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      The Thorny History of the Salzburg Festival’s Logo

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      For its centennial, the venerable festival dug into the story of its defining image — and had to reckon with what it found.SALZBURG, Austria — The logo of the venerable Salzburg Festival is impossible to miss here during the summer months. It is attached to buses and flanks the busy sidewalks on the Staatsbrücke bridge. It’s on wristbands, workers’ uniforms and windows, in tourist pamphlets and hotel lobbies.The logo — featuring the silhouette of the Hohensalzburg Fortress; Salzburg’s regional flag; and a Greek theater mask, all layered over a golden background — has had remarkable staying power. First seen on a poster for the 1928 iteration, it was soon adopted as the festival’s permanent symbol, with the exception of the Nazi era. Yet its history, and particularly the story of its designer, hasn’t been thoroughly known until recently.The Salzburg Festival commissioned a report on the logo’s origins for its centennial last year, a jubilee that has stretched into this summer because of the pandemic. The research revealed new information about the life of its creator, the artist Leopoldine Wojtek, who began as a modernist but whose work took a conservative, Nazi-sympathetic turn in the 1930s, and who was married to one of the party’s most prolific art looters and schemers.It’s a story that raises questions about cultural memory in a country that has been slow to account for its history in the years leading up to and following the Anschluss — Austria’s annexation by Germany — in 1938. But the Salzburg Festival, in some sense, has been here before, reckoning with the fraught Nazi-era legacies of some of its most prominent artists, including the conductors Karl Böhm and Herbert von Karajan.Helga Rabl-Stadler, the festival’s longtime president, conceived the report — which is made up of an investigative account by the University of Vienna professor Oliver Rathkolb and an artistic appraisal by the designer Anita Kern — a decade ago, during the festival’s 90th anniversary celebrations, as she learned some of the troubling details of Wojtek’s biography.“I would have had a bad conscience if we only showed the bright sides of our past,” she said in an interview. “We really are interested in unveiling our history, because in reality the Salzburg Festival is not only a hundred years of festival but a hundred years’ cultural history of Europe.”It is a history that bears retelling amid far-right responses to the pandemic and the global rise of anti-government, populist movements. “We have to remind people that we have already had this history,” Rathkolb said. “This period before 1938 is even more interesting than the Nazi period, because it shows how quickly a parliamentary democracy can change.”Leopoldine Wojtek, left, and colleagues in front of the tapestry “Adam and Eve” in Salzburg in 1926.Collection and Archive, University of Applied Arts ViennaTHE REPORT BEGINS with straightforward biography. Wojtek, known as Poldi, was born in 1903 in Brno, Moravia. Her father was vocally German nationalist, and later, as a resident of Salzburg, greeted Nazi encroachment with an opportunistic spirit. So did her sister — but not her brother, Wilhelm, who refused to join the party yet was drafted into military service and died a bitter, disabled war veteran.Wojtek attended a girls’ school in Salzburg before studying at a vocational school in Czechoslovakia and then at the Kunstgewerbeschule, or Arts Vocational School, in Vienna, where her professors included the design luminary Josef Hoffmann. Kern said that during this time she “was surrounded by real edgy, avant-garde people,” but that, compared with her colleagues, “she was a very conservative modernist.”She returned to Salzburg, and in her early 20s was already taking on local projects such as frescoes and exhibition posters in the modernist mode that she eventually brought to a design contest for the 1928 edition of the Salzburg Festival.The history of the contest is hazy — and suspicious, likely involving interference by Kajetan Mühlmann, Wojtek’s eventual husband, though it’s not clear whether they had any relationship at the time. What is known is that the contest, which was open to students of the Kunstgewerbeschule, was expanded to include three recent graduates, including Wojtek. She didn’t initially place first, but for some reason several designs were sent back to the artists for “certain alterations.” When the new posters were brought before the jury, Wojtek was named the winner.“The competition had a clear No. 1: Hanns Köhler,” Rathkolb said. “He was a shooting star. Then you can see from the records that Mühlmann was very tricky in having a second round.”In her report, Kern describes the poster as simply “typical for its time.” Rathkolb guesses that the jury favored Wojtek for being a local artist whose family had an established reputation.With some modifications, the poster became the festival’s logo. The white bands at the top — used in 1928 to list festival leaders Max Reinhardt, Franz Schalk and Bruno Walter — were made bare, and the dates at the bottom were removed, but otherwise the original design has remained in use, far longer than most logos.It is the most lasting evidence of Wojtek’s modernism, which waned over the following decade. In 1932 she married Mühlmann, who had worked for the association supporting the Salzburg Festival and the Austrian Publicity Bureau — whose meeting records reveal incidents of lavish and irregular expenses. He resigned from that office in 1934, by which time he had begun to ingratiate himself with the Nazi party.Wojtek’s winning poster design for the 1928 festival, before it was adapted into a logo.Archive of the Salzburg Festival; Salzburg MuseumAfter the Anschluss in 1938, Wojtek’s poster was replaced with one that better reflected Nazi aesthetics.Archive of the Salzburg Festival; Salzburg MuseumBefore 1938, though, Nazi ideology was illegal in Austria — which got Mühlmann into trouble, and kept Wojtek from putting her name on the illustrated children’s biography of Adolf Hitler she created in 1936. At this point, her work became “stale,” Kern concludes in her report, adding that additional drawings from this time were “more static and compact than her free and easy illustrations from the 1920s.”Why Wojtek’s work took such a turn isn’t clear. It could be because of Mühlmann, who rose to become a friend of Hermann Göring, for whom he plundered art throughout Europe. But there is evidence that Wojtek wasn’t simply changing under the influence of her husband.In 1941, she was directly involved in the so-called aryanization of a house in nearby Anif confiscated from the Jewish artist Helene von Taussig, who later died at the Izbica transit camp in German-occupied Poland. At the time, the practice of aryanization had been put on hold until the end of the war, but Wojtek, Rathkolb said, “wanted that house at any price.”“Here, she was the driving force,” he added. “She more or less used Mühlmann to make it happen. She had no ethical shame.”Wojtek was involved in the so-called aryanization of this house confiscated from the Jewish artist Helene von Taussig.Salzburg MuseumIt is, then, ironic that Wojtek’s Salzburg Festival poster was quickly removed after the Anschluss; it wasn’t degenerate, but it was uncomfortably modern for the Nazis. It was replaced with something more in line with the party’s aesthetics, what Kern describes as “a portrayal of Mozart as a naked Apollo figure with a lyre.”Wojtek’s design wouldn’t return until after the war. By then, she and Mühlmann had divorced; he had begun to build a second family with a woman in the late 1930s. Wojtek was forced to vacate the house she stole, and the United States returned it to Taussig’s heirs in 1945.Yet Wojtek eluded denazification. Despite her closeness to the party, her membership was never processed; Rathkolb was unable to find her in the party’s card index in Berlin. She was classified as “less incriminated” and was able to vote again by 1949. She found a new partner in the artist Karl Schatzer, and in their shared workshop they hosted courses in painting, illustration and ceramics.She received local honors over the years — including the Max Reinhardt Medal, named for the Salzburg Festival founder who, as a Jewish artist, was forced into exile — and died in 1978.WOJTEK’S BIOGRAPHY has been overlooked in the decades since. This, Rathkolb said, is in keeping with Austria’s broader reluctance to reckon with its Nazi-era history, as the country long hid behind the popular “victim theory” to exempt it from responsibility.The logo has changed little. At one point, a fifth white band was added to the top so it would resemble a musical stave — but that was removed soon after. Kern, for her part, isn’t even sure the logo could be described as good, or that its mask imagery still fits a festival that has come to be known more for music than theater. “Most of all,” she said, “it works because it’s so well known.”But its future is secure.“We talked about it, and our opinion was always: This logo isn’t Nazi propaganda,” Rabl-Stadler said. “It’s a logo out of the spirit of the best time in Austrian graphics. If there had been the slightest doubt that you could misinterpret it, we would have removed it.”Instead, Wojtek joins the crowd of festival artists whose names now come with caveats. Her story is included in the current exhibition “Everyman’s Jews: 100 Years Salzburg Festival,” at the Jewish Museum in Vienna. That show was prompted by Rabl-Stadler, said Marcus Patka, one of its curators, who added that it was a positive sign considering that “there is still lots of silence” in Salzburg on the subject of the Nazi era.Wojtek’s grave, at the Petersfriedhof in Salzburg, is today in disrepair. It was discovered by the festival only while the report was being researched.Laetitia Vancon for The New York TimesHere in town, Wojtek doesn’t have a street or plaza named after her. As someone of no artistic influence, she isn’t talked about. Her burial site was discovered by the festival only while the report was being researched — even though it’s at the Petersfriedhof cemetery, just steps away from its venues.The grave is difficult to find: between two paths, on uneven ground that becomes dangerous in the rain. With no known surviving family members, the stone has fallen into disrepair. Only with effort can you make out the faded carving of her name.At the cemetery’s exit on the Toscaninihof, however, the Salzburg Festival’s logo is once again impossible to miss. And there, under the white of its flag, the name couldn’t be clearer: “WOJTEK.” More

