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      in Television

      Anya Firestone, Tour Guide and Star of ‘The Real Girlfriends of Paris,’ on ‘The Art of Drinking’

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      Anya Firestone leads what she calls “cou-tours” around Paris: Tours tailored to the clients’ interests, be they dinosaurs, drag queens or booze.On a recent morning at the Louvre, Anya Firestone handed out bottles of Evian. “Because ‘the art of drinking’ begins with hydration,” she said.Ms. Firestone, 34, a museum guide-conférencière (tour guide) and art integration strategist, wore rhinestone earrings in the shape of olive martinis, pink Manolo Blahniks, the Mini Bar clutch by Charlotte Olympia and a Marni dress printed with likenesses of Venus. She escorted Matt Stanley, her client, and his Parisian date, Salomé Bes, 30, past the long lines at the museum’s entrance and toward the Code of Hammurabi. The set of ancient Babylonian laws included “an eye for an eye,” she explained, and it also dealt with issues of alcoholic beverages, like watered-down wine and the peoples’ “right to beer,” as she pithily put it.“Pretty impressive!” said Mr. Stanley, the chief executive of a memory care community near Austin, Texas. Mr. Stanley, 43, had hired Ms. Firestone to design a two-day visit around alcohol.“You’re going to see that drinking and art had the same upbringing and moved in the same direction — from a religious context with prayers and libations to decadence and debauchery,” said Ms. Firestone, who calls her custom tours “cou-tours,” a play on couture.Ms. Firestone speaks before “The Romans in their Decadence” by Thomas Couture at the Musée d’Orsay. “I don’t describe myself as American,” she said. “I say I’m New-Yorkaise.”Hugues Laurent for The New York TimesLast fall, Ms. Firestone starred in “The Real Girlfriends of Paris,” a reality show broadcast on Bravo that followed six 20- and 30-something American women as they navigated work, life and l’amour. She said that the opportunity to put her business, called Maison Firestone, on public view was the main reason she had done the show. But Ms. Firestone had also liked the idea of elevating the oft-scorned TV genre with art and culture. (Not to mention some pun- and Yiddish-inflected wit.) “By the way,” she said, “I don’t describe myself as American. I say I’m New-Yorkaise.”Ms. Firestone was raised in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood Manhattan; her parents were actors. She first moved to Paris in 2010 after college at George Washington University, for an artist residency, during which she wrote poetry and sculpted oversize macarons. (People thought they were colorful hamburgers,” she said, explaining that the confection had not become popular yet.) She worked briefly as an au pair, channeling Mary Poppins and Maria von Trapp, she said. But Ms. Firestone likened her current plot to the TV shows “Emily in Paris” — “Love her chutzpah, less her bucket hats,” she said of the protagonist — and “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel.” After a master’s degree in French cultural studies from Columbia Global Center in Paris, she spent a few years traveling between New York and Paris, offering custom tours and writing about art and brand intersections for Highsnobiety. Maison Firestone — which also designs themed events with luxury brands — followed from that interest in “art as branding,” she said.Ms. Firestone often dresses according to her tour theme. In this case, she carried a “Mini Bar” clutch by Charlotte Olympia.Hugues Laurent for The New York TimesAt the Ritz, Ms. Firestone wore rhinestone earrings in the shape of a martini.Hugues Laurent for The New York TimesAt “Winged Victory of Samothrace,” a white marble statue from Hellenistic Greece, better known as “Niké,” for example, Ms. Firestone noted that the figure’s wings had inspired the sportswear empire’s Swoosh logo.Ms. Firestone’s clients used to find her only by word of mouth, but now about half of them, including Mr. Stanley, come to her via the Bravo show and Instagram. The majority are visiting France from the United States; the cost of a tour starts at $2,400 for one or two people for one day.Her angle is to take “art off the wall to show its intersection with things that people already enjoy and consume,” Ms. Firestone said, be it champagne or Schiaparelli or N.F.T.s. Recent and upcoming tours have been designed for drag queens, the crypto team at a venture capital firm, “Eloise-like” little girls with a fondness for dinosaurs, and a man who is blind.The female statue is a Roman copy of a Greek statue of a maenad, at the Louvre.Hugues Laurent for The New York TimesWorking her way through Dionysian art and decorative works, Louis XIV’s stemware, and the occasional Bravo fan (“I just want to say that I loved the show!”), Ms. Firestone directed Mr. Stanley and Ms. Bes into the museum’s largest room, where the Mona Lisa hangs on a wall across from “The Wedding Feast at Cana,” an immense piece by the 16th-century artist Paolo Veronese that depicts Jesus Christ turning water into wine. “You can see wine tastings happening all over the painting,” she said.After lunch at the Ritz, which naturally featured cocktails and champagne, the itinerary called for the Musée d’Orsay. “The Louvre was a former palace, this is a former train station,” Ms. Firestone said. She likes companion visits to the two museums, which, she said, help to show how art entered modernity by breaking from the monarchy, the church and the academy and spilling into the cafes of Paris.“L’Absinthe” by Edgar Degas pictured what she called a “tapped out” woman with a glass of the infamous green spirit on a table before her. Nearby was a painting by Édouard Manet of the same woman (the actress Ellen Andrée), titled “Plum Brandy.” Ms. Firestone prompted her clients to ponder the difference. “She’s not nearly so sad or so schnockered here, right? She seems OK.”The tour naturally included Louis XIV’s stemware at the Louvre.Hugues Laurent for The New York TimesParis, she said, had by then been transformed by Napoleon III’s urban planner Georges-Eugène Haussmann, bringing with it grand department stores like Le Bon Marché and Samaritaine.Ms. Firestone and Mr. Stanley met the next day at Samaritaine, where she had arranged for a cognac tasting and some shopping in the private apartments with a stylist. “Bonjour. How y’all doin’?” Mr. Stanley said, greeting the staff. “I’m not an aristocrat — I’m just a cowboy!” He chose a pair of drawstring trousers by Maison Margiela.Afterward, in a taxi, Ms. Firestone pointed at a Prada ad featuring Scarlett Johansson. “I think they’re referencing that Man Ray photo of Kiki de Montparnasse,” she said. “We like a good art-brand ref.” She Googled the Man Ray photograph on her phone and held it up for Mr. Stanley to see, who said he felt like he had gotten a master class.“Who doesn’t love their hand held in Paris?” Ms. Firestone said. More

