At the beginning of Lincoln we see the president addressing a small crowd at the opening of a new business. After he’s introduced he steps forward, lifts his top hat, pulls a paper out from under it, reads a short speech from it, and then folds the paper and puts it back inside his hat. It’s hilarious and humanizing, and gives the big hat a sense of usefulness.

The movie focuses on the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment and depicts the House of Representatives, where it’s reviewed and just barely approved, as one big frat party. Men laugh, jeer, applaud, thump tables, talk over one another, and shout down any designated speaker. It’s a clear-eyed vision of the “noisy and messy and complicated” (as our current president put it on the night of his reelection) process of democracy. These men, stymied by personal and regional interests, might not be so different from those who currently represent us in DC. What distinguishes them is their extravagant dress and hair. The gentlemen's fitted waistcoats and frock coats, high collars, and silk dressing gowns are as ostentatious as the ladies’ dresses. And their sideburns and moustaches are teased into outlandish puffs that make them look like talking animals from Dr. Seuss. Lincoln’s top hat, an icon of rustic simplicity, is also a theatrical piece of headwear that adds about a foot to the president’s already imposing frame. Could he, like his contemporaries, have been something of a peacock?

November 27, 2012 by Nalina Moses

If the medium really the message? This month I received a robocall from Bill Clinton, was invited to join LinkedIn by my younger brother, and learned that one of my freshman year college roommates had died on facebook. In each instance I felt that the person involved and the emotions they stirred up were far larger than the manner in which we were connecting.

A facebook friendship is something different from friendship. When someone tells me that they haven’t joined yet (won’t we all, eventually, join?) I note that it’s a great way to keep in touch with people we don’t keep in touch with. But what facebook friends post on their walls can be informative, entertaining and even moving. I had been following my college roommate track her illness on facebook for a year, and was looking forward to the day she announced its remission. She posted weekly about her treatments, her tiredness, and the moments of peace she found in between, all with bracing honesty. In the days after her death her facebook page become a living, shifting tribute as family, friends and colleagues posted photos, remembrances, and songs, while others pored over them and added comments. Many of the tributes, like this one, were self-involved, more about the contributor’s inability to express grief fully than about the person who died. The most meaningful ones revealed some small new thing about her: an anecdote, a card she made, a favorite expression. On my college roommate’s facebook wall family photos just weeks-old were mixed up with others from high school and professional events, and terse, formal platitudes were followed by skittish, lyrical rants. Each slight, random expression contributed to a portrait of her that’s fittingly vivid.

Calla Lily by Robert Mapplethorpe, 1984.

November 26, 2012 by Nalina Moses

What revelations there are at the Met’s show Regarding Warhol: Sixty Artists, Fifty Years aren’t about Warhol. They’re about the other fifty-nine artists, all Warhol-inspired, who’s work is featured. There are three Gerhard Richter paintings from the 1960’s that have the same superfine handling of paint and dreamy, blurred finish as the photo-realist work from the 90’s he's famous for. There are also some recent paintings by Luc Tuymans, whose spectral brushwork and coloring blunt their acrid politics. One 2005 portrait of Condoleeza Rice is rendered in a web of translucent, tissue-like layers that convey tenderness more than satire. These men paint magnificently.

But the most impressive of the other fifty-nine might be Sigmar Polke. From the handful of works collected here, dispersed in different galleries, he emerges as a singular voice. There’s a quilt on which the artist’s drawings and doodlings run against the patterns and piecing of fabric. It’s a rich, clotted surface that trumps both the pictorial and compositional pleasures of traditional painting. And there’s Plastic Tubs, which shows the things to us in workmanlike strokes and candy colors on a canvas that’s left largely, strangely blank. Polke’s quilt paintings prefigure the 80’s assemblages of David Salle and Julian Schnabel, which also combine discordant materials and images, but lack their all-out sensuality. Polke’s more conventional paintings, like Plastic Tubs, while fine, lack the ravishing surfaces of Richters’ and Tuymans’. Regardless of the medium Polke, like Warhol, remains supremely cool. He overturns expectations with wit and without winking.

Plastik-Wannen [Plastic Tubs], 1964, by Sigmar Polke.

November 21, 2012 by Nalina Moses

At the closing reception for the 2012 Summit for New York City there was, set out right beside the bar, a site model showing a stretch of midtown Manhattan. One cartoonishly futuristic structure, stepped at the base and capped with four vertical fins, rose high above the fray of anonymous office buildings. “What is that?," a woman scowled as she walked by, heading for a refill. That, I found out later, was Norman Foster’s winning competition entry for a new office tower at 425 Park Avenue, which he’d unveiled just a few days earlier. The other architects invited to submit their designs for the plot, just a block north of the stately Villard Houses, were Rem Koolhaas, Richard Rogers and Zaha Hadid.

Their entries are hearteningly different from one another. Rogers proposed a structure with open, intermediate floors planted with pine forests. Koolhaas proposed an enigmatic, worm-like tower that twists forty-five degrees as it rises. Hadid proposed a square, metal-clad tower that swells outward at the bottom to meet the street, like an upside-down mushroom cloud. It’s the slickest and most sophisticated of the entries, and also the most fitting. The tower, symmetrical on four sides, merges her personal, idiosyncratic formal vocabulary with that of a conventional office tower. It’s distinctive – a building that looks like no other building – without being aggressively avant-garde. It has a molten, organic feeling and yet it’s constructed from standard elements. In one simple volume, Hadid has shaped a structure that projects the modern, moneyed gloss of midtown Manhattan.

November 20, 2012 by Nalina Moses