Kevin Kwan used to do some of his best napping in jewelry stores. This was decades before Mr. Kwan, 50, wrote his new novel “Lies and Weddings”; before the three books in his “Crazy Rich Asians” trilogy became best-sellers; before it was announced that Jon M. Chu, the director of the “Crazy Rich Asians” movie,…
The Dutch fashion designer Iris van Herpen, who counts Beyoncé, Björk and Tilda Swinton among her regular clients, is known for dazzling haute couture pieces that resemble sculpture. Now she’s aiming to show that the equation also works the other way around: She’s not a fashion designer but an artist who happens to make pieces…
What to do when you have too much stuff and not enough storage space? Celebrate it. Storing some of that overflow out in the open can be a good solution when you’ve got a small space with few closets. Well-planned open storage — with wall shelves, pegs, hooks and other accessories — does two important…
In John Guare’s play “Six Degrees of Separation,” there’s a scene in which a father asks a second-grade teacher, at parents’ night, why the art her students make is so especially brilliant. “Look at the first grade,” he says to her. Blotches of green and black. Look at the third grade. Camouflage. But the second…
Using her arms as a makeshift clapboard, a Sudanese woman in a black hijab and black-and-white caftan clapped her hands together, signaling the beginning of the rehearsal. The other amateur Thespians, wearing comic stick-on mustaches, moved to their marks, improvising a scene in a women’s beauty salon where one patron’s hair is accidentally dyed blue….
For the first time in many years, a teacher was correcting my handwriting. “Go more slowly,” Laura Edralin, a calligraphy teacher in London, told me, as she walked around a table of beginners on a recent Wednesday night, explaining how to achieve even, flowing strokes. As a breaking news reporter for The New York Times,…
When Christie’s executives decided on the evening of the auction house’s contemporary art sales to withdraw its most expensive offering of the week, a squiggly-wiggly painting by the artist Brice Marden estimated to sell for $30 million to $50 million, it was evidence of apprehension in the market. “The choice to withdraw the Marden was…
Estimates are still soaring past the $20 million mark and canvases still bear the signatures of dependable ringers like Warhol, Basquiat and Picasso. But there is a shadow looming over the spring auction season that begins Monday. A cyberattack at Christie’s brought down the company’s website on Thursday, and as of Sunday morning, Christie’s had…
The 11-foot sculpture looks like something out of a comic strip: a luxury handbag perched on skinny legs and matched with high-end sneakers. The work is by the Austrian-born artist Erwin Wurm, and it represents accessories from the collections of Lanvin, the French fashion house. “Desire” (the title of the sculpture) was commissioned by Lanvin…
Last spring, Tia Washington, 52, a mother of three in Dublin, Calif., received a stern warning from her doctor: If she didn’t quickly gain control of her high blood pressure, she was likely to end up in the emergency room. He wrote a prescription for blood pressure medication and urged her to see a health…
