Author: ArtsJournal2

John Cheever At 100: The Original Don Draper (Except Not As Straight)

“The master of the American short story was the original purveyor of midcentury mystique, especially its darker facets. The endless drinking, ever-present cigarettes, infidelities, secrets of suburban life and anxiety regarding America’s place in the postwar world — they’re all in the Pulitzer Prize-winning Stories of John Cheever.“

Design School Meets Urban Decay, And Shakes Hands

“The challenge is an old one in urban areas across the country: How do you resuscitate a community without condescending to it, while ensuring that long-time residents won’t be pushed aside, or worse, priced out? The partnership here in Savannah, though, is a particularly unlikely one, pairing the well-off students of a pricey art and design school with the low-income, minority residents of a community with scant interest in art and design.”

Three Reasons Newspaper Paywalls Simply Won’t Work (Not Even At The New York Times)

“It makes more sense to try and figure out how to take advantage of the Web in order to provide something that the current market is likely to value, instead of focusing on how to squeeze as much as possible out of a declining market. What is The Huffington Post doing right, or Buzzfeed, or Politico, or The Atlantic? Why don’t they need paywalls? Coming up with creative answers to those questions is likely to play a much larger role in the survival of traditional media entities than a paywall.”

Thirty Years Of Looking At Cindy Sherman

“Sherman’s photographs evoke an idea of art as a mediated illusion, a grotesque and haunting chimera composed of different parts and pieces, of high-art and popular culture, of fantasies and uncertainties that are embedded and embodied in an array of visual cues that we encounter each day. These ideas have become our language about art and images since the late 1980s.”

A World Of Painting And Text

Artist Mira Schor: “The rectangle is a dynamic visual space, it is a dynamic compositional space, it is architectural, you have room to put something in and then something else in. … Each painting is a short story, and the paintings together suggest a narrative though not necessarily an obvious one, but at the same time, the rectangle is an interesting abstract object.”

Authors Who Produce A Book A Year? Slackers, Say Audiences – And Publishers

Mystery and thriller writers used to produce a book a year – but that’s not enough in the e-book age. “‘It used to be that once a year was a big deal,’ said Lisa Scottoline, a best-selling author of thrillers. ‘You could saturate the market. But today the culture is a great big hungry maw, and you have to feed it.'”

Angelica Garnett, 93, Bloomsbury Survivor and Chronicler

“Published in 1985, her memoir, Deceived With Kindness: A Bloomsbury Childhood, describes the luminous orbit around Ms. Garnett’s mother, the painter Vanessa Bell, a sister of Virginia Woolf. It was a self-reflexive, self-congratulatory milieu in which art was all, sex was the coin of the realm and the only real transgression was the unpardonable sin of being ordinary.”