Because we can't trust the art world to the elites. For instance, in recent years, "Major art collectors (mostly white) were benefitting from the Trump deregulation and tax cuts, while investing some of their surplus wealth into the rebranding opportunity offered by the anti-Trump resistance. They could literally turn a profit on fulfilling the activist demand." - Hyperallergic
It's an urgent question for many in lockdown - and in the UK, "whether we are in lockdown or not, four fifths of the UK population lives in an urban environment and one in eight homes do not have a garden."- BBC
For white Southern writers, especially, "the deconstruction and demolition of so many of the myths about Southern culture and identity has been ongoing in literature for a long time but seems to have accelerated at a stunning rate in the past four years, and especially at the start of this year. The combined effects of these historic circumstances are...
Bernstein's "career as a top film and television screenwriter was derailed by the McCarthy-era blacklist, and decades later turned that experience into one of his best-known films, The Front." - The New York Times
Lee's speech for the New York Film Critics Circle Awards was filmed on January 6 - the day when insurrectionists broke into the U.S. Capitol Building, hunting legislators and raiding offices. "We’re at the crossroads now. And everyone please be safe, this is not a game. These people have guns with ammunition. ... This president, President Agent Orange, will go...
Director Tabitha Jackson was lucky in 2020 - her hiring was big news at last year's Sundance Film Festival. Then, of course, a global pandemic hit. "To say her inaugural year heading the most influential film festival in America was rife with unpredictable challenges is an understatement." - Los Angeles Times
Mance was "a buoyant, bluesy jazz pianist who worked with some of the biggest names in jazz, including Lester Young, Dizzy Gillespie, Cannonball Adderley and Dinah Washington, before establishing himself as the leader of his own groups." - The New York Times
And what Emerald Fennell delivers - which is something different - in Promising Young Woman. "How do you write a revenge movie that feels like something real and that is based in real trauma and grief? Because I suppose the other thing with the revenge that we don’t talk about very much is revenge and vengeance aren’t good...
The chair, Pam Rorke Levy, says that despite controversy over the attempted sale of a Diego Rivera mural, among other things, "she has acted to save the school and that she was taking necessary steps in keeping one of the last remaining colleges on the West Coast exclusively dedicated to contemporary art in operation." - The New York Times
And, because of social media and marketing, it's making a serious comeback. The projects "are magnified again by technology, by the software that enables architects to visualise complex shapes and engineers to calculate them, by the photorealistic visualisation techniques that make a project seem physical before it is, by the construction techniques that turn these shapes into reality and,...
Michelle Burford has co-written, or really, written after many hours of absorbing interviews, quite a few celebrity memoirs. She calls herself a "story architect," and her name appears on the covers of the memoirs alongside the famous counterparts. But as a Black woman, she has to tell publishers not only to think of her for Black women's memoirs: "I’ve...
It's not going to be easy: "Genetic determinism is a fantasy tradition. ... As both a ruleset and a fantasy backdrop, D&D is in the business of translating these racial differences into numerical scores." - Wired
Can a novel be, or feel, contemporary without references to doomscrolling or at least brushing up against social media? "While the internet and mobile phones initially posed problems for fiction writers - not least for their potential to destroy traditional plots of desire and obstruction (chance encounters, missed connections, quests), the dangers of such instant gratification increasingly appear to...
Or at least AMC, despite its debt load and the damage from the coronavirus shutdowns. Adam Aron: "Some of my competitors, the ones caught up in the past, are saying that I’m the worst human being alive on the planet. ... But sometimes you have to stare change in the face, recognize that it has or soon will arrive,...
Despite the fact that the previous president was, himself, the product of show business, the arts seemed to mean nothing to him. "If artists were hostile to Trump’s policies, Trump’s White House — perhaps from a self-protective attitude of 'If I can’t have it, then I never wanted it' — was unusually inhospitable to or at best uninterested in...
