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Los Gatos Gioia Italian Art and Products provides professional and personal gifts for the holiday season online and in-store.

Los Gatos, CA (PRWEB) November 05, 2011

Los Gatos Gioia Italian Art and Products is a specialty online company, providing fine Italian art and unique Italian gifts to destinations near and far. Founded in 2006, the company derives from a strong tradition of old world hospitality, time-honored craftsmanship and a passion for the Italian art. With the holiday season rapidly approaching, Gioia Italian Art and Products have added various professional and personal gifts to its stock and have made these items available online through their website www.gioiacompany.com.

We wanted to provide our clients with quality gift giving options with fine art Italian products at affordable prices, said Kathy Winkelman of Gioia Italian Art and Products. It is important to enjoy the giving. Our business model is Joy for Those Who Give and Those Who Receive. There is great joy in giving especially when you are giving an item that is made with love and care by an Italian Artist or Italian American Artist.

Gioia Company has several gift ideas for this holiday season. They expect some of the most popular items to include Gold Leaf Wine Glasses, Venetian Murano Glass Bracelets, Sorrento Inlaid Wood, Ceramic Pizza Plates, Ceramic Coasters, Antiqued Wine Bottle Sculpture, Olive Oil, Artisan Glass Bowl and many more. These items and thousands of others are now available online.

At Gioia Company, they pride themselves on the many hours spent researching Italian collectables, gifts and art to ensure they carry top-ranking pieces that remain at the top of their class. Each handcrafted Italian gift originates from a passionate artist that carries love for their art and keeping Italian artistic traditions alive. They wish to extend these timeless pieces to their nationwide clientele in efforts to bring a bit of Italian warmth into any home.

For more information on Gioia Italian Art and Products and their products, visit them online at www.gioiacompany.com or give them a call at (408) 640-6628. Customers may also like them on Facebook. Search: Gioia Italian Art and Products.

They are located at 16395 Roseleaf Court Los Gatos CA 95032. While they are mainly an online company, they do take appointments to see clients in house.

About Gioia Italian Art and Products

Gioia Company Italian Art and Products, of Los Gatos, provides one-of-a kind Italian gifts and art. Their selections are all handcrafted and made by family businesses or Italian artisans. They carry Italian jewelry, furniture, art, dinnerware and much more.

