“Art is something that’s elevating and challenges the existing order, whereas culture is precisely the opposite. Culture, or the culture industry, uses art in a conservative way, which is to say it uses art to uphold the existing order. So the culture industry peddles an ideology that supports the prevailing power structure — in the case of America, that ideology was consumerism.”
Tag: 12.26.17
How I Failed My Exams And Learned To Love The Piano
“A few years ago, as a lover of jazz and an admirer of musicians, I decided to take up the piano. In relative terms, it was all a bit late. I didn’t expect much. I merely nursed the hope that one day, for a few fleeting seconds, I would be proficient enough to play a quiet sombre tune on a grand piano in a top-floor penthouse overlooking central Manhattan. As occurs in the best films. That aim seemed modest enough, But then I was told about the exams. You should do exams, came the advice, it focuses the mind. And suddenly the playing wasn’t the thing, it was the exams.”
When A Film Critic Watches A Movie About Events He Was There For
Kenneth Turan on watching The Post and All The President’s Men: “Experiencing that as an adult, and as a critic, has been more complex, even unnerving, and different every time. My range of reactions have also given me insights into what films do and how they do it that I may not have gotten absent that personal connection.”
Ridley Scott Explains How He Rescued ‘All The Money In The World’ From The Kevin Spacey Disaster
Kyle Buchanan: “I met with Scott recently in Beverly Hills to discuss how he did it, and what I found was a filmmaker who has the stamina of a man half his age and an octogenarian’s give-no-fucks bluntness.”
America’s Smallest Museum Wants To Become Its Most Visited – And It Could Succeed
Scientist Amanda Schochet and designer Charles Philipp are the founders of MICRO, which creates six-foot-tall pop-up museum kiosks that can be installed in hotel lobbies, transit stations, office buildings – even DMVs and post offices.
Z’ev, Percussionist And Pioneer Of Industrial Music, Dead At 66
“Performing solo and with others, Z’ev improvised surrounded by homemade percussion instruments. He delved into attacks and resonances, propulsion and meditation. He worked with found objects and later with digital processing. He was intrigued by the properties of materials and by the paths linking sounds, images, the body, nature and spirituality. In a globe-spanning career, he collaborated with musicians, dancers, poets, performance artists and visual artists. His discography includes more than 70 albums as well as multimedia work.”
‘Relentless’ Playwriting Prize Goes To Script Whose Title The Times Won’t Print
The American Playwriting Foundation’s $45,000 Relentless Award, funded by a libel settlement from The National Enquirer for a false story about Philip Seymour Hoffman’s death and given for an unproduced script judged blind, was won by Gracie Gardner for a play whose title — well, we’re too squeamish to print it, too. (Cool fact: all eight semifinalists were written by women.)
Why The Culture Wars Of 2017 Are Not Like The Culture Wars Of The 1990s
For a start, unlike the battles over the “NEA Four” and Chris Ofili’s painting The Holy Virgin Mary (the one that incorporated elephant dung), the censoring impulse this time is coming from the left at least as much as the right (as with Dana Schutz’s painting of the murdered Emmett Till). However, argues Isaac Kaplan, the key difference between then and now isn’t the political identification of those objecting to the art – it’s how much actual power they have.
Good Design Is A Public Good (Why Is This So Hard To Understand?)
“The conventional wisdom is that design costs more and is only a luxury. Yet people from all walks of life deserve good design. The power of design to dignify will never be fully explored until average people have some sense that they deserve better.”
The New York Times Comedy Critic Explains How He Works (And Decides What’s Funny)
Jason Zinoman: “The first question I ask of a show isn’t whether or not it’s funny. Rather, I look to understand: What is the comic trying to do, and how interesting or new is it?”