, you need to return to your roots to feel secure. You’re being swallowed by the power you’ve been given.
Was the 24-hour timeframe a conceptual decision?
Yes. It’s the idea that we are recreating, in full, a social ritual: the opening, the dinner, the party, the press conference, the visit from the school, the opening to the public. Then we pull the red carpet from under everybody’s feet, saying that it’s just an illusion. There’s also is an interesting reference to Yves Klein’s “Dimanche Version – Le Journal d’un Seul Jour,” his newspaper that was sold in Paris kiosks for only one Sunday [November 27, 1960]. It was the first time he published images of “The Leap Into the Void.” The concept is also a similar to the trailer for a movie that doesn’t exist or a campaign for an election that is not real. And in the end, 24 hours becomes a perfect metaphor for “l’Espace d’un Matin” [a quote from François de Malherbe’s famous poem "Consolation à M. du Périer sur la mort de sa fille"].
You’ve been putting together the 24-hour museum in only 24 days.
One thing I like a lot about the fashion industry is its speed of ideas. And the art world is also being pushed into speed, which is something serious thinkers and critics will have to consider. When an industry, like the art industry, has taken up such a speed, it inevitably influences the nature of the artwork. In that sense, my art asks the question: Are we going too fast?
Visually, the show follows your practice of adopting celebrity images, manufactured fantasies, to create something out of your own imagination.
I take their power away, a little bit. Art is always a power struggle. Take royal paintings: in the 15th, 16th, or 17th century, the painter worked for the powers. What are the powers today? I am a court painter but my court is the media, or Hollywood. So I make works to deconstruct this. The most interesting court paintings are not the most beautiful ones, but those where you feel the painter is walking a fine line between the powers that allow him to work and the pleasure that he gets from his freedom to paint the faces as they really appear, or to make them more distorted. It’s always a mirror game. I hold up a mirror and try to reflect the world as it is, even if I like to do little twists sometimes and reality gets distorted. Or I show sides of things that normally are not very visible. I like to discuss the authority of things, with irony.
Critics will find parallels in the museum world, saying that you must follow certain unwritten rules and gain acceptance if you want a show. Your 24-hour museum throws together corporate sponsorship, collaged faces, néons, and a discotheque. Is this liberation?
Yes, I think it’s a liberating gesture, and I like that word very much. But I don’t want serious museums to be offended. They are home to people who spend their entire lives studying art history, providing us with the knowledge upon which we can play and destroy. My project has a bit of a punk attitude — but why not ?
What’s your favorite museum?
I really like the Galleria Borghese — with the Stendhal syndrome, how you are blown away when you are immersed — and also the Sir John Soane’s Museum in London. I’m not trying to sound sophisticated. They take you into another dimension. It’s like entering a movie set, and you feel much less the politics that exist to keep such an institution open. It’s more depressing when I go to a museum and I see the book store, the gadget store, the sponsors, the donations. I understand that they are all necessary for the museum to exist, but I prefer to enter a place and forget who I am, like in a nightclub.
Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week Berlin ended on Sunday, and ARTINFO Germany has since sifted through the fashions that invaded the Strasse des 17 Juni tent and pulled out the more brilliant moments of German- and expat-designed fashion from the week. Here are 10 truly runway-worthy ensembles that took our breath away.
To see the clothes, click the accompanying slide show.
Can Leonardo da Vinci's star power translate to the big screen? After the blockbuster exhibition devoted to the Renaissance master closes at London’s National Gallery, Leonardo will hit theaters across the United States as the subject of "Leonardo Live." The film offers a virtual tour of the blockbuster exhibition "Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan," which closes on February 4.
The 85-minute documentary offers a combination of interviews filmed in the galleries, segments on Leonardo's life, and mini-documentaries about the works on view, which include a full-scale copy of the “Last Supper” and “Salvator Mundi,” which was only recently attributed to the Renaissance master. Most of the paintings will never travel again; those from private collections may never again be on public view.