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Tags: Art

BENTONVILLE, Ark. | Itamp;#x92;s fairly easy to sense that this is a company town. You can drive the commercial strip of Walton Boulevard, the US 71 Business Route, past Wal-Martamp;#x92;s world headquarters and numerous corporate outposts: Wal-Mart Logistics, Wal-Mart Global Support and the like.lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; In the town square thereamp;#x92;s the Walton Five and Dime museum, commemorating the rise of retailer Sam Walton and clan. And all over are the glowing blue signs of Arvest Bank, a financial arm of the Waltons.lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; The family name, businesses and influence have much to do with the fast-growth aura of Bentonville and neighboring towns along Interstate 540 in Arkansasamp;#x92; northwest corner. lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; And now the family that built its retail empire on high volume and discount pricing is delivering something completely different from its usual consume-dispose-and-do-it-again world.lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; After a series of VIP and member previews in the coming days, on Friday, the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, a place that invites reflection, cultural dialogue and learning, opens to the public astride a tree-lined creek bed in a patch of family acreage just a few blocks from Bentonvilleamp;#x92;s town square. lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; Local merchants and residents have been gearing up for the museumamp;#x92;s opening, expecting an influx of tourists and their dollars. lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; amp;#x93;I canamp;#x92;t yet say what itamp;#x92;s going to do, but I canamp;#x92;t imagine anything but good things happening,amp;#x94; says Josh Milton, manager of the Phat Tire Bike Shop on the square. amp;#x93;Iamp;#x92;m glad thereamp;#x92;s going to be more culture in the area.amp;#x94;lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; A couple of blocks away, site work is under way for a $23 million, 100-room hotel, expected to open by the end of 2012. Classy new bistros have been sprouting near the square, and the local Chamber of Commerce projects an influx of 250,000 annual visitors.lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; Crystal Bridges was spearheaded by Alice L. Walton, daughter of Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton and his wife, Helen. lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; So far the museum building and the extensive holdings of paintings and sculptures it has acquired in the last six years amount to an investment far exceeding $400 million, according to IRS documents. In addition, in recent months the Walton Family Foundation has pledged $800 million in endowment and acquisition funds amp;#x97; thought to be a record-setting gift to an American museum amp;#x97; and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. added $20 million to ensure Crystal Bridges can operate with free admission.lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; amp;#x93;I think we all want to give something from the heart,amp;#x94; Alice Walton, 62, said in a brief recent interview in the museumamp;#x92;s boardroom. amp;#x93;This part of the world means a great deal to me. I want people to have something that we didnamp;#x92;t have when I was growing up.amp;#x94;lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; Walton is listed by Forbes magazine as the 10th richest American, with assets of $20.9 billion. A cutting-horse competitor, she now lives on a ranch near Fort Worth, Texas. She enlisted her Bentonville siblings and some of their children to support the museum, and it was the younger generation, she said, who gave their blessing to put the museum on family land.lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; Walton has been collecting American art for the last 20 years or so, buying major works and making waves at auctions and in private sales. She has become such a force in the art world that only the wealthiest of institutions and collectors amp;#x97; Bill Gates, for example, is another prominent buyer of American art amp;#x97; can compete with her for trophy acquisitions in their increasingly rare appearances on the market.lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; So now her museum is opening with a collection of paintings and sculptures that encompass an American story that stretches from colonial times to today. lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; amp;#x93;Itamp;#x92;s a terrific collection,amp;#x94; says Margi Conrads, curator of American art at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; For a book about Crystal Bridges highlights, Conrads contributed essays about the museumamp;#x92;s Winslow Homer works. While Conrads is familiar with virtually all of the pieces in the collection, she said that having them in one place provides new opportunities for exploring art and ideas.lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; amp;#x93;What is really exciting and interesting to me is to see the body of work together, as a totality, to see it as a collection hung together. amp;#x85; Iamp;#x92;m really interested to see how the works talk to each other, and as a result of that, the new insights I gain.amp;#x94;lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; Don Wilkison, a Kansas City artist and hydrologist with the US Geological Survey, became a member of the museum just to take advantage of a preview opportunity next week. The museum will be open to members for 24 hours straight Wednesday through Thursday, and he and some friends are driving down to see it at 3 amlt;/pgt;lt;pgt; Wilkison remembers Bentonville as a place to drive through on family trips to Hot Springs.lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; amp;#x93;The idea that there is a first-class art museum there is really intriguing to me,amp;#x94; Wilkison said. amp;#x93;You donamp;#x92;t get many opportunities to visit museums in the middle of the night, so this was an opportunity to look on your own terms, or different terms.amp;#x94;lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; Many art museums across the country, including those in Kansas City, have added significant expansions in the last decade or two, but few new museums have been built out of whole cloth.lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; amp;#x93;There have not been many openings, certainly not on this scale, in the last decade,amp;#x94; said Dewey Blanton, a spokesman for the American Association of Museums.lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; Crystal Bridges, like the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, is considered a single-donor museum, and thus belongs in the lineage, Blanton said, of such institutions as the Getty Museum in Los Angeles and the Frick in New York. lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; With its unusually deep pockets, Crystal Bridges is bound to increase its collection for years to come, and its officials hope to expand partnerships with other museums in the region to share art, exhibits and educational opportunities.lt;/pgt;lt;pgt;Walton said she expected thereamp;#x92;d be great opportunities to work with museums in, say, St. Louis, Kansas City and Tulsa.lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; amp;#x93;I hope we can get a Midwestern art trail going,amp;#x94; she said. amp;#x93;That would be fun.amp;#x94;lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; Conrads, of the Nelson-Atkins, said that she knows of at least two art institutions, one on each coast, planning patron trips next spring to Bentonville.lt;/pgt;lt;pgt; amp;#x93;And as long as they are in the neighborhood,amp;#x94; Conrads said, amp;#x93;they will also spend some time with us.amp;#x94;lt;/pgt;lt;pgt;lt;stronggt;lt;span class=infobox-headgt;CULTURAL DESTINATION lt;/spangt;lt;/stronggt;lt;/pgt;lt;pgt;The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opens to the public Friday in Bentonville, Ark., a three-hour drive south on US 71 from Kansas City. Because of high demand, free tickets will be available only by timed reservation at least through the end of the year and are amp;#x93;sold outamp;#x94; for opening day. Make reservations online (crystalbridges.org) or by phone (479-418-5700) between 10 am and 4 pm Monday through Friday.lt;/pgt;lt;pgt;lt;/divgt;

