5 Art Events to Attend in New York City This Week

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 20

Talk: “An Evening with Naeem Mohaiemen” at Museum of Modern Art
The title of Naeem Mohaiemen’s current exhibition at MoMA PS1, “There Is No Last Man,” is a direct rebuke of Francis Fukuyama’s landmark 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, which served as a guide for two decades of post-Cold War neoliberal thought. This related screening and conversation with MoMA curator Stuart Comer will cover “The Young Man Was,” a series of films about the global revolutionary Left in the 1970s that the British-born Mohaieman has been working on since 2006. One of them, United Red Army, deals with a 1977 airline hijacking by the Japanese Red Army.
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53 Street, 7 p.m. Tickets $12/$10/$8

Screening: Angelyne and It Should Happen to You at Light Industry
In a digital age where you can broadcast just about anything on a wide variety of social media, it seems, now more than ever, that people want to accumulate followers and become famous. Those dreams of fame aren’t new, though. They were something George Cukor explored in his 1954 film It Should Happen to You, which screens this week with Angelyne, a work by Robinson Devor and Michael Guccione from 1995. In both films, leading ladies plaster their names on billboards in New York City and Los Angeles, respectively, in hopes that advertising will yield celebrity. With the appeal, in both cases, come questions of privacy, loyalty, and identity.
Light Industry, 155 Freeman Street, 7:30 p.m. Tickets $8

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 21

Exhibition: “The Experimental Self: Edvard Munch’s Photography” at Scandinavia House
Most know Edvard Munch best for his paintings about anxiety and the harsh cycle of life and death—some are currently on view in a Munch exhibition at the Met Breuer. But the Norwegian artist was a photographer and a filmmaker, and this show brings together more than 50 pictures Munch shot over the course of his career. (They’re on loan from the Munch Museum in Oslo.) Some of the works are experimental portraits of sorts: one photograph features the artist and Rosa Meissner, a model who posed for a few of Munch’s pictures, together on a beach, their images superimposed and doubled repeatedly.
Scandinavia House, 58 Park Avenue, 12–6 p.m.

WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 22

Party: Nicky Siano at Good Room
Nicky Siano goes back to the days when disco was still finding its form, as upstart DJs began playing R&B records together and abstracting them to accentuate grooves that could roll on longer and with more directed purpose. His club known as the Gallery began in New York in 1972, and—along with others like Larry Levan, Tom Moulton, and scores more—Siano went on to help create the culture around disco as a radical, integrationist space. Here, he returns to a tradition of a pre-Thanksgiving dance party invested in old-school vibes, with turntables playing disco classics and usually lots of balloons in store. (The party invitation shows him slicing a disco ball like a turkey, too.)
Good Room, 98 Meserole Avenue, Brooklyn, 10 p.m.–4 a.m. Tickets $10/$15/$20

SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 25

Screening: Au Hasard Balthazar at Film Society of Lincoln Center
Featuring a star turn by Anne Wiazemsky, who died earlier this year at age 70, Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar (1966) has earned its place in film history for its rigorous, at times clinical look at the nature of fate and pain in modern society. The story is a simple but unconventional one: a donkey named Balthazar gets passed traded around by people in a rural French town. He is abused by some and loved by others; most of all, he is ignored by those who don’t want to see him suffer. Shot in black-and-white and edited with austerity, the film plays here as part of a series about non-actors—Wiazemsky, who later went on to star in some of Jean-Luc Godard’s most famous films, had never been in a movie before this one.
Film Society of Lincoln Center, 165 West 65th Street, 4 p.m. Tickets $11/$14