Monday, January 28, 2008


The culture of New York City is shaped by centuries of immigration, the city's size and variety, and its status as the cultural capital of the United States. Many major American cultural movements first emerged in the city. The Harlem Renaissance established the African-American literary canon in the United States, while American modern dance developed in New York in the early 20th century. The city was the epicenter of jazz in the 1940s, abstract expressionism in the 1950s, and the birthplace of hip hop as well as Punk Rock in the 1970s.
New York City is an important international center for music, film, theater, dance and visual art. The city has more than 2,000 arts and cultural organizations and more than 500 art galleries.

Literature
The American comic book was invented in New York City in the early 1930s as a way to cheaply repackage and resell newspaper comic strips, which also experienced their major period of creative growth and development in New York papers in the first decades of the 20th century. Immigrant culture in the city was the central topic and inspiration for comics from the days of Hogan's Alley, the Yellow Kid, the Katzenjammer Kids and beyond. Virtually all creators and workers employed in the early comic book industry were based in New York, from publishers to artists, many of them coming from immigrant Jewish families in the Lower East Side and Brooklyn.
It can be argued that superheroes, the uniquely American contribution to comic books, owe their origin to New York, despite the fact that the first superhero, Superman, was created by two artists from Cleveland, Ohio. Even when not based explicitly in New York, superhero stories often make use of recognizable stand-ins for the city, such as Metropolis or Gotham City (Gotham being a common nick-name for New York). The form and narrative conventions of superhero stories frequently dictate New York-sized cities as the settings, even generically.
Marvel Comics became famous for breaking with convention and setting their stories explicitly in a "real" New York, giving recognizeable addresses for the homes of their major characters. Peter Parker, Spider-Man, lived with his Aunt May in Forest Hills, Queens. The Baxter Building, long-time home of the Fantastic Four, was located at 42nd and Madison Avenue. In 2007, the City of New York declared April 30-May 6 "Spider-Man Week" in honor of the release of Spider-Man 3. Both of the previous Spider-Man movies made heavy use of New York as a backdrop and included crowd scenes filled with "stereotypical New Yorkers."
New York also served as an inspiration and home for much of America's non-superhero comic books, famously starting with cartoonist and Brooklyn native Will Eisner's many depictions of everyday life among poor, working-class and immigrant New Yorkers. Today New York's alternative comics scene is thriving, including native New Yorkers Art Spiegelman, Ben Katchor and Dean Haspiel, graduates of the School of the Visual Arts cartooning program (the first accredited cartooning program in the country) and many others.
Meanwhile, New York's comic book history has worked its way into other facets of New York City culture, from the Pop Art of Roy Lichtenstein to the recent literary production of Brooklyn-based Jonathan Lethem and Dave Eggers.

Comic Books

Main article: Broadway theatre Theatre

Main article: Music of New York City Music
The 1913 Armory show in New York City, an exhibition which brought European modernist artists' work to the U.S., both shocked the public and influenced art making in the United States for the remainder of the twentieth century. The exhibition had a twofold effect of communicating to American artists that artmaking was about expression, not only aesthetics or realism, and at the same time showing that Europe had abandoned its conservative model of ranking artists according to a strict academic hierarchy. This encouraged American artists to find a personal voice, and a modernist movement, responding to American civilization, emerged in New York. Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946), photographer, Charles Demuth (1883–1935) and Marsden Hartley (1877–1943), both painters, helped establish an American viewpoint in the fine arts. Stieglitz promoted cubists and abstract painters at his 291 Gallery on 5th Avenue. The Museum of Modern Art, founded in 1929, became a showcase for American and international contemporary art. By the end of World War II, Paris had declined as the world's art center while New York emerged as the center of contemporary fine art in both the United States and the world.
In the years after World War II, a group of young New York artists known as the New York School formed the first truly original school of painting in America that exerted a major influence on foreign artists: abstract expressionism. Among the movement's leaders were Jackson Pollock (1912-1956), Willem de Kooning (1904-1997), and Mark Rothko (1903-1970). The abstract expressionists abandoned formal composition and representation of real objects to concentrate on instinctual arrangements of space and color and to demonstrate the effects of the physical action of painting on the canvas.
New York's vibrant visual art scene in the 1950s and 1960s also defined the American pop art movement. Members of this next artistic generation favored a different form of abstraction: works of mixed media. Among them were Jasper Johns (1930- ), who used photos, newsprint, and discarded objects in his compositions. Pop artists, such as Andy Warhol (1930-1987), Larry Rivers (1923-2002), and Roy Lichtenstein (1923-1997), reproduced, with satiric care, everyday objects and images of American popular culture—Coca-Cola bottles, soup cans, comic strips.
Today New York is a global center for the international art market. The industry is clustered in neighborhoods known for their art galleries, such as Chelsea and DUMBO, where dealers representing both established and up-and-coming artists compete for sales with bigger exhibition spaces, better locations, and stronger connections to museums and collectors. Wall Street money and funds from philanthropists flow steadily into the art market, often prompting artists to move from gallery to gallery in pursuit of riches and fame.
Enriching and countering this mainstream commercial movement is the constant flux of underground movements, such as hip-hop art and graffiti, which engendered such artists as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat, and continue to add visual texture and life to the atmosphere of the city.
See also: New York School
Long Island City (LIC) in Queens is rapidly flourishing art scene in New York City, serving as home to the largest concentration of arts institutions outside of Manhattan. Its abundance of industrial warehouses provide ample studio and exhibition space for many renowned artists, museums and galleries.
See also: SculptureCenter

