The Furniture: Batman's Nightmare at the Museum

New Series. Daniel Walber talks production design in "The Furniture". Previously we looked at The Exorcist, and Carol and Brooklyn. And now...

In the Oscar battle between Batman and Superman, there is no real contest. Superman’s three nominations, zero wins and one special achievement award have nothing on Batman’s fifteen nominations and three wins. And it doesn’t look as if we have to worry about the tally getting complicated by any nominations for Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

However, the arrival of the newest Batman movie is an excellent excuse to discuss the oldest. Tim Burton’s 1989 Batman remains the only superhero movie to ever win the Best Production Design Oscar, an honor it certainly deserves to keep...

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Ask Nathaniel

Every other week you get a Q&A column. It's now that "other" week so ask away in the comments and I'll choose a handful or two to answer on Wednesday night (3/30) and bank the rest for possible random inspirations for this daily site. Wednesday is the joint birthday of Goya and Van Gogh* so let's get some art inspired questions this round (though other topics are fine, too.)

* Yes we will be celebrating Kirk Douglas's Centennial in 2016 but that's not until December.

HBO’s LGBT History: Remembering the Artist (2014)

Manuel is working his way through all the LGBT-themed HBO productions.

 For the past two weeks, we took an Oscar-themed break by looking back at the 1993 and 2003 acting races. We imagined a world where Ian McKellen and Lily Tomlin could have nabbed another nomination and wondered aloud if Jessica Lange could have earned nomination #7 had HBO films been released theatrically. This week, we're back to our normally scheduled history but there's still an Oscar winner involved: We're looking at Remembering the Artist: Robert De Niro Sr., a documentary on the Taxi Driver actor's artist father.

The detours into hypothetical Oscar history were meant to remind us that HBO’s LGBT content has been consistently strong for over three decades now, at times dwarfing the mainstream fare that has found itself invited to the Oscars this past few years. But sometimes, as we’ll see this week, the HBO imprint is not enough to guarantee that the issue of sexuality will be given its due.

In Remembering the Artist: Robert De Niro, Sr., directors Perri Peltz and Geeta Gandbhir offer us, we’re told early, an attempt by Bobby De Niro to give his father the due that so eluded him in his lifetime (he died of prostate cancer complications in 1993). [More...]

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Curio: Lucy Liu, Artist

Alexa here with your weekly art break. Lucy Liu made the surprise announcement recently that she'd had a baby boy via surrogate, congrats to her!  In following some links I was also surprised to see that she'd launched a website dedicated to her art, under her own name.

As we've posted before, Lucy had been making paintings under the pseudonym Yu Ling, but now she is ready to unveil new, varied works without the pseudonym.  Her use of media has expanded from painting to screenprint, sculpture, and fiber. 

More pieces after the jump...

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17 Thoughts I Had While Watching "Woman in Gold"

Have you seen Woman in Gold which has been out on DVD for a bit now? It's about an old Austrian Jew (Helen Mirren) who immigrated to America during the Holocaust and attempts to get her family's original Gustav Klimt paintings back which were stolen by the Nazis and now "belong" to a museum in Austria.

Here are a dozen plus thoughts I had while watching it...

What do you know about art restitution?

• Nothing? It's okay. I didn't either. Helen Mirren will teach us. She speaks most of her lines as if to a small child. In fact, a lot of the characters do. They're constantly explaining the movie's plot and conflicts to us. And after explaining things there's sometimes bits of dialogue like...

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