The Problem With ‘The Canon’ And The Wars Over It

Wesley Morris: “This questioning of the canon comes from places of lived experience. It’s attuned to how great cultural work can leave you feeling irked and demeaned. For some readers, loving Herman Melville or Joseph Conrad requires some peacemaking with the not-quite-human representations of black people in those texts. Loving Edith Wharton requires the same reckoning with the insulting way she could describe Jews. Bigotry recurs in canonical art. And committed engagement leaves us dutybound to identify it. … Your great works should be strong enough to withstand some feminist forensics. … Insisting that a canon is settled gives those concerns the ‘fake news’ treatment, denying a legitimate grievance by saying there’s no grounds for one. It’s shutting down a conversation, when the longer we go without one, the harder it becomes to speak.”

A ‘Roseanne’ Writer’s Assistant Explains What It Was Like To Work On The Reboot

OK, sure, here was the plan, according to one writer: “These are the conversations we’re having at home with our families, and we wanted to bring that tolerance, because you can’t have tolerance without understanding. That’s what we wanted to provide. I loved that. America needs help right now, and that’s all we were trying to do.”

Depressing Pride Month Update: Movies Had Less LGBTQ Rep In 2017 Than The Five Years Before That

What the heck, 2017? “In 2017, out of 109 major motion pictures, only 14 films included characters who identified as LGBTQ. In total, the year’s major studio films had 28 LGBTQ characters. This finding represents a 5.6 percent drop in representation from the films of 2016. Gay men, the report finds, are consistently the most-portrayed demographic. None of the movies released this year featured a transgender character.”

A Conservative War On Hip Hop?

The criticism levied at hip-hop from the right is a pointed indictment of black culture: Black people lost their way and this crude music was the culprit. It’s understandably popular because it feeds into the “pick yourselves up” rhetoric that downplays the oppression of black people while justifying it.

The Con Artist Who Used The Arts As A Glamorous Scam

Anna Delvey’s story is a kind of apotheosis of the “Instagram Effect,” where everyone projects a more perfect, happier life than they actually have via social media, and the envy generated becomes a kind of currency. Her Instagram life is stuffed full of deluxe signifiers and only rare flickers of actual sociality. The sense they cultivate is of a private and exclusive world. They are, in their arid glamor, both self-aggrandizing and kind of haughty, which is the air she projected according to copious testimony from her victims.

The Man Who Invented “Culture”

Burckhardt invented culture as we know it – not just the official “arts”, but any human activity that has symbolic meaning. Newspapers and their websites are still behind Burckhardt on this. Looking for articles about fashion and food? You’ll find them in “lifestyle”. Burckhardt saw these too as culture. Of course, so do we – it would just get hard to organise stuff if it was all classed in one big mix. But everyone knows today that clothes are significant cultural creations and that cooking is about meaning as much as flavour. The amazing thing is how clearly Burckhardt saw it 1860.

NEA Gets A New Head Of Its Dance Program

Prior to working at NEFA, Sara Nash managed the USArtists International grant program at Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation. She also worked as senior producer at Dance Theater Workshop (New York Live Arts) for more than six years, where she oversaw the international program, the Suitcase Fund, and developed residency programs for commissioned artists.  Nash’s international experience includes working at Tanec Praha, a contemporary dance festival in Prague, and at the British Council in London.

The New Arts Journalism – A New Era Dawns?

While arts writing is going through one of its richest periods of innovation, with an explosion of forms in recent years, much of the experimentation is happening well outside of traditional media. The internet seems to have reminded at least some writers of the kind of artistry that’s possible in art criticism, says Charlotte Frost, author of a forthcoming book, “Art Criticism Online: A History.” This represents a return to the roots of the field, she adds. The 800-word art review is actually a fairly recent invention. But if you turn the clock back a bit, to the 18th-century Paris salons, for instance, there were all kinds of critical responses to art, Frost says.