Arts

Studio or plein-air, Tile Club member or Abstract Expressionist, painters have praised the South Fork’s light across many disciplines and movements. All of them agree it casts a certain spell, and few places can match the body of remarkable artistic evidence we have to back it up.

The Southampton Arts Center is presenting no fewer than five films this week, beginning tonight at 7 with a screening of “Electoral Dysfunction,” an award-winning documentary that takes an irreverent look at voting in America. The filmmakers will answer questions after the screening. Tickets cost $12, and advance reservations have been recommended.

For anyone stuck outside of Montauk with the August blues again, next week’s Music for Montauk schedule of concerts should be a soothing balm. The series, which runs from Tuesday to Aug. 22, will have world-class musicians performing creative musical programs in unconventional locations.

Hidden away in Noyac, this year’s Hampton Designer Showhouse is a reflection of current tastes and trends inside and out.

The first annual Hamptons Festival of the Arts will launch on Saturday evening at 7 at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill with a recital in the galleries by the renowned soprano Renée Fleming and the singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright. A reception will follow the performance.

The Comedy Club at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor will present “It’s a Mad, Mad World . . . And We’re a Little Angry: An Evening With Angela LaGreca and Julie Halston” on Monday at 8 p.m. According to the theater, the two women will “dish on everything from marriage, motherhood, Botox, and the current deer population in the Hamptons.”

Minimal Art does not have the strong connection to the East End that landscape painting, Abstract Expressionism, or Pop do. And, with the exception of Dan Flavin, Minimalism does not characterize the production of artists who have lived and worked here since the mid-1970s. It might, therefore, come as a surprise that “Aspects of Minimalism: Selections From East End Collections” will open at Guild Hall in East Hampton on Saturday with a reception from 4 to 6 p.m. and continue through Oct. 10.

Comedy, R&B, hospitality, presidential politics, New Orleans party music, and Sith Lords will all touch down at Guild Hall in East Hampton this week, starting tomorrow at 9 p.m. when Jay Pharoah will perform his first comedy show on an East End stage.

Dan Welden, Gerry Giliberti, and Lois Youmans will show work created from alternative photographic techniques at the Alex Ferrone Gallery in Cutchogue. The show “Photo-Technic II,” will run from Saturday through Sept. 25, with a reception set for Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. A solo show of collages and accordion books by Eugene Brodsky will be on view from tomorrow through Sept. 15 at Studio 11 in the Red Horse Plaza in East Hampton. A reception will be held Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.

I think it’s fair to say that “My Fair Lady” is one of the great examples of the American musical’s golden era (that period from the mid-1950s through the ’60s). This 1956 work has just about everything — humor, romance, and some trenchant social satire, including a feminist motif that must have seemed daring for the ’50s. And it was composed by no less than the classic writing team of Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe.

Jamie Patricof was disappointed he could not be in East Hampton for the opening of the film “Captain Fantastic” last Friday. Not because he hadn’t seen it; with Lynette Howell Taylor, he co-produced the film and had in fact seen it countless times. However, having spent summers and weekends here for much of his life, he fondly remembers the theater before it was a multiplex.

It is well known in print circles that Stanley William Hayter was a master of innovation in early Modernist printmaking. What is less known is that his studio, Atelier 17, inspired some 200 other artists, including Jackson Pollock, to push the limits of the various mediums in both engraved and relief techniques.

Eve Queler, founder and director of the Opera Orchestra of New York, will present an evening of operatic arias and duets by Bellini, Puccini, Verdi, and Donizetti tomorrow from 5 to 7 p.m. at the LongHouse Reserve in East Hampton.

Miss Rosie, an Americana-folk group from Oberlin, Ohio, will bring both old-time tunes and original songs to the lawn of the Southampton Arts Center for a free concert Saturday at 7 p.m.

The year 1975 brought two films into the world whose shelf life has yet to expire: “The Rocky Horror Picture Show” and “Grey Gardens.” Classics in themselves, they have also given rise to various spinoffs and rituals.

