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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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      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

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      in Music

      Institutionalized

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      Fat Mike likes to be on time — to “put the punk in punctual,” as he says. So he was mildly distressed to be a few minutes late meeting me at the new Punk Rock Museum in Las Vegas, of which he is a founder and the public face. I had pleasantly cooled my heels at the museum’s bar, the Triple Down. At the Triple Down, you can order a Fletcher, a double rum and Coke served in an emptied Pringles can, named for Fletcher Dragge, guitarist for the band Pennywise and a member of the museum’s governing “Punk Collective.” (You get the chips on the side.) Or you might choose a Double Fatty, honoring Fat Mike himself: a double shot of Tito’s vodka, served with lime-flavored Liquid Death sparkling water and also a shot of Jameson. Fat Mike, as he told me within five minutes of his arrival, was a first-round investor in Liquid Death.Listen to This ArticleOpen this article in the New York Times Audio app on iOS.Fat Mike, né Mike Burkett, is, among other things, the frontman and bassist for the band NOFX. He was wearing a black T-shirt and blue plaid shorts that reached almost to the tops of his black socks. At 56, Fat Mike has thick white hair and sideburns, except where they’ve been dyed the blue of plastic sharks or cotton candy. He wore a padlock on a chain around his neck. He looked like what network executives may have imagined punks looked like when they were a staple category of bad guy on 1980s cop shows, the punk of a Spirit Halloween “punk” costume. To be fair, he had a hand in shaping that image. NOFX formed in Southern California in 1983, long before punk was a viable career path or, by their own admission, the band’s members knew how to play their instruments. By the mid-1990s, they had migrated to the Bay Area and improved enough to be part of a wave of groups — most famously Green Day, the Offspring and Blink-182 — that found improbable fame and commercial success. The pop-punk sound of the ensuing era remains so pervasive that, listening to an episode of Slate’s “Hit Parade” podcast about it, I could not quite tell where the Fall Out Boy ended and a bank commercial began.At the Triple Down, the bartender had a shot of vodka already poured. Fat Mike drank it and began what appeared to be a familiar ritual of haggling over whether the bartender wanted his tip in cash or in ownership shares in the museum. Fat Mike has $3 million in shares, he told me later, and he is giving a portion of them out to museum employees — “At least the good ones.” “If you believe in the museum and think we’re going to kill it — which we are — maybe you take the shares,” Fat Mike said. “I don’t really understand the shares thing, Mike,” the bartender said, shaking his head. “I’ve never worked in a museum before.” He poured another shot. Fat Mike downed it, pulled a roll of cash from his pocket and plunked down a $100 bill. At the Triple Down bar, double rum and Cokes are served in emptied Pringles cans, with the chips on the side.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesAbout three years ago, Fat Mike came to Vegas with the idea of opening a punk rock store. He asked for help from Lisa Brownlee, a longtime veteran of the Warped Tour, the skate- and pop-punk juggernaut; she suggested filling the store with punk memorabilia. From there, it was a small step to a museum. The Punk Rock Museum opened on April Fools’ Day, in a 12,000-square-foot onetime antiques market decidedly off the Strip. Its closest neighbor is an enormous pink gentlemen’s club that advertises “1000’s of Beautiful Girls and 3 Ugly Ones.” All around the country, there are institutions devoted to commemorating and celebrating what was once fringe, rebellious or underground. Rock has its hall of fame and museum in Cleveland; hip-hop’s long-gestating counterpart is supposedly nearing an opening date in Harlem. The pipeline from pop-culture transgression to academic enshrinement has been wide open at least since the 1990s, when Madonna studies made news. If the Who survived “hope I die before I get old” to become elder statesmen, you might think the matter of how binding such promises are would be settled. Still, punk, born specifically in reaction to rock’s decadent self-regard, presents a uniquely hard case. There is something self-evidently absurd about an institution devoted to a movement which, to the extent that anybody can agree on a definition, is specifically about resisting institutions. Nostalgia, hierarchy, hero worship, the establishment of a canon, the separation between audience and artist — all of these are both the natural tendencies of museums and the things that punk was invented to smash. A few years ago, some aging members of a long-running utopian punk scene in Pensacola, Fla., set out to preserve the house in which the scene had flourished by establishing something called the 309 Punk Museum. That last word caused such consternation that it was dropped, in favor of “project.”To Fat Mike, this resistance looks like a hole in the market. “There’s no Billboard chart for punk, although there’s one for bluegrass,” he says. “There’s no Grammy for punks. There’s no award show anywhere for punk. We needed a place where any punk rocker can go and celebrate our heritage.” Fat Mike leading a special midnight tour group in October during the When We Were Young festival.