What’s The High Line?

We are all guilty of giving in to a full season of David Bowie’s arbitrary and capricious tastes:

David Bowie has been a rock god, a philosopher of the pop avant-garde, an actor, a fashion plate and a talent scout. But he has a little trouble taking seriously the job description for his newest gig: curator of the first High Line Festival.

“I love that word ‘curate,'” he said with a slight sarcastic chuckle. “One of the definitions is someone who oversees a zoo.”

To put together the High Line, an 11-day series of music, film, comedy and art that begins on Wednesday with a performance by Arcade Fire at Radio City Music Hall, Mr. Bowie said he followed his own tastes, booking old and new friends like Laurie Anderson, TV on the Radio and the British comedian Ricky Gervais. He also included curiosities like Ken Nordine, the octogenarian “word jazz” artist, and the Australian “kamikaze cabaret” performer Meow Meow.

“The point of the festival,” Mr. Bowie said during a phone interview last week, “is not to dig out as many obscure and unknown acts as possible. It’s to put on what I would go and see. There are certain artists you just never miss; when they come into town you go and see them. That’s how I treat virtually all of the people that are on this.”

. . .

Mr. Bowie’s programming has led to criticism that the festival is somewhat conservative: for a man known as a champion of new music, he has invited many groups that are not exactly uncommon sights in New York, like Deerhoof and the Secret Machines. Several headliners have other, non-High Line gigs booked around their festival appearances.

And the connection to the High Line itself — the 1.45-mile elevated industrial train line on the West Side left fallow since 1980 that is to be developed into a green corridor running from the meatpacking district to Chelsea — is vague. Most of the events take place near the High Line, and organizers describe the festival as partly an awareness-raising event, with some of the proceeds to benefit conservation efforts. For his own part Mr. Bowie said he had never been on the High Line and had “no particular feelings about it.”