Tags: Art

Terra Kulture MD Bolanle Austen-Peters

Art as a viable investment option is the theme of the First Abuja Visual Art Auction that is being organised by the Mydrim Gallery and Terra Kulture.

The joint auction by the two Lagos-based galleries will feature a line-up of diverse art as it opens to audiences on November 17 at the Summerset Hotel in Abuja.

The novel auction will also be projecting Nigerian art to the world as it seeks to stimulate individual and corporate investment in visual arts.

Disclosing the collaboration at a press briefing that held earlier in the week, the organisers also said Omoba Yemisi Shyllon will be auctioneer for the initial edition of the auction. The seasoned collector who has had similar roles at the Terra Kulture Art Auction said 80 works that cut across various eras of Nigerian art will be available to buyers under a suitable ambience.

The works were carefully selected by our arts committee. We feel we have a commitment and duty to Nigerians to see art as a commodity. All over stocks are not doing well. All around the world art is picking up as a viable investment instrument. We want to use the auction to redirect investment attitudes.

Speaking on the partnership with the Mydrim Gallery, Terra Kulture MD Bolanle Austen-Peters said such is necessary for the visual arts realm to thrive.

Our decision to collaborate with Mydrim is informed by it being one of the oldest galleries.
They have built a brand and if we are going to do business, we must synergise. This is one of the strongest partnerships and we must encourage it between art galleries and collectors.

Participating galleries at the show include the Nkem Gallery, Signature Beyond and Frame Masters.

Tags: Art

The close and competitive working-relationship between Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque in the radical, game-changing development of Cubist painting is a standard story in the history of Modern art. Braque, conjuring a bit of mountaineer melodrama, said, We were like climbing partners roped together. Picasso, employing more than a hint of sexist condescension, said that during the most intense period of give-and-take growth, Braque worked as if he were Picasso#39;s wife.

The last time the story was told in a museum exhibition was more than 20 years ago. New York#39;s Museum of Modern Art pulled out all the stops for Picasso and Braque: Pioneering Cubism, brilliantly untangling a knotty artistic revolution that opened the door wide for#0160;work ranging#0160;from total abstraction to anti-art Dada. Nearly 400 paintings, drawings, collages, sculptures and prints began with the run-up to 1907#39;s Les Demoiselles d#39;Avignon, the Spaniard#39;s manifesto in reaction to Matisse, which blew away Braque when he saw it. The show then went on to survey in exhaustive detail the dialog between them until 1914, when the French painter went off to war and suffered grievous wounds that nearly killed him.

We#39;re unlikely to see anything like that definitive MOMA presentation again anytime soon. But now the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, have joined forces to offer a centennial look centered on the year 1911 — the most intensive in the two artists#39; working relationship. Picasso and Braque: The Cubist Experiment, 1910-1912, seen already in Texas and now in California, shines light on the movement#39;s analytical phase. Call it Cubism 101, a primer on the start of something big.

The show is very small — just nine canvases by Picasso and five by Braque. The inevitable gaps are partly filled by almost all the etchings and drypoint prints they made at the time. Ten prints are by Picasso, exceptionally prolific throughout his long lifetime, while eight are by the more deliberate Braque.

Among this modest selection, however, are some of the finest Cubist paintings either artist made. They#0160; start with Picasso#39;s fresh — and decidedly strange — Man With a Clarinet, loaned from Madrid#39;s Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum and prominently installed on the center wall.