Visual art
New York City has a law that requires no less than 1% of the first twenty million dollars of a building project, plus no less than one half of 1% of the amount exceeding twenty million dollars be allocated for art work in any public building that is owned by the city. The maximum allocation for any site is $400,000.
Many major artists have created public works in the city, including Jeff Koons, Louise Bourgeois and Nam June Paik. Anish Kapoor's Sky Mirror, a highly reflective stainless steel dish nearly three stories tall, will be on view at Rockefeller Center in September and October 2006.
In 2005 Christo and Jeanne-Claude installed The Gates, a site-specific art project inspired by traditional Japanese torii gates. The installation consisted of 7,503 metal "gates" along 23 miles (37 km) of pathways in Central Park. From each gate hung a flag-shaped piece of saffron-colored nylon fabric.
The subway system also hosts several public art projects, including intricate tile mosaics and station signage.
Subversive public art trends have also coursed through New York City. Toward the end of the 1960s the modern American graffiti subculture began to form in Philadelphia, 95 miles south of New York. The name originated from a subway tunnel running underneath the Central Park Zoo that was the haunt of very early "oldschool" graffiti writers like ALI (Marc André Edmonds), founder of The Soul Artists. The subway tunnel became a scene where crews of Manhattan graffiti artists gathered at night. With greater law enforcement and aggressive cleaning of subway trains in the 1980s and 1990s, the graffiti movement in New York eventually faded from the subway.
See also: The Gates, Public art, and Public Art Fund

Public art
The early 20th century saw the emergence of modern dance in New York, a new, distinctively American art form. Perhaps the best known figure in modern dance, Martha Graham, was a pupil of pioneer Ruth St. Denis. Many of Graham's most popular works were produced in collaboration with New York's leading composers -- Appalachian Spring with Aaron Copland, for example. Merce Cunningham, a former ballet student and performer with Martha Graham, presented his first New York solo concert with John Cage in 1944. Influenced by Cage and embracing modernist ideology using postmodern processes, Cunningham introduced chance procedures and pure movement to choreography and Cunningham technique to the cannon of 20th century dance techniques. Cunningham set the seeds for postmodern dance with his non-linear, non-climactic, non-psychological abstract work. In these works each element is in and of itself expressive, and the observer determines what it communicates. George Balanchine, one of the 20th century's foremost choreographers and the first pioneer of contemporary ballet, formed a bridge between classical and modern ballet. Balanchine used flexed hands (and occasionally feet), turned-in legs, off-centered positions and non-classical costumes to distance himself from the classical and romantic ballet traditions. Balanchine also brought modern dancers in to dance with his company, the New York City Ballet; one such dancer was Paul Taylor, who in 1959 performed in Balanchine's piece Episodes. Another significant modern choreographer, Twyla Tharp, choreographed Push Comes To Shove for the American Ballet Theatre under Mikhail Baryshnikov's artistic directorship in 1976; in 1986 she created In The Upper Room for her own company. Both these pieces were considered innovative for their use of distinctly modern movements melded with the characteristics of contemporary ballet such as the use of pointe shoes and classically-trained dancers.
New York has also historically been a center for African-American modern dance. Alvin Ailey, a student of Lester Horton (and later Martha Graham), spent several years working in both concert and theatre dance. In 1930 Ailey and a group of young African-American dancers formed the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, which is now the resident company at New York City Center. Ailey drew upon his memories of Texas, the blues, spirituals and gospel as inspiration. Bill T. Jones, winner of a MacArthur "Genius" Award in 1994, choreographed for the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, among others. Another significant African-American dancer, Pearl Primus, made her debut on February 24th, 1943 at the 92nd Street Y as a social-protest dancer. Her concerns and expression fit into the landscape of the ongoing Harlem renaissance and gained much public support, and was immediately graced with attention after her first professional solo debut. Her dances were inspired by revolutionary African-American choreographer Katharine Dunham. Primus became known for her singular ability to jump very high while dancing. She focused on matters such as oppression, racial prejudice, and violence. New York was the birthplace of other dance forms, as well. Breakdance became an influential street dance style that emerged as part of the hip hop movement in African-American communities in the South Bronx in the early 1970s. It is arguably the best known of all hip hop dance styles. Popular speculations of the early 1980s suggest that breakdancing, in its organized fashion seen today, began as a method for rival gangs of the ghetto to mediate and settle territorial disputes. It later was through the highly energetic performances of the late funk legend James Brown and the rapid growth of dance teams, like the Rock Steady Crew of the Bronx, that the competitive ritual of gang warfare evolved into a pop-culture phenomenon receiving massive media attention. Parties, disco clubs, talent shows, and other public events became typical locations for breakdancers, including gang members for whom dancing served as a positive diversion from the threats of city life.
See also: American Ballet Theatre