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesAn exhibit of paraphernalia from the horror-punk band the Misfits, including a bass broken by Jerry Only. (He breaks a lot of basses.)Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesThere is a culturewide urge to catalog, commemorate and nostalgify punk as it enters its fifth decade. Museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian and the Victoria and Albert have hosted punk-related exhibitions. Universities across the country offer courses with titles like “Punk Culture: The Aesthetics and Politics of Refusal.” The nonprofit label Trust Records, founded by the longtime music publisher Matt Pincus and the band merchandiser Joe Nelson, has been rereleasing classic out-of-print records — starting with Circle Jerks’ “Group Sex” — digitally and in deluxe vinyl editions. Pincus believes that punk’s D.I.Y. ethic has made it a folk tradition as fragile and vulnerable to disappearing as, say, early-20th-century blues once was. Fliers get pulped; storage units filled with self-released E.P.s get liquidated; parents die with their children’s hardcore masters moldering in their attics; independent labels disappear. What you might call the dissenting view was offered in 2016 by Joe Corré, son of the Sex Pistols’ manager, Malcolm McLaren, and the fashion designer Vivienne Westwood: He loaded his personal collection of memorabilia — worth, he said, five million pounds — into a boat on the Thames and set it aflame. It was, he said, a protest against Punk London, an officially sanctioned series of exhibitions and events commemorating the 40 years of British punk. To Corré, this was an unacceptable act of appropriation. “Do not tolerate hypocrisy,” he told the assembled crowd. “Investigate the truth for yourself.” One truth is that Punk London added Corré’s event to its own official website as soon as it was announced. Agatha Slagatha, an employee of the Punk Rock Museum, assisting a customer in the museum’s gift shop.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesThe museum’s artifacts, like these customized jackets, are generally allowed to speak for themselves, without much text or explanation.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesAt the Punk Rock Museum, you both enter and exit through the gift shop, where you can buy T-shirts, patches, shot glasses, coffee table books and padlocks. Passing through on our way to tour the collection, Fat Mike and I ran into a father and son visiting from Ohio. The man was wearing a Descendents T-shirt, the teenager a NOFX one; Mom was in the tattoo parlor upstairs, getting her leg inked with an image of a Doc Marten and an anarchy symbol. “I’m famous,” Fat Mike blurted out. They did not need to be told. This was like spotting Mickey Mouse at Disney World. Like many things in Las Vegas, the elements of the Punk Rock Museum that are vulgar, cynical and/or tasteless are fairly easy to spot. So let me say quickly that a lot of the museum is also very cool. It is, to a large extent, a photography museum — filled with beautifully reproduced images from chroniclers of the scene both famous and obscure. One room is a recreation of a wood-paneled suburban basement, iconic breeding ground for frustrated middle-class punk energy; another contains Pennywise’s carpet-and-graffiti-covered rehearsal studio, airlifted wholesale from Hermosa Beach, Calif. There’s also the Jam Room, where you can actually play instruments like Joan Jett’s guitar and Fat Mike’s bass in a soundproof space like something at Guitar Center. One challenge to any project like the museum is how many different things punk has come to mean to different people. “Punk has many houses,” Vivien Goldman, an adjunct professor of punk and reggae at N.Y.U., told me, ticking off a few of them: the political, the artistic, the bacchanalian. Of course, some houses have more pee in them than others. It is hard to overstate the role of urine in “NOFX: The Hepatitis Bathtub and Other Stories,” a group memoir by the band, which is light on situationist theory and heavy on bodily fluids being expelled onto, or into, whatever happens to be nearby, including cats, vans, silverware drawers, ice trays and strangers passed out on the floor. Fat Mike has brought this preoccupation with him to the Punk Rock Museum. The reconstruction of Pennywise’s garage, he told me, was made all the more exact by Fletcher Dragge relieving himself on the floor, a kind of benediction before the museum opened its doors. The top tier of patronage during pre-opening fund-raising was a $25,000 package of perks that included having your name on a plaque over one of the museum’s urinals or toilet stalls. Fat Mike performing with Sum 41 in Pennywise’s rehearsal studio, which was relocated to the museum.