"Leonardo Live" premiered to enthusiastic crowds in Britain in November. The film was beamed live into 41 nearly sold-out cinemas across the United Kingdom on the exhibition’s preview night. "The National Gallery has spent five years putting this exhibition together, and basically only 500,000 people will get to see it in person," “Leonardo Live” director Phil Grabsky told BLOUIN ARTINFO. (Tickets to the National Gallery’s show were famously scalped and resold online for up to $400.) The film will now premiere in the U.S. on February 16.
But what can one really glean from seeing art — which so often benefits from careful in-person inspection — on film? “Even if you’re lucky enough to get a ticket to the Leonardo show, you get about 18 seconds in front of a painting,” Grabsky said. “The great thing about a film is that I can focus on a detail and hold it.”
The film’s hosts, art historian and White Cube exhibitions director Tim Marlow and journalist Mariella Frostrup, get various perspectives on the masterpieces. They interview ballet dancer Deborah Bull about movement in the paintings, while "Harry Potter" actress Fiona Shaw discusses their theatricality.
“It’s one thing to go in and do a recorded documentary,” Grabsky said. “It’s another thing entirely to do a live show in a gallery filled with what is perhaps the most expensive grouping of paintings on exhibition anywhere in the world.” (A few hiccups from the live shooting — a camera that broke, an autocue that stopped — will be corrected in the United States version.)
The film came out of Grabsky's interest in doing a collaboration with the National Gallery even before he knew about the Leonardo exhibition. “I told them, ‘I want to do a live screening, have you got anything coming up?' And they kind of smiled, and said, ‘We’ve got perhaps the biggest artist there is.’”
Eighteen years ago, when Anna Paquin was 11, she won the Best Supporting Actress Academy Award for her miraculous, faerie-steeped Flora in Jane Campion’s “The Piano.” She should now be contemplating attending the Oscars for a second time, but yesterday morning she missed out on a nomination for her shattering performance in “Margaret,” as she missed out on it every January since 2007. It’s hardly surprising, given the tortuous, lawsuit-spinning post-production saga of Kenneth Lonergan’s drama, which was filmed over three months starting in September 2005.
Lonergan was unable to deliver either the two-hour cut of the film contractually demanded, or one of 150 minutes when the running-time was extended. Eventually he was helped out by Martin Scorsese (who thought the film a masterpiece) and his editor, Thelma Schoonmaker, whose 149 minute 40 second version Lonergan believes is the best—though it’s not the one was that released in New York and Los Angeles on September 30.
By then the distributor, Fox Searchlight, had cut their losses. They opted not to promote a film already burdened with negative publicity and it was withdrawn two weeks later after returning just $46,495 on its estimated $14 million cost. Only the persistent championing of the film by discerning critics, such as the New Yorker’s Richard Brody and the Village Voice/L.A. Weekly’s Karina Longworth, led to its re-opening at New York’s Cinema Village on December 23 at the request of Ed Arentz of Music Box Films, who books films for the theater. The Cinefamily theater in Los Angeles has meanwhile booked “Margaret” for a one-week run beginning on January 27.
Fox Searchlight did not send out Academy screeners of “Margaret” and it’s unlikely many Academy voters saw the film. But it hasn’t come up empty during the awards season. The Boston Society of Film Critics named it runner-up in four categories and the Central Ohio Film Critics named it Best Overlooked Film. Better still, the London Film Critics Circle voted Paquin joint best actress with “The Iron Lady”’s Meryl Streep. Like “Melancholia”’s excellent Kirsten Dunst, who has picked up two critics’ groups awards but was prevented from winning more because of her director Lars von Trier’s offensive comments at Cannes, Paquin has been short-changed because of circumstances beyond her control.