Dance
New York's film industry is smaller than that of Hollywood, but its billions of dollars in revenue makes it an important part of the city's economy and places it as the second largest center for the film industry in the United States.
One of the filmmakers most associated with New York is Woody Allen, whose films include Annie Hall and Manhattan. Other New Yorkers in film include the actor Robert De Niro, who started the Tribeca Film Festival after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and the directors Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Spike Lee, Jim Jarmusch, Joel and Ethan Coen, and many others.
While major studio productions are based in Hollywood, New York has become a capital of independent film. The city is home to a number of important film festivals, including the Tribeca Film Festival, the New York Film Festival and the Human Rights Watch Film Festival, as well as major independent film companies like Miramax Films. New York is also home to the Anthology Film Archives, the earliest surviving collective of avant-garde filmmakers, which preserves and exhibits hundreds of underground works from the entire span of film history.
The oldest public access channel in the United States is the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, well known for its eclectic local programming that ranges from a jazz hour to discussion of labor issues to foreign language and religious programming. There are eight other public access channels in New York, including Brooklyn Cable Access Television.
New York City's municipally-owned broadcast television service, NYCTV, creates original programming that includes Emmy Award-winning shows like Blue Print New York and Cool in Your Code, as well as coverage of New York City government. Other popular programs on NYCTV include music shows; New York Noise showcases music videos of local, underground, and indie rock musicians as well as coverage of major music-related events in the city like the WFMU Record Fair, interviews of New York icons (like The Ramones and Klaus Nomi), and comedian hosts (like Eugene Mirman, Rob Huebel, and Aziz Ansari). The Bridge, similarly, chronicles old school hip hop. The channel has won 14 New York Emmys and 14 National Telly awards.
See also: List of films set in New York City

