Screenwriter William Goldman once wrote that the most important thing to remember about Hollywood was that ''nobody knows anything.'' That's also the most important thing to remember about the world of arts and culture in 2006: Everything you knew, or thought you knew, was probably wrong.
Cheapjack little movies like Borat and Jackass Number Two soared at the box office while expensive star vehicles for Tom Cruise and Russell Crowe crashed and burned.
Television finally embraced its true metier, the serialized drama, but audiences fled in terror. South Florida taxpayers finally got a look at their $450 million performing arts center, only to see it upstaged architecturally by a private art space in a converted boxing gym down the street.
Leg warmers, black nail polish and other fashion trappings of the 1980s were in vogue again, but Madonna and Whitney Houston only sank into deeper ignominy.
The biggest comeback of all was staged by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, 250 years after his birth, with performances, recordings and festivals erupting all over the globe -- everything but a star on the Hollywood Walk and an appearance on Entertainment Tonight. (Maybe if he'd imitated Britney and Lindsay, and gone commando . .
.)
Latin music unexpectedly grew a political consciousness, with everybody -- from Colombian rocker Juanes (children maimed by land mines) to reggaeton star Daddy Yankee (Puerto Rico's underfunded schools) -- taking up political causes. But the listeners still flocked to RBD, the ditzy, teeth-grittingly formulaic teen group spun off a prepubescent soap opera, which topped radio and sales charts and had one of the year's bestselling tours.
It was a year that defies all attempts at categorization or conclusion. In television, artistic self-absorption proved disastrous -- NBC put most of its money this fall into a drama (Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip) and a sitcom (30 Rock) that both lampooned TV itself, only to see them fail disastrously.
But country music, arguably the only genre whose songs are about its audience, grew ever bigger with hit songs about the romance of courtship (Josh Turner's Would You Go With Me), divorce (George Strait's Give It Away), spirituality (Brad Paisley and Dolly Parton's When I Get Where I'm Going, Carrie Underwood's Jesus Take the Wheel) and growing up in the country (Little Big Town's Boondocks, Kellie Pickler's Small Town Girl).
Result: While music sales overall dropped 5 percent, country rose 11 percent, so much that Billboard may have to change the mix of radio stations it monitors to derive its Hot 100 singles chart.
It was a year of chaotic entrances and exits. Sometimes the sound and fury signified little; Dan Rather left CBS in a nasty public spat, Katie Couric arrived on a three-month tidal wave of multimillion-dollar hype, but the dismal ratings of the CBS Evening News didn't change.
In other cases, we're still trying to measure the effect and may have to continue for quite a while. The tectonic plates of South Florida culture underwent a shattering realignment with the opening of the Carnival Center for the Performing Arts and the near-simultaneous closing of the Coconut Grove Playhouse.
The brooding Carnival Center, mysteriously plunked down like the alien monolith of 2001: A Space Odyssey in a part of Miami previously known mostly for carjackings and informal pharmaceutical sales, has been like an endless good-news/bad-news joke since it opened in October.
Bad news: It's an ungainly, inelegant and sterile presence by day, its gray granite fading to the appearance of concrete from even a distance of a few feet. (The poor impression is only deepened by the presence, six blocks away of the Rene Gonzalez-designed Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation, a converted boxing gym covered by a vast tile mural of a million tiny pieces, an abstraction of a tropical jungle that can read at almost that many levels.) Good news: The interiors are warm and lovely.
Good news: The acoustics of the center's Ziff Ballet Opera House and the Knight Concert Hall are superb for opera and orchestral concerts, refined and transparent. Bad news: Plugged-in events like the recent performances Dirty Rotten Scoundrels often sound harsh and synthetic. Then there's the sometimes baffling floor design, good news for orthopedic surgeons, bad news for everybody else.
Of course, maybe the architects just took the old custom of urging actors to ''break a leg!'' a bit too literally. Certainly the Carnival Center has been a blessing to the local theater scene.
From Broadway's operatically grand The Light in the Piazza to a very good (and sometimes naked) performance of King Lear by the Classical Theatre of Harlem, the center's programming has translated into an eclectic array of choices -- both mainstream and fringey -- for South Florida's theater-going audience.
That's fortunate, considering the artistic and financial implosion of the Coconut Grove Playhouse beginning in April. In its Golden Anniversary season, the theater presented a slew of one- and two-person shows (the best of which was Doug Wright's I Am My Own Wife, starring Mark Nelson as a real-life German transvestite who survived the Nazis, the communists and a host of homophobes).
The reason for the down-scaling became clear in April, when the theater closed, reopened, then closed (quite possibly for good) amid revelations that it is more than $4 million in debt.
Producing Artistic Director Arnold Mittelman, who made at least as many enemies as friends in his 21 years at the helm, and board chair Shelly Spivack became the key players in a very bad he said/she said drama. The theater has no staff, has infuriated every one of its unions (which won't work with either the Coconut Grove Playhouse or Mittelman again until debts are satisfied), has done subscribers out of thousands of dollars and owes everyone from FPL to the ex-employees who for years put theater expenditures on their own credit cards.
A consulting firm is now sorting through the mess, trying to figure out how to reopen the theater. The bottom line: It doesn't look good, unless the theater comes back in a different form with different leadership.
