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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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      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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      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

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      in Movies

      ‘Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide’ Review: Outlasting an Art Scene

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      A new documentary co-directed by the artist’s daughter shows how Scharf, a poster boy for downtown New York art in the ’80s, is hard at work decades later.The condition of being an artist and the significance of what an artist produces are two distinct things. The post-pop artist Kenny Scharf, who came out of the same downtown art and music scene as Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Klaus Nomi, is someone whose critical and material stock has risen, fallen and risen again over decades. The documentary “Kenny Scharf: When Worlds Collide,” directed by Max Basch and the artist’s daughter Malia Scharf, makes a considered and not entirely uncritical case for Scharf’s relevance.Unlike the three other artists grouped with him above, Scharf is still alive and working. This, as some observers of the art world have noted, can be a career disadvantage. The movie’s canny assemblage of archival footage from Scharf’s early New York ascendancy in the late 1970s puts across what made his scene both exhilarating and, to many within and outside it, insufferable. (In early interviews Scharf often sounds like a snooty teenager being forced to make conversation with his boring parent.)Scharf’s stories of meeting up with Haring (they were roommates for some time) are evocative and moving. “This was the person I’ve been looking for,” he said, still in awe of his friend. Malia is actually on-camera, comforting her father, during a searing recollection of Haring’s death from AIDS. The range of Scharf’s work is intriguing — beyond his familiar cartoon-junkyard aesthetic, paintings from a dark period in his life have echoes of trenchant Surrealists like Yves Tanguy.In recent years Scharf has taken up new forms of street art, in a way carrying the torch of his fallen comrades Haring and Basquiat. The movie shows him decorating the denim jacket of a young man who had just been passing by while Scharf was working on a mural. The gesture shows an admirable generosity of spirit.Kenny Scharf: When Worlds CollideNot rated. Running time: 1 hour 17 minutes. In theaters and on virtual cinemas. More

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      Hong Kong to Censor Films Under China’s Security Law

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      The city’s government said it would block the distribution of films that are deemed to undermine national security, bringing the territory more in line with mainland Chinese censorship.For decades, Hong Kong’s movie industry has enthralled global audiences with balletic shoot-em-ups, epic martial-arts fantasies, chopsocky comedies and shadow-drenched romances. Now, under orders from Beijing, local officials will scrutinize such works with an eye toward safeguarding the People’s Republic of China.The city’s government on Friday said it would begin blocking the distribution of films that are deemed to undermine national security, marking the official arrival of mainland Chinese-style censorship in one of Asia’s most celebrated filmmaking hubs.The new guidelines, which apply to both domestically produced and foreign films, are the latest sign of how thoroughly Hong Kong, a semiautonomous Chinese territory, is being reshaped by a security law enacted last year to quash antigovernment protests.With the blessing of the Communist government in Beijing, the Hong Kong authorities have changed school curriculums, pulled books off library shelves and moved to overhaul elections. The police have arrested pro-democracy activists and politicians as well as a high-profile newspaper publisher.And in the arts, the law has created an atmosphere of fear.The updated rules announced Friday require Hong Kong censors considering a film for distribution to look out not only for violent, sexual and vulgar content, but also for how the film portrays acts “which may amount to an offense endangering national security.”Anything that is “objectively and reasonably capable of being perceived as endorsing, supporting, promoting, glorifying, encouraging or inciting” such acts is potential grounds for deeming a film unfit for exhibition, the rules now say.The new rules do not limit the scope of a censor’s verdict to a film’s content alone.“When considering the effect of the film as a whole and its likely effect on the persons likely to view the film,” the guidelines say, “the censor should have regard to the duties to prevent and suppress act or activity endangering national security.”A Hong Kong government statement on Friday said: “The film censorship regulatory framework is built on the premise of a balance between protection of individual rights and freedoms on the one hand, and the protection of legitimate societal interests on the other.”The vagueness of the new provisions is in keeping with what the security law’s critics say are its ambiguously defined offenses, which give the authorities wide latitude to target activists and critics.Supporters of pro-democracy activists who have been charged under the national security law protested in Hong Kong last month.Lam Yik Fei for The New York Times“How do you raise funds?” asked Evans Chan, a filmmaker who has faced problems screening his work in Hong Kong. “Can you openly crowdsource and say that this is a film about certain points of view, certain activities?”Even feature filmmakers, he said, will be left to wonder whether their movies will fall afoul of the new law. “It’s not just a matter of activist filmmaking or political filmmaking, but the overall scene of filmmaking in Hong Kong.”At its peak during the decades after World War II, the city’s film industry enjoyed huge influence across the moviegoing world, churning out popular genre flicks and nurturing auteurs like Wong Kar-wai and Ann Hui. The influence of Hong Kong cinema can be seen in the work of Hollywood directors including Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese, and in blockbusters such as “The Matrix.”More recently, Hong Kong’s political turmoil has been of intense interest to artists and documentarians, even if their work has sometimes struggled to be shown before audiences.A screening of a documentary about the 2019 protests was canceled at the last minute this year after a pro-Beijing newspaper accused the film of encouraging subversion. The University of Hong Kong urged its student union to cancel a showing of a film about a jailed activist.The screening went on as planned. But a few months later, the university said it would stop collecting membership fees on the organization’s behalf and would stop managing its finances as punishment for its “radical acts.” More

