Page 33 - Rt Critic News Today

A 43-year-old music critic whose beat is hard rock and heavy metal attends a concert by one of his favorite bands whose latest album he has just reviewed for France’s most influential culture magazine. Raising two daughters with his partner, who is also a journalist and began her career covering the 9/11 attacks, he often has to do his writing late at night after the kids have gone to bed (“just like doing homework in high school,” he remarks).

Interviewed by a journalist from the Yiddish daily Morgen Journal-Tageblatt, a world-famous African-American singer shares the news that he is looking around for a Yiddish opera to perform in. When asked why he is seeking an opera written in Yiddish rather than a work from the European operatic cannon, the singer replies that he feels little or no affinity with operas from Italy, France or Germany.

Atlanta-based contemporary painter Frank Morrison (b. 1971) elevates Black voices. Through the end of the year and into 2024, the artist will amplify them further in two concurrent solo exhibitions, blurring the bounds of figuration and abstraction.

Given my interest in painting, I found myself going to Milwaukee to see an exhibition that promised to be taking the pulse of contemporary American painting—all the works in it had been made in the last five years. A show of fifty paintings by fifty different painters who the curators claimed were defining the field of contemporary painting seemed a bold move, amidst the general confusion that has been generated by AI, market manipulation, auction house publicity, critical pronouncements, a...

For Two Angels, her recent show in Los Angeles, Hanna Hur installed twinned paintings on opposing walls, a pew cleaving but also conjoining the gallery at its midline like a wooden spine. In this, Hur’s installation redoubled the bilateral symmetry of each paired diptych; the panels form discrete mirrors rather than imprints of themselves, acknowledging the obdurately physical seams across which the geometries spread, contiguous but punctuated.

Despite being blinded as a young boy, this inhabitant of the Syrian city of Aleppo gains fame for composing some 400 pizmonim, songs sung on special occasions by Sephardic Jews. While able to effortlessly improvise verses to any melody even, it is said, to the sound of water dripping from buckets on a waterwheel, this sightless composer feels his greatest musical affinity for Arab music.

A Jewish orchestra conductor and a Palestinian-Christian literary scholar, both preeminent in their fields, organize a workshop in the German city of Weimar for young classical musicians, both Jewish and Muslim, from across the Middle East. Meant to be a one-time event, the project evolves into a musical academy and a professional touring orchestra.

It’s a story heard all too often: the government declares eminent domain and razes minority communities in the name of urban renewal. With this, families are displaced or cut off from resources and each other as roads, parks, and railways promote growth for wealthier or more powerful stakeholders. In destroying communities, culture is also lost as buildings that brought people together for generations disappear, taking with them the activities they used to house.

Amidst the consumerist frenzy after Thanksgiving, it might seem gruesome to think about ye old cashola, but two shows at the Morgan Library offer humorous images as well as strange moral presumptions that invite comparison to the frameworks of our own era. Money is a technology. So is language.

The most remarkable aspect of this extraordinary exhibition of recent work by Korean-born artist Hyong Nam Ahn lies in his choice of works that emanate from an overflowing aesthetic consistency. Since Ahn arrived in Chicago in the 1970s, he has aimed to develop an identity through art. In the process, he has committed himself to opening new doors of speculation, leading to a pure understanding of what his art represents—these qualities are significant and clearly worth seeking out.