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      in Music

      How the Head of the Universal Hip Hop Museum Spends His Sundays

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      For Rocky Bucano, who fell for the music after buying a Salt-N-Pepa CD in 1986, his work in the Bronx “doesn’t feel like work.”The Universal Hip Hop Museum, which will be part of Bronx Point, a new mixed-use development with affordable housing in the South Bronx, is not scheduled to open until 2025. But that hasn’t stopped Rocky Bucano, the museum’s executive director, from celebrating hip-hop’s 50th anniversary this year.“[R]Evolution of Hip Hop,” an exhibition tracing the genre’s momentum from 1986 to 1990, will offer free admission this August in honor of the anniversary. The show is running through September at the nonprofit’s temporary headquarters in the Bronx Terminal Market.Mr. Bucano, 63, lives in the Clason Point section of the Bronx with his wife, Kim, 62, who recently retired as a public-school teacher, and the younger of their two sons, Kylerr, 31. Rounding out the household are Tangy, the family’s Bichon Frisé mix, and Toby, a former stray cat.6 IN THE MORNIN’ I get up around 6 or 7 a.m. and open up my Microsoft Surface Duo 2. I scroll through emails and read the Sunday edition of The Times. I do this in bed very quietly. I’m trying not to wake my wife up.THE MESSAGE Around 8 or 10 o’clock, we normally order pancakes and scrambled eggs and maybe some corned beef hash from the Crosstown Diner. We have our breakfast watching the Sunday news. I like the political talk shows, like “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.” My wife watches Channel 12, which has news on the Bronx, religiously. After that, we try to get our spiritual vibe on by watching Joel Osteen.IN DA CLUB The exhibit at the Bronx Terminal Market opens at 1 p.m. My son Kylerr and I usually jump in the car and shoot over there. He oversees social media for the museum and is a docent. Most of the time, I’m there all afternoon. I’m meeting with people — our visitors, our guests. Sometimes I’m working with the people who work at the museum, making sure everything is tight in terms of telling the stories of the different artifacts people are looking at. Sometimes I’ll jump on the turntables if I feel like playing music.Mr. Bucano and his son Kylerr, a docent for the museum who also oversees its social media.David Dee Delgado for The New York TimesSUPA DUPA FLY On Sundays we have a visiting D.J., Cutman LG. He’s part of our team and he’s always playing great music: James Brown and a lot of classic hip-hop like Run-DMC, LL Cool J, Salt-N-Pepa. When people come in, not only do they see objects about the great golden era of hip-hop, they actually feel it and experience what the music was like.PEOPLE EVERYDAY Being here on a Sunday is work, but it doesn’t feel like work. I’ve been a part of this project from the beginning, since we first started looking for locations in 2014. It’s part of my DNA now. It’s who I am. And I enjoy meeting people from different parts of the country and different parts of the world and learning what their connection to hip-hop is. Each person has a unique story about how they fell in love with it. Sometimes it’s the first record they bought, sometimes it’s a Run-DMC concert they went to in 1986. I remember when I bought my first Salt-N-Pepa CD. That’s what got me involved in loving the music.ROCK BOX People from Europe come over here because they’re true fans of classic hip-hop and they want to relive the earliest years. On weekdays, we have teachers bringing their students. Kids come in, and many have never seen a cassette player or a vinyl. They don’t know what a boom box is. We have a huge boom box, and when they see it they’re like, “What is that? Why do they call it a boom box?” So it’s just a lot of feel-good moments for me. I see people smiling and doing their selfies.Walking through the museum’s current exhibition, “[R]Evolution of Hip Hop,” an exhibition tracing the genre’s momentum from 1986 to 1990.David Dee Delgado for The New York TimesIT’S TRICKY When I began this journey, I wasn’t really astute in what’s called “the museum experience.” I’ve been learning on the job. The first exhibit was bare-bones. The second one we fine-tuned, made it a better experience in terms of how it was curated. And now, with this third exhibit, I think we’ve knocked it out of the park. It’s the most immersive, the most entertaining, the most informative. I would say the number one thing people like right now is the Dapper Dan Lounge, where we have a couple of his original jackets, or the D.J. booth.PUSH IT! When I get home, I might go to the gym in our community’s clubhouse and lift some weights, or sometimes I’ll walk down to the water. One of the ferry stops is not too far from where we live, so I’ll go down there and stand by the water and enjoy the sights. It’s a way of putting everything in perspective for me.RAPPER’S DELIGHT For dinner on Sundays we like to order turkey wings from a soul food restaurant. We’ll also get collard greens, and for my son, mac and cheese. I can’t eat that stuff, but I love sweet potatoes. After dinner I’m normally on my computer, emailing, sending notes to my team, looking out for anything on social media I should be paying attention to. People say I work too much.“After dinner I’m normally on my computer, emailing, sending notes to my team, looking out for anything on social media I should be paying attention to,” Mr. Bucano said.David Dee Delgado for The New York TimesIT WAS A GOOD DAY I might watch some film on Netflix or Amazon Prime, but I go to bed early. My wife comes to bed late because she’s retired. But at 10 o’clock I say, “I’ll see you later, I’m going to sleep.” And that’s it.Sunday Routine readers can follow Rocky Bucano on Twitter @RBucano and on Instagram @rockybucano. More

