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      in Movies

      When Spider-Man Met Jeff Koons

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      Our critic spots references to Hilma af Klint and Lichtenstein in “Across the Spider-Verse.” Koons, who inspired the film’s creative team, gets top billing with an animated survey (before his work is destroyed).“Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse,” the sequel to the 2018 reimagining of the arachnid-adolescent superhero, doubles down on the first installment with an inventive and magpie visual style. The result is, at least in part, a crash course in art history (literally so, as characters frequently crash into works of art).While the film is largely rendered in computer-generated animation that speeds by at a dizzying clip, there are moments of slowed, even stunning beauty: backgrounds dissolving with painterly effect, shifting into emotive abstraction reminiscent of, at turns, the work of Kandinsky, Mondrian and Hilma af Klint. New York’s cityscape is softened into brushy, Impressionistic swaths. Ben-Day dots stutter across the screen, a nod to the story’s comic book source material, but also calling up Roy Lichtenstein’s appropriations of the same.Justin K. Thompson, a director of the film, said the collision of techniques and applications was deliberate. “We wanted to emulate dry brush, watercolor, acrylic,” he said. “I looked a lot at the work of Paul Klee, the work of Lyonel Feininger.” The experimental films of John Whitney, a pioneer of computer animation, were another inspiration.There are also a number of more direct allusions to contemporary art. An early set piece in the Guggenheim Museum’s Frank Lloyd Wright building allowed the filmmakers gleeful abandon. A version of the perennial Spider-Man villain Vulture that appears as if lifted from a Leonardo da Vinci parchment drawing tumbles through the museum’s rotunda, wielding weapons inspired by da Vinci’s fanciful and terrifying inventions and causing havoc in what quickly appears to be a Jeff Koons retrospective. The fight scene deploys several of Koons’s sculptures of inflatable toys, like “Lobster” (2003) and “Dolphin” (2002), hurled as projectiles. Naturally, a Koons Balloon Dog, his most readily recognizable work, receives top billing.The scene’s version of Vulture, grappling here with one of the multiverse’s many Spider-Men, appears as if lifted out of a Leonardo da Vinci drawing.Sony Pictures Animation“When we talked about the Balloon Dog we said, ‘What could we do with it? What would be special?’” Thompson told me. Koons, he recalled, “was actually the one who said, ‘You know, one thing about the Balloon Dog is it’s this thing that has a lot to do with breath. It’s filled with human breath. But we’ve never actually seen the inside of one. What if we cut one open and we could see what was inside?’ And we just kind of looked at each other, like, ‘But what’s inside?’ And he said, ‘Whatever you want.’”What’s inside ended up being a sight gag that follows after Vulture lops off the head of a 12-foot-tall Balloon Dog, from which spill countless smaller Balloon Dog sculptures, satisfying the nagging suspicion that Koons’s outsize works are in fact elaborate piñatas. (The scene brought to mind an episode earlier this year, where a collector visiting the Art Wynwood fair in Miami accidentally shattered a 16-inch edition. The film was already well through production.)“It was moving to me,” Koons said on a phone call from Hydra, Greece, “because I always thought of the Balloon Dog as kind of a ritualistic work, something that could have a mythic quality to it, a little bit like a Trojan horse or Venus of Willendorf, where there would be some form of tribal community.” (His own balloon Venus did not seem to make the final cut.) Koons considered the Balloon Dog’s presence in the film as “truly participating in a larger community where people can rally around it.”Spider-Woman joining the fray during the Guggenheim battle. In our own universe, the Jeff Koons retrospective took place at the Whitney.Sony Pictures AnimationThe scene, which also features several of Koons’s earlier, stranger and less exposed works, like the polychromed wood sculpture “String of Puppies” (1988), from the “Banality” series, the stainless steel bust “Louis XIV” (1986), and several of his 1980s vacuum cleaner assemblages, is a homage to an artist who served as the original, if indirect, influence for the first “Spider-Verse” film’s direction. In 2014, while still in an early conceptual phase and at an impasse as to how to create a kind of postmodern version of the deathless hero, Phil Lord, a co-writer of the screenplay, and Christopher Miller, a producer, visited the Koons retrospective at the Whitney Museum. Lord has said the exhibition crystallized their thinking.“You could look at ‘The New,’ ‘Equilibrium,’ ‘Luxury & Degradation,’ ‘Antiquity,’ ‘Hulk Elvis,’ all different bodies of work that possibly seem like this kind of multiverse,” Koons offered. “Where you could have things existing at the same time but in different ways.”Whether the deep dive into Koons’s oeuvre resonates with casual viewers is another story. As the plot swings between slightly overbearing teen angst and extrapolations into quantum physics — itself an extended metaphor for the angst-inducing, open-ended possibilities of adolescence — the art in-jokes feel like a concession to adult aesthetes. (“I think it’s a Banksy” is a one-liner recycled from the first film, referring to something that looks nothing like a Banksy. Everyone laughed at the joke at the Upper West Side screening I attended, but not at the Koons stuff.)Spider-Man and Spider-Woman in a quiet moment. The film’s animated images often speed by at a dizzying clip.Sony Pictures AnimationThe idea that, in an alternative universe, Jeff Koons’s career booster took place at the Guggenheim instead of the Whitney is perhaps the most in-joke of them all, something even seasoned art-world insiders might not have fully appreciated. “There was a discussion for many years that I would have my retrospective at the Guggenheim — it never happened,” Koons told me. “So it was wonderful to see.”For his part, Koons gushed about the result: “I think the film is really astonishing, and I think culturally it’s playing a very important role for a whole generation of young people to inform them about the possibilities of perception.” He went on to say, “I never had seen richer colors — the reds are phenomenal!” Koons was born in ’55 and grew up on Disney. “There was a certain point in the ’70s maybe where we saw animation fall off,” he said, “and then with Pixar we saw this tremendous leap forward. The film uses that technology as a base but brings back a texture, really the texture of the senses. I mean, it’s like the way we perceive a Rembrandt or a Titian.”Asked if he was at all disturbed by seeing representations of his work obliterated by animated superheroes, Koons responded with Zen Buddhist diplomacy. “I care very much about the world. I care about living. I care about existence,” he said. “Everything turns to dust. The world around us turns to dust, universes turn to dust. What’s important is how we can enjoy the world that we’re in, and be able to have the perception of what our future can be. As an artist, it’s nice to feel in some way that the fine arts are able to participate within culture.” More

