Somehow I missed the 16,400 internet posts reporting that the ill-fated luxury liner, Costa Concordia — presumably still on its side in the waters off Tuscany’s Isola del Giglio — was the setting for the first act of Jean-Luc Godard’s latest feature, Film Socialisme (2010).
Thomas Micchelli
Thomas Micchelli is an artist and writer.
Posted inArt
Everything Is Fine
What does it mean to be “Perfectly Happy, Even Without Happy Endings”?
Early this week, The New York Times published an article under that title by longtime Philadelphia Inquirer film critic (and former Village Voice art critic) Carrie Rickey. It told the story of an independent film producer named Lindsay Doran, whom Rickey describes in the third paragraph as “a missionary for mood-elevating films.”
It seems as if Doran became enamored of a book by a University of Pennsylvania psychologist, Martin E. P. Seligman, and “began rewatching films through the lens of what Dr. Seligman identifies as the five essential elements of well-being: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. (He refers to these elements collectively as perma.)”
Posted inArt
Adrift in the Cosmos
Any year that begins with the caucusing of Republicans in Iowa and the sacking of Jim Hoberman at the Voice can come to no good. Yet here we are embarking on a new venture, Hyperallergic Weekend, to see what we can make of it.
Posted inArt
Patti Smith, MoMA and a Revolutionary Year
On December 19th of last year, Patti Smith and Michael Stipe gave a “walk-in performance” in the atrium of the Museum of Modern Art to celebrate the centennial of Jean Genet — poet, playwright, novelist, radical leftist, hustler and thief.
It was also the final day of the uprising in Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia, which started three days earlier when Mohamed Bouazizi, a street vendor, set himself on fire and burned to death to protest the confiscation of his merchandize by the police. The timing of the performance and the Tunisia riots were, of course, purely a coincidence.
On December 19th of this year, alone with her guitar, Patti Smith returned to the same place — now occupied by an enormous obelisk holding aloft Sanja Iveković’s golden, hugely pregnant “Lady Rosa of Luxembourg” — to mark Genet’s 101st birthday.
Posted inArt
All That Is Solid, Etcetera, A Review of Cattelan at Guggenheim
Maurizio Cattelan’s All explodes on impact: all noise, heat and light, followed by gradually dissipating trails of smoke. The Italian anti-artist’s anti-retrospective at the Guggenheim, as everyone has heard, hangs in toto from the oculus of the Wright ramp.
