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      in Music

      Review: Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys Show ‘Giants’ in Brooklyn

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      Right in the middle of the exhibition “Giants: Art from the Dean Collection of Swizz Beatz and Alicia Keys,” which opens Saturday at the Brooklyn Museum, is Kehinde Wiley’s 25-foot-long 2008 painting “Femme Piquée par un Serpent.” Showing a Black man in snappy but casual dress reclined in a distinctively twisted position, with a background of Wiley’s signature flowers, it borrows both title and pose from an 1847 marble sculpture by Auguste Clésinger. What you think of it really depends on what you’re asking for.If you view the painting as a Venti-size iteration of Wiley’s ongoing project, his decades-long attack on the paucity of Black faces in Western museums and art history, it’s one-note but hard to argue with. Brightly colored and thoughtfully composed, it’s visually appealing, and even today, when it’s no longer so uncommon to see Black figures on museum walls, catching sight of one this big still elicits a thrill.On the other hand, considered strictly as a painting, “Femme Piquée par un Serpent” (“Woman Bitten by a Serpent”) doesn’t offer that much. There are no details that you’d miss in a jpeg reproduction, no visible evidence of human hands at play, no sensual pleasure to be found in the surface, nothing surprising, mysterious or engrossing. It’s simply the adept illustration of an idea.Of course, you could also ask for both — for a clear conceptual work about painting (and the historical exclusion of Black subjects and artists) that is also a good painting. If you do, you’re likely to respond to “Femme Piquée par un Serpent” with ambivalence and frustration.Swizz Beatz, in turquoise at left, and Alicia Keys, at right, greet guests at the opening of “Giants,” in front of Kehinde Wiley’s 25-foot-long “Femme Piquée par un Serpent,” from 2008.Rebecca Smeyne for The New York TimesI was thinking about this — about artistic endeavors that succeed and fail at the same time — as I walked through “Giants,” the latest celebrity tie-in exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum. (“Spike Lee: Creative Sources” closes on Sunday; a show of photographs by Paul McCartney opens in May.) “Giants” draws on the extensive art collection of the married musical superstars Keys and Beatz (Kasseem Dean), bringing together 98 works — many oversized and of recent vintage — by 37 artists. Most of them are American, but they also come from several countries in Europe and half a dozen in Africa, and they range in generation from Ernie Barnes, who died at 70 in 2009, to Qualeasha Wood, born in 1996.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 Theater

      How a Culture Editor Covers the Kids’ Entertainment Beat

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      Laurel Graeber, who has covered kids’ entertainment at The Times for nearly three decades, shared her favorite stories and interviews from the beat.Times Insider explains who we are and what we do and delivers behind-the-scenes insights into how our journalism comes together.Laurel Graeber grew up loving the theater and museums. But she never thought she would write about them for The New York Times — or that she would do so for nearly three decades.“I was an editor, but I always wanted to write,” said Ms. Graeber, who helped lead the Culture desk’s copy department for more than 10 years before she retired from full-time work in 2017. “And when the freelance assignment of writing our weekend kids’ entertainment column became open, I said yes.”She has written regularly about culture for young people for nearly three decades, spotlighting the best activities that parents or caregivers can do with children each weekend in New York City. She also writes features on new television shows, movies, museum exhibitions and podcasts for kids.“What I find most enjoyable is stuff for adults that’s also good for kids, but not necessarily geared toward them,” Ms. Graeber said in a recent interview.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?  More

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      in Television

      Dick Wolf, ‘Law & Order’ Creator, Gives 200 Artworks to the Met Museum

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      Wolf has promised works by Botticelli, the Gentileschis and van Gogh to the museum, which is also naming two galleries for him thanks to a large financial donation.Dick Wolf, the “Law & Order” creator, has made a promised gift of more than 200 works — paintings, sculptures and drawings among them — for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collections of Renaissance and Baroque art. He is also donating a substantial sum of money, the Met announced on Wednesday, adding that it would endow two galleries with his name.Wolf has been a discreet collector in the art world, focusing his attention on older works at a time when the most well-known collectors invest in modern and contemporary art. Some of his promised gifts to the museum were also recent purchases, including a 15th-century Botticelli painting that sold for $4.6 million in 2012 and a 16th-century Orazio Gentileschi painting that sold for $4.4 million in 2022. The Gentileschi is already on view in the newly reopened European paintings galleries; Wolf is also donating a piece by the artist’s daughter, Artemisia, which sold for $2.1 million that same year.Dick Wolf said he used to visit the Met as a child on his way home from school. Chris Haston/NBC, via Getty ImagesMax Hollein, the Met’s director and chief executive, said that he and the museum’s curators cultivated a relationship with the television producer over the last three years; however, he stayed away from giving advice on the market.“I never wanted to be too presumptuous,” Hollein said in an interview. “But I think he was already thinking about the Met.”The collection also includes a $2.8 million painting by van Gogh sold in 2022, “Beach at Scheveningen in Calm Weather,” one of his earliest oil landscapes. The painting was made in 1882, at the beach outside of the fishing village of Scheveningen, but the artist later abandoned the picture inside of a crate of some 40 works. His family stored the crate with a carpenter, who later sold the contents for the equivalent of 50 cents to a junk dealer named Johannes Couvreur.Orazio Gentileschi, “Madonna and Child,” circa 1620.via The Metropolitan Museum of ArtA museum spokeswoman declined to provide a specific number for the endowment, which will ensure Wolf’s name is on two galleries in the department of European sculpture and decorative arts, but said it was in the tens of millions of dollars.Wolf declined an interview but said in a statement that his appreciation for art started when he was a child visiting the Met on his way home from school. “It was a simpler time, there was no admission, you could walk in off the street,” he said. “I’m sure most collectors would agree that seeing your art displayed in the world’s greatest museum is an honor.”Hollein characterized Wolf’s donation as one of the most meaningful gifts to the museum in recent memory.“The collection reflects Dick Wolf’s excellent connoisseurship and enduring dedication to the diverse artistic media of the periods,” he said. “Furthermore, the substantial financial contribution will provide critical support for the Met’s collection displays and scholarly pursuits.” More

