Bad Review: The New York Times on The Addams Family

It was just a bad idea. Broadway, which is suffering a drought of original productions, has been getting drunk off revivals and re-imaginings of movies and books. So turning the Addams Family franchise -- which debuted in New Yorker cartoons and became more familiar as television show and then became a couple of mildly entertaining movies -- into a musical was a natural shift. Nevermind that the time to capitalize on its familiarity or box office currency has long past.

No, American audiences in both film and theater enjoy recognizing something they've seen before, as New York Times critic Ben Brantley points out: they "snap along" at the borrowed theme song, applaud the characters' first appearance, and give "thunderous entrance applause" to the minor characters of Cousin Itt and Thing. With an audience this easy, it's no wonder the producers didn't try harder.

I have to second Gawker, which chose this gem of a quote from Brantley's review as the most delicious:

"A tepid goulash of vaudeville song-and-dance routines, Borscht Belt jokes, stingless sitcom zingers and homey romantic plotlines that were mossy in the age of 'Father Knows Best,' 'The Addams Family' is most distinctive for its wholesale inability to hold on to a consistent tone or an internal logic."

Bad Review: The New Yorker on Artist Urs Fischer

Since New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl's deliciously nasty review of the Urs Fischer show at the New Museum is so short, I'm posting it in its entirety:

“Why must the show go on?” Noël Coward wondered. The question recurs apropos a desperately ingratiating Urs Fischer exhibition at the New Museum. Frail japes by the mildly talented Swiss-born sculptor—the international art world’s chief gadfly wit since Maurizio Cattelan faded in the role—are jacked up to epic, flauntingly expensive scale. There are huge aluminum casts of tiny clay lumps (you can tell by the giant thumbprints), walls and a ceiling papered with photographs of themselves, and big mirrored blocks that bear images of common objects. When a hole in a wall is approached, a realistic tongue sticks out of it. A faux cake is suspended in the air by hidden magnets. It’s all nicely diverting—but from what? If you spend more than twenty minutes with the three-floor extravaganza, you’re loitering. The New Museum could just as well not have done the show while saying it did. The effect would be roughly the same: expressing a practically reptilian institutional craving for a new art star.

36-year-old Fischer is a Swiss artist who lives and works in New York. The New Museum exhibit is his first solo show in the U.S. The image above shows the detail of Fischer's piece "Noisette," (2009) which the New Museum describes as "a motion-activated plastic tongue
pops out of a hole punched in the wall, in a mischievous slapstick routine."

New York Magazine's art critic Jerry Saltz is kinder than Schjeldahl, but his praise is muted:

"Thrill seekers, be forewarned: There’s bravura work but no drop-dead moment here. Each of Fischer’s three floors is beautiful, and each has an elfin elusiveness and deep material intelligence. They also have dead spots and duds."