Our most-talked-about stories in Art, Design & Style, and Performing Arts, January 16-20, 2011:
ART
– Market reporter Shane Ferro made the case for art-as-an-investment-vehicle — for the one percent.
– Ben Davis returned with another edition of his “Art Lover” column, offering relationship advice to the art world.
– In Egypt, a tomb of an ancient diva was discovered in the Valley of Kings.
– New York's Marlborough gallery opened “Blind Cut,” a celebration of the fictional and the fabulous in art. We offered pictures of some of the choice works in the show.
– Former Young British Artist Gary Hume talked to our UK correspondent Coline Milliard about his new paintings on canvas at White Cube.
DESIGN & STYLE
– Red-soled fashion designer Christian Louboutin is directing four erotic tableaux for Paris’s Crazy Horse cabaret, in collaboration with David Lynch and Swizz Beatz.
– Alexander Forbes picked some of the coolest things on view at Germany’s imm Cologne design fair.
– We offered some highlights from arty fashion photography duo Inez van Lamsweerde and Vinoodh Matadin's new limited-edition Taschen book “Pretty Much Everything.”
– Designer Miuccia Prada decried the upcoming show that paired her work with that of Elsa Schiaparelli at the Met’s Costume Institute.
– Architect Richard Meier is planning a new Aztec-flavored skyscraper in Mexico City.
PERFORMING ARTS
– America’s greatest living documentarian Frederick Wiseman has a new feature about burlesque. Our own Graham Fuller talked to him.
– The Carnegie Hall crowd got hot under the collar about Lola Astanova, the glamorous 26-year-old Uzbek classical pianist.
– Culture intervened in the strained relations between Iran and the United States, as Asghar Farhadi’s “A Separation” took a Golden Globe.
– Providence indie noise powerhouse Black Pus created its own homage to the Occupy movement (of a sort) with its “Police Song” video.
– MoMA and Germany’s Berlinale film festival announced a partnership, spotlighting the works of radical filmmakers working between 1921 and 1936.