Of course any great artist needs their champions: the curators, gallerists and institutional directors who put their boundary-demolishing work on view. So we decided to pinpoint who exactly these people are. Who will we be talking about most fervently over the course of 2018, and the years that follow? Who’s making it happen? This, from our perspective, is a gathering of the people who are truly influential in art right now.
Blog
How Tom Wolfe Channeled The 20th Century
To say that Wolfe’s writing was the poetic refinement of the art of sixties advertising is to say only a good thing about it—Wolfe took the taste for the potent phrase, the loaded short sentence, the startling intervention, even the wild punctuation, of sixties advertising copy, and turned it into a kind of art.
Encouraging: In The Bay Area, Funders Stepping Up To The Arts
The Koret Foundation’s recent arts and culture give underscores an encouraging trend in this cash-flush region. While the tech monied classes may be cool to the arts, other Bay Area funders have been stepping up over the past few years.
How Queer Are The Movies In The Current LGBT Cinema Boom?
Not queer enough, argues E. Alex Jung: “There have been Oscar-validated prestige pictures (Milk, The Kids Are All Right, The Dallas Buyers Club, Call Me by Your Name), and corresponding flops (Stonewall, Freeheld), indie films (Princess Cyd, Tangerine), and commercial middlebrow ones (Love, Simon). While these films vary in intent, provenance, and quality, they encapsulate a similar catholic spirit: rather than assert difference, they point out similarities. They apply salve instead of salt. They’re safe, often boring, and sentimental, following familiar emotional arcs to tell a ‘universal story.’ In short, we’re in a movie moment defined by the political sensibility of the gay-marriage movement.”
Fences Don’t Just Keep People Out, They Come To Define Us
If one looks at history, the answer seems obvious: What fences have very often indicated is not simply what is mine and what is yours, but, more subtly, who I am versus who you are. This tendency is based on the human inclination to define one’s identity in contrast to someone cast as a different, an untrustworthy Other best kept at a distance.
James Baldwin’s Nearly Forgotten Final Book (Whose Time May Now Have Come)
“Arguably no single work by Baldwin is as connected to the issues animating Black Lives Matter as his final nonfiction book, The Evidence of Things Not Seen (1985), but the work was written long after Baldwin had lost the public’s affection. … Written in response to what came to be known as the Atlanta child murders, Baldwin’s book is a piercing examination of anti-black violence in the United States, why it persisted after the ‘gains’ of the civil rights era, and why it would likely continue unless deep-rooted structural and psychic changes occurred.”
Big Media Consequences In CBS/Viacom Drama
No matter who emerges the victor in what promises to be a prolonged series of courtroom showdowns, both companies will be profoundly affected, and the broader media landscape fundamentally transformed.
What Does ‘Excellence’ In Theatre Really Mean? Theatre Professionals Hash It Out
Chad Bauman, managing director of Milwaukee Rep: “After a career in theatre management and multiple stints as a producer or judge for theatrical awards in major metropolitan areas, I’ve become increasingly convinced that as a field we do not have a cohesive definition of excellence. In an admittedly informal attempt to discover commonality, I contacted several hundred colleagues and asked them [to define excellence]. I received more than 50 responses from a wide cross section of diverse people; below is an attempt at aggregating their thoughts.”
In 1968 American Culture Was Ablaze With Revolution. Sound Familiar?
The aftershocks of the cultural revolution of the 1960s and the backlash that followed are with us. We are still looking at dystopian and apocalyptic fantasies, still running from zombies, still watching cities erupt, still fighting over basic human rights. The movies have been conscripts in this continuing culture war and to look back at 1968 is to understand what has and hasn’t changed.
Fact-Checking Of Nonfiction Books (There’s A Lot Less Of It Than You May Think)
Recent controversies over Sally Kohn’s The Opposite of Hate and Amy Chozick’s Chasing Hillary – not to mention Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury – “have raised concerns about the accuracy and standards of published books. … But what anyone who has never published a book might not realize is that the bar for factchecking books during the editing process is low, if it even exists at all. Not only that, it’s common for publishers to never have a conversation with authors about the issue of factchecking and to assume that getting it right is entirely on the author.”