It was Kenneth MacMillan’s desire to drag the real world, kicking and screaming, into the prettified arena of ballet that unsettled people, then and now. “An idea grabbed him and he did it. I don’t think he had any agenda and was quite surprised when people were shocked. His ideas were triggered by everything that was going on around him. He brought real life to ballet.”
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David Frum: The Politics Of Cultural Appropriation Are Complicated
To the extent that the cultural-appropriation police are urging their targets to respect others who are different, they are saying something that everyone needs to hear. But beyond that, they can plunge into doomed tangles. American popular culture is a mishmash of influences: British Isles, Eastern European, West African, and who knows what else. Cole Porter committed no wrong by borrowing from Jewish music; Elvis Presley enriched the world when he fused country-and-western with rhythm-and-blues.
Should Museums Be Taking Political Stands? One Critic Argues Against It
“The new curatorial activism builds on the heritage of critical museology, but also reflects its failure. Rather than adapting museums to serve a wider audience, they argue that museums should actively shape their audiences by impressing on them the gospel of social justice. It devalues collections and condescends to visitors.”
How Once-Golden Univision Has Imploded
Once upon a time, Univision, an American broadcasting operation aimed primarily at Spanish speakers in the United States, was a tremendous golden goose laying tremendous golden eggs: It made incredible amounts of money and had to do essentially nothing for it other than run programming produced by Televisa, a Mexican broadcasting operation. The fairy tale ended long ago. Univision has been in decline for years, thanks to a disastrous private equity buyout finalized in 2007; an aging audience; a burdensome program-licensing deal with Televisa; competition from Telemundo and Netflix; layers of overpaid and useless middle management; and a general failure to position itself for a digital future.
A Super-Simple, Non-Quantum Theory Of Eternal Consciousness
John Horgan considers the phenomenon of a philosopher dozing off at a conference (and himself dozing off while watching TV in bed) and arrives at the idea that consciousness may well be eternal – well, in effect, if not by strictest definition.
Science Reveals: How Words Should Be Spaced
Somewrittenlanguageshavenospacesatalland o thers re quire a space be tween ev e ry syl la ble. Ob viously, thereneed to be standards. Unless you’re doing avant – garde po e try, or something , you can’tjustspacew ords ho w e v e r y o u want. That would be insanity. Or at least, obnoxious. Enter three psychology researchers from Skidmore College, who decided it’s time for modern science to sort this out once and for all.
Edwin G. Burrows, 74, Pulitzer Prize-Winning Historian Of New York City
Burrows and co-author Mike Wallace, both professors at the City University of New York, won a Pulitzer for the 1,148-page Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898.
Ian McEwan Is Pessimistic About Today’s Literary Landscape
“Literary fiction is in a curious nosedive saleswise, down about 35 per cent over the past five years. Everyone’s got a theory: TV box sets, some sort of fatigue, who knows. Maybe it’s not just good enough.”
The Invention Of Young-Adult Fiction And The New Teenage Market It Served
“Targeted at readers 12 to 18 years old, [the genre] sprang into being near the end of the turbulent decade of the 1960s – in 1967, to be specific, a year that saw the publication of two seminal novels for young readers: S. E. Hinton’s The Outsiders and Robert Lipsyte’s The Contender. … Before these two novels, literature for 12- to 18-year-olds was about as realistic as a Norman Rockwell painting.”
Has Protest Art In The Trump Era Let Us Down?
While the self-proclaimed Resistance debuted with vibrant-pink mass action, the most-distinctive cultural creations that have accompanied it so far—at least in the rapid-response popular mediums of music and TV—haven’t been so fired up. Nor have they been, to use the clichéd dismissals that plenty of political art readily invites, shrill or didactic. Instead, the general drift has been in the spirit of Jeff Rosenstock’s album: self-questioning, tentative, conciliatory, emotional. It is, for better or worse, the art not of a revolution but of a failed revolution.