It takes an army of fixers to enable such an ogre
Who supplied actresses to Weinstein and took signatures after?
The Weinstein Company will soon enter the textbooks on marketing, when they rebrand under the new name, The Weinstein (That’s Bob, Not Harvey, Easy Mistake, We Look Similar) Company. There aren’t two sides to this. Imagine being summoned to his room, in the fancy hotel, for your big break. The mogul with the cigar is about to hand you the dream. You’re probably shaking your head in disbelief. Butterflies. The room door opens. Then you notice: the bathrobe is open too — wide open — and this show is in Vista Vision, Technicolor and 3D. Roll up, roll up! And this is just the opening shot. As the Hollywood saying goes: when you’re a star, they let you do it.
Well, until now. Finally, after decades, his comeuppance has arrived.
It’s an all-star cast of complainants. Not to mention the volume. The names just keep going, like donors on a crowd-funding site. He was prodigious, he was consistent. And his people — his efficient, whip-smart team of people — kept sending women up to the room. Actresses went up to that doorway to fulfil their dreams. But instead of a genie behind the door, doling out wishes, there was a creepy ogre instead, all-powerful, all-wealthy. Indeed, above wealth. Above even fame — so far above fame he was capable of bestowing it. But there’s just one catch. The actress who thought (hoped?) she was at a business meeting, suddenly finds she’s a contestant in an impromptu game show for one: “Sex or Banishment”. Make your choice. I remember in the 90s when Ashley Judd first showed up in movies. She was stunningly beautiful. Then, not that many years later, I remember wondering: Hey, whatever happened to Ashley Judd? Turns out she said no to Harvey. In the hotel game show of “Sex or Banishment”, she decided against
An enormous exhibition by the activist artist Ai Weiwei, designed to draw attention to the world’s refugee crisis, is going on view at some 300 sites around New York City.
Good Fences Make Good Neighbours, presented by the Public Art Fund, will be open to the public until February 11.
A global trend of “trying to separate us by colour, race, religion, nationality” is a blow “against freedom, against humanity,” Ai said at a Manhattan press conference.
“That’s why I made a work related to this issue.”
Ai, now based in Berlin, is considered one of the world’s most successful artists.
He spent his childhood in a remote Chinese community after his father, a poet, was exiled by Communist authorities. He came to New York City as an art student in the 1980s, then returned to his homeland in 1993, using his art and public platform to address political issues.
He was alternately encouraged, tolerated and harassed, spending time in detention and being barred for years from leaving the country.
Since his passport was reinstated in 2015, Ai and his team have travelled to 23 countries and territories and more than 40 refugee camps while making a documentary, Human Flow.
The New York exhibition will include three large-scale works and ancillary works throughout the city. Ai expressed a special affinity for Manhattan’s Lower East Side, his former home.
Art will be incorporated onto flagpoles, bus shelters, lampposts, newsstands and rooftops.
Banners will bear portraits of immigrants from different periods, including historic pictures from Ellis Island. There also will be images from Ai’s Human Flow projects.
At Central Park’s Doris C. Freedman Plaza, viewers will be able to walk in and around a work titled Gilded Cage.
The 7.5m-tall symbol of division stands in powerful contrast to one of the most visited urban public parks in the US, the Public Art Fund says. “Designed as a democratic oasis and vision of utopia, Central Park has vast open areas, lush forests, and monuments of heroes and explorers,” it says.
Another cage-like structure, about 15m tall, is in Greenwich Village’s Washington Square Arch, built in 1892.
“When I lived in New York in the 80s, I spent much of my time in Washington Square Park,” an area that was “a home to immigrants of all backgrounds,” Ai said.
“The triumphal arch has been a symbol of victory after war since antiquity,” he said.
“The basic form of a fence or cage suggests that it might inhibit movement through the arch, but instead a passageway cuts through this barrier — a door obstructed, through which another door opens.”
The third large-scale work will be displayed at Flushing Meadows Corona Park in Queens, surrounded by some of the city’s most diverse neighbourhoods. Circle Fence features a low, mesh netting around the Unisphere, a 36m-diameter globe commissioned for the 1964-65 World’s Fair.
The big globe “celebrated both the dawn of the space age and the fair’s broader theme of Peace Through Understanding,” according to the city’s parks department.
“Rather than impeding views of the historical site,” says the Public Art Fund, “the installation will emphasise the Unisphere’s form and symbolic meaning, engaging with the steel representation of the Earth.”