“At the age of 36, the Chicago playwright Lydia R. Diamond has suddenly drilled her way out of a respectable but muted Midwestern career. This month, this articulate and self-revealing African-American scribe has two world premieres in simultaneous production at respected Chicago theaters — a highly unusual and impressive feat. And Chicago is by no means the end of it. On a national level, she’s white-hot.”
Blog
The Neverending Battle Over Modernism
Modernism absorbs a lot of body blows these days, and one UK critic recently claimed that the art movement was responsible for “more human misery than anything else in history.” Hyperbole aside, though, was modernism really a bad thing? “The arguments boil down to claims that Modernism was inhuman, authoritarian and technically inept. But if it was really so bad, and if it was really confined to a tiny and irrelevant coterie, why does it look so good [in museum shows today,] and why was it so all-pervasive in its influence? Above all, why are its critics still so worried about it?”
Modernist Redux
Love it or hate it, there’s no denying that modernism is back in a big way. From the much-celebrated iPod to Frank Gehry’s shiny monoliths to “all the chrome-and-leather furniture and cubic shelving that sells to our most fashion-forward loft dwellers: It was all first dreamed up in the 1920s or before.”
Conquering The Renaissance
“When Ottoman ruler Mehmed II asked Venice for a ‘good painter’, he was sent Gentile Bellini, whose portrait of him brought a lasting touch of the Renaissance to the east.” At the same time, the influence of Bellini’s portrait on Western art was unmistakable, and may represent the original globalization of the European art world.
Blue Skies Are So Overrated
“Spring at last feels sprung, and most Britons are gazing upwards, searching for blue skies. But not all – a growing minority are speaking up in defence of clouds. Cloud lovers now have a spiritual home, the Cloud Appreciation Society, with billowing membership and a UK website that won the recent Yahoo award for Weird and Wonderful Site of the Year.”
America’s Ghost State
Grandiose pronouncements about the glory of the great open West aside, there really aren’t many places in America anymore that could truly be considered underpopulated. And when desolation does exist, it is rarely that poetic type of desolation described in flowery novels. More often, it is the quietly desperate solitude of a place like North Dakota, which has been losing people for decades, and may be on the verge of becoming America’s first wholly forsaken state. “But even as the American small town continues what often seems like an irresistible decline, some in northwest North Dakota are mounting a resistance, an organized effort to draw people — new people, young people, families — to their small towns.”
If It Works, They’ll Install A Few Warhols In The Food Court
Video art frequently has trouble finding a permanent place in traditional museums and galleries. So why not try displaying it somewhere else? In, say, a shopping mall? “Encouraged by the popularity of their free summer film series, which featured James Bond movies one year and Marilyn Monroe pictures another, managers of [a suburban Colorado mall] have begun screening classic video art in their courtyard.”
The Icon Of Operatic Failure
A new set of recordings of opera singer Olive Middleton have just become available. Who’s that, you say? Some great legend of the stage of whom I was previously unaware? Well, not exactly: “Middleton’s singing goes beyond parody. And it goes well beyond good singing. It’s just plain awful.” But her celebrity during her heyday in Britain was such that no one seemed to mind that her voice deteriorated so early in her long career. And besides, “all opera hovers on the border of parody. No other performing art — except possibly dance — so exposes its practitioners to ridicule. Part of the thrill of opera is pitting sheer volume against human limitations, the constant awareness of the possibility of failure.”
Politicians Have Such Lousy Timing
When Tom “The Hammer” DeLay announced last week that he would resign from Congress in the wake of multiple scandals (and a few indictments), liberals across the country rejoiced. But for one leftist filmmaker putting the finishing touches on a new documentary slamming DeLay, the timing couldn’t have been worse.
The New Sitcom Prototype?
If ever there was an argument for just leaving creative people alone and letting them work on their own terms, NBC’s critically acclaimed but frequently ratings-challenged sitcom, Scrubs may be it. Now in its fifth season, the show’s creators have always faced tremendous network pressure to add a laugh track, give up the single-camera technique, and just generally make a sitcom more like every other sitcom on every other American network. It may be formulaic, say the network brass, but viewers like it, and the numbers prove it. But Scrubs has hung on to become quite popular, and even as they defy TV conventions, its creators are also embracing every new technology they can get their hands on in an effort to connect with viewers.