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      Abrons Arts Center’s Fall Season Celebrates Trailblazers

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      Highlights include a photography exhibition on female leaders in public housing and a contemporary play about the life of Mary Shelley, the author of “Frankenstein.”Abrons Arts Center’s lineup for the fall season is a salute to groundbreakers and innovators in the arts, public housing and emerging technology.“As we emerge from isolation, we wanted to focus on work that’s still been happening and developing in different ways during the pandemic,” Craig Peterson, the center’s executive artistic director, said in an interview. “Because it deserves an audience.”Several of the productions scheduled at the 300-seat playhouse for the coming season were booked before the pandemic and postponed because of it, said Peterson, who curated the season in collaboration with Ali Rosa-Salas, the recently appointed artistic director of the center.“Lots of them got displaced when we stopped live performance,” he said. “But we never stopped supporting artists and always intended to present them.”The center has scheduled a concert, “Holy Ground: Land of Two Towers,” by the jazz ensemble Onyx Collective on Sept. 11 to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the attacks on the World Trade Center.“It felt like an appropriate way to think about the long-term impacts of historical moments like the ones we’re in now,” Rosa-Salas said.A week later, the center will open a free outdoor photography exhibition, “Community Matriarchs of NYCHA” (for the New York City Housing Authority), celebrating five women who have transformed their neighborhood on the Lower East Side, where they organized food distribution, especially during the pandemic, to other residents of public housing. The exhibition, presented as part of the Photoville Festival 2021 in partnership with the digital storytelling platform My Projects Runway, will include portraits by Courtney Garvin and video interviews by Christopher Currence and remain on view through Dec. 1.“I’m really excited to uplift women activists in our community and reflect on the role of public housing in our neighborhood and city,” Rosa-Salas said.From there it’s on to Frankenstein, Bigfoot and Sasquatch as Abrons presents a streaming video adaptation of Sibyl Kempson’s “The Securely Conferred, Vouchsafed Keepsakes of Maery S.,” beginning Oct. 29. First performed as an experimental, four-part radio play in January, the production, presented by the 7 Daughters of Eve Thtr. & Perf. Co., is described as a visual journey through the layered universe of Mary Shelley, the author of “Frankenstein.” The new virtual video work will feature hand-cut collages, digital and analog animation and illustration and collaborations with more than a dozen artists. An in-person screening is also set for Halloween at the new Chocolate Factory Theater.Closing the season from Dec. 10-12 is a live motion-capture piece, “Antidote,” created in collaboration with Pioneer Works. Directed by the Jamaican-born choreographer Marguerite Hemmings and the new-media artist LaJuné McMillian, it explores the relationship between physical movement and motion-capture technology and how the latter can be used as a tool of personal power and liberation. The project is a collaboration with six young artists from high schools on the Lower East Side and in Brooklyn’s Red Hook neighborhood.“It’s an intergenerational experiment and a great way to end the season,” Rosa-Salas said.The full season lineup is available at abronsartscenter.org. More