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesThe museum is not big on written text or other forms of contextualization, content instead to let its cases filled with artifacts and memorabilia speak for themselves. Many of these are of a morbid cast, relics in the saintly sense. Fat Mike pointed out “Joe Strummer’s last bag of weed,” a stash supposedly found with the co-founder of the Clash when he died, and the key to the New Orleans hotel room where Johnny Thunders was found dead under mysterious circumstances in 1991. He showed me a black leather couch that once sat in Razor’s Edge Recording, a studio in San Francisco, beneath a photo of Kurt Cobain lying on it unconscious. Fat Mike sat on the couch and posed for a photo, slumped in the same position.A foyer outside the bathrooms attempts a partial answer to the question of why a punk rock museum should be located in Las Vegas, which has never had a punk scene of any significant repute. The walls are covered in fliers from a brief period of exception, when a scene sprung up around shows played at a water-retention basin off a desert highway called Losee Road. Generally, though, the museum is upfront about the fact that it is in Las Vegas because it’s a place millions of people visit every year. It also makes sense because the Punk Rock Museum’s definition of museum falls somewhere on the spectrum occupied by neighbors like the Mob Museum, the Neon Museum and the Harry Mohney Erotic Heritage Museum (current home of the 1990s sensation “Puppetry of the Penis”). A consultant from the Smithsonian visited before opening, Fat Mike told me, but his ideas for multimedia displays and other pedagogical this and that didn’t make the cut. Fat Mike’s record label, Fat Wreck Chords, is one example of a capitalist streak that might cause consternation for punk purists. “Just because something is capitalist doesn’t mean it’s bad,” he says.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesInevitably, the museum is heavy on varieties of white, male, very often shirtless aggression. But care has been taken to be inclusive, and Fat Mike took care to point this out. The first gallery you encounter contains 10 portraits of canonical punk acts. Fat Mike told me that it is one of the rooms he insisted on curating himself, and he directed my attention to portraits of Alice Bag, the Latina lead singer of the seminal Los Angeles punk band the Bags; Poly Styrene, the mixed-race frontwoman of X-Ray Spex; and Laura Jane Grace, the transgender singer of the band Against Me! That month, there was a temporary exhibit devoted to the photographer Angela Boatwright’s work chronicling the largely Latino backyard punk scene that flourished in East and South Central Los Angeles in the 2010s; it was followed, in October, by one titled “Black Punk Now.” There is also an exhibit case simply marked “Diverse,” which highlights queer bands like Pansy Division and Toilet Böys. For all that, it’s the pop, skate and emo punk of NOFX’s generation that predominates. This is a function of Fat Mike’s sensibility (there are few scholars who would grant Pennywise such a central place in the music’s history) but also of which artists have chosen to contribute and which have declined. As Fat Mike will be the first to tell you, not everybody in the punk community loves him. Fairly or not, NOFX and its Warped Tour compatriots are easily written off as empty-headed, obnoxious, adolescent bros. Fat Mike’s capitalist streak rubs many purists the wrong way. Among other ventures, he has created the label Fat Wreck Chords, the punk rock/craft beer festival Punk in Drublic and a line of panties for men. The zine writer Aaron Cometbus once wrote that he was “Trump in a mohawk.” And Fat Mike is consistently, gleefully offensive in a way that suggests both a compulsion and a sense of professional obligation. The wedding chapel at the Punk Rock Museum is decorated with photos of Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. One of the few disagreements he has had with the rest of the museum’s management, he told me in all seeming earnestness, was over his idea of playing “Yakety Sax” whenever the wheelchair lift to the second floor made its ascent.The newlyweds Nadia Pérez and Pablo Cabutti kissing in the museum’s wedding chapel, which is decorated with pictures of one of punk’s most famous couples, Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesStill, Fat Mike believes his reputation is unfair. “It destroys me,” he says. NOFX, he pointed out, remains the one band of its cohort to never sign to a major label. In a world of independent labels with lofty rhetoric and a bad habit of not paying their musicians, Fat Wreck Chords has an honorable reputation. In the early 2000s, Fat Mike spearheaded Rock Against Bush — two compilations and a tour — which he says raised over $1 million to campaign against George W. Bush, and PunkVoter.com, which he says registered over 200,000 young voters. He identifies as queer and has spoken emotionally about the difficulty of coming out publicly as a cross-dresser and a devotee of B.D.S.M., but he says the L.G.B.T.Q. community has failed to embrace him.