Lincoln Center's plaza is Met-centric, giving visitors a self-important thrill as they stride toward the Met's pompous façade.
But that this is not the only, nor even the most interesting part of the artist's story is amply demonstrated by "Van Gogh and Nature," an important, actually thrilling current exhibition at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
Our reviewer, Lee Siegel, found it a "thrilling, important novel," by turns "eloquent, crude, despairing and heartbrokenly hopeful".
He joined MAO in January 2009, and one of his triumphs, following his Karla Black show, was curating a thrilling, important exhibition of Howard Hodgkin's recent work, "Time and Place".
The book became a best-seller, found countless new readers, and, maybe most important of all, thrilled its author... His art was filled with the world's troubles, but it never despaired.
And Mr. Levine, his Met forces and some important soloists in thrilling form, including Deborah Voigt, Ben Heppner and Violeta Urmana, had Schoenberg's thickly scored, harmonically wayward, post-Wagnerian "Gurrelieder" sounding like the most translucent, lush and sumptuously lyrical music imaginable.
Let the avoidance of boredom and the fitful, all-important accumulation of "thrill points" commence: Opal brings tales of exotic travels, and, best of all, she's an artist, which dovetails nicely with Judy's bric-a-brac aesthetic and gift for fancifully rendered lists.
By the end of this thrilling, important novel, which is by turns eloquent, crude, despairing and heartbrokenly hopeful, Fanon has come to be more than a revolutionary (and one, incidentally, who presciently described both the colonizer's morally deluded brutality and the colonized's tendency to destroy themselves with sectarian violence rising from lacerated consciences).
And how do you differentiate between important users and thrill-seeking adolescents?
Exclusive news stories, backstage passes, meeting important people and the thrill of the deadline: the life of a journalist seems full of excitement.
All these tribes are racing one another, at high speed, towards the point where the anticipation of a film becomes more important than the simple thrill of discovery.
