Yearly Archives: 2021
The Writer Who Wants Readers To Feel Like Voyeurs
After all, why should we have access to the characters' sex lives? Raven Leilani, author of Luster, says "I try to portray it in...
A 33-Meter Hillside Vagina Sculpture Is Highlighting Brazil’s Cultural And Political Rifts
The artist, Juliana Notori, "said the scarlet hillside vulva was intended to 'question the relationship between nature and culture in our phallocentric and anthropocentric...
The Antiquities Trade Is About To Get Reined In
Or at least, that's the hope of the U.S. Congress. "Regulators have long worried that the opacity of the antiquities trade, where buyers and...
Marshall McKay, Who Steered Autry Museum Toward The West’s True Diversity, Has Died Of...
McKay was one of a kind, a leader "who helped secure economic independence for the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation near Sacramento, and whose deep...
David Fincher Hates Hollywood
Or at least the "unhappiest auteur" hates happy endings. Manohla Dargis dives deep on the director and his "beautiful bummers," including, of course, the...
Theatremakers Want – And Need – A New New Deal
Hurray for the Save Our Stages money, but theatres need a lot more: "a new Federal Theatre Project (FTP), like the Depression-era government agency...
The Louis Kahn Dorms Threatened For Destruction In India
To continue the Threatened Buildings theme: "A world-class architectural-preservation controversy is brewing in India, where the administration at the Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad had...
The Fate Of The Media-Puffed, Free-Credit-Flowing, Neoliberal Restaurant After Covid
Is food over? Is dining? How can restaurant owners, especially empty, corporate ownership groups, justify their whining while treating low-paid workers like absolute crap?...
It Might Take A Pandemic To Learn To Watch Like A Critic
A parent, working with what she's got - a kid eager to watch, an endless supply of streaming, critical faculties - explains by invoking...
American Television Simply Can’t Deal With Aging And Death
TV execs might say the reason is that audiences don't like to see death (which seems a little odd after the successes of Six...
The Writer Inspired By The Surrealist
Maria Dahvana Headley, whose Mere Wife and new translation of Beowulf have electrified readers (and listeners) on a teenage inspiration: "I happened upon The...
Joan Micklin Silver, Director Of Crossing Delancey, 85
Silver had to forge her own way in the 1970s and 1980s, including with her first feature, Hester Street. "The 1975 independent film ......
Why Are England’s Brutalist Buildings Being Destroyed?
As regular ArtsJournal readers have probably noticed, brutalist buildings are at risk all over the world. But basically, in the north of England, brutalist...
Adal Maldonaldo, Photographer Of The Puerto Rican Diaspora, 72
Maldonado's family moved from Puerto Rico to New Jersey and then to the Bronx when he was a teenager. "The experience left him with...
Creative Commons Is Truly A Great Resource, Until Scammers Pop Up
Kyle Cassidy uploaded a photo of Peter Sagal in 2013 to Wikimedia Commons, with the subject's permission, the correct attribution, and the correct info...
How To Reprise A Role 34 Years Later
Step one is to fight against 1980s racist tropes. Tamlyn Tomita: "I said I would love to, this would be so fun, but the...
The Law Professor Who Did More Than Dream Of Being A Novelist Later In...
Pam Jenoff - you may know her from The Diplomat's Wife, The Lost Girls of Paris, and many other novels - started taking writing...
Dancers Have To Learn New Tricks And Stretch New ‘Muscles’ During The Pandemic
That is, their business muscles. They became bakers, started resource centers, trained non-dancers, and gotten into fashion - among many, many other second, third,...
US Arts Venues Are Finally Getting Some Relief
Is it too little, too late? "Unlike other business sectors that have been hit hard by the coronavirus, performance centres are in a uniquely...
Percentage Of Women Directors Is Slowly Creeping Upward
The headlines say it's a record, but is 16 percent something to brag about? Hollywood thinks maybe. (It's certainly a better record than 2018's...
Australia’s National Anthem Gets An Anti-Racist Tweak
The anthem - which replaced "God Save the Queen" only in 1984, though it had been written in the late 19th century - previously...
TV Production Stays On Holiday Hiatus In Los Angeles As Covid Numbers Rise And...
Positive cases have been identified - in one case described as a cluster of infections - in several of the studios where production won't...
How Jewish Theatre Scrambled And Remade Itself For The Digital Year
As with every other kind of theatre, Jewish theaters and playwrights, actors and tech people, had a lot to figure out. The Jewish Playwriting...
Hollywood Had Rules, And In 2020, It Busted Them All
A lot happened to the moviemaking business in 2020, but not a lot of it by choice. "Since March, the industry has, in effect,...
Claude Bolling, Jazz And Classical Pianist, 90
Bolling's fusion of jazz and classical made him the most popular pianist, composer, and bandleader in Europe for a time. "A devotee since childhood...