On Friday, Sept. 14, the Watermill Center will celebrate the premiere of “Einstein on the Beach” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music with a benefit for the arts center.

    In addition to a premiere ticket, guests will be invited to a pre-show reception at 6 p.m. at the Berlyn restaurant, across from BAM, and a post-show reception there at 11:30 p.m. with Robert Wilson.

    The next day, Leila and Mickey Straus will host a 1 p.m. brunch at their Central Park West apartment, to be followed by a V.I.P. reception at the Paula Cooper Gallery at 3:30. Mr. Wilson, Philip Glass, and other members of the creative team behind “Einstein on the Beach” will speak.

    Tickets for Friday’s events are $1,000. Tickets for events both Friday and Saturday are $1,500 and can be purchased through watermillcenter.org/events/eob _benefit.

   The Pollock-Krasner House and Study Center will present “Artists on Film: Motion and Emotion,” a series organized by Marion Wolberg Weiss, a film historian and art critic, on Fridays through September.

    In exploring how artists used film to communicate movement and expression, Ms. Weiss was inspired by Jackson Pollock and his role as an “action” painter. She will discuss the films after the screenings.

    Tomorrow’s films are “Jackson Pollock,” by Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg, a 10-minute film from 1951  that captures the painter outdoors in Springs behind his house, and “Day of the Painter,” from 1960, a 14-minute spoof of the Namuth film. It won an Oscar for Best Short Subject in 1961.

    On Friday, Sept. 14,  Val Telberg’s “Montage Haitien,” from about 1955, and “Themes from ‘Widow’s Walk,’” circa 1961, will be shown with Maya Deren’s 1944 “At Land.” All are short films. Mr. Telberg’s subject is his wife, Lelia Katayen, a choreographer, dancing both in Haiti and in Amagansett. Ms. Deren’s Surrealist film is also shot on the beach in Amagansett.

    On Sept. 21, a 20-minute film by Herbert Matter will be shown. “Works of Calder” turns the lens on Alexander Calder making mobiles in his Connecticut workshop and compares the process to the changing environment in Montauk. John Cage scored the film, which was produced from 1959 to 1960, and Pollock served as production assistant.

    On Sept. 28, six films by Len Lye will be shown: “A Colour Box” from 1935,  “Trade Tattoo” from 1937, “Color Cry” from 1952 to 1953, “Rhythm” from 1957, “Free Radicals” from 1958, and “Particles in Space” from 1979. All are about three to four minutes long. Mr. Lye was a photographer, painter, and an early direct animator whose films combined dance, ritual, music, and art in an experimental mix. He was friendly with Pollock and other Abstract Expressionists, and their style had an influence on his work in the 1940s.

    All the films begin at 7 p.m. The series is $5 at the door and free for members.

    If you are an adult and you write, or even if you don’t, Stony Brook South­ampton’s Florence Writers Workshop is a trip worth considering.

    The trip, planned for Jan. 13 to 23, has as its centerpiece five three-hour short-fiction writing workshops led by Frederick Tuten, a Guggenheim fellow who writes fiction and essays on art. But afternoons are left for exploring and field trips such as a tour of the Accademia, an excursion to Tuscany and a winery, a class on how to describe wine, and a cooking class and dinner at the culinary school of the Florence University of the Arts.

    To draw attention to the program, on Wednesday at 7 p.m., Stony Brook Southampton will screen “The Tiger in the Snow,” a film directed and written by Roberto Benigni in 2006. It is set in both Italy and Iraq in 2003.

    Christian McLean, the conference director, said on Thursday that it “made sense to have one of the leading Italian filmmakers” shown in connection with the conference. The fact that Mr. Benigni plays a poetry professor doesn’t hurt either. The screening is free and open to the public.

    The cost of the conference is $3,600 for three credits and $3,030 for non-credit participants. The cost includes the hotel and the tours and several electives, which may include a night at the opera, a digital photography workshop, a faculty-led walking tour, an introduction to the Italian language, and other possibilities. Daily breakfast and several meals are also included. Class size will be limited to 12 students.

    Mr. McLean, who did his graduate work abroad in Scotland at St. Andrew’s University, said he enjoyed the opportunity to study British writers he had never heard of before and delve into another culture. “It is part of what inspired me to do this,” he said. After being here full time for some 10 years, he found that January was a good time to be away, he said.

    “It is great to get away from everyone and everything in your daily life that is taking you away from writing. You are focusing on the things you want to be focusing on and having great cultural experiences. It is also a nice way to go with like-minded people. I often see people bond over a drink explaining where they’ve been for the day.”