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      in Movies

      ‘White Balls on Walls’ Review: Time With the Gatekeepers

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      The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam becomes a somewhat flimsy case study for fine-art diversity and inclusion conversations in this documentary.From its tub-like exterior to its gallery walls and vast conference room, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam is awash in white. But the Dutch documentary “White Balls on Walls” concerns a different whiteness (and maleness) endemic in one of the Netherland’s cultural institutions. The movie’s cheeky title comes from a protest that the arts-activist collective the Guerrilla Girls (or an offshoot) staged outside the museum in 1995.The filmmaker Sarah Vos began following the museum’s director, Rein Wolfs, and his staff in 2019 as they set out to address diversity and inclusion. The museum’s slogan, “Meet the icons of modern art,” had been met with scrutiny of the who-decides-what-is-iconic variety. Vos tracks those efforts through the height of the pandemic and the social justice demands wrought by the killing of George Floyd. There will be some awkward social distancing and a doubling down on Wolfs’s sense that the museum must include a richer array of artists, welcome a more diverse demographic and, while it’s at it, hire more people of color.With access to behind-the-scenes processes, the documentary can be instructive about the work of changing legacy institutions, but also wincingly cautionary as Wolfs, his administrators and curators get tangled up in numbers and nomenclature. (“‘Gender balance,’ that sounds nicely diverse,” a woman says in an early meeting.) Their internal conversations — about colonialism, gender and Dutch identity — become more nuanced when people of color arrive. Charl Landvreugd, the museum’s head of research and curatorial practice, and the curators Vincent van Velsen and Yvette Mutumba, offer that nuance and give context to the museum’s quandaries. But even they don’t always pierce the hermetically sealed feel of the documentary.White Balls on WallsNot rated. In English and Dutch, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes. In theaters. More

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      in Music

      36 Hours in Nashville: Things to Do and See

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      1 p.m.
      Stroll the strip, then kick off your shoes
      Roughly a mile south of downtown is the 12South neighborhood, which includes a walkable corridor of shops, restaurants and cafes; it’s an easy excursion to grab a quick gift, a latte or lunch. Plunder the vintage goods at Savant, at the north end of the strip, and then swing by Draper James — the actor Reese Witherspoon’s brick-and-mortar salute to all that is Southern and genteel — which sells clothes, home goods and Ms. Witherspoon’s book club picks. For lunch, grab a few of Bartaco’s light-yet-satisfying roasted-cauliflower tacos ($3.25 each). At the corridor’s south end, White’s Mercantile sells everything from books to organic dog treats to candlewick trimmers. Finally, Sevier Park, next door, is where you can kick off your shoes and lie on the grass, but be wary of cold noses: This park is dog-friendly. More

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      in Music

      36 Hours in Rio de Janeiro: Things to Do and See

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      1 p.m.
      Lunch, then more samba
      There are two excellent lunch options on Rua do Senado, both from the same owner, that offer very different experiences. On the high end is Lilia, a suave two-floor lunch spot with a changing prix-fixe menu that is eclectic and focused on fresh ingredients (lunch for two, about 300 reais). If you prefer snacks at streetside tables, head a few doors down to Labuta Bar for torresmo (fried pork belly), croquettes, oysters and sandwiches, washed down with house-made iced mate or a cold beer (lunch for two, about 90 reais). A few steps away, catch live samba at one of the city’s oldest bars, Armazém Senado, founded in 1907. The business, which was once a market, still has its high shelves stocked with toilet paper and bleach — along with plenty of bottles of cachaça. More

