Blog

How Can Australia Come To Terms With Its Past?

Australia’s Aboriginal poets had some ideas as Australia Day – or #InvasionDay, as it’s known by many on social media – fever hit the country over the weekend. Problem: “Australia is the only Commonwealth country without a treaty between its government and Indigenous people. Yet, in the resulting vacuum, long after the gong’s last clang, the work of First Nations artists maps some directions reconciliation, treaty and atonement might take.” – The Irish Times

With An Organization In Budget Trouble, A Theatre’s Artistic Director Cut Two Shows – And Then His Own Job Was Eliminated

The St. Paul’s Park Square Theatre had a budget issue due to expected donor funding shortfalls and lackluster ticket sales. Now it has a leadership issue. “For ‘at least two years,’ Park Square will be in the unusual position of being an arts organization without a full-time artistic leader, Mattessich said. Board members plan to arrive at a solution this weekend at a retreat, he said. The plan is to create an ‘artistic committee’ — made up of Park Square staffers and Twin Cities theater artists — that will be involved in season planning, … working with collaborators and overseeing productions.” – The Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

Sam Mendes Wins The Directors’ Guild Award For ‘1917’

Can any other film win the Oscar? Doubtful. “The strongest best-picture spoiler is likely Parasite, the South Korean thriller that prevailed at the Screen Actors Guild Awards this month and could become the first film not in the English language to win the top Oscar. Still, with the momentum of the PGA and DGA prizes, 1917 will be tough to beat.” – The New York Times

Dear Met: Please Create A Series Of Concert Performances

This series of unstaged performances of Berlioz’s La Damnation de Faust was an accident – they were meant to be seven fully-staged performances. But what a happy accident, and what the Met could learn from the experience: “Rameau, Lully, Vivaldi: The glory of early music could finally ring at the Met without the pressure and expense of full stagings. Ditto Messiaen’s Saint François d’Assise, a late-20th-century classic still unheard in this city.” – The New York Times

Amazon Has Now Restricted Reviews Of ‘American Dirt’ To Those Who Buy The Book On Amazon

This move has “raised a business question about what kind of platform Amazon wants to be.” In part, it’s problematic because Amazon bought the big review site Goodreads in 2013. One writer and publisher says, “If they want to keep the discussion about race and appropriation out of their website, that’s certainly their right. … But because they have invited this social function into their retail business, it feels a little like dirty pool to a lot of us in the industry.” – Marketplace

Salma Hayek Apologizes For Praising ‘American Dirt’

As controversy continues to swirl (for instance, as HuffPost recounts the ways American Dirt takes passages from Latinx writers’ nonfiction books on immigration) and as the book itself climbs the bestseller charts, Selma Hayek apologizes for praising the book without having read it – thus, perhaps, exposing the celebrity book endorsement for what it truly is: A PR racket. – The Washington Post

Are The Grammys Irrelevant?

Last night, the night before the 62nd Grammys, Sean “Diddy” Coombs called out the awards for their lack of diversity – and a decades-long refusal to recognize rap and hip hop. The NYT had already weighed in, agreeing: “Broadly speaking, nonwhite artists, female artists, and artists who come from the worlds of hip-hop and R&B are consistently marginalized, honored in genre categories but shut out in the four major categories (album, song and record of the year, and best new artist). Add it all up, and you get impending irrelevance.” – The New York Times