What it’s like to go to the theatre and see a play about the Constitution right now: “The play’s concerns could hardly have felt more viscerally urgent. In the row behind me, a woman wept deep, grieving tears — a kind of crying so suffused with pain that we’re not used to hearing it in public, even in a darkened theater. But this is not an ordinary time.”
Author: ArtsJournal2
Judges Overturn Public Vote In The Guardian’s Not The Booker Prize
Democracy shamocracy, right? “Sweet Fruit, Sour Land by Rebecca Ley is the winner of the 2018 Not the Booker Prize. Our three judges have taken the brave decision to overrule the public vote and put their weight behind this dark dystopian novel in the place of Ariel Kahn’s optimistic and gentle Raising Sparks.”
The ‘French Scorsese’ Is Trying His Hand At A Western
French director Jacques Audiard won the Silver Lion at the Venice Film Festival for directing The Sisters Brothers. How did one of France’s greatest filmmakers, who consistently discusses and urges more gender equality in film, wind up with a hypermasculine Western?
What’s The Behind-The-Scenes Story On The Da Vinci Painting Restoration And Its Cancelled Showing?
Jonathan Jones rounds up all of the scuttlebutt – and there’s a lot. “A crucial piece of evidence that Leonardo painted Salvator Mundi also suggests that its restoration has been excessive and has muffled its power. Ironically, this seems to make the work both an original and, in my view, a kind of kitsch concoction.”
Carol Hall, Who Wrote The Music And Lyrics For ‘The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas,’ Has Died At 82
This is how it all began: “Ms. Hall was enjoying moderate success as a singer and songwriter when, developing an idea first hatched during a dinner party conversation, she, Peter Masterson and Larry L. King created Best Little Whorehouse, a comedy based on an article Mr. King had written in 1974 for Playboy. It concerned the moralistic efforts to close down a real-life Texas brothel known as the Chicken Ranch (because some customers paid in chickens) that had operated for years.”
It’s Very Serious To Stick Something To A Statue, And You Should Not Do It Ever, But These Googly Eyes Are Hilarious Anyway
The world came to knew Nathanael Greene as the Revolutionary War general whom Alexander Hamilton didn’t want to serve as secretary, but now? Well, now he’s the googly-eyed statue dude. (And the police of Savannah, Georgia, would like us all to know it’s not funny. Not funny at all.)
The People Trying To Figure Out What’s True Now
Sarah Schulman’s new book is about people trying to figure out whom to blame, and a state where corruption at the very top leeches into every relationship. Where does her protagonist find some reality? In AA meetings. “The sheer humanity of people being able to admit their flaws in a world in which no one will admit their flaws is illuminating.”
Australians Are Making Incredible Films, But Sometimes Even Australians Don’t Get To See Them
Whose fault is that? Well … “Many Australian film-makers are locked out of cinemas. Australian producers too often lack the resources to compete with the massive marketing budgets of US films, while Hollywood cinema distributors dominate our screens. Like stocks in supermarkets, the bigger the marketing spend, the greater the shelf space accorded at the local multiplex.”
Helena Almeida, Portuguese Artist Who Bent The Boundaries Among Genres, Has Died At 84
Almeida had a signature technique of inserting herself into her art, whether that was video, photography, performance art or other media. “‘I turn myself into a drawing,’ she said by way of describing her art. ‘My body as a drawing, myself as my own work.'”
As Oregon Shakespeare Festival Searches For An Artistic Director, Its Executive Director Also Announces Plans To Leave
Cynthia Rider, who has been with the festival since 2013, says the board just offered to renew her contract, and she declined, “adding that the near-simultaneous departure with Rauch will give the festival ‘new eyes, with lots of momentum’ for upcoming challenges, especially around financial loss from wildfire smoke.”