Ben Whishaw is on stage, stripped to his underwear. Prosthetic scars cover his shoulders and back. He puts a large pad over each buttock as he cross-dresses as Marilyn Monroe. Later, the soprano Renée Fleming warbles the line “They’re fracking the fuck out of the world!”, which raises a big laugh from the audience. Others watching, however, seem less taken with Norma Jeane Baker of Troy, a half-spoken, half-sung play written specially for Whishaw by the poet Anne Carson. The first person walks out of this preview performance about 30 minutes in; over the next hour around another 10 leave, the clomping of their shoes on an uncarpeted floor making them impossible to ignore. More storm to the exits at the end, ostentatiously not clapping, as Fleming and a surprised-looking Whishaw take their bows to the rest of the 500-strong audience. It’s Saturday night at the Shed. The first major multi-arts institution to open in New York for decades, it is intended to … [Read more...] about Hold on to your hard hats: New York’s $475m Shed throws open its doors
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New York’s Hudson Yards is an ultra-capitalist Forbidden City
“We love it here because we love you here,” read the enormous ad covering the side of a red double-decker New York City tour bus, touting H&M’s new Hudson Yards location. The slogan is a lie. Hudson Yards does not love you. We do not love Hudson Yards. And we especially do not love it here, in a city that is desperately trying to maintain the illusion that we are all something more than props in a metropolis-sized variety show put on for the benefit of bored hedge fund employees. Hudson Yards, the biggest private real estate development in US history, may be slightly less offensive to the memory of Jane Jacobs than a freeway running through Greenwich Village, but not by much. As urban planning visions go, it is a familiar one: an ultracapitalist equivalent of the Forbidden City, a Chichen Itza with a better mall and slightly better-concealed human sacrifice. The development has been dubbed a “billionaire’s fantasy city”, but it is something more … [Read more...] about New York’s Hudson Yards is an ultra-capitalist Forbidden City
The $500m Shed: inside New York’s quilted handbag on wheels
It seems fitting that the cultural centre of New York’s latest luxury private development should look like a quilted Chanel handbag. Rearing up at the northern end of the High Line on Manhattan’s reborn West Side, the Shed presents a 10-storey wrapping of puffed-up diamond cushions to passersby, standing as the gaudy gateway to Hudson Yards – the most expensive real estate project in US history. While it might fit in with the gilt-edged world of Swiss watch boutiques and Michelin-starred chefs that awaits in this $25bn private enclave, it is an unlikely costume for what the project’s architect and originator, Liz Diller, insists is “simply a piece of infrastructure” to support whatever artists want to do. “It’s not precious,” she says of the $500m building. “It’s muscular and industrial, just meat and bones.” All hope has been vested in the Shed as the one redeeming feature of Hudson Yards, a project roundly … [Read more...] about The $500m Shed: inside New York’s quilted handbag on wheels
New York’s MoMA unveils $450m expansion and ‘remix’ of collection
New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) unveiled its new $450m expansion on Thursday in a revamp of the gallery – including a radical “remix” of its permanent collection, which will see famous works exhibited alongside those of lesser-known artists. The popular Manhattan museum, which attracts 3 million visitors a year, has been closed since June for the renovation and rehang but will reopen to the public on 21 October with an additional 47,000 sq ft of space – an increase of nearly 30% – after the installation of a new glass and blackened steel extension. New features include a studio space for performance, process and time-based art, which MoMA says is the first of its kind in a major museum in the world, where visitors can experience the artistic process firsthand and watch rehearsals. For the first time, an entire floor of the six-floor gallery – including the sculpture garden and ground floor galleries – will be free, opening up … [Read more...] about New York’s MoMA unveils $450m expansion and ‘remix’ of collection
Horror on the Hudson: New York’s $25bn architectural fiasco
‘One thing that’s always been true in New York,” says Dan Doctoroff, “is that if you build it, they will come.” He is referring to Hudson Yards, the $25bn, 28-acre, mega-project that he had a critical hand in originating while he was deputy mayor of the city under Michael Bloomberg in the early 2000s. He can now look down on his co-creation every day from his new office in one of the development’s towers and see hundreds of people climbing up and down Thomas Heatherwick’s Vessel sculpture, like tiny maggots crawling all over a rotting doner kebab. The first phase of Hudson Yards opened last month and people have indeed come – mostly to gawp at how it could have been allowed to happen. On a vast swath of the west side of Manhattan once earmarked for New York’s 2012 Olympic bid, a developer has conjured a private fantasy of angular glass towers stuffed with offices and expensive apartments, rising above a seven-storey shopping mall on … [Read more...] about Horror on the Hudson: New York’s $25bn architectural fiasco
