Bill Marx
Recent changes in Boston’s media landscape do not bode well for substantial coverage of the arts. What do those in the arts world think about what is happening?
Mr. Selfridge drives me nuts because the storyline, the rise of a mercantile empire, calls for edgy Darwinian conflict rather than paternal benevolence sprinkled with layers of powered soap opera.
If we are not diligent in maintaining high editorial standards, arts coverage will morph into misshapen forms of infotainment and advertising. Once those monstrosities are set in profitable stone, quality arts criticism and the arts will face a problematic future.
All is not well with the classical music scene in Boston. Boston’s Church of St. John the Evangelist has pulled funding from its Wednesday Concert Series.
“There is a difference between blood and guts, as celebrated in the current vogue of horror-slasher flicks, and the capacity of the darkest of the Grimms’ tales to pierce the thin skin of civility and mainline the dark caverns of the collective unconscious.”
With your help, The Arts Fuse will launch its first-ever advertising campaign atop taxi cabs this spring. We want to encourage Greater Boston’s arts and cultural communities to see the artsfuse.org as an indispensable resource.
“Clybourne Park” was expressly written to be in conversation with Lorraine Hansberry’s “A Raisin in the Sun.” The former gives us a new perspective — actually new perspectives — on the latter.
Unlike fellow apostate (and friend) Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne didn’t have the chutzpah to be a proto-existentialist — for him, it was better to cling to questionable moral pieties than plummet into sheer nothingness.
Cultural Commentary: Why is Boston’s Arts Coverage So Bland?
According to our docile mainstream media, Boston enjoys a perpetual Renaissance — the merchandise in the cultural window is always worth buying. And that predictability makes for very boring journalism.
Read More about Cultural Commentary: Why is Boston’s Arts Coverage So Bland?