“I’m always just the California bro,” he lamented. Ultimately, Fat Mike says he knows why he’s not better liked: “Why do people hate Tom Brady? Why do people hate the Dallas Cowboys? Why do they hate Machine Gun Kelly? Because they hate success. And they hate when that successful person is stoked. I do what the [expletive] I want. I don’t follow society’s rules, and people hate that: How come he gets to do everything he wants to?” he says, before answering the question himself, not inaccurately. “Because I’m punk.”While you can explore the Punk Rock Museum by yourself, one of its unique selling points is that, for an extra fee, you can get a tour given by a punk celebrity. Among the musicians who have given tours are members of the Germs, Circle Jerks, Fishbone and Suicidal Tendencies, as well as Fat Mike himself, who pointed out that the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame “doesn’t have B.B. King giving tours.” (King died in 2015.) The day after my visit with Fat Mike, I returned and ran into Marko DeSantis waiting for his afternoon tour group in the gift shop. DeSantis was the lead guitarist for a Santa Barbara band named Sugarcult, which had a couple of pop-punk hits in the 2000s. The museum had flown him in and put him up at a hotel for a three-day stint giving two tours a day. He received a cheat sheet of highlights to make sure to hit but otherwise was free to tell his own story. That afternoon, his tour turned out to be a group of one: a 42-year-old in the LED industry named Tristan who lives in Los Angeles and had been excitedly following the museum’s opening since it was announced. Tristan had blown off the day at a lighting convention to attend because, as it happens, he is a huge fan of Sugarcult.“Dude, I am very excited!” he told DeSantis. “So, am I!” DeSantis said. They beamed at each other and repaired to the Triple Down for a quick beer before beginning. Their joy trailed after me as I drifted through the museum alone. Goldman, the professor of punk, had given me an assignment of what to look for: “Let’s be real, I’d want to know if there’s anything political, really,” she said. There wasn’t much that explicitly qualified, unless you counted the simple weight of the compounded evidence: generation after generation of youth and energy and creativity and community. Which, to be honest, I was more and more inclined to do. Watching a video of Indonesian teenagers whirling and clashing in an enormous mosh pit, I found myself a little choked up. The museum’s recreation of a suburban basement, the iconic wellspring of middle-class punk energy.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York TimesJeff Gross, who came from Miami to attend the When We Were Young punk music festival, was eager to visit the museum, where he got a tattoo of the Blink-182 logo.Jamie Lee Taete for The New York Times“It looks like they get it,” came a heavy English accent behind me. I turned to see Morat, the museum’s mononymous, tattoo-covered, maroon-mohawked talent coordinator. Morat runs the visiting-tour-guide program, a battlefield promotion he received after working in the gift shop for a few weeks. He told me that he heard the Sex Pistols’ “Did You No Wrong” in a London schoolyard, not long after it came out in 1977, and thought, “Right, that’s my life, messed up.” He formed a band, Soldiers of Destruction, but they were too busy being soldiers of destruction to get around to recording their own album until 2021. He has stayed in the scene ever since.“This is not just about fun,” he said. “It’s about staying alive.” As far as the museum was concerned, there were some exhibits and some featured bands that he could do without, but that was life. Morat has little time for arguments about what punk is and isn’t. “That’s the thing. Nobody knows,” he said. “I’ve been at it since 1977, and I don’t know.” He looked around, as if to be sure we were alone, then leaned in. “I mean, it was all just made up to begin with.”Brett Martin is a writer in New Orleans and the author of “Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution.” Jamie Lee Taete is a British photographer who is currently based in Los Angeles. His work mainly focuses on reality and perceived realities in the United States. More

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      36 Hours in Acadiana, Louisiana: Things to Do and See

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      10:30 a.m.