The local theater scene wasn't the only venue for a collision of art and commerce.
No place featured more metaphorical dented fenders and busted glass than this year's Art Basel Miami Beach, where the exploding prices begat an unholy proliferation of high-priced ''design objects'' that a newspaper less kind than this one might call ''kitsch'' or even ''overpriced paperweights.'' To wit: a convex mirror designed by Barnaby Barford at David Gill Gallery, decorated with a porcelain ornament of a white-gowned girl with the head of a doe, captioned Oh deer! Oh, dear.
But, believe it or not, commerce wasn't always the one to emerge from the wreckage. All the MTV shows, magazine covers, gossip columns, and mogul muscle in the world couldn't give Paris Hilton, Diddy, and Brooke Hogan the mega-sales they clearly, cravenly craved.
Instead, such left-field artists as Jack Johnson and Gnarls Barkley hit the bigtime by simply making beautiful music.
Even the relentlessly unconventional Prince, who jabbed his thumb in the commercial world's eye by becoming a Jehovah's Witness several years ago, had a chart-topping return this year with 3121 -- and will perform in front of more than 100 million viewers during the Super Bowl XLI halftime show at Dolphin Stadium on Feb. 4. Talk about a major comeback.
If anything, market economics may even have helped pop music. Satellite radio, iPods and MySpace didn't just break the stranglehold of commercial radio over music in 2006, they shattered it. The biggest obstacle to music critics compiling their top 10 lists this year was sorting through the deluge of material from micro-labels and do-it-yourselfers.
Even radio leviathan Clear Channel, accused by its critics of totalitarian control of the music industry for the past decade, seemed to be giving up the ghost, announcing in November that it was selling nearly half of its 1,150 stations.
Promotional muscle was no guide to what worked at the movies in 2006, either. Spike Lee (Inside Man) and Martin Scorsese (The Departed) attained both critical and commercial success by melding their thematic obsessions to star-studded studio productions.
But Clint Eastwood went to war in Flags of Our Fathers and no one turned out to see it. Meanwhile, the Internet produced a lot of buzz over Snakes on a Plane, but no actual ticket sales: another Next Big Thing shot to hell.
That was the case in television, too, where a brave and seemingly sensible attempt to remake the parameters of drama went disastrously awry.
For years, television dramas have been mostly smaller (and crummier) versions of the movies, close-ended stories that had to be neatly resolved in the 42 minutes of a commercial hour.
But this season the networks embraced instead an alternative model offered by The Sopranos, Lost and a few other shows that used the long-running format of the TV series to emphasize character development and complex stories that could stretch over the course of not just several weeks but several years. More than a dozen serialized dramas debuted this fall -- and most of them, including two fascinating cops-and-crooks yarns, CBS' Smith and NBC's Kidnapped, were canceled within a few weeks.
A related experiment, the all-telenovela MyNetworkTV, isn't looking too robust, either.
In a country rent with political fissures, the arts couldn't possibly steer clear of all the fault lines and often didn't even try. ABC's Desperate Housewives even gave a disconcertingly literal interpretation of the aphorism that politics makes strange bedfellows when the uptight character played by Marcia Cross resisted her boyfriend's attempt to perform a blue-state sexual act.
''I'm a Republican,'' she informed him loftily, to which the boyfriend (Kyle MacLachlan) retorted: ''I'm a Libertarian. I believe in minimizing the role of the state and maximizing individual rights.'' No word yet on whether Democrats demanded equal time for the thunderous orgasm that followed.
Television's less oblique attempts to report from the front lines of the culture wars -- casting Geena Davis as the (relentlessly liberal) first female president in ABC's Commander in Chief, Calista Flockhart as an unapologetically conservative talk-show host in ABC's Brothers Sisters, and Sarah Paulson as a sympathetic Christian fundamentalist in NBC's Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip -- were met with viewer indifference (and, in the case of Commander in Chief, cancellation).
Likewise in popular music, where the Dixie Chicks continued to embrace First Amendment martydom with their Taking The Long Way album (and its powerful single, Not Ready To Make Nice), winning critical acclaim if not fans: 14 dates of their Accidents Accusations national tour -- including a performance at the BankAtlantic Center in Sunrise in October -- had to be canceled due to poor ticket sales. Others who tried to play the free speech card won even less sympathy.
When Fox canceled O.J. Simpson's If I Did It TV special in the face of a popular outcry, mention of the First Amendment was notably absent from the debate.
If there was a serene moment amid all the political rancor, perhaps it was when Adam Kidron, the producer of powerhouse urban Latin dance tracks, put together a Spanish-language version of the national anthem, Nuestro Himno, with artists as varied as Olga Ta on and Pitbull stepping in to celebrate and claim their piece of the American dream amid a virulent immigration debate. The song's phrase tierra de libres certainly struck a responsive chord: If all the artistic tumult and turmoil 2006 proved anything, it was that America is still the land of the chaotic, clamorous free.
Elisa Turner and Herald staff critics Evelyn McDonnell, Rene Rodriguez, Lawrence A.
Johnson, Christine Dolen and Jordan Levin contributed to this story.
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