The year was terrible for global pandemic reasons, but also for brutality against artists, journalists, writers, playwrights, cinematographers, and more. How bad was it? "Civil rights were found to have deteriorated in nearly every country." - Hyperallergic
After all, why should we have access to the characters' sex lives? Raven Leilani, author of Luster, says "I try to portray it in the way that moves me when I see it, when it is awkward and silly, which it often is. To depict it that way is to make it tender; what it looks like when two...
The artist, Juliana Notori, "said the scarlet hillside vulva was intended to 'question the relationship between nature and culture in our phallocentric and anthropocentric western society' and provoke debate over the 'problematisation of gender.'" Brazil's alarmingly right-wing government, and its supporters, seem to be provoked. - The Guardian (UK)
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 sellers are seldom identified, even to the parties in a transaction, made it an easy way to shroud illicit transfers of money. The new legislation empowers federal regulators to design measures that would remove secrecy...
McKay was one of a kind, a leader "who helped secure economic independence for the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation near Sacramento, and whose deep support of cultural causes led to his becoming the first Indigenous chairman on the board of the Autry Museum of the American West," and so much more. - Los Angeles Times
Or at least the "unhappiest auteur" hates happy endings. Manohla Dargis dives deep on the director and his "beautiful bummers," including, of course, the newish Mank, "a movie that, in its broadest strokes, enshrines its own loathing of the industry, partly through its strained relationship to the truth." - The New York Times
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 that directly employed artists to produce new work." Save not just the stages, but all of the workers of the stage as well. - The Undefeated
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 announced plans to raze 14 of 18 student dormitory buildings designed by the architect Louis Kahn and built in the 1960s and 1970s." - The New York Times
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? And is there any way through? - nplus1
A parent, working with what she's got - a kid eager to watch, an endless supply of streaming, critical faculties - explains by invoking Ben Brantley: "When we find ourselves isolated, and craving connection, we can find it (for a moment at least) though critical engagement with something wonderful someone has made for us. And thank god for WiFi."...
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 Feet Under, but ... sure, network TV). A closer look reveals the driving force: "The real reason there was so little exploration of death in prime-time programming was that advertisers did not want their products...
Maria Dahvana Headley, whose Mere Wife and new translation of Beowulf have electrified readers (and listeners) on a teenage inspiration: "I happened upon The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington, who was a surrealist painter and writer. ... I didn’t really know anything about surrealists then. The novel is full of wild characters that are very elderly women. It’s also...
Silver had to forge her own way in the 1970s and 1980s, including with her first feature, Hester Street. "The 1975 independent film ... was the story of a Jewish immigrant couple in the 1890s. The low-budget black and white film, in Yiddish with English subtitles, proved a hard sell to studios." But it won rave reviews, made money,...
As regular ArtsJournal readers have probably noticed, brutalist buildings are at risk all over the world. But basically, in the north of England, brutalist architecture has met a deliberate lack of maintenance, and so "a mix of mismanagement and a general undervaluing of brutalism was leading to unnecessary demolition." - The Guardian (UK)
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 a sense of displacement that would be the driving theme of his art and make him a quintessential 'Nuyorican' — one who straddles New York and Puerto Rico and feels entirely at home in neither."...
