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    • 138 Shares149 Views

      in Music

      ‘Ice Cold’: From Biggie to Lil Yachty, Getting Your Shine On

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      Hip-hop jewelry does a lot of heavy lifting in a new exhibition in Manhattan. It signifies elite membership, romantic courtship and ambition for greatness.Of the New York museums that would create an exhibition on jewelry associated with hip-hop culture, I would not have imagined the American Museum of Natural History to be one. Yet, “Ice Cold: An Exhibition of Hip-Hop Jewelry” did open this May in a tiny gallery of their Mignone Halls of Gems and Minerals. With 66 objects, it has an astute premise — that precious stones might attract more attention if regarded through the lens of hip-hop, likely the most widely proliferating music movement that the United States has ever produced.This show might have been organized to absorb the energy around the 50th anniversary of hip-hop’s inception last year or anticipate the Hip Hop Museum’s opening in the Bronx in 2025. More cynically, some might see “Ice Cold” as an act of penance for the museum’s admitted possession and use of the remains of Indigenous and enslaved people, as the museum faces criticism about the legality and the ethics of these acquisitions. Either way, the venture feels successful. I visited the show twice, on a Thursday evening and on a Monday morning, and each time the gallery was filled with visitors.The show is beautifully laid out. It’s installed in a small, dark, semicircular gallery, with jewelry in vitrines spotlighted against a black acetate and Plexiglas. The diamonds glint and coruscate as you move across the displays. One could linger, bedazzled and charmed by the bold inventiveness of pieces like ASAP Rocky’s EXO grenade pendant — its “pin” sets the time — displayed on two disks set inside a locket. However, the exhibition offers more, including the concealed and paradoxical implications of wearing these constellations of bling.In a small, dark, semicircular gallery, jewelry is displayed in vitrines spotlighted against a black acetate and Plexiglas. Vincent Tullo for The New York TimesThe curators, Vikki Tobak, author of “Ice Cold: A Hip-Hop Jewelry History,” Kevin “Coach K” Lee, a founder of the Quality Control music label, and Karam Gill, the director of a documentary on the subject, took the important step of historically situating hip-hop’s ostentatious display of wealth. They refer to an Asante chief in Ghana whose ceremonial dress consisted of copious amounts of gold (though the date of an image referenced turns out to be 2005, which makes the ancestral connection vague).Shrewdly, the curators also name check each jeweler (when they are known), so they are properly recognized as collaborators and makers alongside the musical stars, such as Ghostface Killah’s eagle bracelet by Jason Arasheben — a massive 14 karat gold wrist cuff with an eagle alighting onto it. The Notorious B.I.G.’s Jesus necklace, made by Tito Caicedo of Manny’s New York, is another icon. It features the head and neck of a figure in gold whose beard, locks, clothing and crown are festooned with diamonds. In terms of the meaning they convey, these chains do a lot of heavy lifting.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 125 Shares159 Views

      in Music

      A Hip-Hop Comic Book Star Comes to Life in Steel

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      A statue of Rappin’ Max Robot is bound for Paris. But first it’s making a stop in the Bronx.Good morning. It’s Thursday. We’ll meet a new iteration of Rappin’ Max Robot that is bound for Paris, via the Bronx. We’ll also get details on Robert Kennedy Jr.’s testimony in the court case seeking to have him removed from the November ballot in New York.Clark Ivers, Welder UndergroundRappin’ Max Robot began life as a comic book character only a few inches tall. Now he is a man of steel. He has a skin of steel plates up to an inch thick that covers an I-beam skeleton.He is on his way to Paris, to take note of breaking’s debut in the Olympics, but he will get there a little late. First he will spend some time in the Bronx, the birthplace of hip-hop.Today an 18-foot-tall statue of Rappin’ Max Robot that was fabricated in Brooklyn will be hauled to a spot outside the Hip Hop Museum in the Bronx. The museum is not scheduled to open until next year. But Marc Levin, who with his wife, Adina, runs the studio and foundry where the statue took shape, said it would be assembled for a Champagne toast on Saturday, the second day of breaking events at the Olympics.Hip-hop is a “wondrous and centerless tangle,” The New York Times critic Jon Caramanica wrote last year, so perhaps it is not surprising that the toast will not be the only hip-hop event this weekend. Sunday is the 51st anniversary of the day hip-hop is said to have gotten its start, in the rec room of the apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx, and a group that is not affiliated with the museum is planning a march from that neighborhood to Crotona Park, a couple of miles away.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      in Music

