February 2018 – Page 6 – ArtsJournal Wayback

Nanette Fabray, Broadway And TV Star Of 1940s Through ’70s, Dead At 97

On stage, she starred in High Button Shoes, Make a Wish, and Love Life (for which she won a Tony). On the big screen, she’s remembered for Vincente Minnelli’s MGM musical The Band Wagon (she was one of those bratty baby triplets). But television was where she made her biggest mark – costarring with Sid Caesar in sketch comedy (for which she won three Emmys), playing the mothers of the lead characters in The Mary Tyler Moore Show and One Day at a Time, and appearing on countless variety and game shows, from Ed Sullivan to Carol Burnett and Hollywood Squares to Match Game.

Humorist Cynthia Heimel, 70

“In her books” – among them Sex Tips for Girls and If You Can’t Live Without Me, Why Aren’t You Dead Yet? – “and columns, Ms. Heimel wrote about bad boys, bad dates, bad sex and bad birth control, with the occasional reminiscence of blissed-out pleasure thrown in. ‘God protects drunks, infants and feisty girls,’ she once observed, and in a tumultuous, three-decade writing career, she was feistier than most.”

Why Movie Audiences Don’t Turn Out For Smart Science Fiction

“Sci-fi is a fun genre to work in; it tests creativity, but it seems like it also tests audiences’ patience. They don’t turn up for it. You really have to make a world that audiences are willing to step into and that’s proven the most difficult thing.”

Artistic Director Mark Baldwin To Leave Rambert Dance After 15 Years

“I have commissioned over 60 works, both new and revivals, for the Rambert dancers, who in my opinion have the richest embodied knowledge in the world. This is the beginning of my 16th year as artistic director which is the longest stint of any artistic director of this company, and I think it is the perfect moment to hand over. I arrived as a choreographer and my heart tells me it is time to return to that,” he said.

The Internet’s Post-Text Future

The shift to a thoroughly video-driven internet is indeed on its way, and it will be terrible. To the extent that it attempts to cash in on original content, it will necessarily be terrible, in the conventional sense, because there is not enough talent to go around—ever wonder why British television (and film) relies on the same five actors and actresses? On the other hand, American art has a long history of inspirational terribleness, of sublime trashiness and no-budget artistry that far surpasses, in quality, critically sanctioned prestige. I have no confidence that Google or Facebook will recognize such non-talent for what it is or could be.

How Could A Museum Lose An 83,000-Pound Richard Serra Sculpture?

In 1986, the Madrid museum, one of the top contemporary art destinations in the Spanish capital, commissioned the famous sculptor to create a piece for a landmark exhibition, References: An Artistic Encounter in Time. Their idea was to show the work of three famous Spanish artists next to that of three renowned artists from the 20th century, including Richard Serra.

How Universities Were Taken Over By Administrators

Administrators control the modern university. The faculty have “fallen,” to use Benjamin Ginsberg’s term. It’s an “all-administrative” institution now. Spending on administrators and administration exceeds spending on faculty, administrators out-number faculty by a long shot, and administrative salaries and benefit packages, particularly those of presidents and other senior managers, have skyrocketed over the last 10 years. Even more telling perhaps, students themselves increasingly resemble administrators more than professors in their ambitions and needs.

When Aesthetics Meets Politics In A Triennial Survey, Naivete Abounds

Peter Schjeldahl: In principle, the show’s aim reflects the New Museum’s valuable policy of incubating upstart trends in contemporary art. But it comes off as willfully naïve. Nearly all the artists plainly hail from an international archipelago of art schools and hip scenes and have embarked upon normal career paths. Noting that they share political discontents, as the young tend to do, is easy. Harder, in the context, is registering their originality as creators—like bumps under an ideological blanket. But there’s insight to gain about emergent sensibilities in world art, without hustling everybody toward illusory barricades.

In The Internet Era, Dictionaries Seem Almost Quaint. But We Need Them More Than Ever

At one level, few things are simpler than a dictionary: a list of the words people use or have used, with an explanation of what those words mean, or have meant. At the level that matters, though – the level that lexicographers fret and obsess about – few things could be more complex. Who used those words, where and when? How do you know? Which words do you include, and on what basis? How do you tease apart this sense from that? And what is “English” anyway?

Month: February 2018