Tags: Art

HS: When we wrote the first script for “Harold amp; Kumar Go to White Castle,” there hadnt been a movie starring Asian Americans before unless it was a low budget movie specifically targeted for Asian Americans. It was going through our mind, “Oh, are they going to say, ‘This is really funny, but we cant make it because theyre Asian? If you just make one of them black or one of them white, then we can do it.’” I think for us, what we loved most about it was that they were characters that you hadnt seen on the big screen before but exactly like you and totally relatable.

JH: And the thing that was really great for us was that when wefirst sat down with the people who became the producers on the movie, Greg Shapiro and Nathan Kahane, what they said to us immediately was, Were not going to ask you to change this. This will not be ‘David and Jason Go to McDonalds.’”

ER: “A Very Harold amp; Kumar 3D Christmas” has all the imagery and music you’d expect from a holiday movie, but it also has all the inappropriateness of a “Harold amp; Kumar” movie. How did you approach packaging those two together?

HS: If you look at Christmas movies, there are certain things in them that lend themselves to a “Harold amp; Kumar” movie. In particular, the more out-of-this-world things like Santa Claus and flying reindeer.

JH: But also the themes of friendship and togetherness and family. Those are things that youll see in the “Harold amp; Kumar” movies. The heart in a “Harold amp; Kumar” movie is always in the right place, and the heart of a Christmas movies always in the right place. And what was so perfect for us was with “Harold amp; Kumar,” you like to be able to push the envelope. When you have this warm and fuzzy pure holiday like Christmas, to give it the “Harold amp; Kumar” flavor and treatment and go to those places — we thought that [would] bring the biggest laughs.

ER: What was the allure of making this movie in 3-D?

HS: Were not huge 3-D fans in general. Were very skeptical of 3-D. We hear Hollywoods making all these 3-D movies, and were like, “Why? Why are they doing it?” When we wrote our first draft of this, it was not intended to be in 3-D. But when the studio suggested 3-D, we actually took a look at the script, and we were like, “You know what? Theres a lot of scenes here that can actually be enhanced with 3-D.” And also, it is a stoner movie so theres just something about things flying out at you that can add to the trippy-ness that we sometimes try to do in the movies. And it’s a chance to kind of comment on — in our opinion — the ridiculousness of how Hollywood is using 3-D.

ER: You worked on “American Reunion” while production for “Harold amp; Kumar Christmas” was going on. What’s the biggest difference between the two when it comes to writing for you?

JH: The difference between “Harold amp; Kumar” and “American Pie” is tone in a lot of ways. Both franchises are trying to be crowd-pleasers and get the big laughs, but in “American Pie,” youre not going to go to the surreal places, youre not going to ride the cheetah, youre not going to have a baby doing drugs.

HS: Its just grounded, and all the comedy in it comes from character, whereas in “Harold amp; Kumar,” the characters Harold and Kumar are grounded, but everything else around them gets more and more surreal as the movie goes on, and the comedy can come from anywhere. There’s no rules. So theres a certain freedom and an awesomeness to writing a “Harold amp; Kumar” movie, but with “American Reunion,” you get this relatability that you probably wouldnt get in the wild, crazy “Harold amp; Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay.”

ER: You two went to high school together. Did you draw on common experiences at reunions when writing “American Reunion”?

JH: Our high school reunion didnt really come together, but we did draw from the characters in “American Pie” that are like people that we know. Some of its just sort of like going back to weddings of friends where you get a large sample of people fromyour high school, or being in touch with them on Facebook and sort of seeing where people are.

HS: We had those types of guys [like "American Pie" characters] in our high school. When you watch the first American Pie movie youre like… I know that jock whos kind of sweet and has a girlfriend, and I know that weird off-beat kid. This time youre watching the movie and its like, “Thats the guy who has marriage issues, and this is the guy who peaked in high school.” Its the same characters you like but sort of a whole new world that youre relating to.

ER: Is there anything you feel is off-limits in your writing, or is everything fair game in a “nothing is sacred” approach?