    His own experience with the Southampton campus came several years ago when he took a summer conference playwriting workshop with Marsha Norman. “I felt comfortable here and I kept coming back,” doing work for the school along the way. When the conference coordinator left, he needed a job and it was a simple, organic process.

    The weather in January is variable in Italy but can be warm enough to go without a jacket or heavy coat. Held during the gap between semesters at Stony Brook University, “it’s a block of time where nothing is scheduled.” The conference expanded last year in order to take 16 poets to northern Kenya with Richard Leakey for 11 days.

    Mr. McLean said the school will continue to look for unique opportunities such as that and may alternate from Florence to other places biannually, but the model works, “because it fits what we’re doing now here. The Florence University of the Arts echoes our own ideas for a culinary school and visual arts programs. It’s a good fit for what we’re doing and what we want to be doing.”

   The tribute exhibition “Mike Kelley: 1954-2012,” organized by Harald Falckenberg at the Watermill Center, is not a retrospective, but through its works and catalog it does contribute a reasonably full measure of a man who, Mr. Falckenberg noted, may have been only .0002 percent finished with his work at the time of his suicide in January.

    That amount was taken from a banner in his project “Kandor-Con 2000,” a millennial work in progress that became an all-encompassing oeuvre involving model-making, bell jars, video projections, an unfunded symposium, and other works of a similar theme alluding to the recreation of the city of Superman’s birth. With a number of related pieces and continuing contributions of models by architecture students that became incorporated into the ever-increasing output, it would seem that Kandor as a theme was a never-ending font of new creative energy for him and others.

    Except, its progenitor chose instead to end it all, stating in November in an interview with Artillery magazine that he was going to stop making art, and that he was overworked and exhausted. Perhaps for someone with a boundless imagination and creative drive, to stop making art, as arduous and dispiriting as it was for him at times, was to stop all essential functions, such as breathing.

    Kelley, who became synonymous with Cal Arts and the Los Angeles art scene as it began its rise in the late 1980s and 1990s, was not a product of Southern California, but of a repressive Catholic household in Detroit. That is why, despite calling Southern California home for decades, he always stood apart from it, and his work was equally at home on view in New York City and Europe.

    As complicated as his residency was for him — he didn’t much like L.A. — he was an even more complex individual, pointing out as he did that he was too young to be a hippie and too old to be a punk, and was carving out some kind of hybrid approach to the two opposite sides of rebellion. He took a holistic approach to his embrace of punk, making music, or noise as he called it, with band mates over the years that included a fellow classmate at the University of Michigan, Jim Shaw, and later Tony Oursler in a band called the Poetics, of which a sampling from 1977 to 1983 plays in one of the galleries. Noise it is, but of an artful variety.

    Kelley had an ongoing relationship with psychology, Freudian and otherwise, that infused his work with Surrealist concerns while he straddled and synthesized other significant artistic movements of the 20th century. In his “Half a Man” series, he touched on minimalism, Abstract Expressionism, kitsch, and appropriation, to name a few, mostly with well-worn handmade plush toys and afghans rescued from the bins of the Salvation Army. While these works evinced abjectness and a compromised ideal of masculinity, “Kandor” fixates on unattainable perfection to the point of fetish.

    What is fascinating about this particular late work, especially in contrast with the video works also on view from as early as 1983 to 2011, is the amount of beauty in it. Kelley was a master of the decrepit, the forlorn, the scatological, the cruelly cast off. Works that didn’t have an actual odor still carried an implied scent of overripe human funk, of popped oozing zits, skidmarks on porcelain, and other mortal stains.

    The video work tackles those concerns. “Banana Man” runs the gamut of banana-inspired double entendres and other things that resemble bananas but are less pleasant to look at. “Heidi” uses rubberized stand-ins for figures in a way that draws back the curtain on film illusionism. The cruel and brutal treatment Heidi confronts, in the words of Paul McCarthy, Kelley’s collaborator on the piece, subverts “the purity myth in America and Europe and the media view of family life, horror movies, and ornamentation.”

    Despite their low production values and surreal and cartoonish stylings, the videos do accrue to each other in this setting. Even when familiar with their content, their disturbing imagery, while absorbing and fascinating to watch on one level, can make a viewer queasy and unsteady afterward, with a sense of vertigo akin to having just witnessed a bullfight. As instructive as the videos are when seen together, there is some sensory overload in watching them all at a sitting. Rather than taking a sampling of them, it may be better to choose one or two and leave the rest for another day in order to give them their full due.

    This may be possible soon. A retrospective exhibition tour was in the planning stages before Kelley’s death and will now become memorial shows in the coming months, beginning in Amsterdam at the end of the year, with a stop in New York City at the Museum of Modern Art’s P.S. 1 in 2013. Until that time, it would be worthwhile to have a look at the Watermill installation to see the artist in one of his last creative efforts and some of his earlier ones.

