friday, december 3, 2010
ARTAUCTION Early work by
Roy Lichtenstein A Fairfax woman who spent $12.50 to buy ‘The Statesman’ in the 1960s is now selling it. The opening bid: $40,000. C2
Style ABCDE C EZ SU
The Keegan Theatre production of ‘Golden
Boy’ packs a wallop through subtler means.” —Celia Wren on the Clifford Odets play, C8
3LIVETODAY@washingtonpost.com/discussions Carolyn Hax takes your questions and comments about the strange train we call life. Noon DANCE
Big news ahead of KenCen Honors The Bill T. Jones troupe and Dance Theater Workshop are merging. C3
CLICKTRACK
Long time coming Chuck Brown, 74, the godfather of go-go, nabs his first Grammy nomination for “Love.” C2
KATHERINE FREY/THE WASHINGTON POST
CHANGINGSIDES: For years,Media Matters’ David Brock was conservative; he became liberal in the late 1990s.
Outfoxed by Fox News? No way.
Liberal group Media Matters relentlessly, obsessively
MOVIEREVIEWS Vision, en pointe
Darren Aronofsky’s ‘Black Swan’ glides masterfully into ballet’s dark backstage
BY ANNHORNADAY S ILLUSTRATION BY SEAN MCCABE FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Artists of all faithswalk sacrilege line Muslims are among
many people challenging religious assumptions
BY BLAKE GOPNIK David Wojnarowicz’s video called “A
Fire inMy Belly,” removed Tuesday from an exhibition at the Smithsonian’s Na- tional Portrait Gallery, includes 11 sec- onds of footage of a small crucifix crawl- ing with ants. Some Christians have objected to the passage as sacrilegious. (Others, however, have had no objections to it, or have advanced positive interpre- tations.) Many objectors have also made
SHOJA AZARI/COURTESY LEILA TAGHINIA-MILANI HELLER GALLERY
‘ICON #1’:A2010 video portrait by Shoja Azari takes an image of seventh- century ImamAli and replaces his face with that of a contemporary woman.
incemaking “Pi,” his audaciously low- techblack-and-whitedebut feature, in 1998, director Darren Aronofsky has proven one of themost prote- an forces inHollywood, deliv-
Turning Point”) in creating a ballet film that captures both the gossamer pink softness of classical dance and the scarier psychological impulses lyingjustbeneaththe serene surface. Like its predecessors, “Black Swan” begins
ering a steady stream of visionary ex- periments (“Requiem for a Dream,” “The Fountain”) and intimate dramas (“The Wrestler”). Aronofsky brings both those sensibilities to bear on “Black Swan,” a near-masterpiece of a film set in the hothouseworldofNewYork ballet. With this hallucinatory trip down a rabbit
hole that is equally seductive and repellent, he makes a bid for a canon that includes no less thanMichael Powell and Emeric Pressburger (“The Red Shoes”) and Herbert Ross (“The
BLACK SWAN
rrr½
as a backstage drama but winds up being a meditationonfemaleambition,which in this case gets punished with singu- larly perverse excess. Nina Sayers (NataliePortman)hasobsessivelyper- fected her flawless technique at an unnamedNewYorkcompanyforyears
whenshe’s finally consideredfor the leadinan upcoming production of “Swan Lake.” As her manipulative artistic director, Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), observes, Nina possesses all the innocence and self-control of the Swan Queen, but his “stripped-down, visceral” ver-
hornaday continued on C5
the claim that the art world is always eager to challengeChristian sensibilities, but would never risk it with Islamic imagery.
Although it’s true thatChristianity has
been frontandcenter insomecontempo- rary art, that’s in part because it’s the religion mostWestern artists know best. Cultural figures from theMuslim world, however, have not shied away from touching on theirowntraditions. Images of Muhammad, however, still seem off- limits to the artists, if not necessarily to Western audiences. (Artists from other faiths also use contentious religious im- agery, but they are less in the news.) The writer Salman Rushdie is the
iconic example of a figure whose works have been reviled as blasphemy by some imams, while the works are supported, even celebrated, by Western culturati. The world of visual art is starting to see similar examples. Artists in Iran are eager to probe religious icons and symbols, says Shoja Azari, a prominent Iranian artist and filmmaker who lives in New York. “It’s
islamic continued on C8 BILL O’LEARY/THE WASHINGTON POST
Protest: About 100 march against NPG’s decision. Page C8
fights conservative network BY PAUL FARHI
It takes only an instant for a visitor to
Media Matters for America’s headquar- ters indowntownWashingtontosense its mission, if not its methods. A few steps into itsmodern offices,which resemble a newspaper newsroom, a pair of promi- nently displayed signs spell out the ba- sics: “Fox Keeps Fear Alive,” reads one; “Restore Sanity, Fight Fox,” reads its com- panion. Fighting Fox is what Media Matters
does, relentlessly and obsessively. In the six years since its founding, thewatchdog group has evolved from an all-purpose scourge of the conservative media into Fox News Channel’s veritable shadow and constant irritant. From well before sunrise to long after it each day, teams of young researchers sift through video clips and transcripts of programs hosted by Fox stars such as Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly to find dubious facts, logical contradictions and poisonous — at least to Media Matters’ liberal sensibilities — rhetoric. Media Matters watches other conser-
vative media figures — your Rush Lim- baughs and Michael Savages — but Fox has become the focus. Onmost days, the majority of the blog items, video excerpts and commentaries that the organization posts to its Web site concern some per- ceived outrage perpetrated by one of Fox’s pugnacious hosts and commenta- tors. “Sarah Palin joins Glenn Beck in dese-
cratingMLK’s legacy,” read a headline on the site the other day. “Fox News hosts tell [billionaire War-
ren] Buffett to ‘quit lecturing’ the rich,” brock continued on C5
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