Twenty-three when she played 17-year-old Lisa Cohen in “Margaret,” Paquin is 29 now. She has played Sookie Stackhouse, the telepathic waitress of HBO’s ongoing vampire series “True Blood” since 2008. Languidly sensual blonde Southerner Sookie is a world away from Lisa – a fuller-faced, brown-haired, Upper West Side Jewish schoolgirl, fiercely intelligent, unnervingly direct, and stoked by a rage she can barely comprehend.
When irked by a female Muslim classmate, as she is in classroom discussions about 9/11 and America foreign policy, her temper accelerates from zero to ninety in seconds, causing her on one occasion to be ejected. She is combative, too, in her relationship with her self-absorbed but well-meaning single mother (played by J. Smith-Cameron, Lonergan’s wife) and another middle-aged woman, Kellie (Jeannie Berlin), whom she befriends because they have a common cause. Though Lisa backs down when they fight, Kellie, too, asks this compulsively argumentative girl to leave.
In her relationships with men, she is more exploitative, though scarcely less blunt. Undemanding on the phone with her bland absentee father, who lives in thrall to his second wife in a California beach house, she coldly arranges for one schoolmate to de-virginize her and keeps another, who is painfully smitten with her, at a flirtable distance. Ostensibly seeking counsel from her geometry teacher (Matt Damon), who is troubled by his desire for her, she willfully proceeds to seduce him; the cutting of the film, which hasn’t removed all the visual longeuers but maintains a drifting ebb-and-flow rhythm that rings true to life, probably left a chunk of Damon’s performance on the floor.
What is the source of Lisa’s grief and fury, beyond the residual effect of her parents having divorced? As becomes clear, she is ridden with guilt. Early in the film, she sets out to buy a cowboy hat to wear on a dude ranch vacation with her father. When she sees a bus driver (Mark Ruffalo) wearing one, she distracts him so much he drives though a red light, crushing a woman, Monica (Allison Janney), under his wheels. She dies in Lisa’s arms, leaving her spattered with blood. To protect the driver — because he’s working-class — she tells the police that the light was green. But the guilt nags at her like a migraine. She changes her statement and starts a civil suit against the bus company with the help of Kellie, Monica’s best friend, stipulating that the driver must be fired. But Monica’s grasping out-of-state cousin and beneficiary has her eyes on a lucrative settlement.
The film is a virtual allegory about the American people’s feelings of impotence after 9/11 and the widespread need to prosecute a war against the perpetrators — or anyone guilty by association. As expressed by the movie through Lisa, there are elements of culpability and wrong-headedness in that need, which can visit suffering on those who are not guilty (in the story the bus driver’s innocent family). Paquin doesn’t take on the mantle of collective frustration, of course, but plays a callow teenager dealing with a microcosmic equivalent of mass murder — and lashing out, especially at her mother, because she can’t accept the blow fate has dealt her. Watching her is like watching the emotional equivalent of a thunderstorm from a few yards away; it is a stunning performance, not least because Lisa elicits our empathy without being the remotest bit endearing. Paquin fully earns the film’s title, taken from Gerald Manley Hopkins’s poem “Spring and Fall: To a Young Child” (1918), which, recited in Lisa’s English class, ends with the lines, “It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for.”
No matter that Paquin did her work on the film six years ago, her portrayal of Lisa should’ve brought her an Oscar nomination this week. But as it passes into history – doubtless to be rediscovered and celebrated with the rest of the film on DVD and the Internet – it’ll likely be one of those that constantly reminds viewers that a prize chosen by the few is not the most important consideration there is when assessing an actor’s worth.
Of all the first growths Margaux is certainly a strong contender for being the most splendidly presented, its imposing 19th-century château which peers over the chai, barrel cellars and other buildings easily visible from the D2, the road that snakes up...
January 2012 will mark the 50th running of the world famous 24 Hours of Daytona. While this year will be a hallmark for the race itself, its also shaping up to be quite an event for BMW enthusiasts. Over the last few years, the presence of the Bavarian...
