Commentary

Dance Commentary: Dance Giant Martha Graham — Genius at Risk

December 14, 2005
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Years of bitter and expensive litigation as well as the challenging nature of her work have put the artistic legacy of dance giant Martha Graham in crisis. By Debra Cash Imagine, for a moment, that the only people who could experience Vincent Van Gogh’s paintings were those who had lived during his lifetime. Future generations…

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The Floundering State of Film Criticism

November 22, 2005
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Ana Rivas sent in this piece on a recent confab at Boston University featuring two film critics – Renata Adler, who for a short time in the ’60s was a film critic for The New York Times and A.O. Scott, who is the current chief film critic for the paper. The conversation contained some interesting…

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Film Commentary: A Touch of Awe

October 28, 2005
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At a time when special effects in films are increasingly computerized, it is inspiring to be reminded that images can be more than surfaces that thrill. A festival of movies by the master of the silent cinema, F.W. Murnau, will screen at the Museum of Fine Arts and Harvard Film Archive (with support from the…

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Arts Commentary: Classical Musical Chairs

August 9, 2005
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The controversy over the appointment of a woman to become the conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra boils down to issues of power and gender. By Mark Kroll It’s been a tough year for conductors. In February, David Miller was in southern France conducting “Don Giovanni” with his Bulgarian orchestra when French police burst in…

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Visual Arts Review: Cartoon Memoirist

June 7, 2005
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By Milo Miles Iranian expatriate Marjane Satrapi continues to expand the art of the comic book. Back in the ’40s, the long-standing prejudice that comic books were incapable of presenting serious, adult matters was exploded by such artists as Bernie Krigstein, Harvey Kurtzman, and Will Eisner. But the discovery of how just how uniquely valuable…

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Dance Commentary: Trust Art, Not Theory

April 11, 2005
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By Debra Cash A retrospective chronicles the four-decade career of radical dance giant Yvonne Rainer. Yvonne Rainer: Radical Juxtapositions 1961-2002  at the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts in Cambridge, MA What Rainer has been doing isn’t hard to see, as long as it isn’t theorized into academic incomprehensibility. Over time she has been called a…

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Dance Commentary: Facing Mekka

November 5, 2004
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A new dance show by Rennie Harris serves as a valuable response to MTV’s commercialization of hip hop.

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