Subscribe to Excerpts
Subscribe by Email
Despite dreadful notices, repeated delays and a series of actors either being strung up over the audience or dropped upon the audience onto the stage or into the orchestra pit (ht: Swift Loris), “Spiderman: Turn Off the Dark” is raking in over a million dollars a week. This calls to mind the apocryphal military officer’s [...]
Archive for the ‘Arts reviews’ Category
November 29th, 2010
Category: Arts and Cultural Policy, Arts reviews, Music, Popular Culture, Rhetoric and Framing, Sports, Technology and Society, Uncategorized
Alex Ross noted a couple months ago that the Metropolitan Opera’s new $16m Ring cycle was beginning . Is this a good use of resources in tough times? he asks. He makes a good try at arguing that Wagner, at least, is opera for everyone (Wagner’s views on the relationship of art to society were [...]
November 7th, 2010
They were careless people, Mick and Keef. They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money of their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess….
October 2nd, 2010
Ilya Repin´s painting of Volga boatmen is not one of serfs.
September 9th, 2010
Category: Arts reviews
Film buffs will mourn the passing of Clive Donner, a film director whose career peaked a long time ago and did not have enduring impact in the U.S. Much of the English new wave films, like the French new wave films of the same period, look a bit self-conscious and pretentious today, but Donner’s skill [...]
January 7th, 2010
Why some Gothic statues show a breastfeeding Virgin Mary,
January 7th, 2009
A lesson from Goya’s Duel with Cudgels.
March 15th, 2008
Category: Arts reviews, Spirituality and Religion
… doesn’t include Byrd, Tallis, Taverner, Josquin, or Hildegard. That’s sad.
February 29th, 2008
This week I was trapped in an aluminum tube with the movie, Mr. Magorium’s Magical Emporium. This is a piece of fluff that wastes Dustin Hoffman and Natalie Portman on a deeply vacuous story about a magic toy store, and how you can do anything you want if you only believe, and how accountants and [...]