Plow is not new. But there are some spots in the city that warrant constant discussion well after opening day; Plow is one such place. In April 2010, Joel Bleskacek and Maxine Siu, ex-Oliveto folks, decided to take the plunge and open a small restaurant...
Not too long ago, a group of experts at Christie's figured something out: "old world" wine collectors and Old Master painting collectors are often the same people. This January they began experimenting with tasteful pairings of these two categories, and on Wednesday the house will hold a series of auctions designed to keep lovers of art and wine lifting their paddles throughout the day. The morning will be filled with the first leg of the Old Master auction (which continues Thursday), the afternoon brings "art of France" (a special sale of French Old Masters), and the evening is reserved for a curated sale of rare French wines.
But for the non-connoisseur, it can be difficult to figure out just what exactly makes French wines so special — or even to try to decipher what the catalogue is actually trying to say. In anticipation of the sale, BLOUIN ARTINFO created a primer to understanding French wine, just in case you feel like swinging by Rockefeller Center on Wednesday at 5 p.m. (After all, there are plenty of lots available under $1,000 for the new collector.)
REGION
In many "new world" wine regions (that is, non-European), wines are classified by type of grape — think pinot noir, merlot, chardonnay. French wines, however, are generally referred to by their region of origin. The wines from each region are often similar — Champagne is known for its sparkling wine (usually white or rosé, but sometimes red as well), while Burgundy and Bordeaux are known for their reds (though Burgundy produces many fine whites as well) — and many of the best wines are produced using a blend of different grape varieties. Bordeaux wines usually blend cabernet sauvignon, merlot, and occasionally cabernet franc. Burgundy reds are more often pinot noir, and the region's whites are made from chardonnay. The region, however, only just begins to narrow down the wine's flavor.
TERROIR AND A.O.C.
Terroir is probably the most important term in French winemaking. It is an all-encompassing term that refers to the microclimates, topography, and soil makeup of the land, all of which contribute to the subtle variations in taste from one vineyard to the next. France awards special designations to its regions and vineyards based on terroir. There are four levels of designation, from table wine to A.O.C., or Appellation d'Origine Controlée. The A.O.C. guarantees the quality and type of wine, and sets up legal protections to guard against imposters. The region of Burgundy has its own A.O.C. designation, which covers over 300 villages in the region — but within the region there are also separate A.O.C.'s for vineyards where the terroir is exceptional. For example, A.O.C. Romanée-Conti Grand Cru covers just four acres within Burgundy. Wines from that tiny speck on the map consistently top the list of highest-priced wine at auction. At Christie's Wednesday, a lot consisting of just three bottles of 2002 Romanée-Conti is estimated to sell for $22,000-28,000 (that's $7,333-9,333 per bottle, or $290-370 per ounce of wine).
ESTATES AND GRAND CRUS
Discussion of wine auctions in 2011 were basically synonymous with news articles about Château Lafite Rothschild (pronounced: roth-shield), which has experienced a huge surge in popularity in China in the last few years. Lafite is one of several designated vineyards to be at the level of "grand cru," or great growth, which comes from an 1855 classification system within Bordeaux that designated the area's best wine-growing estates into one of five different "growths." The most coveted of these are the "first growth" grand cru estates: Château Lafite-Rothschild, Château Margaux, Château Latour, Château Haut-Brion, and Château Mouton-Rothschild. Even though the system was conceived 150 years ago, many of these vineyards are still producing the best wines in the world.
Today, "grand cru" has branched beyond Bordeaux, and in other regions of France refers to the best land (not necessarily a specific estate) on which wine is grown in regions such as Champagne, Burgundy, Alsace, and the Loire valley. The original Bordeaux first growth wines are classified as "premier grand cru," and are the kings of the wine auction market. In 2011, the top nine of Christie's top 10 wine sales were lots of Bordeaux premier grand cru wines (the 10th was a Burgundy).