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      Ford and Mellon Foundations Expand Initiative for Disabled Artists

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      The foundations are adding $5 million to the Disability Futures program, which will continue through 2025 with two more classes of 20 fellows each.The Disability Futures initiative, a fellowship established by the Ford and Andrew W. Mellon Foundations last fall to support disabled artists, is expanding. The foundations announced on Friday that they will commit an additional $5 million to support the initiative through 2025, which will include support for two more cohorts of 20 fellows.The fellowship, which was created by and for disabled individuals, was conceived as an 18-month initiative. It provided 20 disabled artists, filmmakers and journalists, selected from across the United States, with unrestricted $50,000 grants administered by the arts funding group United States Artists.But Margaret Morton, the director of creativity and free expression at the Ford Foundation, said it was clear from the beginning that it couldn’t just be a one-off venture.Projects undertaken by members of the first cohort will be showcased at the first Disability Futures virtual festival, on Monday and Tuesday, with programming from some of the country’s leading disabled artists, writers, thinkers and designers. It is free and open to the public.Among the highlights: A session on disability portraiture with the filmmakers Jim LeBrecht and Rodney Evans, the painter Riva Lehrer and the journalist Alice Wong; a conversation exploring the connections between climate justice and disability justice led by Patty Berne; and a virtual dance party hosted by the garment maker Sky Cubacub, with music by DJ Who Girl (Kevin Gotkin). Evening runway performances from models wearing items from Cubacub’s Rebirth Garments and a meditation experience with the initiative Black Power Naps, featuring Navild Acosta and Fannie Sosa, are also on tap.“It’s been really profound for me to see how much the fellows chosen in the first cohort were interested in elevating others in the community,” Emil J. Kang, the program director for arts and culture at the Mellon Foundation, said in an interview on Thursday.The next class of fellows will be announced in 2022. They are chosen by peer advisers who are themselves disabled artists.But the feedback from the first class, Morton said, was frank: Do even better in the selection process.“One of the fellows challenged us,” she said, about there being only one Native American fellow. “And we appreciated that and were challenged to get it right and make sure we have a deeper pool.”The grants offer flexible compensation options. The money can be distributed in a lump sum, in payments or even be deferred, depending on what works best for the artist.The fellowship “has made an incredible difference in my life and career,” the writer and photographer Jen Deerinwater said in an email. “It’s allowed me more financial freedom, without the risk of losing my disability and health care services, to pursue more artistic pursuits such as music.”The pandemic has made foundation leaders “deeply aware” of the challenges disabled professionals face, Morton said. About one in four adults in the United States has a disability, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.“We gained a deeper impression and perspective about what it’s like to navigate through the world,” she said.The program’s overarching goal is to help the artists make connections, Morton said.“Our biggest dream is visibility,” she said. For audiences to see the artists and for funders to see that “they should start investing in disabled practitioners.” More

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      TV Is Full of Stories About Creative Work — Minus the Work Part

