“The romantic comedy has created, on top of everything else, a new genre: the obituary for the romantic comedy. … Because the truth is that [today’s] romantic comedies are, as works of art and pieces of culture, terrible. They are usually some ungodly, unseemly, unsexy combination of: stale, trite, silly, and formulaic.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
Top Posts From AJBlogs 07.09.14
Money For Contemporary Art, Boston: Not So Scarce?
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-07-10
Creative Placemaking & Cultural Entrepreneurship
AJBlog: Field Notes | Published 2014-07-10
Jeff Koons Closes the Whitney
AJBlog: Artopia | Published 2014-07-09
AftA Thoughts (2014)
AJBlog: Engaging Matters | Published 2014-07-09
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All The Stuff We’re Learning As The Met Opera And Its Unions Negotiate In Public
“Now, as the company tries to win concessions from its unions by the end of this month, the labor talks are laying bare new details of life at the Met, from what performers earn to the Met’s recent box office struggles – which, an analysis of ticket sales showed, led the company to sell as many as a quarter of its seats at a discount at a handful of performances.”
Mayor Bans Ruhrtrienniale Art Installation For Fear It Could Cause ‘Panic’
Still skittish four years after 21 people died and more than 500 were injured in a stampede at a Love Parade, the mayor of the German city of Duisberg refused permission for Totlast (“Deadweight”), a labyrinthine installation by Gregor Schneider, because it could induce “confusion, panic and disorientation.”
Clark Art Institute In Mass. Reopens After Four-Month Closure And 15-Year Expansion Program
The Williamstown museum now has big new exhibition space (much of it underground) that finally enable it to show large-scale 20th-century art and to collaborate with major venues on touring exhibitions. That’s not to mention the one-acre, three-tiered reflecting pool designed by Tadao Ando and Gary Hilderbrand.
How Byliner’s Long-Form Digital Journalism Subscription Service Fell Apart
“Byliner, which launched in 2011, was one of the darlings of the literary startup scene … Its original mission was to publish original e-singles, both fiction and nonfiction, and also to create a sort of archival home for journalists on the web.” Do the company’s problems “mean that longform journalism on the web is doomed? Or are Byliner’s problems specific to Byliner?”
Director Christopher Nolan (‘The Dark Knight’) On The Bleak, Bright Future Of Cinema
“A movie’s Friday matinees would determine whether it even gets an evening screening, or whether the projector switches back to last week’s blockbuster. … This bleak future is the direction the industry is pointed in, but even if it arrives it will not last. Once movies can no longer be defined by technology, you unmask powerful fundamentals – the timelessness, the otherworldliness, the shared experience of these narratives.”
Lynn Nottage To Make ‘Black Orpheus’ Into Broadway Musical
“With all eyes on Brazil and the World Cup, Broadway is getting into the act with plans to adapt the Oscar-winning film Black Orpheus for the stage. Producers said Monday that Pulitzer Prize-winner Lynn Nottage will write the story and Tony Award-winner George C. Wolfe will direct.”
Stolen Matisse Returned To Venezuela After 14 Years
“The Odalisque in Red Pants (Odalisque à la culotte rouge) is thought to have been stolen from the Caracas Museum of Contemporary Art in 2002 but its disappearance went unnoticed for some time because the thieves put a fake in its place.”
Could Budget Cuts Shut Down Rome’s Museum of Contemporary Art?
City funding for the museum, known as MACRO, was slashed from €350,000 in 2013 to €61,000 this year. Says the museum’s director, whose contract ran out at the end of June, “We literally have €5,000 a month” from the municipal government.