When Peggy Noonan, who was one of President Ronald Reagan’s speechwriters, writes in The Wall Street Journal, that Taylor Swift should be Time magazine’s Person of the Year, you know that Swift has captured the zeitgeist.
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A gaze of their own: women rethinking art history
In the late-20th and early-21st centuries, an age of cultural appropriation that has seen minorities adapt and reinvent the masterpieces of Western civilization, women artists have reasserted the so-called “female gaze,” not only by creating wholly original works but by reclaiming the art historical canon, either interpolating themselves and women arts leaders into iterations of great paintings or imagining men from a woman’s perspective.
A new exhibit at the Lehman College Art Gallery explores this subject through the prism of 19th-century French art.
Read MoreThe Grand Slam of indictments
If indictments were tennis, former President Donald J. Trump would be Rod Laver.
Rod “the Rocket” was the last man to win all four Slams — the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon and the US Open — in a calendar year. He did it twice — in 1962 and 1969.
Trump, however, won’t be lifting and kissing any trophies. Instead of appearing on the court, he’ll be in the courts of four different venues — New York City, Miami, Washington, D.C. and Atlanta, where he’s been charged with everything from paying hush money to a porn star to obstruction, violation of voting rights and racketeering.
Read MoreTo live and die in L..A. -- Greta Gerwig's 'Barbie'
“Barbie” — the billion-dollar blockbuster that has fashion and interior designers thinking pink and movie theaters seeing green (as in dollars) — is a rather deceptive movie. It starts out as a kind of beach blanket battle-of-the-sexes rom-com that quickly builds into a poignant dramedy of what it means not to be a woman or a man but human.
Read MoreMoving forward: the endurance of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis
What would Jacqueline Lee Bouvier Kennedy Onassis make of J. Randy Taraborrelli’s “Jackie: Public, Private, Secret” (St. Martin’s Press, $35, 439 pages) — out Tuesday, July 18, 10 days before what would’ve been her 94th birthday?
Read More'Vertigo' and the idea of the other
Alfred Hitchcock’s 1958 film “Vertigo” has reached what The Washington Post called in its reappraisal ‘Medicare age,’which got me thinking about my favorite movie — one that regularly appears on lists for the greatest, or one of the greatest, films to date. But is it, as The Post suggests, a story for our #MeToo times or rather a more complex tale of the human desire to project onto others our own dreams, fears and desires?
Read MoreKing and Queen to pawn in a game of love and death
We’ve got our teacup all set for the coronation of King Charles III and Queen Camilla on Saturday, May 6, but what we’ve really been obsessing about is a distant relative of the king’s by way of another Charles — Charles I of England.
He was a direct ancestor of Louis XVI of France, whose marriage to a certain notorious Austrian archduchess is the subject of the revisionist, feminist “Marie Antoinette,” finishing its first season on PBS Sunday, May 7. Quite the royal weekend.
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