    The exhibition is on view through Sept. 16 and can be seen by appointment Tuesday through Friday from 4 to 6 p.m., and on weekends from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 3 to 5 p.m.

   “A picture’s worth a thousand words.”

    On Saturday night at Guild Hall in a special benefit perform  ance, we heard about 5,000 well-crafted words in staged readings of five short plays, inspired by four paintings and one photograph, all by East End artists. The result was a delightful mix of comedy and drama.

    In particular, the theater crackled with laughter during the last two plays, “Swan Song,” by J. Stephen Brantley, based on Jane Wilson’s painting “Lingering Blue: Bridgehampton,” and “The Love Experiment” by Jenny Lyn Bader, based on a painting by April Gornik called “Mirror Forest.”

    In a literal sense, Ms. Bader’s play was the truest of all to the painting that provided its inspiration, as the three characters on stage, looking out over the house, interacted with Ms. Gornik’s trees, beautifully projected onto an upstage scrim, almost becoming a fourth character.

    The evening began with “Exxon Eats the Odalisque,” painting by John Alexander, play by same name by Lucy Boyle, with Blythe Danner, Sarah Bierstock, and Harris Yulin. Sadly, I missed the first five minutes of this piece, thanks to an even worse-than-usual traffic jam when driving west on Napeague near Cyril’s.

But once seated, I was immediately enthralled by this bit of agitprop theater, complete with the upstage projection of Mr. Alexander’s work, which featured a rather slimy-looking Exxon credit card, with swastikas replacing the X’s in Exxon, and the wonderful, simple truthfulness of the actors.

    In a normal production, the actors have had a month or more of rehearsal, shaping their characters, finding the moment-to-moment nuances in the play. In a staged reading, the less rehearsal, the better, save for whatever simple blocking is worked in. The actors are hearing and saying lines for practically the first time. They are forced to really listen and really respond, because they don’t know exactly what is coming.

    And, according to Tovah Feldshuh, the brilliant actress who appears in the final two pieces of the night, the actor must make a strong character choice, not think about it, and just go with it. Maybe the character is Russian, or maybe he walks with a limp, or maybe the character reminds the actor of her Aunt Bess — whatever it is, just let it flow.

    “Exxon Eats the Odalisque” is about a mermaid, played by Ms. Bierstock, who has swum through crude oil pouring out of two tankers, only to be washed up onto the beach and found by an elderly East Hampton couple, who initially think she is tripping on acid. As they debate the fate of the human race from the oncoming sea of crude oil, they find time to argue over the correct pronunciation of “plover,” and Mr. Alexander’s point, and Ms. Boyle’s, is neatly delivered.

    The second work seemed a bit out of place: an excerpt from the hugely successful “ ’Night, Mother,” written and directed here by Marsha Norman, with Lois Markle and Kate Mueth. I didn’t quite get its connection to “Hurricane XLIX” by Clifford Ross, but maybe I missed something.

    This was followed by “Cloud Life” by Joseph Pintauro, based on a painting by the same name by Eric Dever. In this play, the canvas itself was on the stage. Mr. Pintauro plunges us into a wonderfully uncomfortable world, where a misogynistic painter, played by Stephen Hamilton, is secretly sleeping with both his wife (Kristen Lowman), and her adult daughter (Caitlin Dahl).

    The wife confronts him, without actually saying that she knows, as she tells him about her dream trip through the clouds. It is well directed by Jim Lawson.

    Mr. Pintauro ends with the artist flanked by the two women, and the feeling that there might be more here than just a short play.

    Which brought us to the funniest, most subversive play in the sequence, “Swan Song,” in which a frustrated musician turned East Hampton waiter, played by the young and extremely funny Trevor Vaughn, threatens to blow up the catering hall, and presumably all of East Hampton, while his fellow waiter, played by Kenneth Kilfara, tries to talk him out of it.

    “No, the meatballs are not vegetarian!” Mr. Vaughn screams, and the laughter would have been enough to drown out the fireworks which were heard inside the theater a few minutes earlier, going off at Main Beach.

    Ms. Feldshuh, with her classic comic timing, comes on as a divorcée at whose East Hampton wedding the bomb-wielding waiter played the clarinet. “You’re the best jazz clarinet player on Long Island and nobody cares. You’ve got God in your fingers,” she says, convincing him to “just walk away.”

    Kate Mueth’s direction demonstrated a deep understanding of the very tricky world of absurdist comedy.

    “The Love Experiment,” very well staged by Ari Laura Kreith, was a funny and touching way to finish off the evening, with Ms. Feldshuh playing a shrink with extreme cures for patients, Melissa Errico playing a neurotic hostess so shy she can’t even say hello to her own guests, and Mr. Brantley as a compassionate man.