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      in Music

      V&A Museum To Open David Bowie Archive

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      The London museum will house more than 80,000 items from the star’s music career at a new David Bowie Center for the Study of Performing Arts. It will open in 2025.Over a 55-year career, David Bowie redefined the essence of cool by embracing an outsider status. Now, Ziggy Stardust and all of the musician’s other personas will have a permanent home.The Victoria and Albert Museum in London will house more than 80,000 items from Bowie’s career at a new David Bowie Center for the Study of Performing Arts, the museum announced on Thursday. The center, which will be at a new outpost of the museum called the V&A East Storehouse at Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in the Stratford section of London, will open in 2025.“With David’s life’s work becoming part of the U.K.’s national collections, he takes his rightful place amongst many other cultural icons and artistic geniuses,” Bowie’s estate said in a statement. “David’s work can be shared with the public in ways that haven’t been possible before, and we’re so pleased to be working closely with the V&A to continue to commemorate David’s enduring cultural influence.”Bowie died in 2016, two days after his 69th birthday.In a statement, the museum said that the acquisition and the creation of the center had been made possible by a combined donation of 10 million pounds (about $12 million) from the Blavatnik Family Foundation and Warner Music Group, adding that the donation would support “the ongoing conservation, research and study of the archive.” Warner Music bought Bowie’s entire songwriting catalog last year.Beyond 70,000 images of Bowie taken by the likes of Terry O’Neill, Brian Duffy and Helmut Newton, the collection includes letters, sheet music, original costumes, fashion, other photography, film, music videos, set designs, instruments, album artwork, awards, and of course, fashion.Many of those will be familiar to fans: Bowie’s ensembles worn as his alter ego, Ziggy Stardust; Kansai Yamamoto’s costumes for the “Aladdin Sane” tour in 1973; the Union Jack coat designed by Bowie and the British designer Alexander McQueen for the 1997 “Earthling” album cover.Handwritten lyrics for songs like “Fame,” Heroes” and “Ashes to Ashes” will also be on display, including examples of Bowie’s cut-up technique. The artist looked to William S. Burroughs, the postmodern author, as inspiration to cut up written text and rearrange it into lyrics.Cut-up lyrics for “Blackout” from “Heroes,” recorded in 1977 by David Bowie.The David Bowie ArchiveIn 1997, Bowie told The Times that he worked with that method “about 40 percent of the time,” which, in that year, meant using a Macintosh computer.“I feed into it the fodder, and it spews out reams of paper with these arbitrary combinations of words and phrases,” he said.Bowie’s personal writing and “intimate notebooks from every year of Bowie’s life and career” and “unrealized projects” will also be on display, many of which have never been made available to the public, the museum said.The permanent collection comes 10 years after the museum created “David Bowie Is,” a vast survey that traced the beginnings of David Jones, a saxophone and blues player growing up in London, as he became David Bowie, a transcendent figure in music, art and fashion. The traveling exhibit made its final stop in 2018 in New York, the city Bowie called home at the end of his life.“I believe everyone will agree with me when I say that when I look back at the last 60 years of post-Beatles music, that if only one artist could be in the V&A it should be David Bowie,” Nile Rodgers, a longtime collaborator, said in a statement. “He didn’t just make art. He was art!” More

