Year: 2007
The Harvard Crimson has waded into the treacherous controversies swirling around the “Pollock Matters” exhibition currently on view at Boston College’s McMullen Museum (see previous posts here in “Anonymous Sources.”)
Read Moreby Bill Marx The schizophrenia is instructive if somewhat dizzying. At the Calderwood Pavilion, the Huntington Theatre Company kicks off its season with “The Atheist,” a cynical exercise in scatological anti-heroism about a sleazy reporter who blackmails his way to fame. On its main stage at the Boston University Theater the HTC wallows in PG…
Read MoreCould a longstanding debate over copyright law add yet another dimension to the long-running Pollock Matter Affair? There are signs it might, though the media haven’t yet understood just how broad the implications might be.
Read MoreMachiavellian monsters aren’t what they used to be in the theater. The gloriously godless creeps that memorably rampage their way through the plays of Shakespeare, Jonson, Shaw and Brecht scale the dizzying heights of inhuman ambition and self-admiration. The closest contemporary American theater comes to that kind of mountain-sized ego is Roy Cohn in Angels…
Read MoreBy David Hartley Believe it or not, cans and screwtops are not only back, but they are chic. For the past few decades, drinking beer out of a can has been for the slightly louche among us, the thin tin package of choice for undiscriminating guzzlers at football stadiums and frat-houses. But now the lowly…
Read MoreA hard-surfing reader called our attention recently to a piece in the on-line journal, The Hub Review. The piece, “Why all the love for the ‘Matter Pollocks’?” reports on the on-going controversy covered in some previous “Anonymous Sources” posts on The Arts Fuse.
Read MoreThe NY Times is running a series of articles about front-runners for the presidency. I’ve read the two about Hillary Clinton carefully, because I’m stuck about her. She’s someone I’d like to feel enthusiastic about but can’t. She always, to my mind, testifies strongly at first, then cancels herself out. She’s an enigma wrapped inside…
Read MoreSome of the best moments of my visit to documenta XII I spent in bed. Even though Loekie and I had decided this time not to try to see everything and to spend as much time on a display as we wanted, and even though we stuck to this strategy and enjoyed the exhibition all…
Read MoreBy Bill Marx When George Bernard Shaw’s comedy Misalliance, subtitled “a debate,” premiered in 1910, critics couldn’t make heads or tails of the play. It didn’t matter if the reviewer was sympathetic to Shavian excess — the evening’s self-parodying polemics and prophetic theater-of-the-absurd trappings were too much. The production closed after 11 performances: the script,…
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Arts Commentary: “The Boston Globe” Has Nothing to Worry About …
Who cares how the chairs are arranged or even who sits on them on the deck of the Titanic-“Globe”? As the popularity of online publications and blogs grows, the “Globe”’s tepid cultural coverage has become increasingly superfluous.
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