HS: I think our goal is to make a big, broad audience really happy, and so something like getting a baby high — I know that theres some people that wont like that, but we feel confident that enough people will like it. Sometimes Ill say something, or Jon will say something, and Ill be, “That crosses the line in terms of I just think people would be offended more than they’ll think it’s funny.”

JH: Believe it or not, well be like, “Oh, thats too low class.”

HS: Theres an art to stupid comedy. Theres an art to offensive comedy, and I think the key is its just gotta make you laugh. It can be a fart joke, or it can be some sort of racial joke or a religious joke. In the right context, they can be great. In the wrong context, they can be horrible. You have to be the arbiter.

ER: What’s one crazy situation you’d like to put Harold and Kumar in as you continue the franchise?

JH: Theres so many. When the studio approached us about doing a third movie, the idea we wanted to do the most was the Christmas movie, but they were like, “OK, well, what else do you have?” And we had this idea called “Harold amp; Kumar and the Legend of Easy Es Stash,” and it was basically like a “National Treasure” in the hip-hop world where Easy E, before he died, had the best weed ever, and he had his number one go hide it somewhere.

HS: All the clues are hidden in these hip-hop lyrics, and they have to try to figure it out. That didnt end up working out, but thats an idea thats crossed our minds, so you can imagine what other ideas would be.

JH: Weve got plenty when it comes to this franchise.

A Very Harold amp; Kumar 3D Christmas stars John Cho, Kal Penn and Neil Patrick Harris and is now playing in general release.

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American Reunion moves to reunite original American Pie cast, Stifler included

– Emily Rome

Photo: From left, John Cho, Neil Patrick Harris and Kal Penn in A Very Harold amp; Kumar 3D Christmas. Credit: Darren Michaels / Warner Bros. Pictures

Tags: Art

For contemporary art in the 1950s and ’60s, there was New York and that was it. So the old story goes. But it’s wrong. If there’s one thing that recent globally minded art history has taught us, it’s that after World War II, new art, and lots of it, was turning up in cities every­where. Los Angeles was one, and in the late ’50s, almost to its own surprise, it had a big art moment. That moment, which lasted about a decade, is the subject of “Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s,” by Hunter Drohojowska-Philp. The book has much to recommend it: it’s fast-paced, well researched, accessibly anecdotal. But as an account of a still under­studied episode in American postwar culture, it’s oddly lopsided. It corrects one imbalance — the “only in New York” idea — but ignores ­others.

REBELS IN PARADISE

The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s

By Hunter Drohojowska-Philp

Illustrated. 263 pp. A John Macrae Book/Henry Holt & Company. $32.50.

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• Excerpt: ‘Rebels in Paradise’
  (August 19, 2011)

The story starts in 1955, when Los Angeles was a boomtown thanks to movies and the aerospace industry, but a cultural backwater. There were plenty of homegrown artists, but few galleries and no modern art museum. Into this bare terrain came a couple of driven personalities. One of them, Walter Hopps, preppy and bespectacled, was a college dropout and art addict. The other, Edward Kienholz, was a bearish farm boy-artist with a peppery temperament. On the surface, their alliance was an unlikely one — Mr. Peepers meets Bigfoot — but it worked.

Both wanted to get some art action going in the city, and in 1957 they pooled their meager resources to open the Ferus Gallery. Initially conceived as a showcase for local talent, Ferus expanded its scope after an early shift in personnel. Kienholz bailed; he really didn’t want to run a business. Hopps, a person of pathologically impractical habits, didn’t know how to. So when an amiable former actor and New York transplant named Irving Blum turned up and bought out Kienholz’s share, he became the gallery’s functional director and made its range of artists ­bicoastal.

These three men are recurrent figures in Drohojowska-­Philp’s narrative, which pans back and forth in time. Around them, or around Ferus, circulated a constellation of figures who would become the city’s first glamorous art stars, among them John Altoon, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, Robert Irwin, Craig Kauffman, Ed Moses, Ken Price and a young Oklahoman, Ed Ruscha. The Ferus scene, as described in the book, started out fairly relaxed and mildly countercultural. Even its hardest-working members put in serious surfing time. After all, why worry about shows and sales if there was no market? In line with this laid-back affect, everyone made a big thing of not caring about what was going on with art in Manhattan, though in fact, many Los Angeles artists in the ’50s were fixated on Abstract Expressionism. Some of the Ferus artists were too, but what distinguished them was that they managed to work that style out of their systems and come up with something new.

