Featured
By Caldwell Titcomb NEW YORK, NY: Founded in 1971, the Theater Hall of Fame inducted new members at a January 28 ceremony in the Gershwin Theatre. Multiple Tony-winning Tommy Tune officiated at the 37th annual celebration as Master of Ceremonies. Inductees are voted on by the nationwide American Theater Critics Association and living Hall of…
Read MoreBy Gary Schwartz The Rijksmuseum has published the first volume in a series of scholarly catalogues of its collection of Dutch paintings of the 17th century. The two books, one of text and comparative illustrations, the other of color plates, are not only a model of collection catalogues, they are also an unguarded kaleidoscopic self-portrait…
Read Moreby Bill Marx A recent report from the Boston Foundation helpfully advises that if a small arts group’s vision “either dissipated or lost its resonance with its audience or supporters” the troupe should either die quietly or merge with other struggling companies, apparently so they can vanish in bulk more efficiently. But what about larger…
Read Moreby Harvey Blume Marcel Duchamp famously tweaked art for being inferior to chess, saying: “From my close contact with artists and chess players I have come to the personal conclusion that while all artists are not chess players, all chess players are artists.” Duchamp backed this opinion up by abandoning art for years to pursue…
Read MoreBy Gary Schwartz Is there or is there not such a thing as “the Dutchman?” My fellow immigrant Princess Maxima thinks there is not, but since she dared express that opinion in public last September, she has been subjected to an ongoing barrage of reprimands. Indeed, since the brief era of Pim Fortuyn, public discourse…
Read Moreby Peter Walsh “Collective intelligence has no relationship to the stupidity of crowd behavior.” — Pierre Lévy, The Collective Intelligence The day before the New Hampshire primary, I went with a friend to hear George Packer, author of The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq, speak at Dartmouth College. I knew George twenty years ago, when…
Read MoreJust over a month ago, conventional wisdom had it that the long-running Pollock Matter Affair, one of the most contentious art controversies in living memory (see past posts in Arts Fuse and Anonymous Sources), had finally ground to a halt. Oops. As predicted in The Arts Fuse in November, the debate has found some more…
Read MoreBy Harvey Blume Zugzwang,by Ronan Bennett (Bloomsbury USA, 288 pages) It’s an understatement to say chess has been good for literature; the game has even inspired people not known for the written word to produce memorable prose. Consider the following, for example, by composer Sergey Prokofiev apropos a game he witnessed in pre-World War I…
Read Moreby Bill Marx What particularly disappointed Boston Globe theater critic Louise Kennedy about the Huntington Theatre Company’s recent production of David Rabe’s Streamers was that it lacked the emotional impact of the 1976 staging of the script. She found it “painful because that earlier production clearly resonated with its audiences as a powerful antiwar statement,…
Read MoreOnly months ago, developments in the Pollock Matter controversies made news around the world (See past Fuse Flash and Anonymous Sources). But the Nov. 28 International Foundation for Art Research [IFAR] symposium, “Are They Pollocks? What Science Tells Us About the Matter Paintings,” drew relatively scant media notice, even though it had been billed by…
Read More