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      in Television

      Douglas Cramer, Producer of TV Hits and Art Aficionado, Dies at 89

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      He had a hand in some of the biggest shows of the 20th century, including “Dynasty” and “The Love Boat.”Douglas S. Cramer, who produced some of the most successful television shows of the 20th century, many — including “The Love Boat” and “Dynasty” — in partnership with Aaron Spelling, and who used his substantial wealth to become a leading art collector, died on Friday at his home on Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. He was 89.His husband, Hubert Bush, said the cause was kidney failure.Mr. Cramer had a long career in television, producing or helping to develop shows including “Peyton Place” in the 1960s, “The Odd Couple” in the 1970s and “Hotel” in the 1980s. In the 1990s he produced a string of television movies based on novels by Danielle Steel.Today, television producing credits are handed out for a variety of reasons, and those given them often have little direct involvement in the show. But in Mr. Cramer’s day the producer was often more like a film director, shaping the cast and look of a series.“I was very hands-on,” he said in an oral history recorded in 2009 for the Television Academy Foundation. “There was nothing I wasn’t involved with. I worried about every performer, every extra, every piece of clothing.”Mr. Cramer joined forces with Mr. Spelling, the most prolific American television producer of the era, in the mid-1970s. “The Love Boat,” which they produced jointly, ran for 250 episodes beginning in 1977 and had a vast, eclectic list of guest stars that reflected Mr. Cramer’s connections and interests — Andy Warhol turned up in a 1985 episode, playing himself.Mr. Cramer, left, in 1984 with his longtime producing partner Aaron Spelling, center, and their fellow producer E. Duke Vincent.Gene Trindl/MPTV ImagesIf that series was a cultural reference point, “Dynasty” was the type of show that helps define a decade. A prime-time soap opera about a rich oil family, the Carrington clan — Blake (John Forsythe), Krystle (Linda Evans), Alexis (Joan Collins) and others — the show ran from 1981 to 1989. It gave a campy gloss to the decade while also occasionally managing to be groundbreaking: It had a prominent gay character and a prominent Black character, both still rare at the time.“We walk a fine line, just this side of camp,” Mr. Cramer told New York magazine in 1985. “Careful calculations are made. We sense that while it might be wonderful for Krystle and Alexis to have a catfight in a koi pond, it would be inappropriate for Joan to smack Linda with a koi.”That series and others, Mr. Spelling, who died in 2006, told The New York Times in 1993, benefited from the distinctive Cramer touch.“Douglas is a very creative man,” he said. “He has immaculate taste in art direction and wardrobe.”He also had immaculate taste in art. He amassed a collection that included both known names and up-and-coming talents, and he made significant gifts to museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, whose director, Glenn D. Lowry cited Mr. Cramer’s donation of “a superb group of paintings and sculptures by Ellsworth Kelly, among others.”Steve Martin, a fellow art aficionado, recalled gatherings at a ranch Mr. Cramer owned in Santa Ynez, Calif.“He would host a yearly ‘hoedown,’ with hay rides, buffets, inviting Hollywood’s and the art world’s glitterati,” Mr. Martin said by email. “One year, the hoedown centered around the opening of his gigantic, multilevel private museum, stuffed with Lichtenstein, Baselitz (as I recall), Ruscha (as I recall), and dozens of other important artists. All the high-level art mingled with guys and gals dressed in gingham and cowboy hats.”“The Love Boat” had a vast, eclectic list of guest stars that reflected Mr. Cramer’s connections and interests. Andy Warhol turned up in a 1985 episode, playing himself.Walt Disney Television, via Getty ImagesDouglas Schoolfield Cramer Jr. was born on Aug. 22, 1931, in Louisville, Ky. His father was a businessman, and his mother, Pauline (Compton) Cramer, was an interior designer who, after the family moved to Cincinnati when Doug was a boy, started writing a newspaper column, “Polly’s Pointers,” full of home decorating and other tips. She and his grandmother, who owned an antiques shop and would take him on buying trips, “opened my eyes to looking at what was around me,” Mr. Cramer said in the oral history, “which I think had a lot of impact on me as a producer.”Those buying trips with Grandma also spawned his interest in collecting, something he began doing as a child.