“The thousands of field recordings of American folk and vernacular music that were made by Mr. Lomax and his colleagues rank high among the cultural treasures to be found in the Library of Congress. Some of them, like ‘Bonaparte’s Retreat,’ have made their way into the collective consciousness of musicians and music lovers throughout the world. Next to nothing is known about most of the people who cut those rough-hewn recordings, nearly all of whom were amateurs or semiprofessionals who made music purely for their own pleasure and that of their families and friends. Yet many of them were also uniquely gifted musicians…”

“In most human lives, absurdity and sorrow are woven together too tightly to be teased apart–and it is comedy, not tragedy, that illustrates that fact most fully. Life is too complex to be painted solely in shades of black…”

“Everybody in the art world is now talking about the Detroit Institute of Arts, a world-class institution that just came within inches of closing. Instead, it’s now more financially stable than at any time in the past quarter-century…”

“Turn the clock back exactly a half-century and you’ll find yourself in a different America–but one fraught with subtle signs and portents of what was to come. Nowhere is that lost world of confident certitude more clearly visible than in the surviving relics of its popular culture…”

“Despite what seems to be an innate preference for more or less literal representation of the visible world, the abstract idea remains to this day both seductive and perennially relevant. Why? Because the best abstract art has the power to cut through the rigid conventions of direct representation and externalize interior essences–to show us things not as they look, but as they are…”

“Perfect? By no means. But perfection has a way of becoming boring. Whatever else he was or wasn’t, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau was always interesting. He never gave a performance that didn’t make you think–even when it was wrong…”

“Critics tend as a general rule to do their most memorable writing about works of art that they dislike. In the words of Anton Ego, the haughty restaurant reviewer in Brad Bird’s film Ratatouille, they ‘thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read.’ So it is–but as any critic can tell you, it’s also harder to praise than to pan. The reason for this is that the language of abuse is vastly more vivid than the language of praise…”

“So no, we can’t have more plays like Tribes on Broadway, not unless some producer with cash to burn finagles a Hollywood star into taking three months off to appear in a limited run. Nor is that situation going to change any time soon. And until the media shift their focus to off-Broadway and regional companies–which is just as unlikely–then live theater, important and vital though it is, will remain on the margins of the larger American culture, vaguely respected but increasingly ignored…”