Category: AJBlogs

For many, many people going to a concert hall or a museum is a foreign, anxiety-producing prospect. If we want new communities to take advantage of what we have to offer, we need to develop the capacity to imagine what doing so might be like for them. We need empathy. And since the experiences of the arts can be so unfamiliar the empathy must be extreme. – Doug Borwick

It struck me the other day that ever since Mrs. T went into the hospital, our life has come to resemble Groundhog Day, an endless succession of repeat performances. I am, like Bill Murray, stuck on hold, the only difference being that I know what has happened to me — and that, sooner or later, it will end. In the meantime, we’re clinging to our memories, but we’re also doing our best to get what’s to be gotten out of the slow-moving present. – Terry Teachout

Don’t be lulled into false complacency, art-lings, on the theory that Congress will again resist the President’s call to ax support for NEA, NEH, IMLS and CPB. Contact your Congressional representatives. – Lee Rosenbaum

After making a powerful impression at last year’s Whitney Biennial with her six drawings of pie charts plotting Degrees of Deaf Rage, deaf artist Christine Sun Kim reached a much wider, more diverse audience — at the Super Bowl. – Lee Rosenbaum

Over the past decade, both William Grant Still and Florence Price have acquired new prominence. But the buried treasure is William Levi Dawson’s Negro Folk Symphony of 1934. – Joseph Horowitz

An Italian of Slovenian ancestry who grew up in Trieste, pianist Roberto Magris frequently tours in Europe and the United States. Here, we see and hear him and his colleagues in the Birdland Jazz Club in Neuburg a.d. Donau, Germany. – Doug Ramsey

I never sit around pining for what might have been. What was and is, after all, have both proved to be wholly satisfying. But when you get to be my age — I turned sixty-four today — you can’t help but think about the roads you didn’t take, the unknown and unknowable possibilities. – Terry Teachout

Johnny Griffin and Eddie “Lockjaw” Davis were tenor saxophone masters whose collaborations made them among the instrument’s most celebrated players. Their “new” album is titled OW! after one of its tracks, a celebrated Dizzy Gillespie composition from the early years of bebop. – Doug Ramsey

If expanding our base to new communities is necessary, we need an appropriate metaphor for the process. I think I’ve finally stumbled upon something workable. – Doug Borwick

Daniel Radcliffe’s sense of physical theatre is magnificent, but, finally, the evening belongs to Alan Cumming. – Paul Levy