Ai Weiwei says Chinese authorities reject public appeal in tax case

Ai Weiwei will not be given a public hearing to reconsider a $2.4-million tax evasion penalty. The dissident artist told CNN by phone that he received a notice Tuesday from Chinese authorities that said he would have a written hearing instead of a public trial, which he had requested.

Ai collected $1.3 million from 30,000 supporters to contest the charge. Ai said if he had not paid the sum, his wife would have been jailed.

The artist spent 81 days in jail last year, mainly in solitary confinement, prompting an international outcry. Supporters called the tax case a means to silence China's most famous social critic.

The iconoclastic artist and his secret detention are the subject of a new film, "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry," set to open July 27 in New York and head west this summer. Freelance journalist Alison Klayman directs the documentary that follows Ai before he was thrown in jail in April and completed the film after his conditional release in June. 

The film premiered early this year at the Sundance Film Festival, where it won a Special Jury Prize and sparked activist fervor among moviegoers.

RELATED:

Chinese will hear Ai Weiwei's appeal on tax evasion

Sundance 2012: Ai Weiwei screening becomes a political event

Ai Weiwei, Marina Abramovic documentaries opening this summer

--Jamie Wetherbe

Photo: "Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry." Credit: Sundance Film Festival.

Why painting of President Obama with burning Constitution is junk

A Utah-based artist has published a painting on his website that shows a grim President Obama holding a copy of the U.S. Constitution in flames. Apparently it's causing a bit of a stir. Here's the caption I would put on the illustration:

"A concerned President Obama, former constitutional law professor, points to the document's destruction."

That's close to being the exact opposite of the description illustrator Jon McNaughton put on his painting, since reports say he wants Obama to be soundly defeated for reelection in the fall. But mine certainly fits the picture that he painted.

The painting is junk (yes, junk) not because its style is realist or anti-Modern or the image is pandering or inflammatory (you should pardon the expression). The primary reason McNaughton's painting is a flop is simply that conflicting interpretations can be credibly applied to an image whose only function is to illustrate one idea. The artist has been quoted as saying that he "wanted to get the message across as clearly as I could." He failed.

Theater review: The 'Many Mistresses of Martin Luther King'

Can a white guy say anything interesting about race? That’s a question raised this spring by the recent run of Bruce Norris’ tart “Clybourne Park” and now “The Many Mistresses of Martin Luther King,” Andrew Dolan’s polished but talky drama at Ensemble Studio Theatre LA’s Atwater playing space.

Dolan chooses George and Martha’s neighborhood to plant his rhetorical land mines, an Albee-esque world where the epithet “adjunct professor” is used as a put-down and a turn-on simultaneously.

Maverick social worker-turned-professor Simon (Philip Casnoff) marries his African American grad student, Lashawna (Tracey A. Leigh), much to the raised eyebrows of fellow faculty members Augustus (Carlos Carrasco) and Janine (Judith Moreland).  When Lashawna’s troubled younger brother, Anquan (Theo Perkins), is expelled from the college for theft, he moves in with the couple and the battles begin.

On Tom Buderwitz’s shabby chic living room set, “Mistresses” plays like drawing room comedy, punctuated by (too many) lectures on history, race and theater given by its professorial posse. Rod Menzies directs an impressive ensemble, with a deft Perkins and saturnine Casnoff generating the most chemistry as unlikely friends.

Theater review: Culture Clash's 'American Night' at Kirk Douglas

Speak softly and carry a big schtick: That’s the guiding principle of “American Night: The Ballad of Juan José,” Richard Montoya’s fast-paced fantasia on U.S. history, now running rampant at the Kirk Douglas Theatre. Developed in collaboration with Culture Clash, the gleeful “Night” uses sketch comedy, song and a dizzying number of wigs to survey the glories and pratfalls of the American Dream. 

Dream, as in emphasis on slumber. The night before taking his citizenship exam, an exhausted Juan José (René Millán, nicely understated) tries to wrap his head around constitutional amendments and the logic of the Spanish-American War. Dozing off, he takes a picaresque spin through two centuries of “democracy,” bumbling into the famous (Jackie Robinson), the infamous (the Ku Klux Klan) and the obscure (see below). Consider “Night” as revisionist vaudevillian history of the United States from a (Howard) Zinn-master. Bemused, sly and sometimes moving, the evening affirms that we the people are indeed free to pursue happiness, despite metered parking in Culver City until 11 p.m. 