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      HBO’s “Hacks” is more interested in its characters’ personalities than their output. But plenty of great stories have been told about the creative process itself.The premise of HBO’s smart hit comedy “Hacks,” just finished with its first season and renewed for a second, is that a played-out older Las Vegas comedian, Deborah Vance, ends up paired with a canceled and unemployable Gen Z comic, who is meant to help her write new material. Both of them view the association as beneath them. Deborah has always written her own material. Ava, who shows up for the job without even researching her new employer’s work, smarts under the perception that Deborah doesn’t regard her as very talented.When, in the second episode, a flat tire leaves them stranded in the desert, Ava begins to complain that Deborah is making the job unnecessarily hard, even though Ava is “good.” Deborah, regally outfitted in a flowing robe and parasol, responds coldly. “Good is the minimum,” she says. “It’s the baseline. You have to be so much more than good.” Even if you’re great, she says — and even if you’re lucky — you still have to work, and hard, “and even that is not enough.” Deborah doesn’t respect her new employee because Ava has done nothing to earn that respect and has in fact done much to discourage it. She then abandons Ava in the desert.Deborah may be a highhanded, abusive boss, but she is also right. Watching this show, though, you sometimes wonder if it believes her. Like most shows about creative endeavors, “Hacks” commits to the idea that its characters are hustlers: Deborah, in particular, is ruthless when it comes to keeping her Vegas time slots. But one thing that is rarely on the table in shows like this is real failure. (Deborah might lose her slots, and Ava her job, but we’ve seen enough of these stories to suspect those would only be stages on the way to their eventual success.) And despite Deborah’s speech, one thing we rarely see her and Ava do is actual work, hard or otherwise. They bounce jokes off each other, briefly, in the first episode, and Ava pitches Deborah a few times. We see Deborah’s standup, but aren’t offered much insight into her process. We barely see Ava’s work at all. These women are in comedy, but for all it matters to the show, they might as well be in car sales. At least in a show about a dealership, you would see them sell some cars.Taking failure off the table, rarely depicting creative work — these are linked choices, and in making them, “Hacks” is hardly alone. Even outside the realm of TV and film, you find things like Sally Rooney’s novel “Conversations With Friends,” about a poet whose poetry never appears in the book; everybody says she’s great, and we’re left to imagine why. You wouldn’t watch “Rocky” and expect to see neither training nor boxing, but in stories about artists, it’s typical to relocate all the struggle, all the drama, into the protagonists’ personal lives. They are blocked creatively because they are blocked personally. Or they are fine creatively, but personal conflict erupts right before the big show and pours out in their performance. The work, the talent, is a given. The story is elsewhere.“Hacks” is not centrally concerned with the business of show business. Its biggest story lines involve changes in gender politics and tastes — in comedy, but not only comedy — across generations. The show that Ava eventually pushes Deborah to write sounds personal, confessional, more like Hannah Gadsby’s “Nanette” than a Vegas comedy set. But we never see it; we’re only told it bombed, which might have been interesting to watch. Ava’s other major intervention is accusing Deborah of not sticking up for other women, which leads to a scene in which Deborah lectures a male heckler, then pays him $1.69 million to never again enter a comedy club. “Hacks” can get away with this — can avoid showing its characters developing their work — because we accept the premise that they are both talented. If it wanted to suggest they were bad or mediocre at what they do, we would have to see it.They assert that failure lies at the heart of all art, and that any story about art is a story about progressive failures.There are works out there about people who are artistic failures. Some have no talent, while others just have no luck. In the first two minutes of Elaine May’s “Ishtar,” we watch the two protagonists writing a song together, testing out lines, discarding what works and keeping what doesn’t. They do this throughout the movie, even in life-or-death situations, because writing songs is what they care about. The joke is that they are fine-tuning songs that are incredibly, unsalvageably bad, working toward an ideal of aesthetic perfection shared by nobody but them. This creative process is faithfully recreated by May, step by painful step, because the movie is ultimately about two guys who will never be what they want: great songwriters.In Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood,” we watch the titular director of comically hokey B-movies as he crafts “Plan 9 From Outer Space,” famous in some circles as the “worst movie ever.” Unlike May, Burton doesn’t leave the question of why Wood’s movies are so bad as a kind of holy mystery. They’re bad because Wood doesn’t attend to his actual work: He buzzes with such enthusiasm that he films one take of everything, no matter how bad. Like “Ishtar,” the film celebrates this delusional commitment by structuring itself as if it were the story of an artist who eventually won acclaim — and, like “Ishtar,” it revolves around people who are difficult to root for, not because they are unlikable but because they are incompetent. The opposite may be true for Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy,” in which Rupert Pupkin gets on TV by kidnapping a TV talk-show host. The big twist is that his routine is actually pretty funny; he’s just an unlikable guy whose name nobody can remember.The reason these movies are outliers is pretty simple: They were all bombs. (In the case of “Ishtar,” a bomb of such infamous proportions as to become a punchline for decades.) But by putting artistic struggle at their core, they assert that failure lies at the heart of all art and that any story about art is a story about progressive failures. Like Wile E. Coyote chasing the Road Runner, failure chases something it will never have. But would we know anything about the Road Runner without it?Television shows dedicated to creative work, and creative failure, are harder to find. There was “30 Rock,” about a sketch-comedy show that was, pretty clearly, hacky, unfunny and poorly run. And yes, there’s probably only so much time audiences can be expected to spend watching people tinker with songs or jokes — but other kinds of television have figured out how to mix personal drama with the actual work of their characters. There’s no reason we can’t see Deborah and Ava working together; we just don’t. “Hacks” is meant to be a show about women and the work they do that goes unrecognized. But that work seems to be recognized least of all by the show. It would have been a crazy thing to dedicate an episode to Deborah’s routine and its failure to land. But it would have supplied the missing piece of her partnership with Ava. It would have been a crazy thing, but it would have made a better show, too. Source photographs: Screen grabs from HBO MaxB.D. McClay is a critic, an essayist and a contributing editor at The Hedgehog Review and a contributing writer at Commonweal. More

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      China’s Communist Party Turns 100. Cue the (State-Approved) Music.

