The awfulness of Rotten Tomatoes and Cinemascore. (But he does give a defense of mother!, so there’s that.)
Author: Matthew Westphal
If We Can’t Even Gather Together For A Performance Without Worrying About Getting Shot, We’re Doomed
LA Times theater critic Charles McNulty: “We feed our minds and spirits as well our bodies. My way is theater. Yours might be movies, sports or church. It makes no difference. With gun regulation as irresponsibly lax as it is, we are all just a maniac away from being on the next casualty list.”
Margaret Atwood, Azar Nafisi, And Naked Ladies, All Side By Side: A Playboy Literary Editor Reveals All
Amy Grace Loyd, who was Playboy‘s literary editor from 2005 to 2011, writes about how, and why, she convinced some of the English language’s top female authors (along with the likes of Junot Díaz, Walter Mosley, and Sherman Alexie) to write for the magazine.
Letting All-Male Pas De Deux In Ballet Become Genuinely Romantic
“Ballet is slower to change than most art forms, but in the span of just two weeks, New York City Ballet, one of the world’s premier companies, will have shown two ballets featuring significant same-sex duets.” Gia Kourlas talks with the choreographers of those ballets, Lauren Lovette and Justin Peck, and the men who’ll be dancing those duets.
How A Dancer ‘Unwinds’ Bharatanatyam, South India’s Classical Dance
Says Pranita Nayar, who has studied the form for decades, “My audience is not from a thousand years ago, so what are we preserving? For whom am I preserving it? … [What’s more,] the bharatanatyam of today is only about 100 years old.”
Arts Center Damaged In California Wildfires
The Luther Burbank Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa (Sonoma County), which hosts hundreds of performances and workshops a year reports that its main building has suffered “minimal damage,” but its eastern end and several classrooms are “destroyed.”
As Fires Rage, How Are Northern California Art Museums Doing?
Museums in Napa and Sonoma Counties, including the Di Rosa Center for Contemporary Art, the Hess Collection, Stonescape, and the Oliver Ranch report no damage so far, though most of them are closed for the present.
Last Leonardo Painting In Private Hands Is Up For Auction (And Should Fetch $100M)
Salvator Mundi, long taken to be a copy, was only authenticated as a Leonardo original a few years ago, and already it has a tangled legal and ownership history.
Why MacArthur Fellowships Matter: In Modern Culture, Expertise Is Under Fire
“Today, in public attitudes toward everything from science to politics, expertise is under enormous stress. … That pressure makes the MacArthur awards extra important,” writes Christopher Knight, because “the danger is that manipulative demagoguery flourishes in an environment polluted by the anxiety driving the assault on expertise … [so] I’ll take a ringing endorsement of expertise anywhere I can find it.”
MacArthur ‘Genius Grant’ Winners For 2017 Include Annie Baker, Taylor Mac, Yuval Sharon, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Dawoud Bey
Alongside playwright Baker (The Flick, Circle Mirror Transformation), theater artist Mac (A 24-Decade History of Popular Music), opera director Sharon (of the L.A. experimental company The Industry), critic and novelist Nguyen (The Sympathizer), and photographer Bey, winners in the arts include painter Njideka Akunyili Crosby, author Jesmyn Ward (Salvage the Bones), composer Tyshawn Sorey, singer-songwriter Rhiannon Giddens, landscape architect Kate Orff, and geographer-artist Trevor Paglen. (For a complete list of 2017 MacArthur Fellows, click here.)