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      in Music

      Germany Celebrates Wolf Biermann, a Singer Who United East and West

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      A show at the German Historical Museum honors Wolf Biermann, whose music and moral stance endeared him to audiences across the once divided country.If passers-by on a busy bridge in central Berlin on a recent summer afternoon recognized East Germany’s most famous songwriter, poet and dissident, they did not show it.Posing for this article’s photographs in front of a huge wrought iron eagle that featured on one of his best known record sleeves, Wolf Biermann, 86, smiled and tried joking with the afternoon crowd. But the office workers and tourists ignored him and continued their journeys across the river.Nearly five decades after Biermann was thrown out of East Germany for criticizing its totalitarian Communist government, the German Historical Museum is honoring him with a major exhibition. Biermann may not be recognized on the street, but the show, which opens Friday and runs through Jan. 14, 2024, proves he is far from forgotten: He is the first living person in recent memory to be the subject of such an exhibition at Germany’s national history museum.In a life that crisscrossed the East-West border that once divided Germany, Biermann’s music and principled moral stance made him a rare figure who transcended that barrier. Now, his tale is a perfect one for the united Germany to celebrate.“His story is both East German and West German history,” said Monika Boll, the exhibition’s curator. “You can’t get more German than that.”Biermann was born under Nazism, in 1936, and raised in West Germany. As a teenager, he defected to the East and made a career as a singer of witty, folk-inspired songs — until an anti-authoritarian streak in his music began to trouble the Communist authorities. For a decade from the mid-60s, Biermann’s songs, many of which he recorded in his East Berlin apartment, were smuggled to the West and released by record labels there, then smuggled back behind the iron curtain.After a 1976 concert in Cologne, West Germany, in which he criticized the government of East Germany, Biermann was barred from re-entering that country, where he had made his home.Barbara Klemm/Frankfurter Allgemeine ZeitungYet Biermann wanted to stay in the German Democratic Republic, or G.D.R. Although he was the subject of a yearslong state surveillance operation, he was never imprisoned, unlike many other critics of the government. The authorities worried about a backlash from West Germany, where the press was taking special note of Biermann’s career.In a speech at the exhibition opening on Wednesday, Claudia Roth, Germany’s culture minister, compared Biermann to a “raised middle finger” aimed at the “pride of the G.D.R. leadership.” The opening’s guests included many former East German dissidents, and Angela Merkel, Germany’s former chancellor.In an interview, Biermann said that his life story was instructive for anyone who wants to understand Germany’s complicated postwar past. “I’m the ideal counterpoint,” Bierman said, to what was typical in those decades. “To recognize what was normal, you need to look at the exception,” he added.Right from his childhood, he did the opposite of everyone around him, he added. His family was staunchly communist, he recalled, and his father was Jewish. Naturally, he said, they detested the Nazis — unlike most German families at the time.Even the British fire bombing of his hometown, Hamburg, which he only survived by diving into a canal with his mother, did not stop Biermann rooting for the Allies. In a song, he later wrote:And because I was born under the yellow starIn GermanyThat is why we took the English bombsLike gifts from heaven.His father, Dagobert Biermann, a labor organizer, was murdered in Auschwitz by the Nazis when Biermann was 6.In 1953, swimming against the historical tide, the 16-year-old Biermann moved, alone, from West Germany to the East, just as thousands were fleeing in the other direction in search of a better life. But as a convinced Communist, Biermann thought it was the G.D.R., not the capitalist West, that offered a more just and moral vision.Right from his childhood, Biermann said, he did the opposite of everyone around him.Gordon