It must mean a lot that I can remember watching Sid Caesar’s “Show of Shows” on TV with my parents as a young child. For one thing, I don’t recall watching anything else as a family. For another, Caesar’s “Show of Shows” went off the air in 1954 and I
This blogpost cannot adequately display the exhaustive content and brilliant design of "Couper, Coller, Imprimer," the richly illustrated catalogue of an extraordinary photomontage exhibition at La Contemporaine in Nantes, France (running through March 14). Even so, it is hoped that this limited attempt evokes the broad historical spirit of the
A reader, Kevin, asks if I had seen this new report by Brian Shearer at Vanderbilt University on legal remedies for high prices charged by different sorts of firms (airports, hospitals, car dealerships, etc) on “captive” consumers. I had not. I am no lawyer, and so I cannot speak to the various
Adrian Rodriguez, Director of Community Engagement, Chorus Director and Curriculum Manager of the Music Advancement Program at The Juilliard School, shares how to implement a commitment to young people as they develop in the arts.
We posted more than 6,000 stories across all forms of culture in 2025. When you pull back and look at them in aggregate, the individual crises—the closures in San Francisco, the lawsuits in D.C., the endless op-eds about the "death of cinema"—stop looking like isolated incidents. They resolve into a
Nostalgia may be having a moment, but to say that's all that audiences want is oversimplifying. A recent NY Times article flattens the current moment in regional theater and I analyze what it means for how we can understand audiences.
Museums still operate as if interpretation is a one-way stream, produced by experts and consumed by the public. Instead, imagine an exhibition that doesn't just speak, but listens and responds.
Cheyenne King-Bails, Director of Community Experience at The Sphinx Organization, shares the value of the SphinxConnect conference and its impact on the arts community.
It must mean something that the highest creative achievement in American classical music is permanently controversial. When Porgy and Bess premiered on Broadway in 1935, a typical critical reaction was: “What is it?” American-born classical musicians (unlike their European-born brethren) marginalized George Gershwin as an interloper, a gifted dilettante. Later,
The current issue of The American Scholar includes a long piece of mine suggesting a possible new direction for contemporary classical music – versus the “makeshift music” that deluges our concert halls. I make reference to John Luther Adams, Charles Ives, Jean Sibelius, and Ferruccio Busoni. To read the whole
Kevin Haden, Senior Associate Dean of Strategic Engagement and Institutional Excellence at the Curtis Institute of Music, shares the importance of giving young people the space to define their own creative vision.
Mere hours before its board renamed the Kennedy Center for Donald Trump, Persuasion ran my online piece on Trump, the Kennedy Center, JFK, and Leonard Bernstein. I will be following up with a 50-minute “More than Music” feature on NPR, to run in January. Here’s the Persuasion article: When people
Literary critic and academic John Carey died last week at the age of ninety-one. I always enjoyed reading his reviews. If you hadn’t already guessed how the Bloomsbury set and their literary contemporaries viewed common folk, his book The Intellectuals and the Masses gives you chapter and verse. I enjoyed Henry Oliver’s appreciation of
