Commentary
What’s happening right now, this is a bloodbath. It is full on slaughter of small businesses. They lie in the streets gasping for breath.
What gives with the overbearing presence of cuteness throughout the world of contemporary visual art?
There’s a story yet to be written about art dumping; theater and dance dumping; even film and TV dumping now that live performance and production of all kinds has shut down.
I’m curious to see what happens next. I’ll keep writing plays, but I might need to hone my skills as a handyman just in case this whole theater thing doesn’t pan out.
Theater is seen as a cleansing illness that sets out to obliterate the illness we blithely accept as health.
At a time when fear of the influenza was in danger of being deemed unpatriotic, art retreated to nationalism or escapism.
The White Plague uses dread to shock us into empathy for ourselves, to be alarmed by the fragility of our bodies as well as the resources and ethics of the medical system.
Tour de force? Not quite. Joycean? Perhaps in the way contemporary individuals overlap with ancient, mythical counterparts.
Members of anti-arts Right are incensed by the stimulus funding going to Washington D.C.’s Kennedy Center for the Arts. And they’re right.
Arts Remembrance: Saxophonist Lee Konitz
Lee Konitz was, with Sonny Rollins, one of the last of his great generation of jazz men still swinging hard.
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