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By Adrienne LaFrance Before you say “I told you so,” let me explain. I wasn’t expecting Annie Hall. I thought Because I Said So might be likable in a Something’s Gotta Give kind of way. I was wrong. Diane Keaton’s latest star vehicle is an empty vessel of a romantic comedy, pieced together by poorly…
Read MoreSince it is the innovators who make up the real history of the novel, Milan Kundera muses on the increasing tenuousness of this tradition of eccentric innovation. He also charts how the new arises from a collision between forgetting and remembering images of the past. The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts. By Milan Kundera.…
Read MoreEdgar Degas once said that painting should be akin to committing a crime. And many Americans saw creation of some of the most important works of American art as just that—roguish, cunning and wicked—in short, criminal. Visual Shock: A History of Art Controversies in American Culture by Michael Kammen. Penguin Random House, 480 pages, $18.…
Read MoreIncreasingly, artistic directors are expected to be super-successful fundraisers, an unstable hybrid of peddler and visionary that throttles artistic independence. By Bill Marx The failure to renew the contract of Robert Woodruff as artistic director of one of America’s major regional theaters, the American Repertory Theatre at Harvard University, is symptomatic of a new…
Read MoreBy Peter Walsh When a new contemporary art museum gets up on its feet, it typically constructs a slick, fashionable new address for itself and leaves its old, recycled quarters like a student couch at the curb. But is that always a wise decision? Sometimes it makes sense to put new wine in old bottles.…
Read MoreBy Milo Miles World-famous jazz impresario George Wein went to Boston University. I went to Boston University. The Boston University Art Gallery is currently hosting the show Syncopated Rhythms: 20th-Century African American Art from the George & Joyce Wein Collection. Boston University is behind this blog. None of that matters: it’s still the most amazing…
Read MoreBy Adrienne LaFrance February 22nd, 2006 Chances are, when you think of interactive art the first thing that comes to mind is the lineup of cranks to turn, buttons to press, and microscopes to peer into at a children’s science museum. But the exhibition COLLISIONnine BOTbits (at Wellesley College though March 8, 2006) proves that…
Read MoreBy Adrienne LaFrance March 13, 2006 It’s not an area of Boston that tends to attract art-goers. And the works are not by those normally considered artists. “Visual Voices of Detained Youth” was on display at the Rhys Gallery in South Boston through March 4, 2006 but the implications of the exhibit live on. The…
Read MoreThis is an intelligent exhibit, not just conceptually but in that it requires the viewer to actively make connections while absorbing the art.
Read MoreIn her latest project, Pulitzer prize-winning dramatist Suzan-Lori Parks covers the country. By Jared Craig Four years ago, Suzan-Lori Parks set out to do what no dramatist, no matter how prolific, has ever done before. The Pulitzer prize-winning playwright decided to write a play for each day of the year. Her mission completed, the scripts…
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