For me as a DJ, it’s especially exciting to see the new connections being made between club culture and live jazz. It’s a link I’ve been trying to make, in one way or another, for the past 30 years. Now more than ever before, it feels as if that boundary is finally being broken down.
Instead Of Turning Away, Perhaps The Arts Ought To Be Challenging Us On Our Guns Identity
Philip Kennicott: “One fundamental strategy of political art is to say: This ugly image is who we are, and then challenge the audience to deny that, in word and deed. By forcing us to confront the great fetish of American culture, its slavish worship of the gun, the Hirshhorn could dramatize a choice we face, and a decision we have avoided for generations now. There has never been a more urgent moment to project that challenge at Americans, and hope they finally are sickened by the idea.”
The Violent Movies That We Call “Entertainment” And The Real-Life Mass-Killings We Abhor
Michael Phillips: “Whenever there’s another mass murder in our country, action films become a strange and ghoulish experience, beyond whatever the filmmakers have created for our consumption. There are times when the gun fatalities and revised statistics get to you. They’re too much. Too much. There are times when movie slaughter, and extravagant, adrenaline-pumping shootouts, cannot easily be enjoyed.”
Trump’s Proposal To Kill The NEA And NEH Says Volumes About His Views On The Arts
“Americans,” Trump crowed during his State of the Union address, “fill the world with art and music.” And yet, his insistence that support of arts and culture should not be a mission of the government tells us what he actually believes about the arts.
World Trade Center Arts Space Announces $300 Million Funding And A New Artistic Director: Bill Rauch
The push to build a performing arts component at the World Trade Center site has had more reversals of fortune than a Greek drama. But the project took several steps forward this week with approval of an agreement for a 99-year lease; an announcement that nearly $300 million had been raised and the naming, Friday, of its first artistic director: Bill Rauch, who leads the Oregon Shakespeare Festival.
Judge Rules Against News Organizations That Embedded A Pic Of Tom Brady; Huge Implications For Publishers On The Internet
Justin Goldman filed the lawsuit after he snapped an image of New England Patriots quarterback Brady, Boston Celtics general manager Danny Ainge and others on a street in 2016. Shortly thereafter, he uploaded the photo to Snapchat. The photo then went viral, with others uploading it to Twitter. Subsequently, various news organizations embedded the tweets with the image in stories about whether the Celtics would successfully recruit basketball player Kevin Durant, and if Brady would help to seal the deal. Goldman sued some of these news outlets.
Here We Go Again. Why We Still Have To Defend The Existence Of Federal Arts Funding
Howard Sherman: “It’s hard to stay fully positive when, in the 35th year of my career in the arts, I realise the NEA has been under some form of attack almost annually since at least 1990 – fully three-quarters of my professional life. Trumpism may have us on ever more heightened alert, but there’s never really been a moment when we could truly relax regarding this issue. If our community did, we were losing ground.”
Hollywood’s Lolita Complex: Molly Haskell Asks If Time’s Finally Up
“Nymphetmania has a long and hoary pedigree in Hollywood, and flourished years before Nabokov gave us the Lolita syndrome” – from DW Griffith’s child-woman ingénues such as Lillian Gish and Mae Marsh through Taxi Driver and Pretty Baby right up to late Woody Allen. “It is no longer possible to rationalise as consensual certain egregious pairings, or to accept with equanimity the sexualisation of underage performers. We have begun to take a second look at the smarmy overtones of movies such as Allen’s Manhattan and Louis CK’s now-shelved I Love You, Daddy, in which ‘protective’ older men ogle daughter figures in utterly self-serving ways.”
New ‘Golden’ Man Booker Prize To Name Best Of All 51 Past Winners
“The new award, announced on Friday as part of the literary prize’s 50th anniversary celebrations, will be judged by five judges and then voted for by the public.” Of course, they’ve done this twice before, and the same book won both times.
That Cairo Arts Space Egyptian Censors Shut Down In December? Reports Say It’s Reopened. Don’t Believe Them.
The staff at the Townhouse may be back at work after six weeks, but that doesn’t mean the authorities have given them permission to show anything to the public.