VINTAGE
Not all bottles from the same vineyard are created equal, though. Every year is different. Subtle changes in weather can affect the taste of the wine, so certain years — or vintages — are more sought-after than others. Being as many of the grand cru estates are relatively small, in a good year they might sell out of their product, meaning that the only place to turn is the secondary market, which pushes up the price for the most sought-after vintages. Additionally, the finest wines get better with age, and are often at their best years or even decades after they are produced. Picking up a case of 1982 Château Latour at auction in 2012 is like deciding the day of a sold-out concert to buy tickets off of scalpers at the front door. Instant gratification can be bought — but you have to be willing to pay the premium.
VIP2.0, the second outing of the online-only VIP Art Fair, will open to the public on February 3 at 8 a.m. on the dot. Supported by extra server space to combat last year’s loading problems, the site — founded in 2011 by dealers Jane and James Cohan and entrepreneurs Jonas and Alessandra Almgren — will welcome virtual visitors to a freshly redesigned viewing area where they will be able to peruse displays from over 100 galleries with just the click of a mouse, all from the comfort of their laptops.
It is this accessibility that makes VIP so attractive in theory to first-time buyers and armchair collectors, but the fair’s new programming and enhanced interaction opportunities could make this year’s outing a must-see for art-world heavies as well. While BLOUIN ARTINFO has not yet been able to try out the new interactive interface, VIP's founders say the improved technology should help to solve the fair's past glitches. Beyond shoring up its design, the fair has also added a series of videos that give dealers a chance to show off the personality of their galleries and “Insider Tours” that let visitors explore the fair through the eyes of well-known curators and directors — add-ons that should bring VIP even more in line with physical art fairs like the Armory Show, which have extensive auxiliary programming. The founders have also recently launched three sister fairs.
Over the coming week, VIP will release a glossy series of “Discussion” clips presenting interviews with gallerists about their spaces and what they plan to bring to the fair. Leo Koenig says that he will be showing a highly curated booth at VIP mixing from both older and emerging artists, including a selection of monotypes by Nicole Eisenman. The Cohan gallery will bring concrete sculptures exploring urban archaeology by Ruben Ochoa as well as a new work from British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare, previewing an upcoming solo show by the artist. Vito Acconci’s “Stretched Façade,” an interactive sculpture of a human face that includes a cozy seating space, will also be featured.
The French-Austrian Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac has announced that it has created "a special program” for its 2012 VIP booth featuring seven solo exhibitions that will rotate over the course of the fair, ending on February 8. On the opening day of the fair, the gallery will host the debut of a 24-hour live performance by Terence Koh called “Lightning Striking at Both Ends of a Thought.” Following Koh will be consecutive presentations by artists including Raqib Shaw, Alex Katz, and Robert Longo.
The fair’s new “Insider Tours” feature will guide visitors through a selection of works at various galleries chosen by a group of high-profile curators, including Tate Liverpool’s Gavin Delahunty, the Asia Society’s Melissa Chiu, Whitechapel Gallery’s Daniel Herrmann, Alban de Pury of Phillips de Pury auction house, and collector Dennis Scholl. The curators will have the ability to write commentary that will be displayed to the right of each featured work.
Whether the new technology allows a better overall user experience for the crowds waiting to explore these new features is a question that will have to wait until February 3.
In the latest developments from last summer’s discovery of extensive fraud involving some of the most prominent members of Germany’s art world, a multimillion dollar civil lawsuit has been filed against the Cologne-based auction house Lempertz. The €2.8 million ($3.7 million) suit cites “Rotes Bild mit Pferden” a painting thought to be by early 20th-century Rheinland artist Heinrich Campendonk, which was purchased from a Lempertz auction in 2006 by Trasteco Ltd. after being touted by the house as the gem of its fall auction calendar. New allegations state that the work was actually created by master forger Wolfgang Beltracchi.
After having commissioned further tests on the painting in 2008, the buyer discovered that its white pigments contained titanium, a material not used until well after Campendonk’s death in 1957. Now the regional court in Cologne has called on four experts nominated by both Lempertz and Trasteco to evaluate whether the auction house bears blame in having overlooked obvious signs of forgery, or if they followed every standard procedure required to sell the work.