    The short play is as rare these days as a short story. Guild Hall has shown itself theatrically, throughout this summer season, to be innovative and daring. Kudos.

   Whether it’s the first televised dance steps of Elvis Presley or man’s first steps on the moon, Joe Lauro is the go-to guy for archival film footage.

    His specialty and passion are one-of-a-kind music performances of all genres, and his company, Historic Films in Greenport, boasts over 50,000 hours of news and entertainment footage from 1895 to the present day, pieces of which can be seen daily on television networks, on Broadway, and in museums.

    Mr. Lauro also makes films and plays music himself, and is known for his annual parties, including the Shelter Island Beach Blast on Saturday at Wade’s Beach to benefit the Island Gift of Life Foundation and a Halloween throw-down in the three-story barn behind his house on Shelter Island.

    He owns a house in Sag Harbor, too, his primary residence outside the summer months, when it is occupied by Bay Street Theatre performers. Lilias White, the Tony-Award-winning star of the musical “Big Maybelle: Soul of the Blues,” stayed there through Sunday, and each night when she went on stage, Mr. Lauro’s black-and-white film footage served as the set’s backdrop. Mr. Lauro said he is “enthralled with theater” and awed by the talent of live performers. In film, he said, you can do it over 20 times, not so on the stage.

    Mr. Lauro is working now on a documentary on Fats Domino. “It’s 80 percent shot,” he said, but had been on hold until last week, when he received news that the French archive I.N.A. had released footage he needs to complete the film.

    “Katrina is part of the story,” Mr. Lauro said, because after the hurricane, Fats Domino was displaced from his neighborhood, where friends used to sit with him around his kitchen table, sometimes eating crawfish at 10 a.m. “He is really excited about sharing his life and music in the film,” Mr. Lauro said. People in New Orleans who are involved in the project learned the good news last week as they were dealing with the effects Hurricane Isaac.

    Mr. Lauro loves the New Orleans music scene and has visited the city for 20 years. While making the documentary, he had the chance to spend time with the musician in New Orleans, which was “an honor,” he said.

    Mr. Lauro has been making films for 15 years and collecting footage for much longer. Of all the films he’s made, a Louis Prima documentary is his favorite and “Reflections,” a documentary on the Supremes, is his most successful, he said.

    Born in Brooklyn, he saw Al Jolson on television as a kid and was immediately captured by the older music style. He would roam around on his bicycle in search of the music he loved and became known as the “kid that wants the old 78 r.p.m. records.” When he was 15, he said he played in a band that played Beatles-type music, but he always had a private love for the music of the 1920s, and continued “gobbling up all of that stuff” through graduate school at New York University. While living in the city, Mr. Lauro said he was fortunate to have heard Alberta Hunter, a blues singer-songwriter born in 1895, perform every week at the Cookery.

    The son of a correction officer, he was also inspired by seeing the inmate performances, including one called “I’m Dreaming of a Right Christmas,” that his father produced when he ran the art program at the Brooklyn House of Detention. He was fascinated, too, with the prison library that contained donated books from as far back as 1820, some with unexpected memorabilia such as letters and a dried flower. The new, he said, is advertised, but “it’s important to learn about what came before.”

    After seeing someone fall to the ground in Greenwich Village and watching people simply step over him to get to a pizza parlor, Mr. Lauro “packed my bongos and came to Shelter Island.” He spends most of his time now on the East End.

    Next week, he will travel to Portland, Me., where he will pick up thousands of pieces of music and drive it back to New York by rented truck.

    In addition to vintage film clips, he also buys and sells music and vintage memorabilia, selling about 40 items a week on eBay. Some if it is hard for him to part with, he said. He has sold the only known copies of certain albums, and for one rare Louis Armstrong record, “Zulu’s Ball,” recorded in 1923 in Chicago, he received the highest price ever paid for a record. Nobody could find a pressing of the album until the 1940s, when it surfaced during a World War II scrap drive (records were melted down to create shellac for ombs). Mr. Lauro purchased it in the 1970s from a collector in Holland along with some 1,500 other pre-1940 jazz and blues records. He and a partner took turns holding it, eventually selling it for $32,000. Mr. Lauro’s collection also includes what he calls his treasure, a 125-year-old “gut-string” bass, which he plays for the Who Dat Loungers, his nine-piece band, which plays gigs from Manhattan to Montauk.

    Before starting the band, he played with Gene Casey and the Lone Sharks for several years, and before that with the Moon Dogs. He puts together other ensembles, too, like the new band Stretch, which has a sound reminiscent of the Grateful Dead.

