Word: masterwork
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This botched masterwork is titled Epitaph, and its composer was Charles Mingus, the protean jazz bassist who died in 1979 at age 56. "There has been nothing like it in jazz, before or since," says Gunther Schuller, the multifaceted composer, conductor and musicologist who edited the score, which was discovered among Mingus' papers after his death. Schuller directed a proper world premiere of the work at New York City's Lincoln Center last year. (CBS has issued a recording of the performance.) He was at the podium last week for another Manhattan performance, which was to be reprised...
...that the breakup of the Trump marriage isn't a story. It is, and it is appropriate to have a little fun with it. After all, the Trump saga -- the ascendancy of Donald Trump as a business power, of Mr. and Mrs. Trump as social doyens -- has been a masterwork of media manipulation and self-promotion, abetted by a celebrity-worshiping press corps. But to watch a purportedly serious newspaper like Newsday report breathlessly in its lead story that "hotel records show that Maples paid no bills" is to discover where priorities in the news business are heading these days...
...first several decades of its existence, Union Station was a wonder, a glowing masterwork of civic architecture that the authorities maintained and everybody used. Its redemption today is salutary not just as an example of impeccable restoration but also as a reminder that in this age of retrenchment and diminished dreams, ambitious federal public works can still amount to something more than strategic-weapons systems and superhighways...
Thus it is with the gifted Canadian filmmaker David Cronenberg. Images of corporal corruption -- of malefic birth and voracious organs -- stalk his They Came from Within, Rabid, The Brood, Scanners and Videodrome. Heads explode, and monsters issue from the wombs of women. In Cronenberg's masterwork, The Fly, one man wages a heroic, doomed struggle against physical and moral degeneration; his body has a twisted mind of its own. The catalog of punishments seems medieval -- Savonarola meets Bosch -- even as it taps baby boomers' fears of decaying vitality and eviscerated dreams. For Cronenberg the body is a haunted house whose...
...hottest bidding was for Line, a 1920 minimalist masterwork in black and white by Alexander Rodchenko (1891-1956). It went for $567,000 to David Juda of London's Annely Juda Gallery, one of a growing number of Western dealers specializing in Russian art. Several other Rodchenko works drew high bids, including the cubist-inspired Composition, 1916. The second highest price of $ the sale, however, was fetched by a contemporary Soviet artist, Grisha Bruskin, 43, who has been harassed by the KGB for displaying his paintings to foreigners. An anonymous buyer paid $416,000 for his Fundamental Lexicon, a witty...