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Sotheby’s latest gamble

On February 1, 2024, Sotheby’s auction house announced a new fee structure that came as something of a surprise to the art world. For decades, Sotheby’s and its competitors have been one-upping each other with respect to the fees charged to buyers and sellers. While these fees have unquestionably increased the profitability of the auction houses themselves, in their complexity they have often bewildered auction participants and market observers alike. In theory at least, that may be about to change. Beginning this spring, Sotheby’s new fees will be both lower and potentially easier for all parties to understand. They apply to sellers consigning lots for auction after April 15, and to buyers beginning on May 20.

Clarissa Sebag-Montefiore

An Enemy of the People is hit-or-miss

As I entered the lobby of Circle in the Square Theatre, now showing Broadway’s hottest ticket, An Enemy of the People, staff were upselling booze. “Do you want to buy a shot?” offered one enthusiastic barman, waving a bottle of bracing Linie aquavit. He added, grinning: “It’s what the actors drink on stage.” Sam Gold’s revival of Henrik Ibsen’s didactic and stuffy morality play aims to draw direct comparisons between past and present, including what alcohol we consume (more on that later). In late nineteenth-century Norway, a town finds itself prosperous by selling access to the local spa baths, which supposedly have curative properties. When Dr.

Calla Di Pietro

A cultural summer in the city

New York is gilded in beguiling art. It has an excess of riches and though summer is one of the best times to visit, quenching your cultural thirst can be difficult, as the arts patrons decamp to the Hamptons and watering holes ending in -an. From museums to galleries to street art at subway stations or parks, each borough is a canvas, so much so that it is often an afterthought against a landscape of pavement and honking cars. Will you be uptown for the first Monday in May? While the performances on the Met Gala’s red carpet are an art form in themselves, the exhibit the gala underwrites offers plenty to check out uptown as the tulips bloom on Park Avenue.

Alexander Larman

Christopher Nolan, creator of worlds

At this year’s Oscars ceremony, there was a moment that only those blind to symbolism could have failed to pick up. The presenter of the Best Director award was none other than Steven Spielberg, himself the most commercially successful film director who has ever lived. The recipient was Christopher Nolan, whose films so far this millennium have grossed over $6 billion worldwide, making him the seventh-highest earning filmmaker of all time. Those above him — no disrespect to the likes of the Russo brothers, David Yates and even Michael Bay — are journeymen directors whose franchise work makes a lot of money without bothering the Academy; the auteur-ish likes of Peter Jackson, James Cameron and Spielberg have all now been rewarded with their own Best Director Oscars.

Christopher Sandford

A revelatory account of the post-war exploits of the House of Windsor

Power and Glory is, as its subtitle implies, a tale of survival. In a fast-paced history of the British throne from the years 1945-53, Alexander Larman, a seasoned chronicler of the House of Windsor, depicts a dynasty reeling from the 1936 abdication of Edward VIII — “David” to intimates — and the storm of war that broke over Europe three years later.

Amelia Butler-Gallie

Gabriel García Márquez’s posthumously published novel is unconvincing

Love and loneliness. Loneliness and love. These two motifs, these two codependent deities, underpin all of grand maestro Gabriel García Márquez’s fiction — from his bewitching magnum opus One Hundred Years of Solitude to the tumultuous romance of Love in the Time of Cholera. His final sultry, sun-soaked and unexpected work, Until August, which he attempted to complete while struggling with dementia, is a continuation of these oeuvre-defining themes. It’s a damn shame it’s half-baked. The circumstances under which Until August came to be written might, themselves, one day make a rather droll short story, perhaps even a sparky novella.

Oliver Soden

The talented Evan S. Connell

When the journalist Steve Paul began his biography of the writer Evan S. Connell, a young librarian was helping him access research material. She happened across a photograph, and remarked, “What a suave-looking dude.” Connell had movie-star good looks. Of his eight novels, two are now packaged as classics of American literature. This on top of a biography of Goya; a 2009 Man Booker International nomination for lifetime achievement; and a bestselling history of a battle in the Great Sioux War of 1876. Acolytes recommend his greatest book, Mrs. Bridge, with the confident smile that looks forward to welcoming another member to the exclusive band of Connellites.

Michael M. Rosen

The ups and downs of the long road toward workplace parity

In late 2019, for the first time ever, American women outnumbered men in the college-educated labor force. Women now earn bachelor’s degrees and doctorates at a higher rate than their male counterparts, and they account for more than 56 percent of law students. They lead more than 10 percent of Fortune 500 companies. Has the United States come a long way in equalizing opportunities for men and women? Definitely. Do we still have a long way to go? Absolutely, says Josie Cox in Women Money Power, her compelling analysis of the ups and downs of the long road toward workplace parity.

D.J. Taylor

The wild times on the late, great John Belushi’s most famous film

A good place to start with The Blues Brothers, Daniel de Visé’s engaging account of the John Belushi-Dan Aykroyd comedy classic, is in the spring preceding the movie’s summer 1980 release. By this stage, the production was mired in controversy and a martyr to industry scuttlebutt. Press reports put the expenditure at anywhere between $35 million and $40 million (in fact it sailed home at a mere $27.5 million) — and this at a time when over-subsidized box office calamities such as Steven Spielberg’s 1941 and Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate had prompted many a lament about Hollywood hubris. The rough cut came in at a mammoth three hours, at a time when two were reckoned excessive.

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