Caracas diary: A sweet Mahler's Fourth and Dudamel-mania

What doesn’t kill you will make you fat, the Venezuelans are said to joke.

With a day off in Caracas between performances of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony on Saturday night and Mahler's Fourth on Monday night, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, on its first visit here, got a taste of that saying, so to speak. This is not a town in which a visitor might safely roam, and especially not on an election day, as Sunday was. So the players took it easy in their hotel.

Because raw foods and unpeeled fruit are not recommended (there has already been a case of food poisoning), available Venezuelan cuisine has tended toward things high in fat and calories. Sugar is plentiful. But maybe that hasn’t been such a bad thing.

The performance of the Mahler Fourth had a relaxed but potent sweetness Monday in the Teatro Teresa Carreno that it hadn’t when Gustavo Dudamel began his Mahler Project with the symphony at Walt Disney Concert Hall exactly one month earlier.

Justin Timberlake on Richard Serra, Banksy and spending more time in museums

Is it time to call pop superstar Justin Timberlake an art collector too? In the July issue of "Vanity Fair," Vanessa Grigoriadis, who calls the singer-actor-philanthropist "his generation's multi-talented Sammy Davis Jr.," rides with him in his Audi R8 to visit the L.A. County Museum of Art. She says it was a last-minute decision on his part for where to go on a gray day this spring.

The photo shoot was pegged to the release of his movie "Friends with Benefits," but the story covers a lot of ground, including his takes on contemporary art.

On getting turned around in a maze-like Richard Serra sculpture at LACMA that day: "I feel like this is a bad dream I might have had."

On buying a painting by Banksy: "I split it with a friend, so we each get to keep it for a little while." (Banksy was also a punch line for him earlier this year: he joked "I'm Banksy" when presenting the Academy Award for best animated feature.)

On the opening of "Art in the Streets" at MOCA: "I saw so many people I hadn't seen in a while. Some you're happy about, and others..."

Most earnest art lover's thought: "I wish that when I was touring the world as a teenager I would have spent more time going to museums rather than spending all of my time just eating food."

And yes, he does get recognized at the museum, by a group of 30 giggling teenagers on a school tour from West London.

-- Jori Finkel

twitter.com/jorifinkel

Image: Photo of Justin Timberlake in 2011 by Kirk McKoy.

Culture Watch: 'Dreams From Underground' by Julian Bell, New York Review of Books

"Dreams From Underground"

Julian Bell, New York Review of Books, June 9 issue

The lively images of lions, bison, panthers and other animals inside the Chauvet caves in Southern France are at least 32,000 years old -- the world's oldest known paintings. Writing in the New York Review of Books, painter Julian Bell puts Werner Herzog's new 3-D documentary, "Cave of Forgotten Dreams" (currently in theaters), in the context of other Herzog films such as "Grizzly Man" (2005) and "Encounters at the End of the World" (2007) as sublime explorations of what limits there might be to being human.

Ambivalent about the uses Herzog sometimes makes of the 3-D technology -- "'Avatar' colliding with M.C. Escher," he writes -- Bell is also uncomfortable with the filmmaker's inability to maintain some silence in the face of these astounding works. Still, he's mesmerized by Herzog's new pictures of the old pictures -- and he raises some provocative questions about the art on the walls.

-- Christopher Knight

@twitter.com/KnightLAT

Photo: Chauvet cave drawings. Credit: French Ministry of Culture and Communications.

 

L.A. architecture at center (and in centerfolds) of new issue of PIN-UP magazine

It often seems patronizing when New York magazine editors create special L.A. issues, as though the city is really worth exploring only once a year. Namely, in the winter.

But Felix Burrichter gets a lot of things right in the new L.A.-themed fall/winter issue of PIN-UP, the pulpy magazine that treats architecture as yet another fetish. And he gets a lot of voices into the issue, thanks for starters to a series that asks architects to talk about the neighborhoods they know best.

Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues of Ball Nogues Studio pick favorite downtown sites, ranging from Night Gallery to what they call "Bong Row." Sylvia Lavin talks about Venice standouts such as "the commemorative duck plaque" at the Venice canals and the former Eames studio. Frank Escher and Ravi GuneWardena enthuse over Silver Lake's plumeria and the Corita Art Center.

Deeper in the issue are feature interviews:

First Look: Skimming the summer art (and society) magazines

On the cover of its August issue, above the puffed bangs of Angelina Jolie, Vanity Fair promises "Dennis Hopper's last interview." 

More accurately, the tagline should read: VF contributor Bob Colacello takes a few semicoherent things that Hopper said when he was ill, a month before his death, as bookends for sundry observations about the L.A. art world that have nothing to do with Hopper.

Mostly, Colacello serves up gossip on Los Angeles County Museum of Art director Michael Govan's relationship with museum patron Eli Broad, comparing their situation to a divorce in which Govan kept the house (the Broad Contemporary Art Museum) and Broad, the kids (or art). The writer also says he was "told on good authority that David Geffen had secretly promised $30 million" to LACMA to finance its proposed merger with the Museum of Contemporary Art. Also memorable: LACMA trustee Lynda Resnick describing Broad as a legacy-builder by recasting a quote from Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar." 

Click: Vanity Fair turns its lens on Tony nominees

You can count on Vanity Fair for the best in portrait photography and now it's Broadway's turn, if only online.

The magazine's website has a slideshow of 30 nominees for this year's Tony Awards.

Among our favorites is the "are you looking at me" shot of Jude Law, 37, nominated for leading actor in a play for "Hamlet." 

Law tells the magazine his earliest theater memory: “My mom and dad used to be very involved in an amateur dramatic society in Southeast London, and I remember being taken to a theater there where they were doing a production. And I remember playing backstage while my mom was painting the set — for the play that she was also directing, I think. I was always fascinated by this dark, slightly eerie, and exciting place.”

Of course the incandescent Catherine Zeta-Jones, 40, looks good even with her just-out-of-bed hair style.

The nominee for leading actress in a musical, "A Little Night Music," shares her earliest theater memory: “Being taken to the theater when I was a very little girl — and being on the West End when I was nine years old. I did amateur dramatics when I was six years old, but I turned professional at the age of nine. And I’ve loved every show since.”

And no matter how scary he looks, we love Christopher Walken, 67, nominated for best actor for his role in the dark comedy "A Behanding in Spokane."

First Look: Jori Finkel skims the May art (and fashion) magazines

Departures' annual "culture issue" has a big, glossy art-travel story on Instituto Inhotim, the Brazilian museum and sculpture garden once dubbed an "art zoo" for its collection of exotic projects.

Look for Robert Polidori’s spectacular shot of Chris Burden's "Beam Drop," made by dropping dozens of steel I-beams at different angles into wet concrete, which writer Stephen Wallis calls the “sculptural equivalent of the action paintings produced by Jackson Pollock." (Above is a photo of “Beam Drop” by Eduardo Eckenfels from the Inhotim website; Polidori's photo is even more striking.)

Am I the only one who sees Burden's Urban Light at LACMA as its American cousin?

(One small bug in the Departures program: Where is the article on "Tilda Swinton's art-house hit" blurbed on the cover? The editor's letter mentions “Io Sono L’Amore” (“I Am Love”) as something that did not make it into the issue. OK, fine, but maybe it should not have made the cover either?)

Introducing a new feature: First Look, this month's art magazines

As much as I love the idea of the iPad, I also love the experience of the newsstand—actually paging through the new crop of magazines each month.

Over the years, this ritual has also become part of my job, first as an editor of an art magazine and then as a newspaper reporter covering the field. So I thought for my first Culture Monster post, it would be fun to share some noteworthy and newsworthy pieces from the April issues.

For articles that are also posted online, you’ll find links. Others simply say: "On newsstands." Check back the first week of May for next month’s highlights.

And click through for this month's picks, from Amanda Ross-Ho in Art in America to Terence Koh in W.  

--Jori Finkel