The Arts Archives - Page 25 of 37

Literature

“Our War Would Be With a Virus”

The New School poet’s latest collection retraces the losses of the AIDS crisis

March 9, 2020 • by Mark Bibbins

From 13th Balloon What might anyone have made of you and me as babies born into the mess and ferment of the late 1960s Working-class babies born to parents who themselves were babies during World War II Were they worried already about Vietnam or about some other monstrous hand that would grab us from our cribs by our feet and throw us into the war that ...

Film & Performing Arts

Jerome Robbins, Montgomery Clift, and the Origins of “West Side Story”

How a hit Broadway musical was born in New York’s post-war bohemia

March 2, 2020 • by Julia Foulkes

We print this excerpt from Julia L. Foulkes, A Place for Us: “West Side Story” and New York (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) in celebration of the new Broadway production of West Side Story that opened at The Broadway Theater on February 20, 2020. The choreographer Jerome Robbins and the actor Montgomery ...

Jerome Robbins, Montgomery Clift, and the Origins of “West Side Story”

Philosophy

Lao-tzu, Plato, and Parasite

What’s up with that Scholar’s Stone?

February 28, 2020 • by David Lay Williams

Parasite depicts the struggling Kim family, living in a semi-basement apartment in Seoul, desperately seeking sources of income to afford the very basics to sustain their humble lives. In a portentous scene early in the film, the older child of the family, Ki-Woo, is visited by his wealthy college friend, Min, ...

Fashion

Mnemonics of (Re)Used Clothes

Sustainable fashion requires grappling with the relationships and memories clothing represents

February 14, 2020 • by Sanem Odabaşi

Looking inside my wardrobe, I see a pile of clothes, dresses on hangers, shawls in boxes, and my favorite tote bags. If only they could speak, they would probably tell stories about my past experiences. I am not a collector, nor so attached to artifacts that I must keep them ...

Fashion

Fashion, Emotion and the Depths of the Self

February 11, 2020 • by Otto von Busch and Lisa Rubin

Tying fashion to sex is nothing new. Indeed, there is a whole tradition of psychoanalysts since Freud who has never shied away from seeing through clothes and reading sex through dress. Freud famously saw castration anxiety in high heels, and John Flugel recognized how dress is the meandering compromise between ...

Fashion

Do My Lies Say Anything About Fashion?

February 11, 2020 • by Otto von Busch

The answer comes out of my mouth almost as a reflex when my colleague asks about my outfit. It is the quick nature of my response that draws my attention to it, as I so often feel my other replies come frustratingly slow. It seems wit was never my game. ...

Art & Design

Dancing is Work

And it’s one of many ways we experience magic time

December 14, 2019 • by Stuart Hodes

I asked Vernon Scott, President of the Board of Directors, if he would do me a favor: hold this event on Wednesday -- because it’s my 95th birthday. He said no. In the mid 1950s, I was sitting on the steps of my loft residence on East 17th Street talking with ...

Reviews

What Do Walls Do?

Reflections on William Callahan’s “Great Walls” — and on Filmmaking as an Ethnographic Method

December 5, 2019 • by Jiyoung Cho

What Callahan spurs us to challenge is the premise that walls are “problems” that need to be “solved” (Callahan 2018, 460). When Berlin Wall came down in 1989, it was meant to signal the end of the Cold War rivalry between a totalitarian East and a democratic West, a victory ...

History

The Syrian Crisis in Longer View

A review of Fragile Nation, Shattered Land

October 28, 2019 • by Spenser Rapone

Reviewed by Spenser R. Rapone The future of the Syrian Arab Republic, still embroiled in a brutal civil war, is today a topic of raging debate in the Middle East and beyond. Taking the long view, James A. Reilly’s Fragile Nation, Shattered Land: The Modern History of Syria recounts the origins ...

Literature

On the Feeling of Anti-Semitism

When Being Jewish Becomes a Liability

October 26, 2019 • by David Stromberg

Whatever you are, it always turns out to be the wrong kind.––Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (1956) The essay below is the third part of a series and is most profitably read in sequence after parts one and two -- comprising a kind of memoir that participates in a literary genre that has become obscured: ...

Art & Design

The Boogie Down Brigade

Celebrating Bronx Fashion Superheroes

September 28, 2019 • by Mikaila Brown

--- Local heroes like Amaurys the Ambassador have a plan to win the support of the people. His weapon of choice is his fashion line, The Bronx Native. His bullets are iconic Bronx-specific-imagery, like Cardi B’s sassiness and bodacious bodegas. ILLUSTRATION BY: MIKAILA BROWN Jessica the Influencer is using Instagram to embolden women ...

Art & Design

The Writing on the Wall

Orozco, Benton, and Arnautoff

September 25, 2019 • by Jennifer Wilson

Student and activist groups have campaigned for the removal of the murals, arguing they were detrimental to the education and well-being of students of color, who had to confront these images as they walked the halls or ascended the staircase. On the other side of the debate, art historians and ...