      Taylor Swift Gets the Museum Treatment

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      Costumes and memorabilia from the pop star’s personal archive are now on display at the V&A museum in London.“Disappointed Love,” painted in 1821 by the Irish artist Francis Danby, is a scene of eternal teenage wistfulness, its visual codes as readable now as they were back then. A young girl sits by a river, tearful and heartbroken, her head in her hands, her white dress pooling around her legs. In the water, pages of a torn letter float among the waterlilies. By her side are props of femininity: a straw bonnet, a bright red shawl and a miniature portrait of the man who wronged her.The work hangs in the collection of the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, in a red-walled gallery tightly packed with Georgian and Victorian paintings. As of recently, Danby’s weeping beauty has a new neighbor: a ruffled cream Zimmerman dress worn by Taylor Swift in the music video for “Willow,” from her 2020 album “Evermore.”The gown is one of more than a dozen items from Ms. Swift’s personal archive featured in installations across the V&A galleries. Danby’s painting is “so her vibe,” the curator Kate Bailey said of Ms. Swift, gesturing to the lovesick girl and her assortment of trinkets — “the dress, the scarf.”It was not yet noon on a muggy July day in London, and yet Ms. Bailey, a senior curator in the V&A theater and performance department, had already clocked more than 8,000 steps on her iPhone pedometer as she rushed about the museum overseeing the Taylor Swift installation. The V&A galleries, spread across multiple floors, stretch seven miles. (The exhibition, “Taylor Swift: Songbook Trail,” will be open to the public through Sept. 8.)“Whose idea was it to put a trail around the whole museum?” Ms. Bailey asked as she arrived, cheerful and panting, in the gilded Norfolk House Music Room. The V&A acquired the room in 1938, when Norfolk House was demolished, and reassembled it in its entirety, panel by panel, in 2000.Ms. Swift’s “Speak Now” blasted from speakers, and her iridescent tulle ball gown, worn on the back cover of the album, was encased on a mannequin in a vitrine in the center of the room, like a ballerina in a giant music box.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 100 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      San Francisco’s Arts Institutions Are Slowly Building Back

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      Although attendance remains down from prepandemic levels, the city’s arts groups are having some success getting audiences to return.On a recent clear day, visitors were wandering through the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art to gawk at works by Yayoi Kusama and Alexander Calder, and, a few blocks away, making their way through the galleries at the Contemporary Jewish Museum and the Museum of the African Diaspora.That evening, music lovers poured in to Davies Symphony Hall to hear Esa-Pekka Salonen conduct the San Francisco Symphony and into the War Memorial Opera House across the street, where the San Francisco Opera was giving the American premiere of Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence.”Although attendance at the city’s arts institutions remains down from prepandemic levels — with tourism, hotel occupancy and office attendance yet to fully recover — its cultural ecosystem has been showing signs of inching its way back.Arts organizations around the nation have been struggling to regain audiences since the pandemic, with Broadway attendance about 17 percent lower than before and precipitous declines at many regional theaters, museums, orchestras and opera companies.San Francisco has its own particular challenges: People are returning to work, but the city’s office buildings remain emptier than those in Los Angeles or New York. Fewer people are taking Bay Area Rapid Transit downtown; the number of riders exiting at downtown stations is still down by more than half since 2019.The city and its cultural organizations have been struggling to overcome what Thomas P. Campbell, director of the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, referred to as the “doom narrative,” the widespread media coverage of the city’s challenges, both real and exaggerated.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    • 138 Shares189 Views

      in Movies

      Film Academy Chief Gets a Sequel: Bill Kramer’s Contract Is Renewed

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      Amid challenges in Hollywood, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences renewed its chief executive’s contract a year early.In a time of flux in Hollywood, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the organization that oversees the Oscars, placed a bet on continuity, announcing Monday that it would extend Bill Kramer’s tenure as chief executive through July 2028.Kramer’s contract, which was up for renewal in 2025, was approved one year early “due to his exceptional leadership and significant contributions,” the academy said.“He is the ideal person to continue to broaden the Academy’s reach and impact on our international film community and successfully guide the organization into our next 100 years,” Janet Yang, the academy’s president, said in a statement.The academy has faced a number of challenges in recent years: It has worked to diversify the Oscars after nominating only white actors in 2015, faced the steep drop-off in television ratings facing award shows, struggled with the fallout after Will Smith slapped Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards and opened a museum.This year’s Academy Awards drew 19.5 million viewers, a four-year high, according to Nielsen. It was the third consecutive year that Oscar viewership had grown, but it was still far below previous levels: Before 2018, the telecast never had fewer than 32 million viewers. This year’s telecast started an hour earlier than usual.Before becoming chief executive of the Academy in June 2022, Kramer served for two years as the director of its new museum, the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures, and he was credited with helping get it open after years of delays. Kramer’s total compensation was $865,568 from the academy and related organizations in 2022, the year he started as chief executive, according to the academy’s most recent tax filing.Kramer’s contract extension comes as the Academy Museum is working to recover from criticism over how it tells the story of the Jewish immigrants who started movie studios and helped create the U.S. film industry. When the museum first opened, it was faulted for saying relatively little about them, even as it celebrated diversity in film. The museum responded by opening a permanent new exhibition highlighting the contributions of Hollywood’s Jewish founders, but when that installation was criticized by some Jewish film professionals, the museum announced that it would makes changes.Kramer now oversees all aspects of the academy, which has more than 700 employees in Los Angeles, New York and London.The academy has an annual operating budget of about $170 million, 70 percent of which comes from its Oscars broadcast deal with Disney and ABC, which runs through 2028. Last month, the Academy announced a global $500 million campaign to shore up its financial future.“Like any healthy organization or company,” Kramer said in an interview as he announced the international fund-raising effort, “the academy needs a sustainable and diverse base of support to allow for solid long-term planning and fiscal certainty.” More