arts-criticism
Back in February of 2024 I began to write a weekly column for AF newsletter on Substack. A few readers have asked that I post these opinion pieces in the magazine. Here is a selection of my favorites of 2025
Back in February of 2024 I began to write a weekly column for the newsletter on Substack. A few readers have asked that I post these opinion pieces in the magazine. Here is a selection of my favorites.
Theater critics, film reviewers, A&E editors, and arts columnists have been stripped from our dailies and weeklies. Why should you care? Oscar Wilde warned that an age without criticism is “an age that possesses no art at all.”
The time is overdue for a serious discussion of what is happening (or not happening) in Boston-area theaters. Just don’t expect to see anything in our sheepish mainstream media.
In this episode of the Short Fuse, host Elizabeth Howard and Editor-in-Chief and founder of the “Arts Fuse,” Bill Marx, discuss the vital role arts commentary and criticism play in nurturing an open and democratic society
The journalistic value of blathering out weekend tips to the ears of the comfortable in a social media world awash with likes is dubious.
Arts critics are not expected to take the cultural temperature; they are there to reinforce the assumption that the business of the arts in America is … business.
Few critics proclaimed that the emperor was naked as a jaybird with as much savvy panache.
Can anyone — with a straight face — argue that our largely white critical contingent in Boston is interested in generating hard hitting debate, controversy, and unconventional ideas?
Arts Commentary: The Distance Between Us and the Museum
By Mark Pawlak For a working-class kid from Buffalo who once saw museums as places for other people, a lifetime among Cambridge and Boston collections became an education in class, access, exclusion, and the complicated act of looking. Any Sunday when the weather turns—low gray clouds, steady rain, the threat of snow—my thoughts drift toward…
Read More about Arts Commentary: The Distance Between Us and the Museum