Kyoto, the former imperial capital of Japan, is a vibrant mash-up, an ancient city electrified by the breathtakingly new. Cruise the futuristic food halls of a department store, gaping at the perfect fruit and glistening sea creatures, before zipping up to the traditional floor, with its kimonos and tea ceremony implements. (Read More…)
Japan’s capital is a compelling study in contrasts—sprawling yet full of intimate neighborhoods; ancient yet up-to-the-minute. Here’s how to navigate its riches.
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Packing up 900 pairs of glasses for delivery via the USPS is no easy task, but anything is possible with a little (or a lot of) help from your friends.
On a recent Thursday night in San Francisco’s Mission District, dozens of people congregated in the Southern Exposure gallery for a “wrapping party.” The event is like “going to an art opening, but you’re given something to do,” says Jonn Herschend, one of the evening’s hosts and a co-founder of the as-yet-unwrapped object in question: the latest issue of The Thing, an experimental periodical “in the form of an object” that goes out to subscribers worldwide. (Read More…)
The city’s unofficial motto, “Keep Austin Weird,” blares from bumper stickers on BMWs and jalopies alike, on T-shirts worn by joggers along Lady Bird Lake and in the windows of independently owned shops and restaurants. It’s an exhortation for a city that clings (Read More…)
It was a crisp and sunny Saturday in Yountville, a wine-soaked town in the heart of the Napa Valley, and a steady trickle of day-trippers was hopping from tasting room to oak-scented tasting room, spearing Manchego cubes and sipping the latest vintages. (Read More…)
At first, I tried to resist the seduction. I felt that there was something shameful, whorish even, in tourists lusting after color, pointing their cameras at a retreating pink sari, or a flash of red turbans. Yet over and over again I swiveled toward the colors, camera in hand, as if magnetized. I was in northwest India for ten days, reporting a story (Read More…)
ON $250/DAY
SLEEP Carved out of a 1920s hotel, the new Hotel Vertigo in Nob Hill (940 Sutter Street; 415-885-6800; www.hotelvertigosf.com) recently emerged from a cinematic makeover inspired (Read More…)
Indian artisans are breathing new life into old traditions.
If you close your eyes and block out the visual cues — the red ocher 18th-century buildings, the brightly colored bazaars, the monkeys scrambling maniacally over the dusty rooflines — you would still know you were in Jaipur, India. The country’s center of traditional craftsmanship has a distinctive soundtrack (Read More…)
Hip hotels, restaurant and museums are transforming the city of Socrates.
Read excerpted article here.
As the pace of change quickens in Bhutan, so do efforts to preserve its centuries-old Buddhist art. Jaime Gross heads into the Himalayas to report.
Driving Bhutan’s single highway, a serpentine road hacked precariously into the side of a mountain and perpetually under repair, is an exercise in nerve. It averages 20 curves per mile, and requires honking before every one to warn the overloaded trucks and grazing cows that lurk around each bend. (Read More…)
I’m standing outside a birthday cake of a building, a white stone mansion built in 1906. Just beyond it, paddleboats etch lazy circles on a green lake. Along the meandering paths of the surrounding Chapultepec Park, vendors hawk wrestling masks and skewered mangoes (Read More…)
“We’ve got 100-year-old businesses selling wholesale pork rinds and bulk-size canned tomatoes next to world-class galleries selling $50,000 paintings.”
Stand on West Fulton Market in Chicago at around 3 p.m. and witness an incongruous changeover. Forklifts hauling greasy pallets of sliced bacon clear out, as bright young things in stiletto heels and luxury cars roll in. (Read More…)
When is a whale not a whale? When it’s a scrupulous assemblage of plastic lawn chairs by Canadian artist Brian Jungen.
OCCUPATION Artists
HOME BASE New York City
SHOWSTOPPER Oldenburg and van Bruggen, who have lived, worked, and traveled together for the last 29 years, have been shuttling back and forth to L.A. in order to create their 65-foot-high, unfurling aluminum and stainless-steel Collar and Bow for the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall (Read More…)
“When I have limited time in Rome, I try to see works of art that are meant to be seen, and exist, only here”
OCCUPATION Gallery owner
HOME BASE New York
ROMAN HOLIDAY Marks, who represents 25 international artists at his namesake Chelsea gallery, frequently travels abroad for art fairs and studio visits. He recently attended a show of new work by British painter (and old friend) Gary Hume in Hannover, Germany. Afterward, the two decamped for a weekend in Rome. (Read More…)
When it comes to posing for portraits, artists are far more “guarded and controlling” than the average sitter, and “stingy in terms of what they’re willing to give,” according to David Robbins, who in 1986 immortalized 18 rising art stars, among them Jeff Koons and Jenny Holzer, in “Talent,” a series of (Read More…)