Woody Allen’s Lifestyles of the Rich

Saw Midnight in Paris last night. (The next youngest person in the theater was probably three times my daughter’s age, at least.) It was a good one — Owen Wilson did a creditable job as Woody Allen’s mouthpiece, and the modernist name dropping worked well. But more than anything the movie, especially the present-day sequences, reminded me that Allen’s most enduring concern — more than his neuroses or intellectual/anti-intellectual pretensions, urbanophilia, May-September romanticism or even humor — is illustrating the lifestyles of the very rich. That first struck me with Hannah and Her Sisters, but with each movie, good, bad

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Fast Art: The Pointlessness of so Much

Art Chicago is an orgy of fast art. Scores of galleries haul out scads of work so visitors can plow up and down endless aisles burdened with art regressing toward the mean. The work, mostly by living artists, is mostly a blur. Occasionally something lends a booth enough gravity to slow you down, more often than not modernist paintings that you’ll never see in a museum since they’re privately owned (and not necessarily museum-quality pieces even if they’re museum-quality artists). This year the highlights for me were Chicago Imagist pieces of relatively recent vintage – works by Karl Wirsum, Gladys

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John Margolies, Roadside America book cover

Book Review: John Margolies, Roadside America

John Margolies, Roadside America, edited by Jim Heimann, with contributions by Phil Patton, C. Ford Peatross and photos by John Margolies. Taschen, 288 pages, about 400 color photos, 2010. ISBN: 978-3-8365-1173-5. Hard cover $39.99. The enthusiasm for vernacular expression that began flowering in the United States in the 1970s never quite gelled into a unified movement. Yet a new generation did learn to value the work of self-taught artists and a sizable coterie of writers, photographers, architects and others discovered an exterior landscape whose aesthetic dimension was almost entirely accidental, but all the more striking for it.

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