Tag: 01.24.19

Have The Arts Become A Closed-Loop Self-Reinforcing Echo Chamber?

Simon Dancey: “The picture now is of a middle-class sector reinforcing its own values in an echo chamber that compounds the structural inequalities of the UK. This self-endorsing closed shop is never going to shift persisting inequalities and will continue to exclude a large section of our community, its values and potential. This is morally unacceptable, economically stupid and socially disgraceful.” — Arts Professional

There’s Considerable Evidence That Theatre Can Make An Impact In American Justice. Here’s How

“Given that 85 percent of U.S. counties are home to some number of incarcerated individuals, it’s likely that most of our nation’s theatres are close to at least one correctional facility. In those facilities about two thirds of the incarcerated are people of color. As theatres work to diversify their audiences along lines of income and ethnicity, a growing percentage of those attendees will have a personal connection to mass incarceration, opening up new opportunities for relevance to communities. In short there seems to be great room and reason to expand this field of work.” – American Theatre

Artist Activist Group Urges Artists To Withhold Work From Upcoming Whitney Biennial

“The group, which advocates for sustainable economic relationships between artists and institutions, is urging the artists who will be invited to participate in the 2019 Whitney Biennial to withhold their works in solidarity with the museum’s staff and to demand compensation for the labor that went into making the pieces that will be included in the exhibition.”    – Artforum

Jonas Mekas’s Final Interview: ‘The Best Commercial Cinema Today Is Action Cinema’

“The plots are invented on the spot. Not like Hitchcock, where every scene that follows is connected with the final scene. In the action movie, it is more like the style of The Arabian Nights.” (Mekas’s favorite recent film? Lady Bird. “It is the only one that deals with real life and succeeds.”) — The Guardian

How The MAGA Teen Video Crystallizes America’s Culture Wars, Despite Meaning (In The End) Almost Nothing In Itself

“This is just the latest instance of a phenomenon you could call ‘event politics’ — that familiar flurry of knee-jerk responses sparked by a single image or clip that a little too perfectly illustrates one side’s worldview.” Lili Loofbourow looks at what event politics signifies (“a response to uncertainty”) and why it spreads so fast (“we’re in a moment when so much is truly bananas — the president can’t spell hamburgers and was investigated by the FBI for being a possible Russian agent, to pick two examples at random — that reassuring framings are welcome.”) — Slate

#MeToo And Mozart: Do ‘Don Giovanni’ And ‘The Marriage Of Figaro’ Glorify Predators?

“Many critics feel that [these operas] glorify the repugnant behavior and patriarchal values they depict — and question their place in the repertoire”, writes Frankfurt-based violinist Arianna Warsaw-Fan Rauch. Not surprisingly, for those who know the operas, Rauch makes the case that Mozart is solidly on the side of his female characters, but her argument and analysis are good. (Unfortunately, she doesn’t address Così fan tutte, which is a trickier case.) — Slate