Film
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of the world's largest and most important art museums, and is located on the eastern edge of Central Park. It also comprises a building complex known as "The Cloisters" in Fort Tryon Park at the north end of Manhattan Island overlooking the Hudson River which features medieval art. The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is often considered a rival to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Brooklyn Museum is the second largest art museum in New York and one of the largest in the United States. One of the premier art institutions in the world, its permanent collection includes more than one-and-a-half million objects, from ancient Egyptian masterpieces to contemporary art, and the art of many other cultures.
There are many smaller important galleries and art museums in the city. Among these is the Frick Collection, one of the preeminent small art museums in the United States, with a very high-quality collection of old master paintings housed in 16 galleries within the former mansion steel magnate Henry Clay Frick. The collection features some of the best-known paintings by major European artists, as well as numerous works of sculpture and porcelain. It also has furniture, enamel, and carpets.
The Jewish Museum of New York was first established in 1904, when the Jewish Theological Seminary received a gift a 26 Jewish ceremonial art objects by Judge Mayer Sulzberger. The museum now boasts a collection 28,000 objects including paintings, sculpture, archaeological artifacts, and many other pieces important to the preservation of Jewish history and culture.
Founded in 1969 by a group of Puerto Rican artists, educators, community activists and civic leaders, El Museo del Barrio is located at the top of Museum Mile in East Harlem, a neighborhood also called 'El Barrio'. Originally, the museum was a creation of the Nuyorican Movement and Civil Rights Movement, and primarily functioned as a neighborhood institution serving Puerto Ricans. With the increasing size of New York's Latino population, the scope of the museum is expanding.
The American Museum of Natural History and its Hayden Planetarium focus on the sciences. There are also many smaller specialty museums, from the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum to the International Center of Photography and The Museum of Television and Radio. There is even a Museum of the City of New York. A number of the city's museums are located along the Museum Mile section of Fifth Avenue.
In recent years New York has seen a major building boom among its cultural institutions. Long Island City in Queens is an increasingly thriving location for the arts, home to P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center and SculptureCenter for example. SculptureCenter, New York City's only non-profit exhibition space dedicated to contemporary and innovative sculpture, re-located from Manhattan's Upper East Side to a former trolley repair shop in LIC, renovated by artist/designer Maya Lin in 2002. The museum commissions new work and presents challenging exhibits by emerging and established, national and international artists and hosts a diverse range of public programs including lectures, dialogues, and performances.
In 2006 more than 60 arts institutions spread across the five boroughs, from smaller community organizations like the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts in Brooklyn to major institutions like the Morgan Library, were undergoing or recently completed architectural renovations or new construction. In aggregate the projects represented more than $2.8 billion in investment.
See also: List of museums and cultural institutions in New York City

Museums
The Department of Cultural Affairs (DCLA), a branch of the government of New York City, is the largest public funder of the arts in the United States. DCLA's funding budget is larger than the National Endowment for the Arts, the Federal government's national arts funding mechanism.
See also: Government of New York City

Culture of New York City Cultural diversity
New York, with its many ethnic communities and cultural venues, has a large number of major parades and street festivals. Summerstage in Central Park is one of about 1,200 free concerts, dance, theater, and spoke word events citywide sponsored by the City Parks Foundation.
The Village Halloween Parade is an annual holiday parade and street pageant presented the night of every Halloween (October 31) in Greenwich Village. Stretching more than a mile, this cultural event draws two million spectators, fifty thousand costumed participants, dancers, artists and circus performers, dozens of floats bearing live bands and other musical and performing acts, and a world-wide television audience of one hundred million.
The Feast of San Gennaro, originally a one-day religious commemoration, is now an 11-day street fair held in mid-September in Manhattan's Little Italy. Centered on Mulberry Street, which is closed to traffic for the occasion, the festival generally features parades, street vendors, sausages and zeppole, games, and a religious candlelit procession which begins immediately after a celebratory mass at the Church of the Most Precious Blood. Another festival is held with the same attractions at New York's other Little Italy, in the Fordham/Belmont community in the Bronx. The streets are closed to traffic and the festivities begin early in the morning and proceed late into the night.
Other major parades include the annual Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, presented by Macy's Department Store and lasting three hours on Thanksgiving Day, which features enormous inflatable balloons.
A major component of New Year's Eve celebrations in the United States is the "ball dropping" on top of One Times Square that is broadcast live on national television. A 1,070-pound, 6-foot-diameter Waterford crystal ball, high above Times Square, is lowered starting at 23:59:00 and reaching the bottom of its tower at the stroke of midnight (00:00:00). The custom derives from the time signal that used to be given at noon to ships in New York Harbor. From 1982 to 1988, New York City dropped a large apple in recognition of its nickname, "The Big Apple." Dick Clark has hosted televised coverage of the event since 1972 with his show, Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve. For about four decades, until one year before his death in 1977, Canadian violinist and bandleader Guy Lombardo and his Royal Canadians serenaded the United States from the ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel on Park Avenue. Their recording of the traditional song Auld Lang Syne still plays as the first song of the new year in Times Square.

Culture of New York City The city in popular culture

Media of New York City
List of famous New Yorkers
Public Art Fund
New York City arts organizations
Culture of The Bronx
Culture of Brooklyn
Culture of Manhattan
Culture of Queens
Culture of Staten Island

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