    Of all of his work, he said that performing live is his favorite thing to do and the hardest, being at the mercy of the audience, acoustics, and weather.

    The Who Dat Loungers will play on Saturday at Mr. Lauro’s annual fund-raiser for Island Gift of Life, which helps numerous patients on the East End with illness-related financial burdens. A member of the Island Gift of Life’s board of directors, Mr. Lauro helps to seek out locals in need who have terminal or life-altering illnesses.

    The end-of-summer party has taken place for 27 years at various locations including Mr. Lauro’s barn, but the last 15 have been at Wade’s Beach on Shelter Island, where it will be held this year from 3 p.m. to midnight. The $20 entry fee will include live music by such bands as Gene Casey and the Lone Sharks, New Dawn, the Realm, Jet Set Renegades, and Dead Dogs. The headlining band, selected by Mr. Lauro, is the New Orleans High and Mighty Brass Band, which will play new and old tunes, a combination of hip-hop and tubas. Attendees have the option of buying barbecue or taking their own picnic.

Next for Ille Arts

     Ille Arts, a relatively new gallery just off Amagansett’s Main Street, will open “Raw,” a show of work by four artists, with a reception on Saturday from 6 to 8 p.m. Taking part in the exhibit are Andrew Guenther, whose paintings, often in almost primary colors or black and white, can evoke either the Abstract Expressionist period or outsider art, and Jose Lerma, whose recent work has been nightmarish pen-and-ink portraits of bewigged faces, some layered with what appears to be cut and restitched fabric, giant heads, and multilayered installations.

    Also showing will be Liz Markus, a painter, and Wendy White, whose large canvases often incorporate text. The show will be up until Oct. 10.

“Wet” at OutEast

    James Katsipis, a Montauk born-and-bred photographer, and Luiza de Moraes Campos, a Los Angeles-based photographer who spent her early childhood in her parents’ native Brazil, will show their work in “Wet” at Montauk’s OutEast Gallery and Goods on Tuthill Road from Saturday through early October. The pairing has Mr. Katsipis’s work, which includes landscapes, underwater images, and carefully staged black-and-white work with models, contrasting with Ms. de Moraes Campos’s intimate and often erotic portraits.

    Mr. Katsipis began studying photography in high school and continued in college. He makes his living in commercial photography and has shot several television pilots. His film “True Terrace” was screened at a Surfrider Foundation event in East Hampton in August.

    As a girl, Ms. de Moraes Campos moved with her family from Rio de Janeiro to California. She studied at San Diego State University, majoring in English literature before deciding to take up the camera. Her work expresses her interest in female sexuality, her Brazilian heritage, and dreams, according to a release from the gallery.

    An opening party will be on Saturday from 7 to 10 p.m.

Community Art Show

    The Community Arts Project will present photographic work in “This and That,” which begins tomorrow and runs through Sunday at the Springs Presbyterian Church on Old Stone Highway. The photographers include Bruce Milne, Sadie Klughers, Rosa Hanna Scott, David Wilt, and Brad Loewen. Marilyn DeCarlo-Ames will show her Polaroid transfer prints.

    A reception will be held from 5 to 8 p.m. on Saturday. Hours are noon to 8 p.m. tomorrow and Saturday and 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. on Sunday.

Juried in Southampton

    The Southampton Cultural Center is presenting a juried art exhibition through Oct. 7 in its gallery on Pond Lane. A reception will be held Saturday from 4 to 6 p.m. Among the artists with work on view are Justin Ankenbauer, John Bell, Sheryl Budnik, Cesar Delos Santos III, Miranda Gatewood, Caroline Kaplowitz, Donald King, Phil Marco, Reynold Ruffins, and Pamela Topham.

Five at Ashawagh

    A group show will be on view Saturday through Monday at Ashawagh Hall in Springs, with work in a range of mediums by Chick Bills, Marcie Honerkamp, Dennis Lawrence, and Christine Liderbauch.

    Ms. Liderbauch, who has previously exhibited pencil drawings at Ashawagh Hall, will show new sculptural assemblies of plastic automobile parts. Mr. Bills, who lives with Ms. Liderbauch in a house with adjoining studios in Northwest, East Hampton, will hang digitally manipulated images. Ms. Honerkamp’s mosaics will be on view, and Mr. Lawrence will show paintings.

    A reception will be held on Saturday from 5 to 9 p.m.

“Birds” Closing

    There is one day left to see “For the Birds,” an avian-themed group show with work by John Alexander, Terri Elkins, Eric Ernst, Jane Johnson, Kimberly Goff, Paton Miller, Dan Rizzie, David Slater, Joseph Stella, Andrew Wyeth, and others, at the Sag Harbor Whaling and Historical Museum on Main Street. An end-of-summer reception will be held there tomorrow from 6 to 8 p.m. A tasting of local food and wine has been promised, and a donation of $10 has been suggested.

