Coming Attractions
Our expert critics supply a guide to film, visual art, theater, author readings, television, and music. More offerings will be added as they come in.
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The Arts Fuse Currents
Music
Claire Chase and her collaborators make a persuasive, vivifying case for Terry Riley’s hourlong score of freewheeling fantasy, grief, birdsong, and release.
Visual Arts
The Cape Ann Museum’s revelatory exhibition shows how Milton Avery, Adolph Gottlieb, and Mark Rothko turned the Gloucester shore into a language of abstraction.
Film
In films about Franco’s disappeared, AI companions, Iranian exile, and an Indian South African family’s buried history, the Camden International Film Festival finds digital—and analog—means of restoring bonds fractured by violence, loss, and time.
Books
By Dan Kennedy Social change and corporate greed are destroying newspapers in small-town America. What happens to the people left behind? Deserted: Life Without Local News in Rural America by Nick Mathews. University of Illinois Press, 168 pages, $110 (cloth), $24.95 (paper) Local news is in crisis everywhere, but the challenge is more daunting in…
Poetry at The Arts Fuse
This week’s poem: Zachary Bos’s “Sonnet Nearly Forty-Five”
Dance
Animated calligraphy, dancers in half-shadow, and two industrial robots create an eerie, elegant theater of marks, motions, and metallic afterimages at Jacob’s Pillow.
Theater
Television
HBO’s docuseries on the illegal reptile trade is less wild than its predecessors, but its sorrowful, criminal undertow makes it unsettling in a different way.
Podcasts
Guest host Jessica Khan talks to DJ and broadcaster Kwame Daniels about his immersive live musical performance, “North Star.”
Short Fuses
Each month, our arts critics — music, book, theater, dance, television, film, and visual arts — fire off a few brief reviews.
Spotlight
This book is the best travelogue you’ll ever read about a terrible place you’ll never want to visit but want to experience vicariously.
About the Arts Fuse
The Arts Fuse was established in June, 2007 as a curated, independent online arts magazine dedicated to publishing in-depth criticism, along with high quality previews, interviews, and commentaries. The publication's over 70 freelance critics (many of them with decades of experience) cover dance, film, food, literature, music, television, theater, video games, and visual arts. Support arts coverage that believes that culture matters.
Performing Arts Feature: Huzzah! Renaissance Faires as Immersive Theater
King Richard’s Faire, which is New England’s largest and oldest medieval-themed entertainment venue, serves as an intriguing case study of countercultural expression and commercialized theatrical spectacle.