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      in Movies

      Where Culture Flows Along London’s River Thames

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      The Southbank Center, the host of this year’s British Academy Film Awards, has become a focal point of the city’s arts and culture scene.LONDON — As Lisa Vine looked out over the River Thames from the floor-to-ceiling windows of the Southbank Center’s Royal Festival Hall main foyer, she recalled first coming here as an 11-year-old girl in 1957 to attend a concert.Over the decades, Ms. Vine, a retired teacher and native Londoner, who had stopped in for coffee on the way back from a nearby errand, has seen a lot of change here. She has not only watched the Southbank Center develop — with the Queen Elizabeth Hall opening in 1967 and the Hayward Gallery the next year — she has also seen the area around it grow and change, with the addition of artistic and performance spaces including the National Theater, the British Film Institute, the Tate Modern and Shakespeare’s Globe.“I remember when the river was dull,” she said, looking out at a panorama that includes the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben and St. Paul’s Cathedral. Now, she noted, “there is so much going in terms of concerts and events, but I don’t get out here as often as I should.”That’s the sentiment of Londoners and visitors alike. With so much going on at the Southbank Center, from classical music concerts, dance premieres and D.J. sets to poetry, film and literature festivals, it would be impossible to attend every event. And all of those happenings — at a venue that’s open five nights a week, where about 3,500 annual events take place — have made the Southbank Center one of the focal points of London’s arts and culture scene.Hosting the British Academy Film Awards, commonly known as the BAFTAs, for the first time on Sunday is yet another big moment in the storied history of the space, which has had everyone from Ella Fitzgerald, Frank Sinatra and Jacqueline du Pré to David Bowie, Michelle Obama and Greta Thunberg grace its stages.The Royal Festival Hall, as seen from the Hungerford Bridge. The venue opened in 1951, kicking off the development of what would become the Southbank Center. Bjanka Kadic/Alamy“We’re so thrilled about the central location of the Royal Festival Hall and accessibility of the space, enabling us to program our most ambitious and inclusive night for attendees yet,” Emma Baehr, the BAFTAs’ executive director of awards and content, wrote in an email. (The awards have previously been hosted in various locations, most recently the Royal Albert Hall in Kensington.) “Southbank is the largest arts center in the U.K., home to the London Film Festival and in the heart of London on the River Thames — having staged our television awards there for several years, it felt a natural move for us.”The Royal Festival Hall — which seats 2,700 — was opened in 1951 by King George VI, along with his daughter Princess Elizabeth and her husband, Prince Philip, during the Festival of Britain, which was centered on the south bank of the Thames. The area had been devastated during World War II and its derelict buildings and factories were razed to build a number of temporary structures for the festival.During the next few decades, not only did the Southbank Center develop — both the 900-seat Queen Elizabeth Hall and the Hayward Gallery, which holds contemporary art exhibitions, are fantastic examples of 1960s Brutalist architecture — but the area around it did, too.The British Film Institute, which hosts film festivals and has helped fund a number of films including the BAFTA-nominated movies “Aftersun” and “Triangle of Sadness,” opened its first theater in 1957 under the Waterloo Bridge. And the National Theater, under the direction of Laurence Olivier, opened its doors next to the institute in 1976.Members of the royal family, including Princess Elizabeth, center, opened the Southbank Center’s Royal Festival Hall in 1951 during the Festival of Britain.Associated PressThat festival centered on the redeveloped south bank of the Thames, where the Royal Festival Hall, right, sat alongside a typical British pub.Frank Harrison/Topical Press Agency, via Getty ImagesAbout a mile east is Shakespeare’s Globe, which first opened in 1599 and then burned down in 1613 during a performance of “Henry VIII” (a second theater was later built but was eventually closed by parliamentary decree in 1642). The newest version of the theater opened in 1997 and now houses two stages including the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, where plays and concerts are performed by candlelight. A stone’s throw from the Globe is the Tate Modern, the world-class modern and contemporary art museum housed in a former power station that opened its doors to the public in 2000.