The 2017 roster of honorees continues to favor popular culture at the expense of theater and classic music. This year’s celebration will spotlight three pop musicians who have collectively sold hundreds of millions of recordings. Absent are big-name Hollywood actors and Broadway stars.
Author: Douglas McLennan
Have The Kennedy Center Arts Honors Abandoned The Traditional Arts?
“Representatives of the wide range of traditional arts, including classical music, opera and ballet, have been slowly edged out until, it seemed, they were lucky to be represented with a single award among the five given out each year. This year even that toehold looks precarious. Of the five artists to receive the 2017 Kennedy Center Honors, only dancer and choreographer Carmen de Lavallade falls into the tradition of the arts on which the Kennedy Center was founded and built its reputation.”
For Decades, Angelyne Was A Mysterious LA Billboard Phenomenon. Now We Know Who She Is
Angelyne had single-handedly created and then inhabited a modern myth of L.A.: the platinum blond bombshell in the bright pink Corvette forever circumnavigating the city, seeking to enchant by dint of her sheer superficial glamour. It had the aesthetic power and emotional resonance of genuine performance art, Marina Abramovic by way of John Waters, particularly as she kept on rambling around the city over the decades while she aged.
Why Arts High Schools Are Phenomenally Successful With Students
“Performing and visual arts high schools like New World inspire a fierce devotion among students and graduates. It is no wonder. Many serve as springboards to the professional world. Just as important, graduation and college attendance rates are typically high (100 and 96 percent for New World), particularly impressive considering the schools’ urban setting. The best of these schools offer a conservatory-style training ground that helps budding artists win admission to an undergraduate arts program — training that is expensive, requiring a cadre of specialized teachers and money for student performances.”
Philippe de Montebello On What’s Ailing The Met Museum
“The messages that are sent out have a completely unbalanced emphasis on contemporary art, as if somehow the crowds that come to the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue—where people go to see Egyptian, Greek, and Islamic Art and great European paintings—are suddenly going to come to see contemporary art. This when there are a thousand commercial galleries all over New York, and how many museums with contemporary art? It’s nonsense.”
The Frank Lloyd Wright Problem
Academicians warned decades ago that “the restrictive control of the master’s archives for a quarter-century after his death in 1959 by his widow, Olgivanna (who died in 1985), would set back Wright studies for a full generation, if not longer. Dissertation advisers prudently steered doctoral candidates away from Wright topics because of the extortionate research and reproduction fees demanded by his foundation, as well as the editorial approval it demanded for publications that used material from the Taliesin archive. The rise of poststructuralist criticism further eroded younger scholars’ interest in an architect whose uniquely personal approach to architecture had little to do with the period’s fascination with literary theory.”
Divide Between The Arts And Those With Disabilities Is Wide (And Often Inadvertent)
“There is a fine line in promoting artists’ work appropriately. All too often artists with disabilities are given empathetic reviews replete with that “inspiration porn” trope of heroism overcoming tribulations, but ultimately they are not taken seriously as artists. Aesthetic validation is far more important than sympathy.”
Criticism At A Remove – But Why Does Criticism Have To Stand Apart?
Rita Felski asks what might happen if we looked not “behind the text” but “in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible.” In doing so, she seeks to rehabilitate the validity and importance of what we might call “literary desire”: the force that drives you to reread your favorite book yet again; or to finish that work of genre fiction even when you know the ending; or to press a beloved book awkwardly into a distant acquaintance’s hands in hopes that she, too, will come to love what you love and might one day talk with you about it.
How Design Permeates Our Culture (and Vice Versa)
“We’re all ’80s kids,” said David Dodde, co-owner and designer at House Industries. “We’re not inventing anything, we’re just stealing really well. It’s all about the honesty of the theft. In a way, we’re paying homage.”
Understanding The Arcane Process By Which The MPAA Rates Movies (By Someone Who Used To Do It)
What makes, for example, a woman kissing a man OK for G-viewers, while a man kissing another man is PG or PG-13 worthy? Howard Fridkin rated movies on the MPAA’s rating board for over a decade.