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      A wave of nationalistic music, theater and dance is sweeping China, part of Beijing’s efforts to improve the party’s image and strengthen political loyalty.Yan Shengmin, a Chinese tenor, is known for bouncy renditions of Broadway tunes and soulful performances in operas like “Carmen.”But lately, Mr. Yan has been focusing on a different genre. He is a star of “Red Boat,” a patriotic opera written to celebrate the 100th anniversary this week of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. Mr. Yan has embraced the role, immersing himself in party history and binge-watching television shows about revolutionary heroes to prepare.“I feel a lot of pressure,” Mr. Yan said in an interview between rehearsals. “The 100th anniversary is a big occasion.”A wave of nationalistic music, theater and dance is sweeping China as the Communist Party works to ensure its centennial is met with pomp and fanfare.Prominent choreographers are staging ballets about revolutionary martyrs. Theaters are reviving nationalistic plays about class struggle. Hip-hop artists are writing songs about the party’s achievements. Orchestras are performing works honoring communist milestones like the Long March, with chorus members dressed in light-blue military uniforms.The celebrations are part of efforts by Xi Jinping, China’s authoritarian leader, to make the party omnipresent in people’s lives and to strengthen political loyalty among artists.Mr. Xi, who has presided over a broad crackdown on free expression in China since rising to power nearly a decade ago, has said artists should serve the cause of socialism rather than become “slaves” of the market.In honor of the party’s centennial, Mr. Xi’s government has announced plans for performances of 300 operas, ballets, plays, musical compositions and other works. The list includes classics like “The White-Haired Girl,” a Mao-era opera about a young peasant woman whose family is persecuted by a cruel landlord. There are also new productions like “Red Boat,” which chronicles the party’s first congress in 1921 on a boat outside Shanghai.Xi Jinping, China’s top leader, has said that artists should serve the cause of socialism.Xinhua, via Associated PressThe outpouring of artistic expression comes amid rising nationalism in China. Many artists have little choice but to comply with the government’s demands for more patriotic art, with officials in China’s top-down system wielding considerable influence over decisions about financing and programming.“It has become very important for artists to follow the political line,” said Jindong Cai, director of the U.S.-China Music Institute at Bard College. “The government wants artists to focus on Chinese works that relate to people’s lives and positively reflect China’s image.”Critics have denounced the so-called “red” works as propaganda. But Chinese artists say that is partly the point.“China is very strong now and people should respect that,” said Warren Mok, a Chinese tenor who is embarking on a national tour to celebrate the centennial.Mr. Mok said he hoped to use music to remind people about the party’s success in improving living standards in China. Still, he said it was important that patriotic works are balanced with Western music and other art forms.“Anything you do should not be too extreme,” he said. “If you’re so insecure about your own culture, your own nationalism, you close your door. Isolation is not good for any country.”Hundreds of performances related to the party’s centennial have already taken place, and scores more are expected by year’s end.In Suzhou, a city west of Shanghai, the choreographer Wang Yabin recently staged “My Name is Ding Xiang,” a new ballet about a 22-year-old martyr who died during the Second Sino-Japanese War. In Nanjing, an eastern city, an orchestra recently performed “Liberation: 1949,” a symphony about the Communist revolution by the composer Zhao Jiping.Some works deal with contemporary themes, including the party’s efforts to eliminate extreme poverty and its success in fighting the coronavirus, which Mr. Xi has held up as evidence of the superiority of China’s authoritarian model. A play called “People First” depicts the heroism of medical workers in Wuhan, where the coronavirus emerged in late 2019.By reviving older works, Mr. Xi appears eager to remind the public of the party’s glory days.Kevin Frayer/Getty ImagesPropaganda art has a long history in China, and some of the country’s most celebrated works emerged during periods of intense political control, including the decade of bloody upheaval in the 1960s and 1970s known as the Cultural Revolution. During that time, classical music was attacked as decadent and bourgeois, and many Western composers and instruments were banned.In modern China, music and dance from the Cultural Revolution still resonates with the public, including works such as the “Yellow River Piano Concerto” and “The Red Detachment of Women,” a revolutionary ballet.“These cultural products have their own artistic value,” said Denise Ho, assistant professor of history at Yale University who studies 20th century history in China. “For many Chinese, there is a nostalgia for certain aspects of the Mao era.”