Museums still operate as if interpretation is a one-way stream, produced by experts and consumed by the public. Instead, imagine an exhibition that doesn't just speak, but listens and responds.
Cheyenne King-Bails, Director of Community Experience at The Sphinx Organization, shares the value of the SphinxConnect conference and its impact on the arts community.
Dear Mayor Mamdani, We love your love of arts for all, and we swooned when we read that your favorite museum is the art we all see and share together in the NYC subway: the “…beautiful murals and pieces of art across our subway system. And the fulfillment of art as being something for the
It must mean something that the highest creative achievement in American classical music is permanently controversial. When Porgy and Bess premiered on Broadway in 1935, a typical critical reaction was: “What is it?” American-born classical musicians (unlike their European-born brethren) marginalized George Gershwin as an interloper, a gifted dilettante. Later,
The current issue of The American Scholar includes a long piece of mine suggesting a possible new direction for contemporary classical music – versus the “makeshift music” that deluges our concert halls. I make reference to John Luther Adams, Charles Ives, Jean Sibelius, and Ferruccio Busoni. To read the whole
Kevin Haden, Senior Associate Dean of Strategic Engagement and Institutional Excellence at the Curtis Institute of Music, shares the importance of giving young people the space to define their own creative vision.
Mere hours before its board renamed the Kennedy Center for Donald Trump, Persuasion ran my online piece on Trump, the Kennedy Center, JFK, and Leonard Bernstein. I will be following up with a 50-minute “More than Music” feature on NPR, to run in January. Here’s the Persuasion article: When people
Literary critic and academic John Carey died last week at the age of ninety-one. I always enjoyed reading his reviews. If you hadn’t already guessed how the Bloomsbury set and their literary contemporaries viewed common folk, his book The Intellectuals and the Masses gives you chapter and verse. I enjoyed Henry Oliver’s appreciation of
Let’s stop cocking around and just let people vote in peace.
This will the last post for 2025. I’ll be back in the first week of January. For now, let’s talk about voting.
In this meh land of ours, voting has always been restricted. One by one, restrictions based on sex, creed, color, religion, land ownership, and hair color have been...
The exhibition opened recently at La Contemporaine (an institution associated with Paris Nanterre University). It is free and runs until March 14, 2026. Have a look at some of the montages.
On June 8, 2020, a letter was sent and signed by 300 artists who were Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC). It has since been signed by over 100,000 people. After 5 years, the report card shows a failing grade.
On May 25, 2020, as COVID-19 was killing millions of people all over the world, one Black man in...