      Time travel to a historic village
      When the British forcibly removed the Acadians from parts of Canada in the mid-18th century, an event known as Le Grand Dérangement, the French-speaking Acadians started making their way down the Mississippi River, creating settlements in South Louisiana. Vermilionville was the name given to Lafayette when it was established in the 1820s as one of those settlements. Today, Vermilionville, a 23-acre, open-air living history museum along the banks of the Vermilion River, tells the story of that migration and how the Acadians’ mingling with Creole, Spanish and Native American traditions created the unique culture of today’s Acadiana. Visitors can embark on a guided boat tour of the grounds, be entertained by costumed actors and historical reenactments, or join Cajun dance lessons and jams. The on-site restaurant, La Cuisine de Maman, also hosts an all-you-can-eat Sunday brunch. Adult admission, $10; handicap-accessible. More

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      Es Devlin Imagines Worlds That Don’t Exist

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      Es Devlin is a British designer of memories and psychologies, ideas and dreams. She has created environments for operas, dance works and plays (her scenic design for “The Lehman Trilogy” won the Tony); designed concert tours for Beyoncé, U2, Kanye West, Adele and Miley Cyrus; worked on the opening ceremony of the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games and the closing ceremony of the London Olympic Games; imagined fashion shows for Louis Vuitton; and invented huge installations, centered around endangered species and endangered languages.Her cross-disciplinary work is category-defying, and so is her new monograph, “An Atlas of Es Devlin” (Thames & Hudson) — an exquisitely produced and immersive artwork in itself, containing photographs, texts, foldouts, pullouts, translucent overlays and cutout pages that reflect the intricacy and imaginative extent of Devlin’s processes, from concept to final iteration.Pop concerts, like Beyoncé’s 2016 Formation World Tour, are about achieving the intimacy of television “on a gladiatorial, sports arena scale,” said Es Devlin, the tour’s stage designer.Kevin Mazur/WireImage, via Getty ImagesAn example of Es Devlin’s scenic design, using the box motif, was “The Lehman Trilogy,” shown here at the National Theater in London in 2018.via Es Devlin StudioAn exhibition of the same name, based on “An Atlas,” opens at the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum on Saturday, Devlin’s first major solo show in the United States. “In many aspects, it’s a three-dimensional manifestation of the book,” Devlin said in a recent interview at her home in south London, where a long refectory table in front of floor-to-ceiling glass windows was laden with books on climate change, economics and art.“There is no presumption that you know what my work is,” Devlin, 52, said, describing the exhibition, which will begin in a replica of her studio before a wall opens to reveal a series of apertures, inscribed with the names of everyone she has worked with.Devlin has “reinvented the wheel in every field she has been part of, whether theater, poetry, sculpture, climate or installation,” the art historian Katy Hessel said. She added, “I would define her as a visionary.”Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, said that Devlin’s gift is not just to unite “so many different talents, of design, architecture, writing, drawing, but that she has created an art form of collaboration. She creates a communal space for the rituals of theater, pop concerts or art.”Over several hours and a vegetable curry, Devlin picked favorite works in the book and the exhibition, speaking with characteristic verve about her past, her partnerships and her passions. “For me,” she said, “there is no hierarchy between the value of the opera ‘Carmen’ and Beyoncé.” Here are edited excerpts from the conversation.1. A series of teenage sketchesA sequence of drawings by Es Devlin, 1989: Studies of a female figure constrained within a box. She later translated the box into theatrical space.Es DevlinThis sequence shows six drawings of a female figure with a box or a cube, made when I was 18 years old, in 1989. I had just started an English literature degree at University of Bristol, and I would have been reading “Beowulf” and living in the library.I was very attracted to figures of speech that conjure unstable and impossible matter, where matter and language won’t sit together. All the great poets live in this place. As I was reading and writing, I became more and more eager to draw. I resisted going to art school because the people going there knew what they wanted to say, and I didn’t. I wanted to learn.In these drawings, a person is constrained within a box that is too small, or is static within the box, or manipulating it. The person holds on to it like an iceberg, uses it like a lookout post or a climbing frame. Of course the box translates into the theatrical space. I have made several works, like “Don Giovanni,” or “The Lehman Trilogy,” using a box as a structure for design. These sketches are a map or atlas of everything I have made since.2. A hand mapEs Devlin, “Redraw the Edges of Yourself,” 2023. After making observational drawings of endangered species in London, she made a poster that shows the