Goodbye Judy

    Tonight brings the last chance to catch the inimitable Judy Garland on the big screen as Guild Hall concludes its Red Carpet Film Series, which this summer was an all-Judy celebration, 75 years after she made her first movie. The film, “Summer Stock,” which co-stars Gene Kelly, is the story of a small-town farmer, down on her luck, whose homestead is invaded by a theatrical troupe invited to stay by her ne’er-do-well sister.

    There will be a talk following the 8 p.m. screening with Nicolas Rapold, a senior editor at Film Comment and contributor to The New York Times, The Village Voice, Artforum, and Sight & Sound. Tickets are $12, $10 for members.

    Saturday night at 8, the John Drew Theater hosts a staged reading of “The Painting Plays,” new works by well-known East End playwrights inspired by artists who have lived and painted locally, performed by noted actors who also live here. A story about this event appears elsewhere on this page.    

    Guild Hall concludes its weekend offerings on Sunday at 7:30 p.m. with a performance of Linda Eder’s “Songbirds — A Tribute to the Ladies.” The ladies in question include Lena Horn, Etta James, Barbra Streisand, Judy Garland, Eva Cassidy, and more. Ms. Eder has performed on a number of distinguished stages, among them Carnegie Hall, Radio City Music Hall, and the Kennedy Center. Tickets start at $50.

Readings in the Barn

    The Mulford Repertory Theatre will continue its series of readings at Mulford Farm, 10 James Lane in East Hampton, with one-night-only performances on Saturday and Sunday.

    Saturday’s reading will be of Edward Albee’s “Zoo Story,” and Sunday’s will be John Patrick Shanley’s “Beggars in the House of Plenty.” Both performances will start at 7:30 p.m. and cost $10 at the door. The Mulford barn holds only 50 people, so early arrival is advisable.

Audiences have been encouraged to take blankets and picnic on the farm grounds before the show. Gates will open at 5 p.m.

   Last Saturday, the lazy late-summer afternoon was punctuated by the sounds of bat hitting ball and ball hitting glove. On the Amagansett School field, a group of men and women were engaged in a spirited but friendly game.

    This first annual meeting — on the diamond, that is — of music industry attorneys lay at the end of a long and winding road shaped by the seismic changes in the music business over a relatively brief period.

    Bob Donnelly, an attorney with Manhattan and Minneapolis firm Lommen Abdo, is a 34-year veteran of the music industry. On Saturday, as colleagues played catch on the school’s field, the Sag Harbor resident considered the broad range of events that have transformed the industry and brought the players together on a baseball field.

    Mr. Donnelly is known as a champion of recording artists. He was part of the team that won a judgment in unpaid royalties for the artist Ronnie Spector against her former record label. Former New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer credited him with a case that resulted in payment of $55 million in back royalties by labels to artists. And he was a prominent figure in the repeal of the changes to the “works-for-hire” provision of the Copyright Act of 1976, which paved the way for recording artists to take ownership of their master recordings after 35 years. The act went into effect in 1978: As 2013 approaches, many recording artists are indeed moving to claim their master recordings.

    “Gigantic,” Mr. Donnelly said of the implications. “Right now, 60 percent of all [record labels’] sales are deep catalog.”

    This effort on behalf of songwriters and musicians — few of them among the most business-savvy members of society — reflects a lifelong love of music, evident in the attorney’s often self-deprecating remarks. “Like so many people in the business side of the music business, I’m a hopelessly failed musician,” he said. “I took guitar lessons when I was in the sixth grade, and at the end of the semester you’d play that concert for your parents. I had one song, three chords. I played it so badly that even my mother, who to the day she died was my greatest apologist, could find nothing redeeming to say. When your mother thinks you suck at something, that’s the time to change course. I then became the kid that had every record, even every imported record. Whether you hated me or not, you had to invite me to your party because I had the best record collection.”

    Mr. Donnelly attended Providence College on a track scholarship, and then pursued a master’s degree in counseling psychology at Columbia University, “which, I like to joke, I use more dealing with artists than I use my law degree.” The School of Law at St. John’s University was next, after which the young graduate worked for New York State Assemblyman Edward Meyer’s campaign for Congress.