This series of legal actions was followed by a story in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung revealing that further Beltracchi forgeries had been found. This time, the works were initially attributed to French painter Marie Laurencin (1883-1956), but appear to be some of Beltracchi’s earliest works.
Die Zeit has also reported further on the remarkable network of fraudulent transactions that turned the Max Ernst Museum in the artist’s home city of Brühl, outside of Cologne, into a cash till for some of those at the top levels of its administration. From the beginning, alleges the paper, the Max Ernst Museum was a project built on politics and finance, not art. Despite warnings in the fall of 2004 that opening the museum was a huge financial risk, plans for the museum carried on. Heralding it as a success, Brühl's mayor, Michael Kreuzberg, was reelected.
In 2006, a painting, “La Forêt,” was shown in the grand hall of the museum for several months on curatorial advice from art historian Werner Spies. And in 2010, after being purchased by New York collector Daniel Filipacchi, it was proved a Beltracchi fake, opening a massive inquiry into perceived collusion. Allegedly, Spies earned a six-figure sum for his appraisal and curation of this and other purported Beltracchi fakes. Spies denied his complacency in the affair or lack of care in his professional services via his lawyer Peter Raue (who is also the co-founder of the Friends of the National Gallery). Yet, over the summer he admitted that he received a 7 to 8 percent commission for the sales of the fake paintings.
Documents that were submitted to Die Zeit further outline the monetary transactions involved. After each sale, almost exactly 8 percent of the purchase price was sent from an account Beltracchi kept at the Crèdit Andorrà bank to an account called “Imperia.” For example, €136,565.04 was sent to the Imperia account from Beltracchi two weeks after Marc Blondeau purchased a Max Ernst painting for €1.7 million. Despite this, Raue denies knowledge of the account’s existence.
In October of last year Beltracchi was sentenced to six years in prison, along with his wife and two accomplices. The sentence was based on an identified 14 fake pictures, though many more have been found in the aftermath that were not named in the initial indictment.
Alain de Botton, the high priest of pop philosophy, is calling for a network of "atheist temples" to be built around Britain. The best-selling author of such self-enlightenment tomes as "The Consolations of Philosophy" has laid out his plans in his latest book, "Religion for Atheists," in which he claims that some of religion's human values and community-forging rituals could be put to good use by contemporary liberal society. "I guess my insight was: 'What is there here that's useful, that we can steal?'" he told the Guardian last weekend.
For de Botton, temples don't need religions to be built. "You can build a temple to anything that's positive and good," he said. "That could mean: a temple to love, friendship, calm or perspective. Why should religious people have the most beautiful buildings in the land?" The idealists of the French Revolution had something similar in mind when they created Paris's famed Temple of Reason in a former church.
Although no funding has been secured and an opening date is yet to be announced, de Botton has already started to work on the first "temple for atheists" with Tom Greenall Architects. The 46-meter-high black tower would be located within the city of London and meant to represent the age of Earth: each centimeter of its height equates to one million years of the planet's life, with a thin golden line representing the duration of human presence on earth. De Botton's inaugural temple is to be dedicated to the idea of "perspective" — something rather scarce in London (a good dollop of Bottonian love, friendship, and calm might not hurt the fat cats either).
De Botton is a big believer in culture with a purpose. In 2010, he launched Living Architecture, an organization that defines itself as a "social enterprise" commissioning holiday houses from some of the world's leading architects. Four buildings — designed by the likes of Dutch firm MVRDV, Scottish practice NORD, and Jarmund/Vigsnæs Architects from Norway — have been completed so far in Suffolk, Kent, and Norfolk. Living Architecture is also behind "A Room for London," the Joseph Conrad-inspired boatlike structure dreamt up by David Kohn Architects in collaboration with Fiona Banner, currently moored on the roof of the Southbank Centre.