porosity between her hand and their form, her knuckle and the edge of a bird wing.Es DevlinLast year, Hans Ulrich Obrist, who has been a real mentor for me, called to ask me to design a poster for a project at the Serpentine called “Back to Earth.” By the next day.At the time, I was working on a project called “Come Home Again,” for which I drew 243 endangered, nonhuman species living in London. I was inspired by the environmental activist Joanna Macy and other writers who speak to the continuity of the biosphere and the self. In other words, if you saw other species and the rest of the world as a continuation of yourself, you wouldn’t harm it.I was drawing insects, fish, plants, mammals, sometimes 18 hours a day, and in a slightly hallucinatory frame of mind. When Hans Ulrich called, I just put my hand on paper, drew around it, took photos of some of the drawings, and plunked them around the outline. When I did that, I felt that continuity between myself and the species I was drawing — between my knuckle and the edge of a bird wing, the veins on my hand and on a leaf. The species are a sort of tattoo composition on the hand. This drawing, which is a D.I.Y. pop-up, is placed inside the book, as a gift.3. A line of lightEs Devlin, “Morning I,” 2009. Photograph of a line of light between curtains.Es DevlinThis is a photograph I took, around 2016, of a line of sunlight coming in through curtains or blinds. Now, every day, when I wake up, I photograph the line of light and spend about 20 quiet minutes meditating on this. In the exhibition there is a voice-over about this, with the image.Lucio Fontana, whose work I saw at the Tate as a teenager, is obviously a huge influence here. The first film I worked on, in 2008, with the composer Nitin Sawhney and the choreographer Dam Van Huynh, was a story about a person entering a line of light; in art you can! I’ve used it in many other pieces — Alastair Marriott’s “Connectome” at the Royal Ballet, “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” “Howie the Rookie” — and I know I’ll continue to do so.4. ‘Miracle Box’Es Devlin, “Miracle Box,” 2016. She built a box covered with projections of her hands trying in various ways to access a light at the heart of the rotating cube. The work was part of a series of revolving box sculptures including Beyoncé’s Formation Tour and “The Lehman Trilogy.”Es DevlinIn 2016, Hans Ulrich Obrist invited me to give a talk at the Serpentine. I thought of myself as a set designer, so I was excited to be welcomed in [the art] world, which can frankly be quite exclusive. I talked about the mechanics of the suspension of disbelief, and while I was talking, I built a box onstage — all very basic, Velcro and tape. But when I finished building it, the lights went off, music came on and the box turned, covered with projections of my hands trying in various ways — cutting through clay, paper and mirrored board — to access a light that appeared to be at the heart of the rotating cube.I have made a version of this in lots of different modes. For Beyoncé’s 2016 Formation Tour, I thought about how the art form of the pop concert is an attempt to achieve the intimacy that television, and now films, give to people, but on a gladiatorial, sports arena scale. When I first talked to Beyoncé, she had written a poem that had the line “an electric current humming through me.” I think what she was expressing in the poem was the sensation that she was a medium for her songs.When I was flying over to meet her, I made some sketches on the plane. I hadn’t heard the “Lemonade” album yet, but knew it was about a relationship and a crisis. I wanted to show something between the poster icon and [King Lear’s] “bare, forked” creature, a small figure, constantly in motion, magnified in the revolving cube.5. ‘Carmen’: The suspension of disbeliefDevlin’s opera set for “Carmen” in Bregenz, Austria, in 2017 was based on a scene where Carmen throws cards into the air.Es DevlinHands suspended between sea and sky, magic, illusion, the suspension of disbelief. This is one of my favorite things, the backdrop for the opera “Carmen,” in 2017 in Bregenz, Austria. This is an extraordinary venue for an opera festival. After the Second World War, Maria Wanda Milliore, a young set designer, suggested performances on a barge on the lake because the concert hall had been bombed. My design was the first by a woman in that spot since 1946.I was watching bull fights, wanted a big bull, but the director, Kasper Holten, said no. So we went back to the text and were looking at the scene when Carmen throws the cards into the air. As I imitated that action, Kasper said, “That’s it!”It’s really difficult to make work on a barge in a lake, to make the cards look like they are floating. One of the reasons the set is so beautiful is that there are no visible speakers. Here, whole chunks of the hands are made of gauze and are full of speakers, as are the cards. The whole thing is a big, 25-meter-high sound-emitting device.6. ‘Your Voices’Es Devlin, “Your Voices,” 2022, an installation at Lincoln Center created in collaboration with the Endangered Language Alliance.Es DevlinDuring the pandemic, when so much cultural work was extinct, I had an invitation to make a piece from the Champagne house, Moët & Chandon. If this sort of project is not truthfully approached, it can end up as an advert.I wanted to collaborate with the Endangered