ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

Stories

A Ukrainian Director Killed In April Had A Documentary Premiere At Cannes

"A few days after the city itself fell to invading Russian forces, Kvedaravičius’ fiancée Hanna Bilobrova fought back tears as she introduced the film, which she completed after smuggling the footage out of the country." - Slate

Agnieska Holland Is Furious That Cannes Accepted A Film From Russia

Holland is the European Film Academy president. "The Polish-born director – who fled to France in 1981 when Communist authorities imposed martial law – said now was the time to stand up to Russian aggression in Ukraine." - Variety

Why Art Prices Are Shooting Toward The Stratosphere

To be blunt, the rich have gotten richer during the pandemic, and continue to do so. - The Guardian (UK)

Legendary New Yorker Writer Roger Angell Has Died At 101

Angell's baseball writing - his gorgeous sentences, his attention to detail, his belief that being a fan was a worthwhile endeavor - earned him award after award, but his essays about his New Yorker childhood and his annual holiday poem also had a devoted readership. - The New York Times

Public TV Fundraising Telethons Are Losing Their Effectiveness

An analysis by Contributor Development Partnership of March pledge results reported a 24% decline in the number of gifts year-over-year, a nearly 5.5% drop in the number of new donors and a 7.5% slide in the percentage of sustainer gifts. - Current

Workers At The Whitney Museum Protest Wages At Gala

Workers at the museum rang bells, chanted, and cheered when taxi drivers and chauffeurs who just dropped off their employers honked in support of them, holding signs that read “Honk for a Fair Contract” and “Union Strong.” - Hyperallergic

The Ways Disabilities Are Being Portrayed Are Changing

Children’s literature is definitely getting better at representation. Indeed, when I asked disabled friends and acquaintances to name their favourite disabled character, almost all of them highlighted books aimed at younger readers. - The Guardian

The Morality Of Critics

Although perhaps you might say that literary critics in a certain sense are custodians of the language. I think there has been a tradition, including people like Edward Said, Susan Sontag and Raymond Williams, who were not so much critics as they were moralists. - The Point

Could a New $100 Million Movie Studio Transform Newark’s Economy?

One study estimated that the Newark project could bring as many as 600 long-term jobs and a constellation of new business opportunities to the city, the state’s largest with a population of 312,000 and a median household income of less than $38,000. - The New York Times

How Our Memory Is Becoming More Specialized

Memorizing can become a highly specialized act, based on regular practice and rehearsal. A singer, though fully capable of performing the role of say Aida, is unlikely to be able to memorize an epic poem that is similarly long. - The Baffler

Head Of Cannes’ First Tiktok Festival Jury Quits Over Concerns About Independence

“The difficulty is that TikTok is a marketing-focused company and fails to understand creators and their independence…They kept asking me for reports on our progress, even though we hadn’t even seen each other,” he said. - Deadline

Elspeth Barker, Journalist Who Wrote “One Of The Best Least-Known Novels Of The 20th Century,” Dead At 81

Published when she was 51, Barker's O Caledonia won several awards and was popular in Europe for several years, then faded away. She parlayed the book's success into a busy career as a journalist and essayist, known for being quirky and free-spirited, but never wrote another novel. - The New York Times

What It’s Like To Spend Your Life In Translation

To spend a lot of time with your head in dictionaries is to understand the extent to which your head is made up of dictionaries. And if our language doesn’t give us a word that another language contains, it may be that we won’t think or feel things that speakers of other languages do. - The New York Times

One Of India’s Bravest Playwrights Takes On Her Touchiest Subject Yet: The Man Who Murdered Gandhi

Anuparna Chandrasekhar has wriiten about a sex tape going viral in conservative India to the notorious 2012 gang rape on a bus in Delhi.  Her latest, The Father and the Assassin, examines the journey of Nathuram Godse from boy-raised-as-a-girl to Gandhi-admiring journalist to Hindu nationalist assassin. - The Guardian

What Cancer Therapy Is Teaching Us About The Vast Complexity Of The Human Condition

How can immunotherapy cure a 65-year-old, newly retired man of Stage IV lung cancer, restoring the promise of his golden years with his family, but do nothing for the 55-year-old woman whose cancer robs her of decades of life? We do not know. - LA Review of Books

Our Free Newsletter

Join our 30,000 subscribers

Latest

Don't Miss

function my_excerpt_length($length){ return 200; } add_filter('excerpt_length', 'my_excerpt_length');