The Hidden ‘Weekend Arts’

With its lordly presentation and capacious page count, the New York Times’ “Weekend Arts” section is designed for big newspaper experiences. No paper in the city delivers so many versions of awesome under one roof: walking tours of the city, floor-to-ceiling movie reviews, French painters in retrospect, with a Will Shortz crossword and a Kakutani review thrown in.

And yet, surely no New York newspaper section packs such a wealth of eye-catching minutiae. In such vivid but peripheral images — like the pull quote or shapely young starlet on E1 — we sense the editors’ intimacy with their subjects, and we feel our own connection to the paper itself. How close we can physically get to such details can, of course, be limited by how close we can hold the newspaper to our face. And then there’s the matter of concentration: 30 pages of arts coverage — even in the news-barren dog days of August — tends to overwhelm our attention.

This is where the camera becomes an invaluable tool, a second set of eyes, sharp-focused and guiding us to what we might otherwise not see. Everett Bogue, Vulture’s photo editor, recently embarked on a survey in close-up of today’s “Weekend Arts” section and revealed a second newspaper hidden in plain sight within the first: a treasury of particulars. In these late summer weeks we invite you to follow him on his gallery travels and offer a challenge: to find the larger works from which Mr. Bogue singled out these fragments. In the process you’re likely to learn what summer-desperate newspaper editors have always known: any idea, no matter how goofy, can be stretched into a popular recurring feature. Small isn’t small after all.

Answer key:
1. Detail of Russian gymnast’s butt, “Four Russian Gymnasts Definitely Not in Beijing,” page E1

2. Detail of beach photo, “Too Darn Hot? Hop the ‘Sea’ Train,” page E30

3. Evian bottle strategically placed between Javier Bardem’s legs, review of Vicky Christina Barcelona, page E1

4. Clues for 24- and 25-Down, New York Times daily crossword puzzle, page E2

5. Final two lines of Nathan Lee’s Star Wars: The Clone Wars review, page E9

6. Michiko Kakutani’s byline, “Literary Soul Mates or Authors Who Were Polar Opposites?,” page E29

7. Detail of a defaced poster from gallery Broadway 1602’s current show, “The Rictus Grin,” review on page E27

8. Pissing dog, “The Hidden Collection,” page E25