Language Alliance, which Brian Eno had introduced me to. The anthropologist Wade Davis said, “Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind”: When we lose a language we lose a library of cultural, historical and biological references.I felt the installation should be at Lincoln Center because New York is the city that is home to the most languages — 637 at last count. I used a compass as the basis of the design for an illuminated kinetic sculpture on the plaza, mapping the languages across the city, then stretching the 637 lines across the arc to connect with one another. You could stand inside the object and it was like being inside a musical instrument. At the same time, you heard recordings of the endangered languages all around you, speaking the E.M. Forster text, “Only connect,” and other poems. There were choirs from the Bronx, a Ukrainian and Russian choir, Japanese and African choirs. It was a deeply condensed version of being in New York City.7. The iris“An Atlas of Es Devlin” opens with several layered pages with circular apertures, an iris shape, with the names of collaborators.Es DevlinThis figure turns up a lot in my work, and it is the opening piece in the exhibition. It is based on a series of eight cutout, circular layered apertures at the start of the book. In the exhibition, the room is filled with a replica of these pages with holes through the center, built to the height of the room. The visitor walks through them, and becomes part the structure.In a circle around each hole are the names of all the people who I have worked with; it’s an atlas of participation. Any collaboration is about seeing through the lens of the designer, the composer, the choreographer, the playwright, the director. What I quite like is that the iris shape isn’t stable; there are a lot of currents clashing together and centrifugally holding. This is about trying to develop a muscle to see through the lens of others. More

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      After Election, Poland’s Art World Calls for Change

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      The Law and Justice party tried to reshape the country via the arts. Now that it appears set to lose office, its critics are split over how to move on.Just weeks after becoming Poland’s culture minister, in 2015, Piotr Glinski began a yearslong effort to shift his country’s cultural life toward the political right.He ousted liberal museum directors, replacing them with conservatives. He created new institutions to celebrate traditional culture and nationalist heroes. And along with other lawmakers from his party, Law and Justice, he launched broadsides against movies, plays and pop stars that criticized the Roman Catholic Church or the government’s policies on issues including immigration.Many artists and cultural leaders opposed Glinski’s actions, and there were protests throughout his term, including outside Poland’s National Museum after a leader he had appointed removed sexually suggestive artworks from the walls.Pawel Sztarbowski, the deputy director at the Powszechny Theater, in Warsaw, said that Glinski had tried to “return Poland to an imaginary past.”Now, that project may be coming to an end. After opposition parties won a majority of parliamentary seats in the recent general election, Polish cultural figures are calling on what is expected to be a coalition government dominated by centrist parties to reverse Glinski’s agenda. But they are split over how to do that without entrenching political interference in the arts, which they have spent nearly a decade protesting.Jaroslaw Suchan, a former director of the Museum of Art in Lodz whose contract was not renewed by the Law and Justice government, said that the party had “treated culture as an ideological weapon.” But if a new government simply fired Glinski’s appointees, “they’d be repeating the last government’s behaviors.”“We have to think of the long term,” Suchan said, instead of seeking revenge.Protesters gathered outside Warsaw’s National Museum in 2019, after the gallery took down a sexually suggestive work.Krystian Dobuszynski/NurPhoto, via Getty ImagesMore than three weeks since the Oct. 15 election, it is still uncertain when Law and Justice will leave office. Under the country’s Constitution, President Andrzej Duda, a Law and Justice ally, has 30 days to ask a party to form a new government, though he has not done it yet. In the power vacuum, Law and Justice supporters have been trying to derail the decision by questioning the legitimacy of the vote.Observers of Polish politics expect that Donald Tusk, the leader of Civic Coalition, the largest opposition party, will eventually be asked to lead a new government in alliance with several other groups.Before the vote, Civic Coalition said in a manifesto that it would abolish the “censorship of Polish culture” and ensure that institutions that presented controversial work kept their grants. The party also promised that it would not appoint political figures to run cultural organizations, though the manifesto gave no further details. A spokesman for Civic Coalition did not respond to an interview request.Current and former museum and theater leaders said in interviews that they were hoping for more significant change.The most pressing issue, according to Piotr Rypson, the chairman of the Polish branch of the International Council of