Painters like Bengston, and sculptors like Bell and Kauffman, stayed with abstraction but eliminated gesture and psychological drama. Instead, they developed a kind of surfboard look: plain geometric forms, with immaculately smooth surfaces that took on an interior glow, particularly in sculptures made from glass, or from plastic, which, after years of restricted military use, had become available on the popular market.

The sculpture — which came to be called Light and Space art or, disparagingly, Finish Fetish — had similarities to the minimalism of Donald Judd and others on the East Coast. One difference was plastic, which minimalism abjured. Another was attitude. Judd loaded his stripped-down aesthetic with a materialist rhetoric; the West Coast artists gave theirs a spiritual overlay. And there was Pop, which appeared simultaneously but differently in Los Angeles and New York. In 1962, Hopps, by then a curator at the Pasadena Art Museum (now the Norton Simon), organized the first-ever group show of Pop work in the United States. That same year, Ferus gave Andy Warhol his first commercial gallery show, made up of Campbell’s soup can paintings. And Los Angeles was already on a Pop track of its own, with Ruscha’s paintings of commercial pack­aging and signage.

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Holland Cotter, an art critic for The Times, won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2009.

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Posted at 11:33 AM ET, 08/19/2011
Hoover lands at the Art Institute of Chicago
By Allen McDuffee

The Hoover Institution has in impressive collection of 120,000 political posters, twenty-six of which have been put on loan to the Art Institute of Chicago for their exhibit, Windows in the War: Soviet TASS Posters at Home and Abroad, 1941-1945.

“It is very unusual for Hoover to send one-of-a kind items off campus,” said Hoover Institution Library and Archives director Richard Sousa in a released statement. “But we felt the opportunity to partner with such a prestigious institution and to offer so many people the chance to see artistic history, firsthand, just made sense. It’s great exposure for one of our most important collections.”

By Allen McDuffee
 | 
11:33 AM ET, 08/19/2011

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Tags: Art

How many layers are there to human thought? Sometimes in art, just as in people’s conversations, we’re aware of only one at a time. On other occasions, though, we realize just how many layers can be in simultaneous action, and we’re given a sense of both revelation and mystery. When a choreographer responds to music — when one artist reacts in detail to another — the sensation of multilayering can affect us as an insight not just into dance but into the regions of the mind.

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Andrea Mohin/The New York Times

From left, Maile Okamura, Spencer Ramirez, Aaron Loux and Rita Donahue of the Mark Morris Dance Group in “Festival Dance,” at the Rose Theater in Lincoln Center.

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William Smith III and fellow members of the Mark Morris Dance Group in “Renard.”

The triple bill by the Mark Morris Dance Group at the Rose Theater, presented on Thursday night as part of the Mostly Mozart Festival, moves from simple to complex, and from plain entertainment to an astonishingly beautiful and intricate demonstration of genius. Mr. Morris’s latest work, “Renard,” is a good-humored, but nonetheless thoroughly flimsy, romp to Stravinsky’s score of that title. But in “Festival Dance” (2011), the evening’s second piece, he meets Hummel’s Piano Trio in E (Op. 83) with some of his most elaborate tapestries of dance motifs and stage geometries. The danciest piece on the program, this has a generous energy and charm that win it the loudest applause.

“Socrates” (2010), which closed the program, is a calm and objective work that has no special dance excitement and whips up no vehement audience reaction. Its beauty, however, is extraordinary. It’s possible to trace in it terms of arithmetic, geometry, dualism, epistemology and ontology, and it acts as a demonstration of art and as a reflection of life, philosophy and death.

Though Mr. Morris has choreographed a number of classics, he made three works between 1988 and 1993 that have stood as demonstrations of his capability for greatness: “L’Allegro, il Penseroso ed il Moderato,” “Dido and Aeneas” and “Grand Duo.” In the past 15 years he has made very few that should be considered classics. But “Socrates,” for all its hushed objectivity of manner, surely is on the same summit as “L’Allegro,” “Dido” and “Grand Duo.” Here the word genius truly is in order. Watching, we feel that our era is blessed to contain such a composition.