Welters for The New York TimesA talent for music was recognized during his tenure as a production assistant at Berthold Brecht’s Berliner Ensemble theater, where he had been hired by Brecht’s widow. Supported by politically connected sponsors, Biermann had gained minor notice as a singer-songwriter by 1960. If his lyrics offended some, he got away with it because of his communist bone fides, including the fact that his father was killed by fascists.But soon his lyrics and texts became too critical of the government and, in 1965, the authorities — which had tight control over cultural life — de facto banned Biermann from performing, recording or publishing in East Germany.During the 11 years in which he was also not allowed to leave the country, Biermann’s apartment became his stage and recording studio, and he was under constant watch. Over the decades, the East German state security services, known as the Stasi, watched and bugged his home, followed his car, listened to his phone calls and tried to recruit his friends and lovers.“You could say he was in the champion league — such a level of surveillance was atypical,” said Ilko-Sascha Kowalczuk, a historian who has studied Biermann’s Stasi file.Biermann responded ironically with “The Ballad of the Stasi,” in which he commiserates with the poor “Stasi dogs” monitoring him, who would probably end up singing his songs in bed.East German fans who were caught with Biermann’s music on bootleg cassette tapes or handbills of his verse could be arrested and locked away for years. But his apartment, which was close to the main border crossing point into West Berlin, still became a gathering place for dissident artists and thinkers. American stars, like Joan Baez and Allen Ginsburg, also visited him there.A turning point in Biermann’s career came in 1976, with a three-and-half-hour concert he gave to a sold-out hall in Cologne, on a rare visit to West Germany. He came out swinging against the “old comrades” who ran East Germany, and painted a bleak picture of life behind the wall. Three days later, while watching the news on television, he learned that he had been permanently barred from re-entry to East Germany.Demonstrators in Leipzig, East Germany, in 1989, the year the Berlin Wall Fell. The placard, in German, reads, “We want our old singer Biermann back!”Archiv Wolf Biermann; Staatsbibliothek–PK/Abteilung Handschriften und historische Drucke Biermann said he was crestfallen to be shut out of the country he held so dear, despite all its shortcomings. While hundreds of people were risking their lives crossing illegally to the West, Biermann’s heart pined for the East. “With me, everything was always the other way around — that’s almost the fundamental law,” he said.Biermann’s expulsion led to protests by East Germany’s most famous artists, writers and actors, and the government reacted with further repressions on artistic expression that remained in place until the fall of the Berlin Wall, 13 years later.After Germany’s 1990 reunification — in which he played an important role — Biermann remained active, though less in the spotlight. He continued to be a respected figure on the German left, even as he voiced unpopular opinions among his comrades: He supported the American-led war in Iraq, and criticized the peace movement that grew against it.Standing in front of the bridge’s wrought iron eagle in Berlin, Biermann recalled writing one of his most popular songs, “The Ballad of the Prussian Icarus,” after he and Ginsburg crossed the bridge in 1976 and took pictures in front of the bird. They made a bet over which of them would bring the iron creature into verse, Biermann recalled.That song, which became one of his best known, is typical Biermann, a lyrical critique of the East German state that notes:The barbed wire slowly grows deepInto the skin, the chest and boneInto the brain’s gray cellsAs tourist boats passed under its perch on the bridge, the same eagle looked out on a very different world. If Biermann now has an official place in German history, it’s because of the part he played in shaping it.Wolf Biermann: A Poet and Songwriter From GermanyThrough Jan. 14, 2024, at the German Historical Museum, in Berlin; dhm.de. More

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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