Fluidly directed by Jo Bonney, who shares a development credit with Culture Clash, “Night” is nimblest when it exposes the strange bedfellows of the American project. Shawn Sagady’s projections slide along upstage corrugated panels, leaving the stage a free-for-all where, for instance, Sacagawea (Stephanie Beatriz) is imagined as a brainy Ugly Betty, wearing a retainer and in need of a quick trip to REI to procure appropriate footwear.  (Her response to her face on the dollar coin? “I look fat.”) 

Rush Limbaugh sculpture is planned for Missouri statehouse

When Thomas Hart Benton's murals depicting Missouri state history for the Capitol building in Jefferson City were unveiled in 1937, deep in the dark days of the Great Depression, a clamor arose over the artist's inclusion of corrupt Kansas City political boss Tom Pendergast. Within a few years, Pendergast would be locked away in Leavenworth -- something about failure to pay taxes on bribes received --  but Benton was adamant in defending his mural's depiction.

Facts were facts, truth was beauty. Everything in the mural had happened in Missouri history, Benton insisted, and if he had been hired to paint a mural for Illinois he would have included Al Capone.

Pretty much the same defense is now coming from Missouri Republican Steve Tilley, speaker of the House, who recently chose conservative radio shock-jock Rush Limbaugh to be immortalized in a bronze sculpture inside the state Capitol. Limbaugh is currently bleeding advertisers in the wake of a three-day diatribe demeaning a law student as a "slut" and a "prostitute" for her position on women's healthcare. The broadcaster lives in Palm Beach, Fla., but was born in Cape Girardeau, Mo.

“It’s not the 'Hall of Universally Loved Missourians,’” Tilley told the Kansas City Star in defense of his decision, now the subject of a petition drive to halt the move. “It’s the Hall of Famous Missourians.”

Foes of Eisenhower Memorial design hit snag

In the aftermath of President George W. Bush's disastrous escapade in Iraq, the right-wing clamor for a triumphalist monument to a wartime Republican president has gotten loud. But on Tuesday, the mounting political attack on architect Frank Gehry's more modest design for the Dwight D. Eisenhower Memorial in Washington slammed head-on into a wall.

The Associated Press obtained documents showing that David Eisenhower, the late president's grandson and the family representative on the memorial commission, had been an enthusiastic supporter of the project for a decade.

The younger Eisenhower joined the memorial commission in 2001. The AP reported that he "played a central role in selecting Gehry as the lead architect, according to the documents. David Eisenhower was the only person to serve on both the design jury and an evaluation board that recommended Gehry as the top choice to the full commission. When Gehry's selection was approved, David Eisenhower praised the 'integrity and excellence' of the selection process, according to the minutes."

Last July, Gehry told the commission that he was considering inclusion of a sculpture of the 34th president as a boy and metal "tapestry" images depicting Eisenhower's childhood home in Abilene, Kan., "bringing a representation of America's heartland directly into the heart of the nation's capital." Juxtaposed with sculptural reliefs of then-Gen. Eisenhower at D-day and later as president, the design would extol his role as leader of an army of ordinary citizen-soldiers who achieved greatness in World War II.

Commission member Sen. Pat Roberts (R-Kan.) offered a motion to support Gehry's concept, the AP reported, while "David Eisenhower seconded it, and it passed unanimously."

Eisenhower Memorial opponents' McCarthyite attack

The nostalgia patrol has been out in full force in recent weeks, shrieking like Hecuba over designs for the planned memorial to Dwight D. Eisenhower, 34th president of the United States, to be built just off the National Mall in Washington near the Air and Space Museum.

The 4-acre project by Los Angeles architect Frank O. Gehry was chosen by the U.S. Fine Arts Commission in 2010, and its general concept of a tree-filled park lined on three sides with woven metal-mesh "tapestries" hung from large stone pillars was approved last fall. It's set to go before the National Capital Planning Commission in the next several weeks.

What's the complaint? Gehry's design is contemporary, not Neoclassical.

