Wesley Morris: “This questioning of the canon comes from places of lived experience. It’s attuned to how great cultural work can leave you feeling irked and demeaned. For some readers, loving Herman Melville or Joseph Conrad requires some peacemaking with the not-quite-human representations of black people in those texts. Loving Edith Wharton requires the same reckoning with the insulting way she could describe Jews. Bigotry recurs in canonical art. And committed engagement leaves us dutybound to identify it. … Your great works should be strong enough to withstand some feminist forensics. … Insisting that a canon is settled gives those concerns the ‘fake news’ treatment, denying a legitimate grievance by saying there’s no grounds for one. It’s shutting down a conversation, when the longer we go without one, the harder it becomes to speak.”
Author: Matthew Westphal
A Renaissance In Queer Stand-Up Comedy
E. Alex Jung surveys “a larger seismic shift that has occurred in the past few years: Instead of gay people trying to fit into traditionally heterosexual and male comedy spaces, they’re creating a gay paradigm. … What distinguishes it today is a queer sensibility. It’s queer comedy: stranger and more off-kilter than ever before, with a distinctly camp flavor.”
How ‘Killing Eve’ Made Itself Into Appointment TV (In An Age When There’s No Such Thing)
“If the always-streaming, everything-on-demand state of TV right now has taught viewers anything, it’s that very little about television is urgent. Sure, there are still a few watercooler shows, and events like the Oscars or the Super Bowl require real-time viewing, but everything else can be watched on an I’ll Get to It When I Get to It basis. Short of one’s peer group pressuring them into watching something right now no one feels they have to be caught up on everything. Killing Eve, however, was different.”
Malcolm Morley, Pioneer Of Photorealist Painting, Dead At 86
“Morley is often discussed in relation to the Photorealist movement, which sought to strip any sense of authorship from the act of painting through the creation of carefully worked images that mirror their photographic sources. However, Morley said he preferred the term ‘super-realist’ to describe his work, because it aligned it with Suprematism, the early 20th-century Russian avant-garde that sought to distill painting to its most basic forms.”
One Little Adjustment To New York State Tax Law Makes The Art Market Shudder
The question of whether a particular shipper qualifies as a common carrier or a private carrier would probably make your eyes glaze over – until you realized that whether or not you have to pay, or collect, sales tax on thousands and thousands of dollars’ worth of art depends on the answer.
Historian Jill Ker Comway, 83, First Female President Of Smith College
“The Australian-born Dr. Conway was just 40 when, in 1975, she became the first woman to lead Smith, the nation’s largest liberal arts institution for women. In her decade-long tenure, she presided over a transformation that brought the women’s movement to a school dominated for more than a century by conservative male faculty and administrators. … In a wide-ranging career, Dr. Conway was an accomplished scholar who focused on early-20th-century women’s reformers but later wrote a trio of critically acclaimed memoirs.”
I’ll Return Elgin Marbles To Greece If I’m Elected Prime Minister, Says Jeremy Corbyn
The leader of the UK’s Labour Party told a Greek newspaper, “They were made in Greece and have been there for many centuries until Lord Elgin took them. … As with anything stolen or taken from occupied or colonial possession … we should be engaged in constructive talks with the Greek government about returning the sculptures.”
Prop Masters Who Made Fake Money For Film Shoot Tried In Hong Kong For Counterfeiting
“The question, local cinephiles say, is why the police even bothered to seek charges. They say the case illustrates how onerous rules are needlessly hampering a local industry whose golden age of Bruce Lee kung fu films and Wong Kar-wai dramas seems long past, and which is now struggling to compete against rising competition from studios in South Korea and mainland China.”
Fight Breaks Out In Audience At UK’s National Theatre
As an eyewitness tweeted after the incident at a performance of Polly Stenham’s modern adaptation of Strindberg’s Miss Julie, “As if there wasn’t enough onstage drama … as the play ended tonight, a fight broke out in the circle between a couple of middle-aged blokes, held back by their respective crews.”
Modern Standard Arabic – The Language That Unites The Arab World – Is Fading
“Arabs often see MSA’s decline as the failure of their nations to uphold the legacy of Arabic, the language of the Qur’an and Islam. Though some rejoice in the strengthening of vernaculars, the so-called colloquials or dialects, as a sign of local identities gaining prominence, the withdrawal of MSA is in fact a warning about the weakening social infrastructure and declining education system.”