.css-1xzcza9{list-style-type:disc;padding-inline-start:1em;}.css-3btd0c{font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-size:1rem;line-height:1.375rem;color:#333;margin-bottom:0.78125rem;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-3btd0c{font-size:1.0625rem;line-height:1.5rem;margin-bottom:0.9375rem;}}.css-3btd0c strong{font-weight:600;}.css-3btd0c em{font-style:italic;}.css-w739ur{margin:0 auto 5px;font-family:nyt-franklin,helvetica,arial,sans-serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.125rem;line-height:1.3125rem;color:#121212;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-family:nyt-cheltenham,georgia,’times new roman’,times,serif;font-weight:700;font-size:1.375rem;line-height:1.625rem;}@media (min-width:740px){#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-w739ur{font-size:1.6875rem;line-height:1.875rem;}}@media (min-width:740px){.css-w739ur{font-size:1.25rem;line-height:1.4375rem;}}.css-9s9ecg{margin-bottom:15px;}.css-uf1ume{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-box-pack:justify;-webkit-justify-content:space-between;-ms-flex-pack:justify;justify-content:space-between;}.css-wxi1cx{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-flex-direction:column;-ms-flex-direction:column;flex-direction:column;-webkit-align-self:flex-end;-ms-flex-item-align:end;align-self:flex-end;}.css-12vbvwq{background-color:white;border:1px solid #e2e2e2;width:calc(100% – 40px);max-width:600px;margin:1.5rem auto 1.9rem;padding:15px;box-sizing:border-box;}@media (min-width:740px){.css-12vbvwq{padding:20px;width:100%;}}.css-12vbvwq:focus{outline:1px solid #e2e2e2;}#NYT_BELOW_MAIN_CONTENT_REGION .css-12vbvwq{border:none;padding:10px 0 0;border-top:2px solid #121212;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-rdoyk0{-webkit-transform:rotate(0deg);-ms-transform:rotate(0deg);transform:rotate(0deg);}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-eb027h{max-height:300px;overflow:hidden;-webkit-transition:none;transition:none;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-5gimkt:after{content:’See more’;}.css-12vbvwq[data-truncated] .css-6mllg9{opacity:1;}.css-qjk116{margin:0 auto;overflow:hidden;}.css-qjk116 strong{font-weight:700;}.css-qjk116 em{font-style:italic;}.css-qjk116 a{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;text-underline-offset:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-thickness:1px;text-decoration-thickness:1px;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:visited{color:#326891;-webkit-text-decoration-color:#326891;text-decoration-color:#326891;}.css-qjk116 a:hover{-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}By reviving older works, Mr. Xi appears eager to remind the public of the party’s glory days. His government has redoubled efforts to fortify ideological loyalty among artists. This year, a government-backed industry association released a moral code for performing artists — dancers, musicians and acrobats included — calling on them to be faithful to the party and help advance the socialist cause.Mr. Xi, in a ceremony this week at Beijing’s Great Hall of the People, handed out centennial medals to 29 party cadres, including Lan Tianye, an actor often described as a “red artist,” and Lu Qiming, a patriotic composer known for the piece “Ode to the Red Flag.”“For Xi, as for Mao, art is first and foremost a political instrument,” Professor Ho said.The Chinese government has tried to use music, dance, television and movies in recent years to improve its image, especially among young people, many of whom have no direct connection to the Communist revolution of 1949.A rap song celebrating the centennial, titled “100 Percent,” has been widely shared on the Chinese internet in recent days. But the 15-minute track, featuring 100 artists, has been mocked for its wooden propaganda slogans.“Our spaceships are flying in the sky,” says one lyric. “The new China must get lit.”Performers say they hope the high caliber of the centennial productions, including elaborate costumes, sets and visual effects, will appeal to younger audiences.A gala performance about the Long March. Some of the country’s most celebrated works emerged during periods of intense political control.Ng Han Guan/Associated PressWang Jiajun, 36, a principal dancer at Shanghai Dance Theater who plays a martyr in a revival of the dance production “The Eternal Wave,” said young people could identify with the work.“These heroes were only in their teens, 20s or 30s when they lost their lives,” Mr. Wang said. “The stories of young people will attract young people.”For artists taking part in the centenary, the effort has at times been laborious.Xie Menghao, a Chinese-born graduate student in music composition in Germany, spent six months repurposing a suite of Red Army songs into a piano concerto about the Long March, a 6,000-mile retreat of Communist forces that began in 1934 and established Mao’s pre-eminence. He said he was proud of the piece, which the Shanghai Philharmonic Orchestra premiered last month, but added that the experience was “more like a job.”“I just did what they said,” he said in an interview. “Every composer just thinks about the music.”Mr. Yan the tenor starring in “Red Boat,” said he has found it easy to connect with his character, Chen Duxiu, a founder of the party. But he said rehearsals have not always been easy. Younger performers, for instance, have needed help better understanding the emotional experience of being part of the early communist struggle, he said.“They don’t have the ideas to fight or sacrifice for the nation’s destiny,” Mr. Yan, 56, said. “I can do it in one take.”Mr. Yan said he was confident that the show would have success in China and perhaps beyond.“We’re depicting history, not just lecturing how great the Communist Party is,” he said. “This isn’t a communist slogan-type performance. It’s plain storytelling.”Javier C. Hernández reported from Taipei, Taiwan, and Joy Dong from Hong Kong. More

