Matthew Westphal – Page 1770 – ArtsJournal Wayback

‘The Wire,’ The Burning Of Baltimore And The Limits Of Art

“The conflagration in Baltimore is a reminder that art’s power can work both in service of change and against it. Watching a fictional story is not precisely the same thing as bearing witness. And when consuming that story becomes a substitute for action or an argument that action is futile, fiction can paralyze us just as surely as it can inspire us.”

You Won’t Learn Everything You Need To Know About Baltimore From ‘The Wire,’ But It’s A Start

Scott Timberg: “[David] Simon’s show, and his point of view, clarifies the smoky, intensely sad scene better than anything else I know.”

MoMA Director Glenn Lowry Responds To Criticism Of Museum’s Pop-Culture Focus

“I was actually happy that nobody challenged us on doing Björk – that artists like her, who cross disciplines, have a place in a museum like ours … We just didn’t do the show we should have done. Fair enough. We just need to find a way to do those shows better.”

The End Times Are At Hand For New York’s Museum Of Biblical Art

“The small, secular museum, which is dedicated to exploring the Bible’s influence on Western art, is a casualty of Manhattan’s astronomical rents. For the past decade, the museum had been renting space inside the American Bible Society (ABS) building near Lincoln Center for $1 a year. In February, ARS announced it had sold the building and planned to move to Philadelphia.”

The Perils Of Writing About Your Own Family

George Hodgman, author of Bettyville: “You kind of have to face the fact if you write a memoir that you are a somewhat aggressive person, that you are appropriating lives, in a way, that aren’t yours. And you put yourself out there and you try to be really generous, and you do what you can to get permission, but a lot of times the permission is meaningless because they have no idea to the extent that you’re going to examine, or what you’re going to say. … So memoir is a total minefield, as you know. It’s best if you write the book and leave the country.”

How Eduardo Galeano Changed Writing (It Wasn’t With His Leftism)

The great Uruguayan author is best known for his 1971 anti-capitalist manifesto Open Veins of Latin America – a work he repudiated last year. (He calls the prose unreadable.) But his later “technique is difficult to precisely describe, but it is easy enough to read. The word most often applied is ‘fragmentary,’ though the fragments are carefully arranged into unified wholes.”

A Little Dose Of Nastiness Can Be A Creative Thing (Wait, What?)

“A spate of research published over the past couple of years reveals something surprising and new: measured amounts of dark-side traits, expressed at lower levels – too little to be considered a diagnosable personality disorder – open the doors of perception, helping us see the world through an edgier, more on-the-bias creative lens.”

How I Survived A Public Shaming Over A Silly Mistake

“When a Web site broke the news on April 3 that, instead of posting an Internet link to an article about writing legal briefs, I had inadvertently sent my law school students a link to a porn site, I thought I could never recover. (And if you’re hoping to find out here how that happened, among the many possibilities that have been raised by gleeful commentators, I’m sorry to tell you you’re going to be disappointed.)”

Author: Matthew Westphal

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