The plans to serve the jazz community that WGBH offered to JazzBoston during the meeting, from an internet jazz station to making Eric Jackson more visible on the station’s talk shows, are only part and parcel of the strategic dithering, a cover for lowering standards and doing little.
Persona Non Grata
Fuse Commentary: The Demise of Arts and Culture on WGBH — Hypocrisy in Plain Sight
Discard the empty rhetoric about “amplifying the arts,” follow the money and you will eventually find, winding your way through all the obfuscation and spin, WGBH’s thrifty corporate character.
Arts Commentary: “The New York Times” — Shouldn’t It Know the Purpose of Arts Criticism?
Based on Public Editor Arthur S. Brisbane’s recent New York Times column on arts criticism, he and others at the newspaper haven’t much of a clue regarding what a serious arts review is supposed to be.
Fuse Commentary: What Does WGBH Do When It Cuts Back On The Arts? It Celebrates, Of Course.
Jazz is dying on WGBH — long live the arts, and let us all eat cake financed by Citizens Bank at the upcoming Arts Weekend, created by WGBH and The Boston Globe
Fuse Commentary: WGBH’s Radio Theater of the Absurd
WGBH is exploring an interesting question — how little can you invest in arts coverage and still have the chutzpah to ask for money from supporters who mistake crumbs for a loaf?
Fuse Commentary: Critical Rule #1 — Don’t Write Like a Publicist
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.
Book Review: Roberto Bolaño —The Critic as Bomb Thrower
This is adversarial criticism, with an eye on the martyred, fueled by grievances political and aesthetic — the return of the repressed as the comeuppance for the comfortable. No wonder Roberto Bolaño’s reviews garnered him fierce detractors as well as admirers.
Arts Commentary: Can Criticism Be Too Positive Too Often?
How much do you really know about a critic if all you have on record is what he or she likes and why? At some point staying mum about the negative looks less like tenderhearted support or good manners and more like cowardice or a lack of seriousness. By Bill Marx The news that veteran, […]
Theater Commentary: Isn’t It a Question of Relevance?
The reviews of the Huntington Theatre Company (HTC) production were generally ecstatic. And what could be timelier than an oft-produced American drama that focuses on the tragic costs of war profiteering?
World Books Update: October 2009
By Bill Marx A number of new pieces on World Books since the last update in September, including my podcast interview with Benjamin Moser about his biography of Clarice Lispector (1920-1977) entitled “Why This World” from Oxford University Press. The Brazilian writer’s challenging stream-of-consciousness technique, lack of political bite, physical beauty and, Moser argues, her […]