The Arts Archives - Page 26 of 38

Feminism

Celebrating the “Female Byron”: An Interview With Lucasta Miller

The National Book Critics Circle finalist on her biography, L.E.L.

March 13, 2020 • by Lucasta Miller and Kate Tooley

Lucasta Miller, author of The Bronte Myth, returns to the world of 19th century female authors with L.E.L., an extensively researched recasting of the life and career of Letitia Elizabeth Landon. Long ignored and dismissed by critics, recently unearthed information has shed light on Landon’s personal life and by extension offered a new perspective ...

Celebrating the “Female Byron”: An Interview With Lucasta Miller

Literature

On The Hatred of Literature

Liberalism is about life and everything it contains

March 10, 2020 • by Jon Baskin

When I was in college, at the end of the last century, the prevailing school of literary interpretation was called “New Historicism.” The foundational assumption of this approach was that artworks were primarily of value insofar as they could offer us insight into the context and conditions of their historical ...

Film & Performing Arts

When the Networks Prescribed a Dose of Reality for Ailing Soap Operas

How AIDS and Social Issues Reinvigorated Soaps in the 1990’s

March 9, 2020 • by Elana Levine

In this excerpt, Levine looks at how “the soaps”, challenged by flagging ratings in the 1990s, embraced the social issues of their day. --- Reality versus Fantasy As soap ratings initiated their slow decline by the later 1980s, the programs began to explore new developments in storytelling, shifting the boundaries of soap opera ...

When the Networks Prescribed a Dose of Reality for Ailing Soap Operas

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 ...