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      in Movies

      Lydia Lunch’s Infinite Rebellion

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      “Good luck figuring me out,” the 62-year-old artist said. A new documentary called “The War Is Never Over” does its best.For nearly two hours on a recent afternoon, Lydia Lunch sat in her bright Brooklyn apartment and spoke with bracing speed, and at an alarming volume, about rape, murder, incest, genocide, racism, sadism, torture and — for a thunderous encore — the apocalypse. Because she has spent more than four decades broadcasting her belief that such brutal subjects lie at the heart of the human experience, critics have often cast her as a nihilist.“It’s the problems that are nihilistic, not me,” said Lunch, 62. “I’m the most positive person I know. To me, pleasure and joy are the ultimate rebellion. For some reason, few people seem to know that.”“The War Is Never Over,” a new documentary about the artist opening Friday, will offer more people the chance to get a fairer sense of Lunch’s life and work. Directed by her longtime ally Beth B, the movie provides enough context and nuance to counter a common view that Lunch’s output hits just one note: a deeply discordant one.Not that her oeuvre has made such broader assessments easy. From the start of Lunch’s career with the beyond-abrasive no-wave band Teenage Jesus and the Jerks through her psycho-ambient and jazz-noir recordings, spoken word pieces, essay collections, film performances and visual art works, subjects like chaos and ruin have obsessed her.By contrast, hanging out with Lunch is a delight. She’s a doting host, offering a well-appointed cheese plate while regularly checking on a guest’s hydration and comfort. Her home is decorated to look like a tasteful bordello, with overstuffed red-and-black furniture that mirrors the color scheme of the dress she wore. While the subject matters covered in our interview toggled reliably between cruelty and catastrophe, her delivery of many lines along the way had the timing of a skilled comedian, suggesting that a finer description of what she does might be stand-up tragedy.“With a comedian, the audience waits for the punchline,” she said. “In my work, the audience waits for me to punch them in the face.”“I am not, nor have I ever been, a musician,” Lunch said. “I’m a conceptualist.”K Fox/Kino LorberYet, as the film makes clear, a sincere heart beats behind even Lunch’s most gob-smacking declarations. She traces the source of both her righteousness and her rage to two formative events during her childhood in Rochester, N.Y. Though she was just 5 and 8 years old when that city experienced the racial uprisings of 1964 and 1967, they had a life-changing effect on her.“We were one of only two white families living in a Black neighborhood, so this was happening right outside my front door,” she said. “I had a reckoning that something was not right with the world. Consciousness came into me in that moment.”At the same time, something was very wrong within her own family. Lunch said that her father, a door-to-door salesman and grifter, sexually abused her, and her parents fought constantly and bitterly. At 16, she ran away to New York, making her way to the downtown clubs she had read about in rock magazines, where she saw the shock-tactic bands Suicide and Mars. “They were so extreme and so perverse,” Lunch said with awe. “They directed what I was to do.”She hoped that would take the form of spoken word pieces but, at the time, music provided a far more welcoming audience. “I am not, nor have I ever been, a musician,” she said. “I’m a conceptualist. To me, a chord is something I put around somebody’s neck if I want to throw them out the window.”Still, the sonic assault she devised altered the musical landscape. With Teenage Jesus, she subverted the common purpose of rhythm — to create a groove that moves the music forward — to instead favor a static series of hellacious thuds. The result made the music feel less performed than inflicted. To achieve her trademark beat she said, “I had to imprison the drummer to make him play his instrument like a monkey would.”To up the ante, she made sure the guitar she used was only tuned once a month, “so it would develop these harmonics that made it automatic art,” she explained. “Amazing guitar players could not play my parts.”Her next group, 8 Eyed Spy, mixed West Coast surf music with groundbreaking punk-jazz, but she broke the band up because “we were becoming too popular. My ideal audience would be reduced to one,” she said. “Because that would be the right one.”At 16, Lunch ran away to New York, making her way to the downtown clubs she had read about in rock magazines and joining her own bands.David Corio/Redferns, via Getty ImagesIn 1980, her debut solo album, “Queen of Siam,” created the audio equivalent of an early John Waters film, displaying an equal genius for sleaze. Still, music couldn’t contain the scope of her verbiage, so she began to publish books and to stress spoken word pieces that centered on her main theme: the universality of trauma. An early piece, “Daddy Dearest,” detailed the extremes of the physical and sexual abuse she experienced from her father. But part of what made such works stand so far out was that, instead of cowering from the violence, she used it as fuel, recognizing the power she had over those who desired her and, then, relishing the chance to use it against them.“I was never having suicidal dreams,” she says in the film. “I was having homicidal dreams.”In a parallel way, Lunch co-opted the role of the sexual predator, both in the brutalism of her work and in a period of ferocious promiscuity in her personal life which she now views as a point of pride.“Lydia totally turned the tables,” Beth B said in an interview. “She figured out the power that comes from owning your sexuality as well as your trauma. It can empower you to create new fantasies for yourself that free the female psyche and challenge the societal norms put on women.”Lunch said her ability to pull this off psychologically hinged on her “understanding that the abuse didn’t start in my house and that mine was not the worst.”“Abuse is endemic,” she said. “It goes back to the cave. I’m talking blood trauma. Every nationality has had war, violence, murder. It’s just that some of us are more astute at decoding it.”She considers it key, as well, that she forgave her father years ago. (He died in the early ’90s). “When I told him that my rage came from him, he said ‘I know,”’ Lunch said. “You never get that. They always deny.”Her processing was aided by the fact that “there are certain emotions I just don’t experience,” she added. “I have never experienced shame or humiliation. I have never felt guilt.”“Because of the aggression in my work, people tend to miss the poetry,” Lunch said.Krista Schlueter for The New York TimesLunch’s bulletproof persona has given many the impression that she’s devoid of vulnerability. But, she countered, “is it not vulnerable to reveal as much as I have of my life? Just because I’m not crying when I’m telling the story doesn’t mean it’s not there,” she said.In a similar way, Lunch believes that “because of the aggression in my work, people tend to miss the poetry,” and that many people take her words too literally. “I might be speaking in triple tongue,” she said. “I might be speaking sarcastically. I might mean exactly what I say, or I might mean the opposite.”Not that such misconceptions have a chance of stopping her feverish output. During the pandemic, Lunch recorded two albums and she will begin playing shows again with her band Retrovirus, which cherry-picks pieces from throughout her career, in New York next month. She has been hosting a podcast with her Retrovirus bandmate Tim Dahl since 2019, “The Lydian Spin,” which allows her to push beyond the metaphors in her writing and the hyperbole of her sound to speak more plainly.She is also directing her own documentary about the relationship between artists and what she believes to be their common psychological issues, titled “Artists – Depression/Anxiety/Rage.” Creating so broad a legacy of work has been central to Lunch’s mission to drive home her multi-dimensionality.“I am as male as I am female,” she declared. “I am as submissive as I am dominant. And I am as sublime as I am ridiculous. Good luck figuring me out.” More

