1. Fred Astaire over Gene Kelly
2. The Great Gatsby over The Sun Also Rises
3. Duke Ellington over Count Basie, I guess.
4. Cats over dogs
5. Matisse over Picasso
6. Yeats over Eliot
7. Buster Keaton over Charlie Chaplin
8. Flannery O’Connor over John Updike
9. To Have and Have Not has been sitting on my tv for months, courtesy of Netflix, and I fully expect to prefer it to Casablanca. Terry and the Cinetrix can’t be wrong.
10. Jackson Pollock over Willem de Kooning
11. The Stones over the Who
12. Philip Larkin over Sylvia Plath
13. Dickens over Trollope
14. Billie Holiday over Ella Fitzgerald
15. Tolstoy over Dostoyevsky
16. The End of the Affair over The Moviegoer
17. George Balanchine over Martha Graham
18. Hamburgers over hot dogs
19. Letterman over Leno in a landslide.
20. Cat Power over Wilco
21. Verdi over Wagner
22. Grace Kelly over Marilyn Monroe
23. Johnny Cash over Bill Monroe
24. Martin over Kingsley Amis
25. Robert Mitchum over Marlon Brando
26. Mark Morris over Twyla Tharp
27. Vermeer over Rembrandt
28. Chopin over Tchaikovsky
29. White wine over red, this being summertime.
30. Oscar Wilde over No
Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City
An ArtsJournal Blog