Review of reviews: Art & Music

Exhibit of the week

Ai Weiwei: Good Fences Make Good Neighbors

Various locations, New York City, through Feb. 11

For anyone who spends more than a few days in New York City this fall, the art of Ai Weiwei will be “nearly impossible to miss,” said Katharine Schwab in FastCompany.com. The worldrenowned Chinese artist has put his mark on 300 public sites across the city, in a project designed to call attention to refugees worldwide and the rising tide of anti-immigrant sentiment they’re confronting. Ai’s Good Fences Make Good Neighbors has adorned hundreds of lampposts and bus shelters with portraits of refugees, and its 18 sculptural installations have recast several city landmarks, including the grand neoclassical arch in downtown Manhattan’s Washington Square Park. Inside the arch, Ai has erected a 37-foot-tall metal cage that all but forces park visitors to walk through a passageway with contoured mirror walls. Suddenly, “an ordinary stroll through the park becomes a symbolic act—a crossing of borders, right in the middle of America’s most famous immigrant city.”

For the artist, the installation marries the personal and the political, said Casey Lesser in Artsy.net. Born in Beijing, Ai was only 1 in 1958 when his poet father and the rest of the family were forced to relocate to a distant labor camp during Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward. The artist’s later outspokenness won him the enmity of China’s current regime, and after living for four years under house arrest, he’s been a refugee from his own homeland since 2015. He’s spent much of the time since visiting refugee camps worldwide to create a documentary, titled Human Flow, that’s now playing in select theaters. The movie, in truth, achieves more visceral impact than his new street art does, but Good Fences “will make New Yorkers stop and think, or at least slow down.”

Each of the project’s best works “unsettles the world in which it intercedes,” said Jason Farago in The New York Times. In Queens, Ai has put up a distinctive fence around the giant steel globe that was the symbol of the 1964 World’s Fair. A soft, sock-like net, standing about knee-high, it functions as both a barrier and an invitation to lounge atop it. But the project’s standout sculpture is Gilded Cage, an “elegant, quietly ominous pavilion” that stands 24 feet tall and occupies a corner of Central Park just up the street from Trump Tower. When you step inside Ai’s golden cage and look upward to the sky, you’ll be struck by the work’s abstract beauty. But you’re aware, too, that the gilding mimics President Trump’s tastes, and that you’re both protected by the cage and trapped. It’s the subtle showpiece in a collection of quietly potent interventions— “a hundred muted bells that add up to a deafening alarm.”

St. Vincent

Masseduction

St. Vincent’s latest isn’t just her bid to build a mainstream audience; “it’s also a push toward making big-time pop deeper and darker,” said Jon Pareles in The New York Times. Ten years after the gifted alt-rock guitarist started recording as St. Vincent—and almost three since her last album garnered a Grammy— Annie Clark is now framing her “shapely, boldly arching” melodies with programmed drumbeats and polished synthesizers while offering a vision of contemporary life as a product of dread and self-destructiveness. As always, she’s “self-conscious, unblinking, completely in control, and exactly as revealing as she wants to be.” Masseduction is still easily Clark’s most personal work to date, said Isaac Feldberg in The Boston Globe. No simple confessional, the album “places Clark within a kaleidoscopic hall of mirrors, each refracting a sliver of identity back at the listener,” touching on addiction (“Pills”), gender fluidity (“Sugar Boy”), and suicide (“Smoking Section”). This “coruscating sucker punch of an album” is also St._Vincent’s “first bona fide masterpiece.”

Beck

Colors

It’s about time Beck made another fun album, said Stephen Thomas Erlewine in AllMusic.com. “Designed to be nothing but a good time,” Colors sounds a world removed from Morning Phase, the folk-rock album that won Beck an Album of the Year Grammy in 2015. Now 47, Beck teamed with hitmaker Greg Kurstin to create this record, and the pairing somehow allowed him to cut loose the way he did in the ’90s. Colors combines abundant hooks with shifting rhythms, “cycling through exuberant dance rock, new wave ballads, mock hip-hop, and candied pop.” None of the experimentation sounds cynical, said Dan Weiss in ConsequenceOfSound.net. “The worst thing you could say about it is the usual: Beck sounds removed, punching the clock, unsure of what he’s supposed to be doing in 2017.” That said, on “Dear Life,” “Dreams,” “No Distraction,” and a couple other standout tracks, “you can still hear marginal residue of the man who,” at his peak, “managed to be compared to both Dylan and Prince within the same five-year span.”

Robert Plant

Carry Fire

“Robert Plant refuses to cash the Led Zeppelin reunion check, and God bless him for it,” said Dan DeLuca in The Philadelphia Inquirer. Far from a nostalgia act, the former Zeppelin frontman “continues to age with leonine grace.” After exploring bluegrass and other acoustic Americana in projects with Alison Krauss and Patty Griffin, Plant lately has been blending blues with Middle Eastern, North African, and Celtic influences. Though he’s now 69, “his creative flame still burns bright” on his “beautifully paced” 11th solo effort, the second album he’s recorded with his current band, the Sensational Space Shifters. Having lost a bit of his youthful, high-pitched howl, Plant has replaced it with “a midrange tremble that’s just as stirring,” said Hal Horowitz in American Songwriter. He’s also getting politically outspoken in his old age, though not overly so. Mostly, Carry Fire finds him “firmly ensconced in his mature lover man/spiritual guru mode,” a persona that’s especially well suited to the “belly dance– worthy” title track.