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      in Music

      Diego Cortez, a Scene Shaper in Art and Music, Dies at 74

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      In ’70s and ’80s New York, he elevated Jean-Michel Basquiat in a huge show he curated, helped found the Mudd Club and worked with Patti Smith and Laurie Anderson.Diego Cortez, an influential figure in New York City’s Downtown art and music scenes who in 1981 curated a massive exhibition featuring dozens of artists that brought the 20-year-old Jean-Michel Basquiat to public renown, died on Monday in Burlington, N.C. He was 74.The cause was kidney failure, his sister, Kathy Hudson, said. He died in hospice care at her house but had been living nearby in Saxapahaw.Mr. Cortez seemed to be everywhere in SoHo, Tribeca and beyond in the late 1970s and early ’80s. He was a founder of the Mudd Club, a gritty, boundary-pushing nightclub that opened in 1978. He performed with Laurie Anderson and Kathy Acker; directed music videos for Blondie and the Talking Heads; mounted shows of drawings and photographs by the rock singer-songwriter Patti Smith; and wrote “Private Elvis,” a book with photographs of Presley’s time in the Army that Mr. Cortez found in West Germany.Then came the “New York/New Wave” show in 1981. Held at the cutting-edge P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS 1) in Long Island City, Queens, the exhibition demonstrated Mr. Cortez’s eclectic knowledge of the visual and musical worlds that he’d been immersed in since he moved to New York City.He recruited more than 100 artists for the show, among them Ms. Acker, Robert Mapplethorpe, Nan Goldin, Keith Haring, Andy Warhol, David Byrne, William Burroughs, Futura 2000, Ann Magnuson, Fab 5 Freddy and Basquiat, whom he had met on the dance floor of the Mudd Club.“It was huge — literally 600 to 700 works of art that took three weeks to install, using two installation crews,” Alana Heiss, the founder of P.S. 1, said by phone. “He was very persuasive: we started with one group of galleries on the first floor and ended up on two floors.”“Diego was full of unquenchable passion,” she said.Curt Hoppe, a photorealist painter whose work was in the exhibition, recalled: “He brought uptown and downtown together, graffiti and downtown artists, and he hung it in an unusual way, splattering everything on the walls. It was a riveting show.”He added, “Diego was the epitome of cool.”Mr. Cortez recruited more than 100 artists for “New York/New Wave,” a 1981 show at what is now the exhibition space MoMA PS 1 in Queens. The show brought wide renown to Jean-Michel Basquiat in particular.MoMA PS1 ArchivesIn a maximalist show that Mr. Cortez packed with existing and future stars, Basquiat was introduced to a wider world. Known first for his graffiti art, he had morphed into a painter who incorporated images of angular people and symbols with words and phrases. The show, for which Basquiat created about 20 new works, brought him to the attention of dealers. By the time he died in 1988 at 27, he was a superstar.“What makes this work is the intensity of the line,” Mr. Cortez said in 2017 when the Basquiat portion of “New York/New Wave” was partly restaged at the Barbican Art Gallery in London. “Jean-Michel was really more of a drawer. It keeps that innocent aspect, that childish aspect that’s important, because it’s slightly not adult.”Mr. Cortez remained linked to Basquiat long after the P.S. 1 exhibition. He curated a few more shows of his work; advised his estate and served on its authentication committee; acted as a consultant to Julian Schnabel when Mr. Schnabel made the film “Basquiat” (1996); and played a bit part as what the credits called a “fist-fighter at the Mudd Club” in “Downtown 81,” another film about Basquiat, from 2001.Mr. Cortez stood before a painting of him by the photorealist painter Curt Hoppe. “Diego was full of unquenchable passion,” a colleague said.Curt HoppeJames Allan Curtis was born on Sept. 30, 1946 in Geneva, Ill., and grew up nearby in Wheaton. His father, Allan, was a warehouse manager for a steel company, and his mother, Jean (Ham) Curtis, was a manicurist.After graduating from Illinois State University with a bachelor’s degree, he earned a master’s degree in 1973 at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where he studied film, video and performance art. His teachers included the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage and the video artist Nam June Paik.He changed his name to Diego Cortez before moving to New York City in 1973, adopting it as an artistic pseudonym and as a reflection of the Hispanic neighborhood in Chicago where he had lived.Once in New York, he worked as a studio assistant to the conceptual artist Dennis Oppenheim and then to the video and performance artist Vito Acconci. Over the next few years, as he became further enmeshed in the Downtown music and art worlds, he held a variety of jobs, including one as a security guard at the Museum of Modern Art. The job inspired Ms. Anderson in 1977 to release “Time to Go (For Diego),” a song that tells how Mr. Cortez, working the late shift, would tell people when it was time to leave:Or, as he put it, snap them out of their … art trances.People who had been standing in front of one thing for hours.He would jump in front of them and snap his fingers.And he’d say, “Time to go.”Mr. Cortez’s career after “New York/New Wave” was multifaceted, but he never organized another enormous exhibition like that one. He was an occasional agent and curator; collaborated on projects with his friend Brian Eno, the innovative musician and producer; and served as an art adviser to the Luciano Benetton and Frederik Roos collections. He composed an album, “Traumdetung” (2014), a mix of music and his snoring. And at one point he tried, unsuccessfully, to start a museum in Puerto Rico.Laurie Anderson and Mr. Cortez at a benefit in New York City in 2013. She was inspired to base a song on one of his early jobs in New York, as a museum security guard.Cindy Ord/Getty Images“His main goal was to to support artists by having collectors buy their work or to get their work into museums,” said his sister Ms. Hudson, who organized exhibitions with her brother at the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University, where she worked.In addition to her, Mr. Cortez is survived by another sister, Carol Baum, and a brother, Daniel Curtis.Patti Smith, in a phone interview, said she first got to know Mr. Cortez in the 1970s. He later urged her to resume working on her visual art, which she had largely stopped pursuing during a long hiatus from public life. “He was a bridge to helping me get my feet back on the ground,” she said.He helped curate a show of her drawings and photos at the Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh in 2002 and an exhibition of her photos in 2010 at the New Orleans Museum of Art, where he was the curator of photography at the time.“He didn’t like to stand in other people’s light,” Ms. Smith said. “He wanted Basquiat to stand on his own. He wanted me to stand on my own at my exhibition in New Orleans. He was really interested in seeing people he thought had promise flower.” More

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      in Television

      Artist David Choe on His New FX and Hulu Show

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      An hour into our interview, the artist David Choe admits that he lied about something.He said he had turned down two offers to do a television show many years ago, one from the producer Scott Rudin, the other from the celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain. He had said the same thing during his first burst of media attention nearly 10 years ago; and he said it again during a Zoom call last week from his home in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles. More