“I spend my life in a constant state of FOMO because there is always something happening,” said Stuart Brown, B.F.I.’s head of program and acquisitions, adding that the area is quite magical because of its location by the river and the architecture of the buildings. “You’ve got these incredible world-class artistic offerings to people through music, theater, visual arts, film, and all those experiences can inspire us, move us, make us think about the world differently.”The American jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald, backstage at the Royal Festival Hall circa 1963. Ms. Fitzgerald is among the luminaries who have appeared at the London venue. David Redfern/Redferns/Getty ImagesMusic has always been a highlight of the programming at the Southbank Center and with six resident orchestras — including the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment and the Aurora Orchestra — almost every evening there is some kind of concert.“Music is absolutely central to everything we do,” said Elaine Bedell, the chief executive of the Southbank Center. However, she added that classical music audiences globally had not returned to full pre-Covid strength and that that was something she and her colleagues wanted to address. “We have a very dynamic new head of classical music, Toks Dada, who has a very clear strategy and has very ambitious plans for bringing new audiences to classical music.”The Purcell Sessions have been part of that overall strategy to bring in younger audiences to various genres, including classical music. Housed in the same building as the Queen Elizabeth Hall, the Purcell Room is an intimate stage with just 295 seats. The series based there is a chance for up-and-coming musicians, some of whom work across different art forms, to showcase their talents. “It has always had this legacy of experimentation,” Ms. Bedell said. “The idea is, it’s a real space for collaboration, innovation and invention.”The Purcell Room, of course, is not the only space for collaboration and experimentation. For 40 years the Southbank Center has had an “open foyer” policy in the building that houses the Royal Festival Hall, which connects to the other Southbank buildings through a series of outdoor concrete walkways. Like the year-round free exhibitions, and the concerts outside during the summer Meltdown festival, the foyer is open to the public seven days a week as a civic space. Weekly music jams, dance groups and language clubs meet up there to practice.“That sense of openness and inclusiveness is the unique thing about the Southbank Center,” Ms. Bedell said, adding that there are cafes and restaurants scattered across the cultural campus that help add to the center’s revenue. “I like the idea that people kind of feel their way to use the space.”Over the years, the various cultural institutions along the river’s south bank have cross-pollinated on projects. For a number of years, the British Film Institute has used the Royal Festival Hall for premiere screenings during the London Film Festival. Last year during the Hayward Gallery’s exhibition “In the Black Fantastic,” which focused on Afrofuturism, the institute hosted a talk with Ekow Eshun, the show’s curator.“We have a warm and collaborative relationship with other organizations on the south bank, meeting regularly as leaders to learn from each other and share best practice,” Kate Varah, the executive director of the National Theater, wrote in an email. “We’re all asking similar questions as we navigate through the permacrisis, and it’s more important than ever that we share our experiences and have a forum for collective ideas.”During the lying-in-state of Queen Elizabeth in September, a number of the spaces worked together to entertain — through poignant music and archival film of the royal family — the thousands of mourners who stood in the queue that snaked past the cultural institutions before heading across the river to Westminster Hall.The interaction between the venues is just one of the reasons fans of the area like Ms. Vine say they love it so much.“It is a wonderful place, one of my favorites in London,” she said. More