Most recently, Living Architecture has commissioned a secular retreat in Devon from Swiss starchitect Peter Zumthor. De Botton's temples, however, are not conceived as places to retreat from the world, rather they are an attempt to restore some of the social links once nurtured by group celebrations. "Religion puts you with people who have nothing in common except that you're human," said de Botton. "I think that's what we need at a societal level — hosts who are able to produce the benevolence, charity, curiosity, and goodwill that are in all of us but we can't let out."
If you’ve heard any hits by Drake, the Canadian rapper-crooner who once played the wheelchair-bound high-schooler Jimmy Brooks on “Degrassi: The Next Generation” (and you have; they are ubiquitous), you know that hip hop now trades as much on sultry vulnerability as it does on self-assured brawn. Of course, Drake didn’t get there first: Eminem obsessed over his anger and impotence, and Kanye West’s hip-hop striving is dosed with insecurity. (Reach as deep or as far back as you like. Wasn’t the theme song for the “Fresh Prince of Bel Air” about a Philly kid who couldn’t hang on the playground?) The flip side of rap’s macho posturing is all too tempting of a place to spelunk.
But not every rapper with a tender spot self-consciously shows it off. Some, like Young Buck, who has just released the mixtape “Live Loyal, Die Rich,” are street toughs who find themselves on the defensive. Jay-Z wasn’t referring to Buck when he rapped “sensitive thugs, you all need hugs,” in “Heart of the City (Ain’t No Love),” but “sensitive thug” nicely sums him up.
Or more precisely, sums up his image. Young Buck was once merely an up-and-coming thug, plucked from Nashville, Tennessee to join 50 Cent’s G-Unit group. His gruff, appealing G-Unit debut, “Straight Out of Ca$hville,” broke the Billboard 200’s top five and delivered two minor hits, including the irresistibly slinky, sleazy “Shorty Wanna Ride.” Young Buck proved an eager acolyte of 50 Cent and his crew; he was arrested after the 2004 Vibe Awards for allegedly stabbing a man who had punched 50’s mentor Dr. Dre. But Buck not only found disagreement with 50 Cent’s enemies, including G-Unit exile the Game, but eventually, 50 Cent himself. As a result, 50 released a recording of what he said was Buck weeping during a telephone call, and dismissed him from his group. Buck later filed for bankruptcy. When Nah Right posted the new mixtape, it was greeted with comments like, “Oh the fuckin irony, lmao *doesn’t download*.”
“Live Loyal, Die Rich” is Young Buck’s first mixtape since late 2010. (He has said he plans to release three more this year.) He’s not overtly sensitive here — although on “21 & Up,” a highlight, he does betray a certain gentility, telling a young woman he’s waiting for her 21st birthday before pursuing her. As opposed, that is, to settling for her 18th. But the delighted menace that suffused “Shorty Wanna Ride” isn’t much in evidence here. Buck, who raps over rolling, twilight-tinged beats, sounds less cocksure and controlled — and less like he’s trying to prove his worth. The album opens with “2nd Chance,” and Buck announcing, “Made a lotta money. I blew my whole advance. People stole from me, but now I understand: I want mo’ money, and I’m the fucking man. So I’m gonna make this bitch jump with my second chance.”
There isn’t much to those lines, lyrically. Buck’s just being blunt, announcing his freedom and his intention to make amends with his career. Contrast that against the abiding existential angst of another, more famously sensitive thug, the oft-ridiculed the Game, who after losing his spot in G-Unit has fascinatingly indulged all manner of defensive postures, tearful nostalgia, festering resentment, idol worship, and maybe especially, wounded pride (in his neighborhood, gang affiliations, cultural traditions, and so forth). The Game has probably made more of his various defeats then Buck, but it sometimes seems as if that’s what he was born to do. Young Buck had a fall, and you could do a lot worse than listen as he tries to stand back up.
Related: Rick Ross Turns the American Dream Inside Out
