Arts Fuse critics select the best in film, dance, visual art, theater, music, and author events for the coming weeks.
Arts and Sciences
Arts Commentary: Conserving Cultural Heritage — the Tangible and the Intangible
Cartagena is a 500-year old urban jewel in the Caribbean. But climate change and rising sea levels threaten its heritage.
Visual Arts Commentary: A Tale of Two Bridges
Two stories about how a public process, because of politics, can make it very difficult, and costly, to connect two points.
Visual Arts Commentary: The ICA — The Limits of Being an Icon
The nagging question: why didn’t the ICA didn’t create a building that offered options to be developed vertically?
Book Review: How Science Fared in the Enlightenment — At the Halle Orphanage
Kelly Joan Whitmer does two things very well: she tells a vibrant tale of intellectual reform and shines a light on less prominent historical actors in the history of science.
Visual Arts Review: Cyberarts’s Art on the Marquee — Digital Game Shorts for Now People
Whether art can comfortably exist in this thoroughly commercial frame is a question for the ages. Let’s say that whether this show succeeds is firmly in the eye of the beholder.
Arts Commentary: To Stay or Not to Stay? Copley Place’s fountain faces an uphill battle
Today, the fountain at Copley Place feels embarrassing in some way; not its form or execution, but its very existence.
Book Review: “Reading Ḥayy Ibn-Yaqẓān” — Rewriting the History of Ideas
“Reading Ḥayy Ibn-Yaqẓān” is a mesmerizing study that will enchant anyone interested in interdisciplinary, cross-cultural explorations of the history of science that transform the way we look at the past and the present.
Fuse Feature: A Letter From Paris, City of the Arts
A two week stay in Paris, April 11 through 26, delivered the sights and sounds crooned about in the well-known songs.
Book Review: A House of Many Doors — Gish Jen’s Tiger Writing
Moving restlessly between independence and interdependence in style and content, the lecture captures the changeling quality that Gish Jen associates with those who must creatively manage multiple cultural influences.