The Arts Archives - Page 17 of 36

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

Revolution in the Service of Poetry?

Would-be fascists on the Right and would-be commissars on the Left

February 28, 2022 • by Greil Marcus

There are would-be fascists on the right and would-be commissars on the left. All they need is institutional power, and they will speak as art, against art: Caesar will become God, and God will tell Caesar it is right....

Authority and Freedom: A Defense of the Arts

What makes the arts an essential part of a society is their freestanding value—a value that cannot be described as radical, liberal, or conservative

February 28, 2022 • by Jed Perl

While there have been many periods when the arts inspired some sort of controversy, different times have different troubles. In our data- and metrics-obsessed era, the central problem is that the imaginative ground without which art cannot exist is under threat....

The Arts

Art on Her Mind

bell hooks’s theory of beauty in the everyday

February 14, 2022 • by Monika Gehlawat

bell hooks’s contributions to feminist thought and race politics are widely known, as are her rigorous theoretical works and academic scholarship. While I have read and learned much from her art and political criticism, what has moved me most recently are hooks’s personal reflections on the quotidian spaces of Black ...

Literature

Decolonizing Daniel Defoe

How Black lives matter in A Journal of the Plague Year

February 9, 2022 • by Anna Neill

It isn’t hard to see why A Journal of the Plague Year has enjoyed renewed attention in recent times. But to invoke it without considering Defoe’s support for British imperialism and the expanding Atlantic slave trade is to make literary history complicit with colonial and racial injustice....

Literature

Literary Imperialism and Scenes of High Melodrama

When BIPOC and queer writers defy minimalism

February 1, 2022 • by Torsa Ghosal

The term melodrama is a value judgment—and as such, it can be careless. ...

Literary Imperialism and Scenes of High Melodrama

Literature

The Eleventh Mouse

A writer welcomes the unexpected at end of an old year and the start of a new one

January 3, 2022 • by Maureen Buchanan Jones

Here I was caring for another creature with more than a bit of martyrdom and annoyance in my heart. I had forgotten my self-administered advice as an antidote to despair that “something extraordinary is going to happen today.”...

Film & Performing Arts

Puerto Rican History Deserves More Than a Musical

West Side Story displaces the true story of the Young Lords Organization’s civil rights struggle

December 15, 2021 • by Jacqueline Lazú

For many, West Side Story is simply an iconic musical with catchy tunes. For me, however, it became a critical entryway into political consciousness about when and how Puerto Ricans matter in United States history, and why popular representations are instrumental to that....

Puerto Rican History Deserves More Than a Musical

Literature

Libertie

In Brooklyn in 1860, a daughter watches her mother bring a patient back from the dead, in this excerpt from Kaitlyn Greenidge’s second novel

December 15, 2021 • by Kaitlyn Greenidge

I saw my mother raise a man from the dead. “It still didn’t help him much, my love,” she told me. But I saw her do it all the same. That’s how I knew she was magic....

Literature

The Best Books I Read in 2021

And why I liked them

December 15, 2021 • by Claire Potter

It’s the most wonderful time of the year—buying books for other people that you want to read yourself! And on that note, here are the best ones I read last year. All links are to IndieBound to gently nudge you to buy from independent bookstores. Fiction It’s a tie between Douglas Stuart’s ...

The Arts

When Diane Arbus Came to Central Park

The New York City story of a latchkey kid and a trailblazing photographer

November 30, 2021 • by Vicky Oliver

For me as a city kid, Central Park was a forbidden Eden. Even though I grew up a stone’s throw from the park, my parents forbade me to walk there, even chaperoned, even in broad daylight. And so, it’s all the more astounding that I recently found myself trotting—no, tearing over—to see ...

Feminism

What Does It Mean to Be “Written By a Woman?”

How a misleading phrase went viral on TikTok, Twitter, and then became part of the Gen Z lexicon

November 17, 2021 • by Madeleine Janz

He could be skinny or ripped or somewhere in between, but never fat. He’s different from most of the men you meet: He doesn’t catcall, he doesn’t question your rape story, and he would never, ever put anything other than your pleasure and happiness first. He could be old or ...

What Does It Mean to Be “Written By a Woman?”

Reviews

Titane: Transformative Gender and Intimacy

The winner of the 2021 Palme d’Or takes us through hell and out the other side

November 3, 2021 • by Melinda Freudenberger

The following review contains spoilers. My friend has a phrase she likes to use about her new dog. “I look at him from across the room,” she says, after talking to me about all the piss pads littering her apartment floor, “and I can tell he’s having bad dog thoughts.” Something ...