Front Page

"The next wave of Italians has come to America," a 2010 commercial for the Fiat 500 proclaimed.
Brightly-colored examples of the itty-bitty city car slid around typical Italian alleyways paved with cobblestones and then ... dove suddenly into the sea, to then emerge from the depths on the beaches of Brooklyn. 

 “Enrico Baj” at Luxembourg & Dayan is a hoot and an eye-opener. Surveying about 16 years of works in several modes, the exhibition reintroduces the Italian artist Enrico Baj (1924-2003) to New York after an absence of three or four decades.  

 It was vulgarity and not elegance that ruled the day in Italy when Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was simultaneously running the country and staging “bunga bunga” bacchanals. Mr. Berlusconi was hell on traditional Italian cultural values, his years in office a prolonged populist takedown of the high-minded intellectual and aesthetic achievements that defined Italian architecture, art, industrial design and, not least, its fashion for much of the 20th century. 

 The Grim Reaper has got his work cut out in Sellia in southern Italy, thanks to a decree ordering the village's elderly and dwindling population to stay in good shape.