Body ink didn’t spread from the dockyards
of San Francisco to the boardrooms of
Silicon Valley by accident, said Jonathon
Keats in Forbes.com. At least in part, we
can thank 74-year-old
Ed Hardy, “a pivotal
figure in bringing tat-
too art from the mar-
gins of society to the
mainstream.” Hardy
was just 10 when he
started inking tat-
too designs on other
Southern California
grade schoolers, using
his mother’s eyeliner.
That passion led him
to develop an unusual
pedigree for a practi-
tioner of the trade: an
art-school degree, an
apprenticeship with an
acclaimed printmaker,
and a trip to Japan to
study under a master of irezumi, the coun-
try’s centuries-old tattoo language. Even
today, his commitment to his craft sets
him apart. A first-rate Hardy tattoo is “the
corporeal equivalent of a mural or fresco,”Virile Music, a 1992 watercolorExhibit of the week
Ed Hardy: Deeper Than SkinDe Young Museum, San Francisco, through Oct. 6
24 ARTS
and his most extreme work “looks more
avant-garde—and has certainly had greater
influence—than the bulk of self-consciously
avant-garde paintings and sculptures.”Hardy didn’t produce only tattoos and the
preparatory drawings for them, said Sura
Wood in the Bay Area Reporter. He has
customized boogie boards,
filled a 500-foot-long Tyvek
scroll with 2,000 dragons,
and made some “excep-
tional” paintings and
prints. In 1967—about the
time he turned down a fel-
lowship at Yale to continue
tattooing—he created a self-
portrait in which he looks
at once cocky and “more
like a mild-mannered
science teacher than the
iconoclastic artist he would
become.” Two “spec-
tacular” and vividly colored
depictions of tigers—2010’s
Red Wind Tiger and 2011’s
Climber—take inspiration
from traditional Chinese
landscape painting. And though the more
than 300 works in the de Young show
can be “a bit much to take in,” they offer
a great introduction to Hardy’s work for
newcomers and “a wonderland for fans.”“This one’s for the hedonists,” said Ben
Brantley in The New York Times. The
spectacular new Broadway adaptation
of Baz Luhrmann’s 2001 movie “has the
febrile energy of the wilder parties of
your youth,” and its brand of decadence
might be preferable, because it produces
no hangovers. Like Luhrmann’s Moulin
Rouge, this production draws its energy
from the inspired notion that the biggest
pop songs about love and lust are the past
half-century’s equivalent of opera arias,
and so it crams 70 well-known hits into a
two-hour-plus melodrama about an ailing
Paris chanteuse and the naïf who loves
her. Set in a lavish Belle Epoque nightclub
full of men in top hats and women in cor-
sets, it plays at selling sex when what it’s
really selling is pure escapism. “You may
not believe in it all by the next morning.
But I swear you’ll feel nothing like regret.”“Moulin Rouge is one of those shows
that is not only critic-proof but maybe
also story-proof,” said Alexis Soloski in
TheGuardian.com. A gloss on La Traviata,
it sets up a triangle in which the singer,Olivo and Tveit: A tragic loveMoulin Rouge
Al Hirschfeld Theatre, New York City, (877) 250-2929 ++++Satine, agrees to be the kept woman of
the unsavory Duke of Monroth but then
falls in love with a purehearted, penniless
songwriter just before she dies of consump-
tion. The characters are thin and the love
triangle lopsided, “but the genius of the
movie was not its narrative; it was its lav-
ish design, its out-and-proud ahistoricism,
its deep knowledge that popular music
unpacks our hearts.” When Karen Olivo’s
Satine and Aaron Tveit’s Christian proclaimtheir love for each other in snippets
of familiar song, “the effect is Shazam
for the soul.” It somehow doesn’t mat-
ter that Tveit has zero sexual charisma
when Olivo is belting out big numbers
that blend major hits by Lady Gaga and
Britney Spears or by Madonna, Carol
Channing, and Beyoncé.Olivo is “underused vocally, especially
in Act 2,” said Chris Jones in the New
York Daily News. But she’s the only
performer who conveys any real feeling,
“doing her considerable best to human-
ize not so much a character as a piece
of iconography.” The audience doesn’t
really want emotional depth anyway. What
we apparently crave is “relief from our
growing terror of physical intimacy” in
the form of an eye-popping musical that
explodes with familiar songs for more
than two hours. This isn’t a musical in the
traditional sense. “This is grand date-night
pastiche, a unifying communal playlist, an
omnisexual dip into a sensual ocean with
a few hundred fellow travelers, no worries,
being happy, selling tickets.”Review of reviews: Stage & Art
The rebels have scored a big victory in
the current museum wars, said Alex
Greenberger in ArtNews.com. Last
week, weapons manufacturer Warren
Kanders resigned from the board of
the Whitney Museum of American Art
following months of protests from art-
ists and activists against the New York
institution’s association with Kanders’
Safariland, a company that produces
a tear gas used against demonstra-
tors around the world. At a moment
when artists are demanding that muse-
ums stop accepting ill-gotten money,
“Kanders’ departure could embolden
other protest movements,” said The
New York Times. Kanders, for his part,
said in his resignation letter that the
protests violate the spirit of art, which is
to never dictate a single way of thinking.
The art community he has long valued,
he wrote, is “clearly at risk.”A Whitney trustee bows out
An early protest: Resetting art’s standardsMatth
ewMurphy,
D
on
EdHardy,^ Gett
y