It’s too bad that “Renard,” for all its goofy fun, feels like only a thin first sketch of a cartoon. Stravinsky’s score is much more than that: a barnyard fable told as a cantata, with the voices chanting or uttering in a style that Stravinsky developed further in his better-known work “Les Noces.” It also features a 15-piece orchestra, including a cimbalom (Hungarian dulcimer) providing a strange, often brittle, array of sonorities. It’s not a dance-friendly score, but Bronislava Nijinska (1922) and George Balanchine (1947) staged “Renard.” Stravinsky spoke of his admiration of Nijinska’s version in the book “Memories and Commentaries”: “Her acrobatic ‘Renard’ coincided with my ideas, as well as with the real — not realistic — décors.” He added: “Renard was also a real Russian satire. The animals saluted very like the Russian Army (Orwell would have liked this), and there was always an underlying significance to their movements.”

Mr. Morris’s animals are perkily individualized, but they amount to little. Best are the three perplexed hens, in skirts and heeled shoes, never doing the same staccato movements of head and shoulders at the same time. The few dance movements occur mostly on the peripheries of the main action and seem more coarsely shaped than is customary in Mr. Morris’s work.

The staging’s best features are the costumes by Maira Kalman, the children’s book illustrator and artist who worked with Mr. Morris in 2000 on his “Four Saints in Three Acts.” Her animals are dressed as humans, with a few animal details: individual tails, a headdress for the cock and large letters spelling out identities on each animal’s shirt (“FO” on the front, “X” on the back, and so on). Stefan Asbury conducts the MMDG Music Ensemble, with Matthew Anderson, Zachary Finkelstein, John Buffett and David Salsbery Fry singing.

When “Festival Dance” was new at the Mark Morris Dance Center in March, it was in a wide, shallow space very close to the audience. Now it is danced with a green-to-blue backdrop suggesting verdure merging into sky, and the six male-female couples must project into a space 20 times deeper. This is one of Mr. Morris’s most tightly woven compositions: it would take many viewings to analyze satisfactorily the repetitions and multiplications of its many motifs. At moments this emphasis on composition is irritating; a couple of the motifs are too preciously artful. Over all, though, the impetus of each of the three movements proves irresistible.

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The program continues through Saturday at the Rose Theater, Jazz at Lincoln Center, 60th Street and Broadway; mmdg.org. It is part of the Mostly Mozart Festival, which runs through next Saturday; (212) 721-6500, mostlymozart.org.

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CAIRO: A flowering of Egyptian art since the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak is adding color to Cairo and an upswing in business at the citys galleries, as the pride, anger and optimism of a long-frustrated generation plays out on canvas.

Politically inspired photography, graphic design and graffiti sprayed or stenciled on walls, fences, bridges and flyovers have flourished since the uprising toppled the autocratic leader.

Across Cairo, faces of protesters killed during the uprising are immortalized on concrete, fists are shown breaking free from ropes and ancient mummies scream I am free!

Much of the street art reflects pride in the movement that united Egyptians across class and religion to put an end to decades of calcified politics and a gaping rich-poor divide.

In Nasr City, a beautiful woman is spray-painted on a fence surrounding a plot of disused land, her dress in the flowing colours of Egypts red, white and black national flag. Further west in Mohandiseen, an imam and a priest are shown standing hand in hand on the side of one building.

Elsewhere it is darker, angrier. One image painted on a disused building shows a man writhing in chains wrapped tight around his body.

Other graffiti shows anger toward Mubarak and his family the former leader is depicted scowling arrogantly or with his head in a noose or anxiety at whether Egypts military rulers really want to deliver the country to democratic civilian rule.

An army officer sketched on a wall in a busy street asks passers-by man antum? (who are you?), an allusion to Moammar Gadhafis disdainful question aimed at Libyan rebels, implying that the military council holds Egyptians in similar contempt.

