Some Art News

By Charles Kessler

ArtInfo has an excellent interview with Renzo Piano on his addition to the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. Judge for yourselves how “chivalrous” the addition is.

The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum with Renzo Piano’s addition.

Also from ArtInfo is news that the Spanish filmmaker Carlos Saura will be directing a film about Pablo Picasso’s emotional upheaval while painting “Guernica” in 1937.

Wired Magazine reports on a fascinating (and very strange) group of artist/hackers who sneak into buildings, including the Pantheon, to secretly refurbish neglected treasures. Pretty incredible but supposedly true.

The Observer has an excellent article about perennially underrated artist/writer Walter Robinson. Be sure to read the comments.

ABC No Rio Cardboard Band performing at The Kitchen in 1983. Performers, from left to right: Bebe Smith, Kiki Smith, Ellen Cooper, Bobby G and Walter Robinson. (Photo by Christy Rupp, courtesy 98 Bowery.)

Other Art News:

NYU’s Creative Writing Program has a new, intimate brownstone for their extensive poetry and fiction readings — the Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House, 58 West 10th Street, between 5th and 6th Avenues. The readings are free and open to the public and well worth going to. Last night I saw Mark Strand, who's a Pulitzer Prize and MacArthur award winner and a former U.S. Poet Laureate. He was charming, funny, clever and elegant — just like his poetry (or, as he called his new work, “prose fragments”). To quote him: “‘Fragments’ because they’re pieces of prose, and ‘pieces’ because they’re ‘fragments.”

The Lillian Vernon Creative Writers House

And speaking of great literature, check out this funny, caustic letter from a former slave responding to an old master who wanted him to come back to work on his farm.