Museums, is the leadership of three important museums, which he said had been handed over to Law and Justice sympathizers: the Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art and the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, both in Warsaw, as well as the Museum of Art in Lodz.The Ujazdowski Castle Center for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, one of the museums whose directors were replaced with conservatives under Glinski.AlamyRypson said two of those leaders were “incompetent,” and that the third, the Ujazdowski Castle’s director, Piotr Bernatowicz, had displayed artworks out of step with his institution’s traditions. Bernatowicz, whose contract runs through 2027, has staged several exhibitions featuring artists whose work focuses on conservative political hobbyhorses. He did not respond to emailed interview requests.Malgorzata Omilanowska, who was culture minister in a center-right government before Law and Justice took office, said that the three appointees were a “real embarrassment” and had marginalized their museums within Poland.They had also had an impact on Poland’s reputation abroad, she added, not least because they had just helped choose the country’s representative for next year’s Venice Biennale. Their pick, announced on Oct. 31, was the painter Ignacy Czwartos, with a show focused on Polish victims of German and Russian aggression, events often highlighted by Law and Justice. One of the works he proposes showing in Venice, for example, will depict Angela Merkel and Vladimir V. Putin on either side of a burning swastika.A worker cleaning near paintings by Ignacy Czwartos at the Ujazdowski Castle in 2021. He has just been selected to represent Poland at the next Venice Biennale. Czarek Sokolowski/Associated PressIn an email exchange, Andrzej Biernacki, the current director of the Museum of Art in Lodz, said that Poland’s art world was intolerant of artists with conservative views and its institutions had favored Western artists to the detriment of the country’s own. That’s why, he said, he refocused the museum’s budget to acquire works by Polish, rather than international, artists, buying or securing as donations nearly 1,000 pieces.Janusz Janowski, the director of the Zacheta National Gallery of Art, said in an email that he has also shifted his museum’s focus toward contemporary Polish art, including through “collaborating with eminent artists, even those who might not necessarily align with the artistic ‘mainstream.’”Janowski and Biernacki both said that they would be staying in their posts, and that their contracts ran until the end of 2025. Biernacki added that if the new government tried to remove him early, it would be breaking the law.In an emailed statement, Glinski, the culture minister, said that he had simply replaced museum directors when their contracts expired. “Polish culture was dramatically underinvested” when he came to office, he said, and he had refocused the country’s institutions to foster a sense of national identity and patriotism — something “all wise and responsible states” do. Ukraine would have been quickly defeated by Russia without its “strong Ukrainian patriotism,” Glinski added.The bullish statement summed up the past eight years with pride: “The scale of our achievements — of this great institutional change in Polish culture — has no precedent either in contemporary Polish politics or in contemporary culture.”His critics see it differently, yet even among those who desire a cultural reset, there are some aspects of Glinski’s tenure that few want to lose. Suchan, the ousted Lodz museum director, said that under Glinski culture was “at the center of politics” — a position it never held under liberal governments, for whom it was often an afterthought. The culture ministry’s budget doubled during Law and Justice’s eight years in office, Suchan added, and Glinski secured funding to set up a host of new institutions — including museums, an opera company and various grant-making bodies.The new coalition government should maintain that funding, Suchan added. If nothing else, Law and Justice had showed that “culture isn’t a waste of money,” he said, adding that “it plays an important role in creating citizens, and shaping society.” That, he said, was “one lesson” everyone in Poland, liberal or conservative, could take from the past eight years. More

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      36 Hours in Glasgow: Things to Do and See

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      12 p.m.
      Browse Scandi home goods and woolly Scottish knitwear
      Glaswegians have an appetite for sustainable shopping and for secondhand goods of all stripes. Hoos, next to the Botanic Gardens, stocks chic Scandi home goods, while the Glasgow Vintage Co., farther along Great Western Road from Papercup, has a thoughtful selection of second-hand Scottish knitwear alongside show-stopping coats and dresses from the 1970s. Up the hill on Otago Street, above Perch & Rest Coffee, Kelvin Apothecary sells a nice range of gifts including handmade Scottish soaps and wooden laundry and cleaning tools. In the cobbled Otago Lane is the chaotic Voltaire and Rousseau secondhand bookshop, with teetering, vertical book piles. Unlike many Glasgow shops, this store isn’t the most dog-friendly, because of the resident cat, BB, who supervises from his perch at the till. More