“Campaign in poetry; govern in prose,” the old adage goes. This moment, though, has in many ways flipped that idea: The 2016 presidential campaign was decidedly lacking in poetry. Yet in its aftermath, as Americans consider the contours of their new government, they are, often, turning to poems: to Cope and her gallows humor.
Author: Douglas McLennan
Big Cuts Coming In The New York Times Arts Coverage?
“The revamped Arts front page will have no more than three stories (there now are sometimes as many as six) anchored by an oversize photograph, according to sources who have been apprised of the changes. (Today’s Arts section is a good example of what the section will more typically look like.) Critics have been urged to stop covering events least likely to appeal to online subscribers: indie movies having brief runs in art houses; one-night-only concerts, off- and off-off-Broadway shows that aren’t star-driven, cabaret performances, and small art galleries. Many of the Times‘ contingent of freelance contributors, who provide much of that coverage, are likely to meet the same fate as the regional freelancers last summer. But even staff critics have been given the same marching orders, telling Deadline they are being pressured more frequently by editors to focus on higher-profile events.”
TV Industry Struggles To Figure Out Who’s Watching What (Why That’s Important)
“If Netflix or Amazon can control how our perception of how popular a TV show is – how many people are watching it – that controls the TV industry. So that controls what kind of shows the viewer ultimately gets to see. Right? And there’s other people, actors and producers, they want to get paid. And they also want people to recognize that they’re creating shows that are popular.”
The George Lucas Museum Tour-D’America Project Stops In LA – Could This Be Where It Gets Built?
George Lucas’ much-travelled museum project proposal made a stop in Los Angeles Wednesday, and LA County supervisors embraced the project. The LA proposal would put the museum at Exposition Park next to USC. But wait, you ask, wasn’t the project going to be located in Chicago? Then the Bay Area? Sure – so what is it about the Lucas museum that can’t quite find a landing spot?
Our Movie History – Alive Only Because Of The Obsessives Among Us
Given the ubiquity and popularity of movies, it’s easy to imagine that there’s some sort of central repository for all the movies ever made. But in fact, old movies disappear all the time, and sometimes it’s only because some obsessive collector found and saved a movie that it still exists.
Putting Abstract Expressionism In Its Place
“Unlike Impressionism or Cubism, Abstract Expressionism was not a style or a movement. What the five pioneers had in common was not a shared aesthetic, a painting technique, or a manifesto but a sense of the overwhelming importance of art, a bedrock belief in the power of painting to address ideas and emotions at the deepest level. That sense of importance was there from the beginning.”
Can’t Get Back To Sleep At 4AM? Yeah, That May Be Creative Anxiety
The airy study and the quiet afternoons look awfully nice in the videos, but the life described by my correspondents was one riven by fever and fret, a life of staving off panic and the harsh voices in one’s head. Don’t believe the videos: The most famous writers in the country can’t get over their divorces and take a lot of pills.
So A Glitzy New Concert Hall For London Is Canceled? No Great Loss
“Those who thought the whole thing an unnecessary extravagance, a vanity project dreamed up by Rattle and Nicholas Kenyon, director of the Barbican Centre, at a time when arts organisations across the country were struggling to fund performances in the spaces that already existed, were drowned out by those determined to give the returning hero Rattle whatever he wanted.”
Is The Cult Film On The Way To Going Extinct?
“In today’s fragmented, ever-churning pop culture ecosystem, the long tail of home video that once gave oddball movies a shot at a glorious cult afterlife has shortened to the point of vanishing. With even big-budget commercial films often struggling to break through the endless clutter of content, the challenge for smaller, quirkier fare is that much harder.”
Atlanta’s Woodruff Center Raises More Than $110 Million In A “Transformation” Campaign
“That is $10 million more than the goal set for Woodruff’s Transformation Campaign when it began in 2014. Of that money, about $35 million will be used to pay for capital expenses, including the new Alliance Theatre main stage facility that is slated to begin construction next year, the remodeling of the High Café and a new roof for the Stent Family Wing of the High Museum of Art.”