“I started to collect saltshakers for some bizarre reason,” he told The Courier-Journal of Louisville in 2003. “From saltshakers it went to postcards. I had an enormous collection of postcards of art and posters.”He also developed an early fascination with the theater and New York City. After six months at Northwestern University in Illinois, he left college at 18 and went to live in New York, securing a job as a production assistant at Radio City Music Hall.The outbreak of the Korean War in 1950 led him to conclude that “I’d rather be at the University of Cincinnati than fighting in Korea,” as he put it in the oral history; he eventually earned an English degree there.He returned to New York as a graduate student at Columbia University, obtaining a master’s degree and also making a start on a career as a playwright; his drama “Call of Duty” was staged at the Provincetown Playhouse in Greenwich Village in 1956. The play had a decent run, but his main takeaway from the experience, he said, was the realization that “I really hadn’t lived enough to have anything to write about.”Though the Korean War was over, he was eventually drafted into the Army, spending six months working in communications. He managed a summer playhouse in Cincinnati for several seasons, at the same time teaching at what is now Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.From left, Joan Collins, John Forsythe and Linda Evans in an episode of “Dynasty,” one of the most successful shows with which Mr. Cramer was involved. “We walk a fine line,” he said of “Dynasty,” “just this side of camp.”ABC Photo ArchivesIn the late 1950s and early ’60s, sponsors were particularly influential in television, and Procter & Gamble, headquartered in Cincinnati, was one of the biggest players. Hoping to work his way into the television business, Mr. Cramer went to work there as a supervisor on two of its daytime shows, “As the World Turns” and “The Guiding Light.”After several years there he moved to New York, where in the early 1960s he took a job at ABC. As director of programing planning there, he helped develop “Peyton Place” into a hit series and also was involved in bringing “Batman” to the small screen in 1966.At ABC and throughout his career, Mr. Cramer crossed paths with future Hollywood titans. One was Barry Diller, who would later lead Paramount and 20th Century Fox.“I met Doug Cramer in the parking lot of the Bel Air Hotel as I was leaving my job interview with his boss at ABC,” Mr. Diller said by email. “He gave me the ticket to retrieve his car, thinking I was the parking attendant, and I’ve greatly admired him ever since.”From ABC Mr. Cramer moved to 20th Century Fox, and then to Paramount. There, as executive vice president in charge of production, he had overall authority over its many series, including “Love American Style,” “The Brady Bunch” and “The Odd Couple.” He soon formed his own production company, and in 1974 he produced “QB VII,” based on the Leon Uris novel, a star-studded production often identified as network television’s first mini-series. It won six Emmy Awards.After his run with Mr. Spelling, Mr. Cramer formed a different kind of partnership with Ms. Steel, beginning in 1990 with a TV movie version of her “Kaleidoscope.”“The time that I spent working with Doug Cramer on 21 TV movies and mini-series based on my books,” Ms. Steel said by email, “are among the happiest memories of my career, with fantastic results.”Mr. Cramer’s marriage to the gossip columnist Joyce Haber ended in divorce in the 1970s. A daughter, Courtney, died in 2004, and a son, Douglas III, died in 2015. Mr. Cramer began his relationship with Mr. Bush in 1991, and they married in 2006. A brother, Peyton, also survives him.Mr. Bush said that one of Mr. Cramer’s proudest accomplishments was that quirky casting on “The Love Boat.” In addition to working Warhol into an episode, he would sometimes engineer theme episodes, including one that featured designers like Bob Mackie and Halston. It was a chance, Mr. Bush said, to give Middle America, which loved the show, a look at people they might not otherwise see.“Doug made that accessible to America,” Mr. Bush said. “I think that was important.” More

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      5 Things to Do on Memorial Day Weekend

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      Our critics and writers have selected noteworthy cultural events to experience virtually and in person in New York City.Art & MuseumsExpressions of FreedomZaq Landsberg’s “Reclining Liberty” will be on view in Morningside Park until April.Zaq LandsbergIn 2005, Zaq Landsberg created a new nation in rural Utah called Zaqistan, on the premise that our ideals around governance were worth re-evaluating. In Harlem’s Morningside Park, his yearlong installation “Reclining Liberty” — a 25-foot-long Buddha-like version of the Statue of Liberty — is another re-examination, this time of a quintessential American symbol. More