Yearly Archives: 2021
So Yale Theatre School Tuition Will Be Free. Is This A Good Thing?
The fascinating idea is that the free tuition even can expand exponentially to help yet more artists. It’s an interesting argument, rarely applied to...
Bollywood Isn’t Nimble Enough To Have Made COVID Films Already, But This Indian Film...
The Malayalam-language cinema, based in India's best-educated state, Kerala, has managed to produce compelling dramas dealing with the pandemic — from a two-hander shot...
Martha Nussbaum And The Striving In Structures
For her entire career, Nussbaum, now seventy-four, has blazed a trail for women in philosophy, a field that historically has not welcomed female thinkers....
How Do You Prove Opera Singers Can Act? Put Them In ‘King Lear’
Director Keith Warner assembled a cast made up entirely of opera singers, headed by such major names as John Tomlinson, Thomas Allen, Kim Begley,...
How Charleston Is Finally Reckoning With Its History In The Slave Trade
From the Old Slave Mart on Chalmers Street to historic plantations and downtown mansions to the new International African American Museum to walking tours...
A Deep Dive Into The Ancient Egyptian Tombs At Saqqara
Once the necropolis for the Pharaohs' capital city of Memphis, Saqqara has lately been the most exciting and productive archaeological site in Egypt. Here's...
It’s The Chinese Communist Party’s 100th Birthday, And Socialist Realism Is Back
Not only are they reviving classics of the Cultural Revolution like The Red Detachment of Women, new works celebrating the Party's achievements are being...
Chicago Tribune Puts Theater Critic Chris Jones In Charge Of Editorial Page
The move follows the paper's loss of 40 journalists since Alden Global Capital bought the Tribune earlier this year. Jones says he'll continue to...
Composer Louis Andriessen Dead At 82
He combined Philip Glass-style minimalism with influences ranging from jazz to Baroque music to Stravinsky to hard rock, not to mention leftist politics. He...
Daniele Gatti To Succeed Zubin Mehta In Florence
Fired from Amsterdam's Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra in 2018, Gatti then had a stint as chief conductor at the Rome Opera. He now succeeds the...
Stolen Picasso, Mondrian Found In Ravine In Greece
In custody is not a gang of thieves who planned a Hollywood-style heist, but a 49-year-old construction worker, with the Twitter name ArtFreak, who...
Why Writers Need Agents
Writers need agents more than agents need writers. They have needed them since the late 19th century, when an increasingly literate public fed by...
Let’s Talk About Green Things In Movies (Fascinating)
What makes a good greensperson? The best of them know how and where to get things, no matter how rare or obscure or out...
How The Pandemic Has/Is Changing The Ways We Look At Art
What I did not expect was how these installations would speak to one another, and to me, about the pandemic. - Artnet
Why We Need Distrust In Our Civic Discourse
Sometimes distrust is not only appropriate but is also a way to initiate the conversation that’s needed for civic friendship. Distrust, in a democracy,...
No Surprise: European Movie Box Office Down 70 Percent Last Year
The European box office plunged 70.4 percent last year, down $6.04 billion (5.1 billion euro) from $8.5 billion (7.2 billion euro) in 2019 to...
Florida Man Says He’s The One Who Invented Invisible Sculpture, May Sue Artist Who...
In early June in Milan, conceptual artist Salvatore Garau auctioned off an "immaterial sculpture" for €15,000. Now performance artist Tom Miller points out that...
An NFT Of The Internet’s Source Code Sells For $5.4 Million
With bidding starting at $1,000, a total of 51 collectors competed for the NFT during a sale titled “This Changed Everything.” The winning bid...
The Maestro Who’s Bringing Period Instruments To Ravel, Mahler, And Stravinsky
François-Xavier Roth and his orchestra, Les Siècles, like to play concerts with Rameau in the first half and Ravel in the second, or Debussy...
Memory Champ: Trick Your Brain To Remember
This technique of linking images with places is called the memory palace, and it’s particularly useful for remembering the order of certain elements. -...
Lucinda Childs At ’81 On Paper’
"She's most associated with the Judson Dance Theater and New York's downtown arts scene of the '60s and '70s, a hub of radical musicians,...
How Ancient Humans Adapted To Be Smart
One of the things we’re learning from new fossil discoveries is there appears to be these different species of early human, or hominin, coexisting...
Let’s Give Mae West Credit As The Auteur She Was
She doesn't get the respect for her pioneering role that, for instance, Ida Lupino does — because her characters and stories were comic, and...
Banksy “Adjustment” Of Mount Rainier Painting Sells For $6 Million
Banksy added an asterisk and a tiny bit of corporate-speak to the painting’s bottom right-hand corner: “*Subject to availability for a limited period only.”...
‘La Madre De La Telenovela’, Delia Fiallo, Dead At 96
She started out writing radio serials in 1940s Cuba, switched to TV, fled the Castro regime in 1966 and started over in Miami —...