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      in Television

      Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Tries Reality TV to Find ‘the Next Great Artist’

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      Seven artists compete for an exhibition at the museum in a series it produced with MTV and the Smithsonian Channel.“One of you will show your work at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and will take home $100,000.”At least that’s the promise made by Dometi Pongo, the host of a new reality television series, “The Exhibit: Finding the Next Great Artist,” about the making of an art star. The first season is six episodes, produced by the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn together with MTV and the Smithsonian Channel.The program, which starts March 3, focuses on seven rising artists from around the country who were selected by Hirshhorn curators. Each week, the artists are commissioned to make a themed work — such as an exploration of gender — that is evaluated by Melissa Chiu, the Hirshhorn’s director, and a team of guest judges (the artists Adam Pendleton, Kenny Schachter and Abigail DeVille are among them).“This TV partnership was really about an expansive idea of art — radical accessibility,” Chiu said in a telephone interview, adding that the show will be “bringing new light to artists and artwork.”The show’s host, Dometi Pongo, left, with three of its judges: Melissa Chiu, director of the Hirshhorn; Kenny Schachter, an artist and writer; and Keith Rivers, a Hirshhorn trustee and collector.via Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Photo by Shannon FinneyThe artist Jennifer Warren inside Barbara Kruger’s “Belief + Doubt” (2012) at the Hirshhorn Museum during filming.via Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; Photo by Shannon FinneyWhether audiences find the making of art compelling television remains to be seen. Chiu said she hopes the show will help “demystify what it means to be an artist.”The artists are Jamaal Barber, Misha Kahn, Frank Buffalo Hyde, Baseera Khan, Clare Kambhu, Jillian Mayer and Jennifer Warren.The weekly series will feature artwork from the museum’s collection, including pieces by Harold Ancart and Jacqueline Humphries and an exhibit by Barbara Kruger. Chiu said the program was part of the museum’s mission to serve as “the national museum of modern art” and builds on its recent initiatives, including the revitalization of its Sculpture Garden with a design by Hiroshi Sugimoto that connects to the National Mall.Recently, the museum also appointed the Colombian pop star J Balvin as a global cultural ambassador to work with teens in its Artlab education center. And the museum recently created the Hirshhorn Eye (Hi), which allows visitors to point their phones at a work of art and see a video of the artist talking about it.Having the TV series broadcast on both MTV and the Smithsonian Channel (there are no plans to stream it) will allow the Hirshhorn to reach both “a younger demographic as well as a more mature demographic,” Chiu said, adding that she hoped the program would reveal more about “what the museum does, but also the artistic process.” More