- If It's Really Art, It Doesn't Fit In A Cliche Blake Gopnik has had it up to here with silly cliches about what art is or isn't. In fact, he has a top ten list of the silliest pigeonholes critics and pundits try to force art into. Included are such gems as "Good Art Is The Mirror Of Its Times," "Good Art Is Abstract," and "Good Art Is Finely Crafted." Says Gopnik of that last cliche, "a cuckoo clock is finely crafted." Washington Post 03/23/03
- Madness And The Arts "Charles Dickens fought recurrent bouts of depression with hyperactivity. Hemingway, Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf took their own lives. Dylan Thomas drank himself into an early grave. Percy Bysshe Shelley suffered from recurring nightmares and hallucination and died at 30. William Blake heard voices. All artistic geniuses, definitely. All more or less mad." A new Toronto festival examines the connection between madness and artistic genius, from both clinical and cultural perspectives. The Globe & Mail (Canada) 03/22/03
- What Happens When The Definition Of "Classic" Changes Classic movies aren't what they used to be. That's not a judgment - more of an observation. "The canon has been changing over the last decade, and what makes a classic of cinema is now drastically different to discerning young moviegoers than it has been to their teachers or to the critics or to Leonard Maltin. The implications of the new canon are vast, much bigger than the specific films themselves, and they speak to the ways in which a new generation perceives history, reality, and even perception itself." Boston Globe 03/23/03
- Return Of The Blacklist? Can the blacklist live again? Absolutely, writes Linda Winer. "Lest anyone think I overstate the danger to artists who use their media access to penetrate the drumbeats of war, consider what already exists on the Internet - ironically, a phenomenon that thrives on the gift of free speech." Newsday 03/23/03
- Dumb And Dumber - Just How Do These Books Get Published? It's supposed to be really difficult to get a book published, right? So how to account for all the really dumb books out there? "What were they thinking? I'm not talking here about bad books. Though they exist, books that are just plain and irredeemably awful are too sad to waste time thinking about. No: the books I'm presently pondering aren't necessarily bad - though some of them are - they're just so... well... dumb and unplaceable, it's difficult to imagine book store owners knowing what to do with them, let alone book buyers." January Magazine 03/03
