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Clive Barnes.

The British dance critic died today. He was 81, and in fragile health, but it is still a shock: it couldn’t have been more than a few weeks ago that I last saw him at a show, frail but alert, always a gentleman, always with a grand anecdote.

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Andrew Sarris gave us a way to think about movies. Pauline Kael opened up ways to respond to movies. But it was Manny Farber more than any other American film critic who really showed us how to look at the movies.

At least that’s one way to pin down a writer whose avid, mercurial language never dead ends in cliche or boxes itself into known formulas. Farber is at once the wildest and most disciplined of critics - every fresh dip into his writing sharpens the mind and sets it spinning.

In honor of Farber, who passed away this August, the Film Society of Lincoln center has organized a wide-ranging survey of films of special interest to Farber. The series was programmed by the critic, filmmaker, and programmer Kent Jones, who was a close friend of Farber. I spoke to Kent about Manny’s special genius as a critic, and how the film series reflects his singular sensibility.

“But it’s not far-fetched for a movie lover to think that Obama’s rise was prepared—if not predicted—by Soul Man.”

Say what?? Well, so says film critic Armond White in the cover story of this week’s New York Press. White’s readers have come to expect, shall we say, unusual perspectives from this combative, contrarian critic, whose polemical reviews forefront issues of class, race, and sexuality. See, for example, his praise of the “vulgar life force” in the Wayan’s brother’s reviled comedy “Little Man.”

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Adrian Martin writes a fascinating essay on the unexplored possibilities of DVD chaptering over at Moving Image Source.

For any student of performance history, or of the culture wars, the words “victim art” immediately bring to mind “Discussing the Undiscussable,” Arlene Croce’s infamous and fascinating 1994 New Yorker essay on the choreographer Bill T. Jones. Croce deemed his dance-theater work, “Still/Here,” “beyond the reach of criticism” in its incorporation of the testimony of terminally ill people. “I can’t review someone I feel sorry for or hopeless about,” Croce explained. And so, instead, she offered a scathing critique of Jones, and of all those making this so-called victim art.

I have always been puzzled by Croce’s essay - not the politics of it, which are clear. But the fig leaf of ill people, or disenfranchised people, being beyond a critic’s reach. It goes along with the model of critic as serene, uninvolved, objective judge, a model that, in my view, is utterly alien to the way we take in art. Aren’t the watchers in the mud as much as the doers? Aren’t things hopeless for all of us mortals in the end?

Then, this weekend at St. Ann’s Warehouse I saw “Black Watch,” the celebrated National Theatre of Scotland play about Scottish soldiers in Iraq, and I started thinking about our avoidance of art and entertainment that has to do with the war and with September 11th. It occurred to me that many of these works are the opposite of victim art: they’re hero art. And maybe that’s why we steer clear of them - for a variety of complex, often contradictory reasons.

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Photo by Flickr user minifig

You’re invited to meet ART.CULT bloggers Claudia La Rocco and Nathan Lee for a live chat.

Live Chat: The chat is now over! Click here to read the transcript of our conversation.

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“Lola Montes” is, in my unhumble opinion, the greatest film of all time, and I am willing to stake my critical reputation, such as it is, on this one proposition above all others.

Thus wrote the legendary film critic Andrew Sarris following a screening of Max Ophuls’ “ill-starred masterpiece” at the inaugural New York Film Festival in 1963. Based on the life of an actual 19th century courtesan but realized as an extravagant, dreamlike spectacle, “Lola Montes” tells the story of a fallen woman in the most exalted of styles. “To be moved by Lola Montes,” Sarris proclaimed, “is to feel the emotion in motion itself as an expression of a director’s delirium.”

Sarris was no stranger to polemics; this was, after all, the man who went to war with Pauline Kael over some shady business he imported from France. His estimation of Ophuls’ swan song, since retracted but no less forceful a statement of principles, abides as one of the most audacious throwdowns in the history of cinephila.

45 years later, the infamous film and its famous champion are back at the New York Film Festival. On October 4 - his 80th birthday - Sarris will introduce a screening of “Lola Montes” looking better than ever in a new digital restoration.

I spoke with Sarris about his ongoing love affair with “Lola” in all her incarnations - including her latest in the Governor of Alaska.

“Lola Montés” opens at Film Forum for a three-week run starting October 10. Check out their trailer.

One of the great things about blogging is that it allows a critic to backtrack, waffle or otherwise hedge her bets.

For example, while in my previous post I waxed grandly philosophical about the idea of erasing boundaries in performance, in this one I want to talk about the important role those same boundaries can play, and should play, as long as we don’t get too caught up in them. There are big differences in how theater artists approach their craft, as opposed to dance artists. Same goes for visual artists working in a performance mode. Those differences are hugely exciting and powerful. But there is also huge overlap. The trick is to see what’s happening in front of you - to really look - and not get hung up on expectations. Sounds simple, but if I had a dollar for every time I heard someone huffily say “This isn’t dance” or some such after a show didn’t fit inside the limits of her categories, or every time a theater fan felt incapable of having an opinion on a performance art piece because “I just don’t get visual art,” I would be writing this post from my yacht.

All you really have to do is look - and you might also consider getting tickets to “Diptyque.”

On Tuesday, as part of FIAF’s “Crossing the Line” festival, I attended a panel of choreographers, moderated by the performance studies scholar Andre Lepecki. It was a typical panel - engaging at the outset, makes you want to gouge your eyes out with toothpicks toward the end. Much of the talk centered around space - the actual space of a performance, as well as the temporal and conceptual space it occupies. And, of course, the need artists feel to claim a particular space for themselves.