Some art dealers say the movement is grabbing the attention of collectors at home and abroad.

Theres an enormous interest and push for the graffiti artists, for the illustrators, for the new comic books that are coming out, said William Wells, Director of Cairos Townhouse Gallery. At the moment, foreigners are coming through the city constantly looking for them.

Mona Said, owner of Safar Khan gallery, said she received strong interest in her first To Egypt with Love exhibition at the gallery in March. The exhibition displayed photography and graphic artwork inspired by the revolt.

I sold four times what I expected to sell, said Said. I shipped all over the world.

Hossam Hassan, who combines photography, digital design and painting, depicted protesters in Cairos Tahrir Square at Safar Khans gallery.

He said the beige background of his canvases reflects a decaying feeling on the eve of the uprising.

Everything was cloudy, beige, colorless, tasteless before the revolution. These people came with their energy and injected this red, orange, yellow energy into Egypt, he said, pointing to the splashes of color on the paintings.

Hassan says his work on the uprising will be exhibited in European capitals including Vienna and London this year and will appear next year in a Paris exhibition commemorating the first day of the uprising, Jan. 25.

Other artists hope their depictions of the revolution will promote social causes they say were neglected under Mubarak, who is on trial accused of authorizing the use of live ammunition to shoot protesters, of corruption and abuse of power.

Hanan al-Nahrawy, a deaf-mute artist who has produced surrealistic oil and ink images of Mubarak, said through her son who interprets for her that she wants to spread awareness for deaf-mutes who received little care under the former leader.

Mubarak did not like the disabled, whatever their disability, said Nahrawy. In the days of [previous president] Anwar al-Sadat, there was more attention to the disabled.

One of Nahrawys canvases depicts the Nile flowing through Mubaraks face, its delta branching off in vein-like lines on his forehead. A small fist carrying tear-shaped nooses is painted on one of his cheeks, while small images of people carrying Egypts flag chip away at the other.

These are the protesters trying to find out whats hidden, how much he owns, said Nahrawy. The veins are like the reverberations of an earthquake. The revolution shook Mubarak.

Another of Nahrawys works shows the Nile passing through an image that combines Mubaraks face with that of Hussein Salem, a close confidant of the former president charged with squandering public funds. Dollar signs fill the background.

Inspiration from the countrys political upheaval is mixed with fears of political censorship by Egypts Army, which has ruled since Mubaraks overthrow on Feb. 11. Rights groups worry over the armys use of military trials in cases where civilians criticized its actions.

Many artists are concerned that religious conservatives now vying for power may try to exert pressure that will curb freedom of expression.

Weve moved into a situation thats a little bit disturbing, said Wells, with the army now adopting similar tactics in terms of censorship that we had prior to Feb. 11.

Hassan said the diversity of religion and culture that has inspired artists in Egypt is under threat from strict Islamist groups such as the Salafists.

This is not right for Egypt. Well go back to where we were before the revolution and worse, said Hassan.

The beauty of Egypt is its diversity. I get very upset when Islamists or Salafists say lsquo;Egypt is Islamist, it has to be this hellip; the depth and strength of Egypt is that its Coptic, Pharoanic, Muslim, modern and old.

Tags: Art

FX is pulling out all the stops for its upcoming drama American Horror Story.

Just hours after the first video teaser featuring Dylan McDermott, Connie Britton and the rest of the cast was released, the cable network has unveiled the keyart for the psycho-sexual horror-thriller.

Revolving around a family that moves from Boston to a creepy Los Angeles mansion, the series, from Glee co-creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk, has what Murphy estimated were eight cliffhangers in the 90-minute premiere (set for Oct. 5).

By the third episode, all of those big mysteries are settled and I think the audience can just be along for the ride, Murphy said earlier this month at the Television Critics Associations summer press tour in Beverly Hills.

Among them: the rubberman that, judging from the new keyart, appears to be part of the houses many mysteries.

After seeing the trailer and the key art, are you ready to move in?

American Horror Story bows Oct. 5 at 10 pm on FX.

Email: Lesley.Goldberg@thr.com; Twitter: @Snoodit

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Tags: Art