    “Right after the campaign,” Mr. Donnelly said, “I got a job that enabled me to negotiate a deal with Steve Leber and David Krebs, who had just left the William Morris Agency and were forming what grew to become the biggest management company in America, Leber/Krebs. They offered me a job to become general counsel. I was intensely flattered, until I discovered they intended to pay me about one-eighth what I was currently making. But it was a full-time music position, and that’s what I was looking to do. I was very lucky, because the first band that Leber/Krebs signed was an unknown band from Boston called Aerosmith. On their heels came Ted Nugent, AC/DC, Def Leppard, Parliament-Funkadelic. I was in-house there for about three years and then went off on my own, with them as my first client.”

    With the birth of grunge in the early 1990s, the music industry rode Nirvana and other artists to unprecedented prosperity. But as the decade drew to a close, a software called Napster was spreading like a virus across college campuses and, quickly, across the record-buying public. With Napster and the programs that quickly followed, digital audio files could be freely shared by anyone with a computer and modem. The music business would never be the same.

    “During the 1990s, we would increase the price of a CD by a buck each year, and everybody would say we were going to hit the wall, there would be price resistance,” Mr. Donnelly said. “To our utter amazement, sales went up. While the film business, the theater business, all the similar entertainment industries were going up and down, we were going straight up. An arrogance developed, along the way, that we were smarter than everybody else.”

    The industry was slow to react, finally launching user-unfriendly Web sites to sell their recordings and attempting to stuff the genie it had unleashed, in the digitization of pre-recorded music via the compact disc, back into the bottle. But all copy-protection schemes were easily hacked, and the labels couldn’t compete with free, albeit inferior, MP3 files of their products.

    “It was a demonstration that we didn’t get it, we didn’t understand the technology revolution that was happening around us,” Mr. Donnelly conceded. “And 2000 was the watershed year. Since then, our ‘hard good sales’ — CD sales — are off, I think, 40 percent.”

    Such a dramatic reduction led to widespread layoffs, from which attorneys were not exempt. With the consolidation of the major-label industry (now numbering just three transnational corporations) and far fewer artists being signed, “You have a larger pool of attorneys seeking to represent a smaller pool of artists,” Mr. Donnelly said. “In that way, our business isn’t as economically viable as it once was.”

    A manifestation of the music industry’s retrenchment is reduced travel expenditures, one result of which is fewer East Coast-based attorneys able to attend the annual Entertainment Law Initiative luncheon and scholarship presentation during Grammy Week in Los Angeles. “For many years, when I would negotiate a deal, even though we would do it over the telephone for the most part, at the very least we would meet on the day of closing, where the label and the artist and the lawyers would all get together in the conference room,” Mr. Donnelly said. “If at no other time, you were assured of meeting your colleague. That doesn’t happen anymore; we do everything with FedEx, PDFs. The ELI luncheon has become an important part of doing things.”

    With the participation of the Sag Harbor resident Joe Serling, of Manhattan company Serling Rooks Ferrara McKoy and Worob, a meeting of attorneys, not in a conference room but on an Amagansett baseball diamond, began to make sense. “We were on a conference call organizing a breakfast we’re going to have in October for music lawyers,” Mr. Donnelly said. “There were other folks on the call who were also out here. We were all saying, ‘We’re all going to be out here in August, why don’t we get together?’ Joe organized this.”

    “I’m a big fan of Bob’s,” Mr. Serling said. “He knows what he’s doing and is good to negotiate with. Bob is a very solid guy, and a very decent guy to be on the other side of deals with.”

    In recent years, Mr. Donnelly co-founded Modern Works Music Publishing, a publishing administration company with a decidedly artist-friendly bent. “In an ever-shrinking music industry” the company will soon hire its ninth employee, Mr. Donnelly said.

    At home, where he lives with his wife, Marie, Mr. Donnelly grows oysters from the end of his dock on Sag Harbor Cove, part of a program overseen by Cornell University to introduce oysters grown in captivity to Peconic Bay. “I don’t know who enjoys it more. Me? My grandkids? The oysters?”

    Despite the rampant piracy of pre­recorded music and consequent contraction of the music industry over the last dozen years, he remains an optimist, and clearly retains a deep love and enthusiasm for his work.

    “The revolution grabbed us by the throat and threw us down on the floor,” he said. “But it’s caused us to think about the business differently. One of the objections that people had for the last few years is that everyone, including the artist, was guilty of being obstructionist in trying new technologies. I’m still nervous when [music streaming service] Spotify pays 0.00027 cents per play. But I’d rather be exploring these new avenues. I’d like to leave the business in as good shape as I found it, because I love music. Even though I’ll battle with the record labels, and have had my fair share of wrestling matches with them, I don’t want to see them fail. They’re a crucial part of what makes this work. But they’ve got to change in the same way that the rest of us do.”

Tonal Vision

    Glenn Horowitz Bookseller in East Hampton will shift its usual focus to host Peter Dayton’s “rocknrollshrink” record release on Sunday from 6 to 8 p.m., along with a preview of the exhibition “Andy Warhol: Album Covers.”

