Arts and Sciences

Theater Review: “Marie Antoinette” — Let Them Eat Images

September 12, 2012
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In its program, the A.R.T. links today’s 1% with the French aristocracy, a stab at relevance that does both the snobby thugs of the French Revolution and the super well-off of today a disservice. Say what you will about the 1%, but they aren’t stupid.

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Arts Commentary: “The New York Times” — Shouldn’t It Know the Purpose of Arts Criticism?

July 17, 2012
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Based on Public Editor Arthur S. Brisbane’s recent New York Times column on arts criticism, he and others at the newspaper haven’t much of a clue regarding what a serious arts review is supposed to be.

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Book Review: The Survival of the Fittest Yarnspinner

July 12, 2012
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Reading “The Storytelling Animal” is akin to listening to a series of terrific humanities lectures given by a polymath professor with a P.T. Barnum streak.

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Fuse Commentary: WGBH — No Excuses

July 9, 2012
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WGBH is not even attempting to make any excuses, not bothering to put in the energy to explain why the station isn’t using funding from its supporters to hire first-class journalists or to create news programming that builds community and educates because it challenges, investigates, and digs deeper.

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Dance Commentary: Let’s Go iDancing

July 1, 2012
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This is the first of a series of occasional essays where Fuse Dance Critic Debra Cash will reflect on dances made for camera and new technologies. As they used to say, don’t touch that dial!

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The Arts Fuse Turns 5: The Future of Arts Journalism is Now. Help Us Make it Happen.

June 24, 2012
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As a long time arts critic for print, broadcast, and the Web, the potential for cultural coverage online strikes me then and now as exhilarating. The challenge for The Arts Fuse is to foster dialogue that articulates the value of the arts in our lives.

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Book Review: “Picturing the Book of Nature” — Empowering the Visual

June 6, 2012
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Given the flood of publications on early modern natural history over the last two decades, the detailed and strikingly illustrated Picturing the Book of Nature represents a herculean undertaking.

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“Anti-Entropy and Uncle Order”: A Dispatch from William Kentridge’s Sixth Norton Lectures

April 27, 2012
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Over the past 6 weeks William Kentridge has shown the form of the lecture itself to be obsolete. But over the course of his returns to the podium, he has shown us that the lecture’s fate is not so dire as he had induced us —- for seventy minutes at a stretch -— to believe.

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“The Bad Backwards Walking” — A Dispatch from William Kentridge’s Fourth Norton Lecture

April 12, 2012
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William Kentridge spoke of the value of using a mirror to re-learn what he already knew how to do; the clear implication was that we are daily surrounded by mirror-images that we do not see for themselves but that hold the potential to alter our relationships to our tools and to our visions.

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Fuse Feature: Vertical and Contingent — A Dispatch from William Kentridge’s Norton Lectures

April 6, 2012
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The decisions William Kentridge makes in his minute to-ings and fro-ings are akin to the decisions a poet makes as she works her measure over and over again.

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