Author Archives: Ted C. Fishman

Walk around Utrecht past the charming shops, the old-world bookstores, the throngs of cheerful, attractive bikers, and immaculate, slim streets and narrow canals with nary a gum wrapper befouling them, and you can’t help thinking that the Dutch really have it together. Holland is nearly perfect. It has the most productive economy per capita in […]

Ted Cizma radiates calm. Never mind that carpenters are badgering him to decide how many holes to drill into the bar and maitre d’ station. Or that his understandably flustered designer almost took delivery of the wrong truckload of banquettes (they were for Blue Point, the restaurant next door). Or that the kitchen staff must […]

Daniel Goldstein loves rules. As an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin he studied artificial intelligence, the branch of computer science that imbues machines with the rules of thought. As a graduate student in psychology at the University of Chicago, Goldstein works on computer models of cognition, studying the rule sets that govern how people […]

In the 70s, when photo-realism first wowed gallery hoppers in New York’s newly vibrant SoHo, the works of Idelle Weber, like those of Richard Estes and Chuck Close, invited such close inspection that people walked up to them with magnifying glasses just to see how something so real could spring from an artist’s palette. Weber, […]

The loft space that houses the New Art Examiner on South Wabash is pin-drop silent. It is not at all the scene one would expect at a magazine on deadline. In fact, the NAE has got two: the one for its 20th-anniversary October issue, which is several weeks past, and the one for its November […]

For artists the go-go 80s were mighty fine. Now galleries close faster than they opened, and painters who once sold on spec scrounge for corporate commissions and jobs at Starbucks. Artists and dealers chalk up the art world’s doldrums to bad times all over: people just don’t have enough money to buy art. Create some […]

In the villages of Java life is monotonously regular. On the equator the sun rises and sets at nearly the same times every day of the year, and dawn and dusk last only a few minutes. By early evening the sky is pitch black. Few of the homes are electrified, and most light is the […]

There’s something about Stewart Figa–maybe it’s his deep, rich baritone voice or his robust energy–that lands him roles demanding overdrawn characterizations, wild costumes, and lots of eye rolling. One of his first roles out of school–Northwestern University’s Theater Department–was as Macbeth in Wisdom Bridge’s long-running Kabuki Macbeth: he had to move and rumble like a […]

When Peter Taub came to Randolph Street Gallery in 1985, as executive director, it had an annual budget of $60,000 and was $50,000 in debt. That was in the midst of one of the biggest art-market booms in U.S. history and during a period of enthusiastic governmental support. Eight years later, at a time when […]