    A clear vinyl 12-inch 45 r.p.m. disc, “rocknrollshrink” is also an archive of Mr. Dayton’s interactions with his patients as the shrink in the title. The recording contains their accounts and reminiscences of how rock music affected their lives. “Rock and roll destroyed my life,” John, 43, says in one of the testimonials. “My uncle gave me ‘Blonde on Blonde’ when I was 8 . . . so there ya go,” says Katrina, age unknown. “Rock and roll is about fucking, that’s what it means,” according to Eric, 51.

    Mr. Dayton, who also founded the 1970s punk band La Peste, designed the cover and label of the record, which is available in an edition of 300. An MP3 will be available at 6decadesbooks.com.

    The Warhol show will include his complete collection of 60 covers, such as the Rolling Stones’ “Sticky Fingers” zipper cover and the full-page blotted line drawings found on Tchaikovsky’s “Swan Lake, Acts I & II.” It will run through Sept. 24.

New Duo at Halsey Mckay

    Halsey Mckay in East Hampton will open its next show — work by David Kennedy-Cutler and Elise Ferguson — on Saturday from 6 to 9 p.m. According to the gallery, the artists share “idiosyncratic approaches with materials to their unique interpretations of geometry and abstraction.” Ms. Ferguson is a painter. Mr. Kennedy-Cutler is a sculptor.

    Ms. Ferguson’s pigmented plaster reliefs will hang in the downstairs gallery and are inspired by Louis Kahn. While abstracted, her sculptural objects offer hints of material things such as stovetops, industrial packaging, and construction tools and materials.

    Mr. Kennedy-Cutler’s work reflects his neighborhood in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, a fairly remote, industrial area where pollution and gentrification meet in a muddle. His sculptures contain epoxy resin, clear and tinted Plexiglas, acrylic printer’s process ink, photographs of oil rainbows on wet asphalt, smashed compact discs, and recycled motor oil. The exhibition is on view through Sept. 30.

Hurricane Talk

    Richard Barons, the director of the East Hampton Historical Society, will give a curator’s talk on Saturday at 10 a.m. on the current exhibit, “The Long Island Express: Rare Photographs of East Hampton After the 1938 Hurricane.” The show, which is on view on weekends at Clinton Academy, is the result of the discovery of dozens of hurricane pictures tucked away in two family photo albums found locally in an antique bureau.

    Responsible for more than 600 deaths on Long Island and New England, the Hurricane of ’38 is the one against which all other severe weather incidents in the region are measured. It hit land at Westhampton Beach and made Montauk into an island. The show includes more than 125 rarely seen images taken in the aftermath of the storm. Mr. Barons will repeat the talk on Sept. 15.

Eighth “Body of Work”

    “Body of Work VIII” will be shown at Ashawagh Hall in Springs beginning tomorrow and running through Monday. It features work by artists such as Rosalind Brenner, Linda Capello, Ellen Dooley, Michael Cardacino, Tina Folks, Gordon Gagliano, Anthony Lombardo, Michael McDowell, Frank Sofo, and Margaret Weissbach. The artists make up a group that is interested in depicting the figure in various forms of naturalism and abstraction. A reception will be held on Saturday from 5 to 8 p.m.

Ramiro at Grenning

    The Grenning Gallery has a solo show of work by Angel Ramiro Sanchez, known simply as Ramiro, on view now in Sag Harbor. It features pieces from his series of studio interiors that, intimate and on a human scale, are far removed from his grander historical paintings. The artist had a retrospective in Milan in 2011 and traveled to St. Petersburg, Russia, last winter, which inspired the painting “Memories of St. Petersburg.” In addition to his interior scenes, a number of East End landscapes are in the show.

New at Kramoris

    The Romany Kramoris Gallery in Sag Harbor will show the work of Herbert August and Michael Yurick beginning today and on view through Sept. 20, with a reception on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m. Mr. August, an abstract artist, is from Sagaponack. His work often starts from nature and then moves away from the form as he focuses and expands on aspects of it.

    Mr. Yurick will show his “Rising Sky” series of metallic, iridescent, and flat finished paintings. His works are abstracted, too, but inspired by the meeting of sea and sky.

Bilotta at Crazy Monkey

    Barbara Bilotta’s work is featured in a solo show at the Crazy Monkey Gallery in Amagansett. Ms. Bilotta was the winner of the gallery’s 2012 art competition in February. She paints large colorful canvases in a style she calls “abstract impressionism.” The artworks of all of the members of the artist cooperative are also on view through Sept. 29. A reception will be held on Saturday from 5 to 7 p.m.