Category: issues

“All the festivals are hoping to take advantage of the estimated 4,000 presenters, producers, vendors, managers, artists and donors who descend on the city for the annual Association of Performing Arts Presenters convention at the beginning of January.”

“[Lindy] Hume, whose first Sydney Festival was last year, has decided not to continue beyond 2012. Unusually among our professional festival directors, Hume is a practising artist. She is itching to get back to staging opera productions, after presenting four Perth Festivals and what will be three in Sydney.”

“In an era of cultural fragmentation, a worryingly large number of people wouldn’t know a parody if they saw one, or, worse, if told that it was there would fail to see the need for its existence.”

“As someone who grew up going to Lincoln Center in its early years (if I remember, my first Philharmonic concert at what was then Philharmonic Hall was in 1964), I am delighted and surprised that the center has been able to make itself so much more inviting, to blend into the neighborhood.”

“Negative criticism is particularly exciting, not only because of schadenfreude, but because once limitations are identified, we glimpse how to transcend them.”

“There is little point in blaming ‘New Criticism,’ which fetishized the uniqueness and autonomy of literary works, or in lashing, yet again, the dead horse of creative writing departments, which prescribe an antihistorical formalism while turning a noble vocation into yet another moneymaking opportunity.”

“Now, maybe more than ever, in a cultural desert characterized by the vast, glimmering territory of the Internet, it is important for the critic to write gracefully. If she is going to separate excellent books from those merely posing as excellent, the brilliant from the flashy, the real talent from the hyped… then the critic has one important function: to write well.”

“There have been many other defenses of criticism — by Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde and Lionel Trilling, to name only a few — each an effort to establish, or re-­establish, the continuing relevance of a literary form whose value has been challenged for much of its modern history.”

“It was a panicked move, and I suspect they knew it was dumb even as they were doing it. They did no real harm to Virbila — if anything, they lent her pluckiness — but they made themselves look second-rate.”

“The reality is that most high-end restaurants already have a pretty good idea of what the leading critics look like. After all, a big-deal restaurant is a big-deal investment. With millions of dollars riding on a business that can be dramatically affected by one person’s opinion, owners of course do everything they can to find out who the critics are.”