Month: February 2007
Boston-area college art museums go where many mainstream exhibition spaces fear to tread. By Margaret Weigel Originally Published February 07, 2006 Boston, MA – Throw a stone in Boston and you’ll hit a college (or an undergraduate); throw it a little further, and you’ll likely hit a college gallery or museum. The Boston metropolitan area…
Read MoreFrench actor Gaspard Ulliel stars in a surprisingly classy prequel in the Hannibal Lecter saga. By Betsy Sherman Considering that the road from the 1991 movie “The Silence of the Lambs” to “Hannibal Rising” consists of a dreadfully over-the-top sequel (the 2001 “Hannibal”) and a decent remake (the 2002 “Red Dragon,” from a novel which…
Read MoreGiven the growing inclination, in the name of security, to regulate public expression, is it any wonder that protest art is scarce?
Read MoreFrom gophers, “Ghostbusters” and groundhogs to “Broken Flowers” and beyond, Murray evolves into something much more meaningful.
Read MoreBy Adrienne LaFrance Before you say “I told you so,” let me explain. I wasn’t expecting Annie Hall. I thought Because I Said So might be likable in a Something’s Gotta Give kind of way. I was wrong. Diane Keaton’s latest star vehicle is an empty vessel of a romantic comedy, pieced together by poorly…
Read MoreSince it is the innovators who make up the real history of the novel, Milan Kundera muses on the increasing tenuousness of this tradition of eccentric innovation. He also charts how the new arises from a collision between forgetting and remembering images of the past. The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts. By Milan Kundera.…
Read MoreEdgar Degas once said that painting should be akin to committing a crime. And many Americans saw creation of some of the most important works of American art as just that—roguish, cunning and wicked—in short, criminal. Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture by Michael Kammen. Penguin Random House, 480 pages, $18.…
Read MoreIncreasingly, artistic directors are expected to be super-successful fundraisers, an unstable hybrid of peddler and visionary that throttles artistic independence. By Bill Marx The failure to renew the contract of Robert Woodruff as artistic director of one of America’s major regional theaters, the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard University, is symptomatic of a new…
Read MoreBy Peter Walsh When a new contemporary art museum gets up on its feet, it typically constructs a slick, fashionable new address for itself and leaves its old, recycled quarters like a student couch at the curb. But is that always a wise decision? Sometimes it makes sense to put new wine in old bottles.…
Read MoreBy Milo Miles November 18th, 2005 World-famous jazz impresario George Wein went to Boston University. I went to Boston University. The Boston University Art Gallery is currently hosting the show “Syncopated Rhythms: 20th-Century African American Art from the George & Joyce Wein Collection.” Boston University is behind this blog. None of that matters: it’s still…
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