The Arts Archives - Page 14 of 36

Reviews

A World in Motion

A review of Sindya Bhanoo’s Seeking Fortune Elsewhere

May 17, 2023 • by Palak Godara

Bhanoo evokes not the spectacular scenes of people in motion that fill the news, but the ordinary and everyday events that make up lives in migration, and how the lives of Indian and Indian American women have changed over the years....

Film & Performing Arts

Nihilism for the Whole Family!

How Evelyn misinterpreted Waymond’s rebellion in Everything Everywhere All At Once

April 18, 2023 • by Ken Hu

Evelyn’s response to the multiverse reflects an existentialist resolution that builds upon a particular version of nihilism: if the universe is inherently meaningless, then we are at liberty to create our own meanings within it....

Literature

Year of the Rat

An excerpt from Marc Anthony Richardson’s experimental novel

April 5, 2023 • by Marc Anthony Richardson

... it had a semi-prehensile tail that nearly snaked a forearm like an opossum’s or a cat’s, but it was a gargantuan rat’s ......

Film & Performing Arts

Entertaining Propaganda: Hate-watching Fauda

The elision of the difference between Jews and Israel is one of the tragedies of the Middle East conflict

March 20, 2023 • by Mitchell Abidor

In Fauda, the Palestinians are often driven more by personal pathology than an outrage at historic injustice....

Entertaining Propaganda: Hate-watching Fauda

Art & Design

Poetic Rage, Anti-colonial Avant-gardes

An excerpt of Interior Frontiers

March 7, 2023 • by Ann Stoler

This essay distills what I see as a fugitive, peripatetic set of counter-colonial avant-gardes, innovative and mobile to different degrees, challenging both what avant-gardes do and who are included among them. I do not treat them as a movement but as convergent spaces of work and thought, of “counter-conducts,” of ...

Literature

Bard, Kinetic

An excerpt from the preface of Anne Waldman’s new nonfiction book

January 25, 2023 • by Anne Waldman

Poetry has always braved shifting and terrifying frequencies. There is no time in human history without poetry. Poets often go into exile in fraught times....

Reviews

The Little Prince and the Allure of Sadness

Is it possible to decode the mystery of the world’s most haunting children’s book?

January 24, 2023 • by Alla Anatsko

What The Morgan gets right is showing us how The Little Prince took shape from day one...

The Little Prince and the Allure of Sadness

The Arts

Edward Hopper: Solitude and Light

A new exhibition is at the Whitney until March 5, 2023

January 5, 2023 • by Mitchell Abidor

If there’s a sure thing in the art world, it’s that any Edward Hopper show will be both an artistic and audience success. The current exhibition at the Whitney until March 5, 2023, “Edward Hoper’s New York,” is certainly a success on both levels....

Film & Performing Arts

Saving Gay Pornography

An interview with queer film historian Elizabeth Purchell

November 15, 2022 • by Gillani Peets and Elizabeth Purchell

There’s been this explosion of interest in queer cinema history in the past couple years. But to me, at least, I think it’s generally very boring. It’s people just talking about the same films over and over and over again—films like Parting Glances, The Watermelon Woman, Desert Hearts, Tongues Untied—which ...

The Arts

Docking the Long Tail of Culture

How mass culture has scored a decisive victory in the age of the Internet

November 9, 2022 • by W. David Marx

In the past, the difficulty of acquiring long-tail content suggested that a person had many underlying status assets, such as intelligence, curiosity, and deep knowledge. When anyone can find anything obscure on the Internet within minutes, acquisition alone reveals no virtues or skills....

The Arts

Photography in the Service of Justice

Why it doesn’t matter that some war photographs are staged

November 2, 2022 • by Mitchell Abidor

Consider Joe Rosenthal’s famous photograph, Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, the image of American heroism in World War II, taken in February 1945. As we now know, the photo was not taken of the raising of the first flag on Mount Surabachi, freshly conquered by the Japanese. There is ...

Activism

The Art of Contemplating Justice

An excerpt from Studies into Darkness: The Perils and Promise of Free Speech

November 1, 2022 • by Amar Kanwar

When you look at any crime, it is investigated by an agency, the police, or the criminal justice system of any society. The process of justice is based on an investigation that is in turn based on the collection of evidence. Only evidence defined as permissible by law is presented ...