Seriously. Welcome to the 21st century.

Having seen only photographs of the model, I'll let others weigh in on the full design. (Philip Kennicott's enthusiastic, Dec. 15 Washington Post review is the most informed.) Some members of the Eisenhower family have expressed concerns, but it's worth noting that the late president's role as family man is not why he's getting a national monument. The opinions of kin are no weightier than any other  American's.

Yet the loudest -- and most troubling -- noise is coming from something called the National Civic Art Society, a club founded in 2002 to wage culture war. (In Washington you can call yourself "national" and a distracted public might be duped into thinking it means something.) Never mind that the last faux-Neoclassical monument built on the Mall -- the ugly 2004 World War II Memorial -- is imperial kitsch worthy of a totalitarian state. This fusty guild wants more.

How determined are they? In a tinpot version of the McCarthyism that bedeviled Eisenhower's own administration, the Civic Art Society is willing to smear people to get it.

Jackie Kennedy papers reveal taste for fine art

Is it any surprise that Jacqueline Kennedy had sophisticated and exacting tastes when it came to fine arts? In case you needed proof, new papers released by the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston show the extent to which the first lady oversaw White House renovations, including securing paintings and other works of art.

The documents, released Monday, contain thousands of pages revealing new details about the Kennedys' first years in office and preparations for Jacqueline Kennedy's famous televised White House tour in 1962, which aired 50 years ago on this date. Tom Putnam, director of the Kennedy Library, said in a statement that the papers show the range of the first lady's understanding of "art, history and public diplomacy."

As reported in the Washington Post, the papers show that Kennedy created the White House Historical Assn. and the Fine Arts Committee within a month of moving into the White House. The documents also show that she formed relationships with philanthropists and collectors of fine antiques, including Walter Annenberg, who donated a portrait of Benjamin Franklin to the White House.

The Franklin portrait was painted in 1767 by David Martin. It was described in a document as "the first major acquisition of art for the White House" under the then-new Kennedy administration.

Jacqueline Kennedy also managed the transfer of four Cezanne paintings to the White House that had been hanging in the National Gallery of Art.

Photographing the American Wall

An ominous barrier meanders through a remote landscape appearing to float across the desert sands, reminiscent of a stark, modern-day Great Wall of China. The structure is not filled with ancient wonder but rather conjures up the controversy and hostility associated with the Berlin Wall. This barricade is the American wall that divides the U.S.-Mexico border.

Since 2006, fine art photographer Maurice Sherif has spent sweltering days documenting the wall that hopscotches 2,000 miles from the Pacific Ocean in California to the Gulf of Mexico in Texas. His collection of 96 photos, along with essays from scholars, can be viewed in his giant two-volume book, "The American Wall" (MS Zephyr Publishing).

Racist image of Michelle Obama based on Versailles painting

A baldly racist depiction of First Lady Michelle Obama that appeared Tuesday on a right-wing website is based on a 1775 portrait of Marie Antoinette by Jean-Baptiste André Gautier-Dagoty (1740-1786). The full-length painting hangs outside Paris in the Palace of Versailles.

The Internet image grafts Obama's face onto Gautier-Dagoty's lavish depiction of the French queen, dressed in full regalia. It also replaces the draped left arm of the young monarch, then barely 20, with a muscular black arm and shifts the position of the right hand to place it in front of a world globe.

The caricature of Obama as a profligate queen relies on the racist stereotype of an "uppity Negro," which emerged among slave masters in an earlier American era. Obama, born into a working-class Chicago family whose roots are traced to the pre-Civil War South, graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School, prior to holding several high-level positions in the academic and private sectors.

The racist image appeared Tuesday on the right-wing blog Gateway Pundit; the slur was later called out by Media Matters for America. A post by Gateway blogger Jim Hoft paired the picture with a clip of the first lady's guest appearance on a forthcoming episode of "iCarly," a Nickelodeon sit-com. In the script, Obama commends the cast for their support of military families. Responding to a cast member who mistakenly addresses her as "your excellency," the script has Obama jokingly reply, "I kinda like it." 

The doctored painting also turned up in August 2010 on the right-wing Instapundit website, where it apparently originated.