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      in Theater

      ‘Walk on Through’ Review: Dispatches, in Song, From a Museum Novice

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      In his new show, Gavin Creel sings about the wonders of visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but sticks too close to the surface.The Broadway star Gavin Creel had been a New Yorker for 20 years before he first visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in 2019.He realizes this is embarrassing information. In “Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum Novice,” his new show at MCC Theater, he gets that admission out of the way in the opening number.“I feel ashamed, like I should just go and hide,” he sings. “How have I never been here? Well, I think, it’s anyone’s guess, but it is on the Upper East Side.”It’s a cute joke, and ingratiating in a particularly Manhattanite way — because who among us hasn’t let the prospect of a simple crosstown trip keep us from some cultural treasure that people from all over the world flock here to experience? It’s glib, too, though: the flash of vulnerability swiftly obscured with charm.Superficiality is a bane of this uncertain show, for which Creel wrote the book, lyrics and soft-pop music. Commissioned by the Met’s Live Arts Department, and performed at the museum in 2021, it has the dispiriting feel of an advertisement for the Met’s collections — and despite the dozens of artworks projected upstage, not a persuasive one.Try though Creel does to convince us that he eventually succumbed to the museum’s magic, little of “Walk on Through” seems heartfelt. A lot of it seems forced, as if he is trying to deliver what he thinks is expected in response to the art: profundity, epiphany.“Oh,” he says, after gazing at the idealized lovers in Pierre-Auguste Cot’s oil painting “The Storm,” from 1880, “I am in it now — just swept up in the fantasy of this place.”That bit of dialogue follows one of the better songs, the wistful “What Is This?,” sung principally by the band members Madeline Benson (the show’s music director) and Chris Peters, but it rings hollow.The band, which also includes Scott Wasserman and Corey Rawls (a gorgeous soft touch on the drums), contributes fine work on generally anodyne songs. The two supporting actors are also strong: Ryan Vasquez, mainly as an almost spectral ex; and Sasha Allen with a solo — inspired by Lucas Cranach the Elder’s 16th-century “Judith With the Head of Holofernes” — that feels ripped from a musical-theater epic, and which Creel deflates with a flippant last line.On a set by I. Javier Ameijeiras that suggests the Met’s architecture, with projections by David Bengali and lighting by Jiyoun Chang, it is an odd duck of a show. Directed by Linda Goodrich, it avoids being a lecture, but also identifies little of the art we see. (A wall of images and text just outside the auditorium helps with that.) It casts exploring the collection as a search for self, yet never goes deep.During one number, “Hands on You,” Creel leaps into the aisles to lead the audience in clapping rhythmically along — though at the performance I attended, participation seemed more indulgent than enthusiastic. The song tries hard to be a cheeky celebration of gay male sexuality, but its topic is jejune: vigorous lust for a bevy of ancient marble nudes.Still, “Hands on You” is meant as a riposte to the bountiful Christian imagery in the Met’s galleries — or, rather, to the rejection it connotes for Creel as a gay man. Albrecht Dürer’s “Salvator Mundi” (circa 1505) is the icon of that tension, and the catalyst for the show’s final and best song, “Unfinished World.” Lovely and emotion-filled, it is a prayer of self-acceptance in the face of hostile tradition.Then the projections of artworks start up again, killing the moment, and the show ends as it began: as an advertisement.Walk on Through: Confessions of a Museum NoviceThrough Jan. 7 at MCC Theater, Manhattan; mcctheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 45 minutes. More

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      in Music

      36 Hours in Melbourne, Australia: Things to Do and See

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      12 p.m.
      Explore a lane that’s gone from rags to riches
      Flinders Lane was the center of Melbourne’s rag trade, as its textile industry was known, until production moved offshore starting in the 1960s. Today, it’s home to a number of gorgeous shops and restaurants. The city’s most beautiful retail space must belong to Alpha60, a local brother-sister fashion label (think boxy shirts and breezy culottes), whose store inside the Chapter House building occupies a cathedral-like space with lofty, vaulted ceilings, pointed-arch windows and a baby grand piano. Across the road, Craft Victoria, a subterranean gallery and store, features experimental Australian ceramics and textile art. After your shopping, drop into Gimlet at Cavendish House, a glamorous restaurant where crisply dressed waiters sail by with caviar and lobster roasted in a wood-fired oven, but you don’t have to go all out: Squeeze in at the bar right after the doors open at noon for an expertly made gin martini (29 dollars) before the lunch rush. More