Under Deng Xiaoping, the Chinese Communist Party decreed that the Great Helmsman was 70 percent right and 30 percent wrong. “And this mixed legacy makes it hard to pin down exactly what about Mao Party leaders want to celebrate, and what about him they don’t. Who could have anticipated this? Andy Warhol.”
There’s No Such Thing As Standard English Anymore (So Why Do We Pretend There Is?)
“Non-standard English is linguistically the equal of the standard version – in fact, dialects tend to be more sophisticated grammatically than standard (as in the plural “youse” of many non-standard dialects where standard has just one confusing form). Yet standard continues – even now – to be prized as the “correct” form, and any deviation is considered to be wrong, lazy, corrupt or ignorant.”
Theatre in a Tehran Taxi
“Iranian cabs afford passengers a degree of anonymity, paving the way for uninhibited conversations and a new play.”
Give My Theatre Its Funding Or I’ll Drive My Car Into The Presidential Palace!
“An Italian theatre manager rammed his car into the iron gates of an entrance to the French presidential palace Thursday to protest against subsidy cuts for his Paris venue, police said. The action was seen as largely symbolic since Attilio Maggiulli ‘only succeeded in lightly hitting the grills at slow speed,’ a police source said.”
Actually, The Movies This Year Were Pretty Great
“Back in the movie wasteland of last January, no one could have guessed what a bounty of good films the year would bring. Not just good films, but several that measure up to our idealized notions of what the medium once was.”
When You Consume Culture, Spare A Thought For The Creatives
“Those circulating copyrighted content can be as Scrooge-like as they please, because there’s no Tiny Tim to think of. Except that there is.”
What A Disaster Was London Architecture This Year
“After such crimes against our built environment as an office tower that burns its neighbours with a solar “death ray”, and prison-like student flats that look out directly on to a brick wall, architects risk earning the same contempt as bankers and politicians.”
Measuring Wikipedia (What we Can Learn From How People Use It)
“The internet behemoth boasts 30 million articles written in more than 285 languages, tweaked by 70,000 active editors and viewed by 530 million visitors worldwide each month. As mountains of information go, it’s Everest. Teasing out trends from the open source encyclopedia’s archives is a task few would even attempt.”
Who Has The Least Power In The Artworld? (A Top 20 List)
“This is a particularly bad year for critics. Not a single entry on the Power 100, while print media keeps firing their full-time art critics. It’s so bad, some critics don’t even bother putting their names on scathing takedowns of multi-million-dollar shows since it really doesn’t matter.”
Strand Bookstore Reports Its Best Sales Day Ever
“With Strand’s announcement, it appears that literature lovers have proved with their wallets — that the good, old-fashioned print book has not yet gone the way of the scrolls and tablets.”
What Milwaukee Did In Visual Art This Year
It was a full year, as critic Mary Louise Shumacher chronicles.
Vasari’s ‘Last Supper’ Reassembled After Nearly Half A Century
“The last casualty of the devastating Florence flood of 1966 has been reassembled, raising hopes of a full restoration before the 50th anniversary of one of the greatest cultural disasters of modern times.”
Italy’s Entire Opera System Nears Collapse
“Only three Italian opera houses are currently able to pay their bills within two months.”
The Year’s Most Pirated TV Show
Fans “are so eager for the murder, villainy, depravity and wedding banquets gone horribly wrong depicted on that series that they don’t mind engaging in a little piracy to see the show.”
We’re In A Golden Age Of Video Games – And Video Game Criticism
Well, the New York Times video game critic would say that, wouldn’t he? But Chris Suellentrop may have a point.
Nicole Kidman With The Real-Life Character She’s Just Played
In The Railway Man, the Oscar-winning actress portrays the wife of Eric Lomax, who wrote a best-selling memoir of his time as a prisoner-of-war in a World War II Japanese labor camp in Thailand. In a three-way phone interview, Kidman and Lomax talk about getting to know each other and what they have in common.
Best Arts Quotes Of 2013
“I have a friend who says there are two problems in this world, and only two: one is how you live with other people; the other is how you live with yourself. What I like about theatre is that it’s the meeting point of those two problems.”
An Orchestra Comprised Of The Mentally Ill
It’s billed as “the world’s only classical music organization for individuals with mental illness and the people who support them.”
Star Ailey Dancer Returns To The Stage At Age 55
A former Alvin Ailey superstar and a current artificial-hip owner, Elizabeth Roxas-Dobrish, returns to the stage to perform “Revelations,” the company’s best-known work.