This week: On Thomas Sowell, Ettore Spalletti, Mozart, Sara Mearns, Michelangelo & more.
Jason Riley on Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell, hosted by the William F. Buckley Jr. Program at Yale (March 3): The economist and social theorist Thomas Sowell opens his landmark Knowledge and Decisions (1980) with a nifty observation: “Ideas are everywhere, but knowledge is rare.” Its economic implications aside, this statement also reminds us just how uncommon a thinker of Sowell’s caliber is—and why it might be worth considering the circumstances that gave rise to the man, as the Wall Street Journal opinion columnist Jason L. Riley has done in Maverick: A Biography of Thomas Sowell. This Thursday, March 3, at 4:30 p.m., Riley will be discussing his work in a book talk hosted by Yale’s William F. Buckley Jr. Program, viewable via live stream from the organization’s YouTube page. —RE
“Ettore Spalletti,” at Marian Goodman Gallery, New York (through March 5): From afar the works of Ettore Spalletti (1940–2019) might resemble machine-made minimalism, but these subtle paintings, drawings, and sculptures are anything but. This is the final week to see a major survey of the Italian artist at Marian Goodman Gallery. Spalletti emerged from the Arte Povera movement to imbue his works with the sea, sky, and air of the Adriatic town of Cappelle sul Tavo, in the Abruzzo province of Pescara, where he lived and worked. His compositions and palettes were minimal, but his medium of impasto maximalized his forms with delicate effects that engage with the spaces around them. —JP
“What Makes It Great? Mozart’s ‘Dissonance’ Quartet,” at Merkin Hall, Kaufman Music Center (March 7): When Mozart’s publisher sent his String Quartet No. 19 for publication in Italy, the manuscript was returned—surely the document was riddled with errors, the printers complained. Erroneous it was not, but experimental, highly chromatic, and sometimes dissonant it was—hence its nickname, Mozart’s “Dissonance” quartet. The critics of the day were skeptical, but Haydn (the quartet’s dedicatee) was unreserved in his praise: turning to Mozart’s father Leopold at the piece’s debut concert, he declared, “your son is the greatest composer known to me either in person or by name” (or so Leopold attested, in any case). Hear Mozart’s piece this Monday performed by the Harlem Quartet with explanatory remarks by Rob Kapilow at Merkin Hall. —IS
“Sara Mearns,” at the Joyce Theater, New York (March 8–13): Sara Mearns, the emotive ballerina who was thrust into the spotlight when she starred in Peter Martins’s Swan Lake at just nineteen, has spent three years putting together a new solo show opening at the Joyce in Chelsea. Flying in to join her is Guillaume Côté, the longtime principal of the National Ballet of Canada who has choreographed a new duet for the pair. Other partners include the protean Taylor Stanley, who gave a mesmerizing performance opposite Mearns in Andrea Miller’s Sky to Hold at New York City Ballet’s fall gala. A master of Balanchine repertoire, Mearns will also show off her extensive training in Cunningham technique in a run of seven shows starting next Tuesday. —JC
“Michelangelo and other Renaissance and Baroque Masters: Essays by Leo Steinberg,” featuring Shawon Kinew, Christian Kleinbub, Maria Loh, Sheila Schwartz, and Alexander Nagel, presented by the Institute of Fine Arts (March 1): Eric Gibson lauded the late Leo Steinberg’s Michelangelo’s Sculpture: Selected Essays (2019) as “some of the most intellectually stimulating art history and pleasurable prose to be found anywhere.” Admirers of Steinberg’s “renegade” scholarship will be pleased to learn of another volume of posthumous writings, to be published by Chicago, on Picasso, adding to the collections already in print on Michelangelo’s sculpture, Michelangelo’s painting, and Renaissance and Baroque art. To mark the forthcoming publication, the Institute of Fine Arts has convened a virtual conversation today at 1 p.m. on Steinberg’s wide-ranging work, which includes Sheila Schwartz, the editor of these volumes. —BR
By the Editors:
“Carnegie plus one.” On Carnegie Hall’s new streaming service.
James Panero, The Spectator World Edition
From the archives:
“André Malraux: Politicizing literature, fictionalizing politics” by David Pryce-Jones (March 2005). A review of Malraux: A Life by Olivier Todd, translated by Joseph West.
Dispatch:
“A classic moral fable” by Steve Morris. On rereading Hard Times by Charles Dickens.