Category: issues

Bevin has spent two years trying to undermine the Arts Council and its work. In addition to his 2016 board reorganization, he forced out veteran executive director Lori Meadows. Her successor, Lydia Bailey Brown, lasted nine months. Since Brown quit five months ago, there has been little apparent effort to find a new director. The annual Governor’s Awards in the Arts, which the Arts Council manages for the governor’s office, also has gotten weird.

“A misconception abounds that feminists who want to bring abusers to account don’t accept Roland Barthes’s “death of the author” principle. This is not really true, at least for me. I consider Woody Allen and Roman Polanski’s movies gifts, to me and to the culture—even when they’re bad—and I’m never giving them back. I don’t want Allen and Polanski to have control over their own legacies or even over their own works. If they don’t get to dictate how I interpret their films, then they don’t get to control anything about the film industry. We, the viewers, do.”

Canadian arts consultants are worried. “Especially in Ontario, where the largest of these organizations are located, the top job often goes to an international candidate. [British-born Julian] Cox was hired by AGO director Stephan Jost, a Swiss-American who joined the museum in 2016. Meanwhile, the Royal Ontario Museum, Luminato, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection and the Shaw Festival have all hired British or American leaders in the past 2 1/2 years. It’s a pattern that has arts consultants worried.”

Quentin Tarantino doesn’t come off very well, either. Thurman says, “I went from being a creative contributor and performer to being like a broken tool.”

Matthew van Besien: “When we step back and remember that one person’s provocation may be another person’s reality, we are also reminded that it behooves all of us to move out of the echo chamber and expose ourselves to environments where people may disagree with us.”

From the status of Pocahontas and Squanto as quasi-mythical figures in the nation’s founding, through the use of Sitting Bull as an attraction in Buffalo Bill’s show, to the use of generic Indian figures as branding symbols for everything from cigarettes to baking powder to sports teams, Carolina Miranda looks at a “wildly complicated” history.

“On Thursday, Poland’s Senate pushed through a measure that would make it illegal to accuse Poles of complicity in the Holocaust or any other crimes associated with the Nazi era. Offenders could find themselves imprisoned for three years once the law, which is awaiting the signature of the Polish president, comes into effect.”

The center, designed by Robert A.M. Stern Architects and due to open in 2020, will present performances for people at Yale and the general public — from poetry readings to rock concerts. Located in the current freshman dining hall Commons (which will remain) and Memorial Hall, the center will also serve as a communal campus hub, with multiple gathering spaces, including a bistro and pub on the renovated basement level.

We have our little ways, we cockeyed critics — tips and techniques picked up over years of writing reviews, sometimes at leisure and sometimes under extreme deadline pressure, responding to something familiar (Beethoven again, or Meryl Streep) or to something barely identifiable flying in from left field.