Commentary
WGBH is not even attempting to make any excuses, not bothering to put in the energy to explain why the station isn’t using funding from its supporters to hire first-class journalists or to create news programming that builds community and educates because it challenges, investigates, and digs deeper.
This is the first of a series of occasional essays where Fuse Dance Critic Debra Cash will reflect on dances made for camera and new technologies. As they used to say, don’t touch that dial!
As a long time arts critic for print, broadcast, and the Web, the potential for cultural coverage online strikes me then and now as exhilarating. The challenge for The Arts Fuse is to foster dialogue that articulates the value of the arts in our lives.
Early on I was given these words of wisdom by my friend, the late theater critic Arthur Friedman: “Criticism should not read as if it had been written by a publicist.
Given the flood of publications on early modern natural history over the last two decades, the detailed and strikingly illustrated Picturing the Book of Nature represents a herculean undertaking.
I have read the Harvard Business School study about critics and it is clueless on so many levels about the craft and mechanics of reviewing that it is astonishing that major newspapers and magazines have taken it seriously.
Simon Garfield’s tour of fonts, Just My Type, is a rollicking, sometimes snarky social history of the design decisions behind lettering from Gutenberg to the iPad.
Dramatist and director Wesley Savick faces a number of fascinating but formidable theatrical challenges, and the generally compelling Yesterday Happened (how could it not be, given its story?) takes an honorable, visually striking swipe at the problems.
Over the past 6 weeks William Kentridge has shown the form of the lecture itself to be obsolete. But over the course of his returns to the podium, he has shown us that the lecture’s fate is not so dire as he had induced us —- for seventy minutes at a stretch -— to believe.
Dance Commentary: In Short Order
None of the Boston Dances Made to Order submissions dodged dance-on-camera cliches. There was a lot random dancing outdoors, body parts — especially hands and feet — shot in close-up, and random objects (mirrors, food) revealed by camera pans.
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