Last fall, Billy Strong and Dell Cullum would reveal few details of the unique project they were planning, raising almost as many questions as answers. Despite scant details, Mr. Strong, an environmental activist known as the Green Explorer, and Mr. Cullum, a photographer, wildlife-removal specialist, and tireless crusader against litter, seemed an ideal partnership. The East Hampton residents were equally passionate about the environment, and their plan was ambitious.

“Living Well Is the Best Revenge: A Jazz Age Fable of Sara and Gerald Murphy,” an exhibition of photographs, paintings, decorative arts, and memorabilia, will open tomorrow at the East Hampton Historical Society’s Clinton Academy with a reception from 6 to 8 p.m. It will remain on view through Oct. 10.

Laurie Anderson, the musician and visual and performance artist, will make a whirlwind tour of East Hampton next week. On Wednesday at 6 p.m., she will speak at the Art Barge on Napeague in the final installment of its 2016 “Artists Speak” series. Andrea Grover, curator of special projects at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill and incoming executive director of Guild Hall in East Hampton, will moderate the discussion.

It seems silly in retrospect, but there was once a time when painting was so out of favor in the art world that artists who chose it as a medium were considered doomed to irrelevancy.

Public life these days is filled with images, some posed and others less scripted or welcome. While celebrities and starlets can refuse to participate in requests for selfies and such, those holding elected office have to consider how the public will view them if they are uncooperative. Fearing reprisals, the world of political photography has moved from very stilted setups to a more casual and natural feeling.

The Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor will launch its 2016 Comedy Club on Monday at 8 p.m. with a performance by Richard Lewis, the comedian who has fashioned a stellar career by mining his own neuroses.

Athos Zacharias and Knox Martin will open summer exhibitions of their work on Saturday at Lawrence Fine Art in East Hampton. The Springs Improvement Society will hold its 49th annual invitational art exhibition from tomorrow through Aug. 21 at Ashawagh Hall in Springs.

Bebe Neuwirth, a Tony and Emmy Award-winning actress, singer, and dancer, will be the host on Saturday at the Ross School Center for Well-Being in East Hampton of a multidiscipline dance performance that will benefit the Paul Taylor Dance Foundation and the Ross School Scholarship Fund. World-class dancers will perform.

First there were cat videos, which were shown in Southampton earlier this summer. Now, the canine crowd will have their chance to celebrate their favorite pets at the Dog Film Festival on Tuesday at Guild Hall.

“My Fair Lady,” the iconic Lerner and Loewe musical based on George Bernard Shaw’s “Pygmalion,” will open a three-and-a-half-week run at the Bay Street Theater in Sag Harbor on Tuesday. The production is directed by Michael Arlen, a Tony Award nominee and Outer Critics Circle Award-winner for Best Director of a Musical for the Broadway revival of “Spring Awakening.”

If there is anything that funny TV shows like “Saturday Night Live” and “The Daily Show” have proven, it is that there is a huge market for comedy. And if there’s anything that Caroline Hirsch has proven, it’s that it is possible to develop a comedy business with longevity.

Thirteen concerts, 32 instrumentalists, and 30 composers in five venues in four weeks: The Bridgehampton Chamber Music Festival has put together another outstanding series of summer events that promises to entertain and enrich aficionados.

Maia Ruth Lee and Peter Sutherland, an artistic couple with varying viewpoints and methods, have individual shows at the Fireplace Project in Springs, both of which seem reflective of the country’s mood on the eve of a divisive presidential election and in the wake of a global wave of violence and uncertainty.

A night of swing dancing with the George Gee Swing Orchestra will take place Saturday evening from 6 to 8 in the concert hall of the Southampton Arts Center.

“Paint at the Parrish,” a monthly program of gallery discussions and activities tailored to people with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia and their caregivers, will be honored tonight with a benefit sponsored by the Alzheimer’s Disease Resource Center from 6 to 8.