There's a nice review of Nan Goldin's latest collection of photographs, The Devil's Playground, in the Times. [In a strange coincidence, it cites Michaelangelo Antonioni's Blowup as a possible progenitor of Goldin's investigations of intimacy; the same Antonioni feature is also mentioned in an article this week about the saddest film ever made, as an exemplar of the loss of faith in photographic truth since the world first watched Zapruder's 26 seconds of footage of JFK's assassination forty years ago.]
The 'Fesser and I were fortunate enough to sneak into the traveling exhibit of The Devil's Playground at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal this summer, just before the museum closed for a private party. [We weren't charged admission, and we snagged some hors d'oeuvres on the way out. I love Montréal.] The show was beautiful and moving, presenting photographs and video that spanned Goldin's career, including some especially strong new series of portraits and landscapes.
Be sure to watch the accompanying slide show on the Times site. Some of the images overlap with the slide installation, "Heart Beat," which was at the center of the Goldin exhibition. Bjork and the Brodsky Quartet were commisioned to record the eerily moving "Prayer of the Heart" by classical composer John Tavener, which accompanied the images, but these photographs stand up in silence, too.
Movie recommendation: High Art