As Trajal Harrell said, “People talk about us trying to do something multidisciplinarian, or eradicate boundaries. No: I’m trying to make a dance.”

Beautiful. And simple, right? Except that, as the festival’s co-curator, Simon Dove, pointed out, “There’s this idea that you need to pander to a very limited set of expectations … a territory mapped out that is very familiar. We’ve built that into not artistic practices but the way we consume and package them.”

After the panel, came Catherine Baÿ’s “The Snow White Project,” which I also mentioned in my last post, and which can be seen at the following locations, as well as in this great video by WNYC’s Andrea Silenzi:

Download Video

Talk about packaging! The disaffected ladies, holding signs that said “On Strike” and “My Life Depends on People Wanting to Use Me,” fit right into their setting, the Diane von Furstenberg showroom in the Meatpacking District. Hellooo, fashion, hellooo fabulous people: it’s a scene visual artists have long ago embraced, many of them entirely losing themselves in the process. I don’t see Baÿ’s installation as much of a critique of that scene, despite the clever signs.

We like to think that America has no class system - it’s one of our great mythologies about ourselves. But class is alive, and well, and it extends fully into the arts: these days, visual artists are the haves, and choreographers the have nots. It’s a cruel divide, and many choreographers argue that the dance world needs to be more savvy in marketing itself to consumers. I’m all for artists making a living wage. But I would hate to see choreographers get so savvy that the line between fashion and art disappears there as well. As I said at the outset, not all boundaries are bad.

Photo by Flickr user jessicakaylewis

Ok it wasn’t really a fight. But the NYPL’s Paul Holdengräber certainly tried to frame the opening night of this year’s ‘Live from the NYPL‘ lecture season as a big ticket brain brawl. In one corner - Bernard-Henri Lévy, French ‘Superstar’ philosopher, and in the other corner Slovoj Zizek - ‘Slovanian Elvis’ of cultural theory. Both men are pushing new books that deal with the legacy of 1968 and the current state of the intellectual left. Heady stuff to be sure. Levy made the case that leftists have a better framework to fight fundamentalism than the right. Zizek expanded on one of the major themes from his book, Violence, that liberal attitudes towards charity, organic foods, and tolerance tend to depoliticize important issues like globalism, climate change, and racism. Holdengräber got perhaps the best comeback line when he reminded Zizek that the NYPL is actual Carnegie largess. Somehow the conversation devolved into a debate over who had a better understanding of the state of Israel (All three men made vows to tour the Holy Land together in the near future).

After the show I caught a few men using “Who won?” as a pick-up line on the library steps. You can decide that one for yourself: WNYC is pleased to present the entirety of the Zizek/Levy lecture here on the Art.Cult blog. Thanks to Live from the NYPL, we look forward to another great season.

My friend George saw Zizek in Cambridge the night before and he sent me a tantalizing text message “Zizek is talking about Kung Fu Panda!” Wish I could have been there for that one… update: Kung Fu Panda is a popular topic for Zizek, witness a recent NYmag Vulture post

**WARNING: This post contains a very big photo of a man’s head**

Did you all see the sky last night, around 7:45? It was incredible - luminous, clear, and the air was at that perfect temperature where you forget that such a thing as temperatures exist. If New York weather were like this all the time we wouldn’t have any culture (insert joke about perfect climate of some city - you know the candidates - that we all secretly wished we lived in much of the year).

Thankfully, this weather has arrived at a time when there is, in relative terms, precious little to do around town, and when most of us, if we aren’t on vacation, have slipped into that dreamy, somewhat removed state known as “girding our loins in preparation for the madness that is the fall arts season in New York.” It’s a Quixotic effort to build up reserves of calm.

I’ve been reading Oscar Wilde’s “The Critic as Artist,” which, fittingly, opens “With Some Remarks Upon the Importance of Doing Nothing.” This should be required yearly reading for all New Yorkers (that phrase, at least). In fact, maybe it should be our book club pick - no, I haven’t forgotten. I’m just slow.

I’ve also been thinking about some of the art I’ve seen lately - being able to really reflect is a luxury that I don’t always have, especially if I’m reviewing every night. Truthfully, much of the work I encounter doesn’t engender an awful lot of reflecting; it’s not great, it’s not terrible, it’s just there, like a polite dinner guest whose name you keep forgetting.

This has been the case for most shows I’ve seen at the Fringe festival, this year and in past years. But it wasn’t true of “Zombie,” which I mentioned last week. Its run ends tonight at 7:15, and you should check it out if you have nothing to do, and want to be seriously disturbed:

And you wonder why he’s stuck in my head …

Bill Connington adapted this one-man show from Joyce Carol Oates’ novella about a sexual psychopath. Oates tends to annoy the hell out of me, but here her words were murderously good (though they do seem, at times, to be straying uncomfortable close to linking homosexual repression and pedophilia - made me a little squirmy). Connington’s adaptation and Thomas Caruso’s direction are old-fashioned in the best possible way: they don’t try to reinvent any wheels or be strange for strangeness’ sake. They’ve got powerful material, and they stay out of its way.

But thinking about the idea of solid, traditional theater made me think of one of the events that I’m most excited about for the fall, a highly opinionated festival that promises to offer a wholly experimental take on theater: “PRELUDE ‘08.” I’ll be writing more about this as we get closer to the September 24 start date, but just wanted to make sure it’s on everyone’s radar.

O.K. Go back to daydreaming - hope you can get this photo out of your head.