The Arts Archives - Page 33 of 36

Literature

Will Trump Defund Culture?

History Says No

March 20, 2017 • by Claire Potter

It doesn't surprise me that the first Trump budget proposes to eliminate all federal cultural and public broadcast funding. It's the same script we have been seeing for almost forty years. First, the amounts of federal money devoted to arts and culture are infinitesimal, particularly when you compare them to ...

Reviews

Why I Wish To Thank Fareed Zakaria

(Even if I don’t always agree with him)

March 10, 2017 • by Roshni Majumdar

I first read his essay, “The Politics of Rage: Why Do They Hate Us?” in Newsweek several years after he wrote it in October 2001. In the essay, he explained that political stagnation in the Arab World, where he remarked that many Gulf countries had even fewer freedoms than they ...

Reviews

Queer History on Stage

A Review of The View UpStairs by Max Vernon

March 1, 2017 • by Lina Landstroem

No, it is not, they responded. We do not call the LGBTQ community ‘family’ because we don’t need to. We no longer live in a world where we need to call each other family and create homes in public spaces. However, we have already forgotten that it wasn’t always this ...

Feature

Fighting Over and On the Streets of New York

A Review of the ‘Whose Streets? Our Streets!’ Exhibition

January 17, 2017 • by Julia Foulkes

“Whose Streets” features the work of thirty-eight independent photojournalists who documented -- and participated in -- protests in New York from 1980-2000. The issues ranged from housing, abortion rights, housing, queer activism, AIDS, education and labor, police brutality, race relations, the war and environment -- there were a lot, and ...

Education

Simianization in the Film “Sing”

Glaring caricature and stereotype provides teachable moment about racial bias

January 9, 2017 • by Jill Corson Lake

The animated film “Sing,” which opened on December 21, features a lazy, tone-deaf, and hurtful character choice by writer and director Garth Jennings. Whether conscious or unconscious, Jennings’ script perpetuates systemic racism and the history of simianization and oppression of black people by depicting them as gorillas, monkeys, and apes. “Sing” ...

Education

“Great Books Camp” as Political Education

A Reply to Molly Worthen

December 23, 2016 • by Michael Weinman

In “Can I Go to Great Books Camp?” which recently appeared in the New York Times, Molly Worthen provides an historical account of the development of the “Great Books” program and related curricula inside American universities. It is a report about the present deployment of such “canonical” works in various ...

“Great Books Camp” as Political Education

Literature

A Pure Solar World

Sun Ra and the Birth of Afrofuturism by Paul Youngquist

December 21, 2016 • by Vince Carducci

One of my favorite moments of personal cognitive dissonance goes back to my time at Michigan State in the mid-1970s when at brunch at IHOP one Sunday morning I looked over to see John Gilmore, June Tyson, and Marshall Allen seated a couple of tables over from me. They were ...

Feature

The Lady in the Van (2015)

Movie Review

December 20, 2016 • by Margaret Kim Peterson

“One seldom was able to do her a good turn without some thoughts of strangulation.” Mary (or is it Margaret?) Shepherd was a pianist. And then she was a nun. And then… well, it’s not clear just what happened next. But by the time we meet her, in Alan Bennett’s ...

Reviews

What Can Cinema Teach Philosophy?

Badiou and Rancière on Film

December 19, 2016 • by Emmanuel Alloa

Philosophy’s general distrust of cinema is a thing of the past. Cinema no longer serves only as a placeholder for reproving wrong conceptions of time (Bergson on the “cinematographic illusion”), as the incarnation of the distraction industry (Adorno), as a symptom of cultural depravation (Heidegger on the remove from “Japanese ...

Feature

Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-1971, by Jonas Mekas

December 6, 2016 • by Vince Carducci

Back in the day when I was an aspiring young artist, one of my bibles was a well-worn copy (gotten at the late-great independent bookstore Paperbacks Unlimited) of Movie Journal, a collection of columns by filmmaker/impresario Jonas Mekas that had originally appeared in the Village Voice from 1959 to 1971, trumpeting the ...

Movie Journal: The Rise of a New American Cinema, 1959-1971, by Jonas Mekas

Feature

Remaking the Rust Belt

The Postindustrial Transformation of North America

November 20, 2016 • by Vince Carducci

The decline of American manufacturing and what to do about it has been a key topic in the current election cycle. The demise of the nation's industrial plant, and its implications for manufacturing cities such as Detroit, Akron, and Pittsburgh, has often been seen as inevitable, a result of blind ...

Reviews

The Banality of Woody

Reviewing Irrational Man (2015) and Cafe Society (2016)

November 15, 2016 • by Laura Nelson

Irrational Man, a film by Woody Allen (2015) Café Society, a film by Woody Allen (2016) (Caution: mild spoiler alerts) “You’re a comedian. You want to do mankind a real service? Tell funnier jokes”, says the space alien in Woody Allen’s Stardust Memories (1980), which still, despite its ambitions, falls into the category ...