So “none of this old tired stuff done in the same way” could really be the festival’s motto. But this year’s installment, O18, which began on Thursday and runs through Sunday, is most successful when it’s most traditional. Two of the four shows I saw over the weekend were proscenium productions with orchestras in the pit: opera as you imagine it. These were far more satisfying than the pair of out-of-the-box entries.
Tag: 09.24.18
Why Public Square Debates Need To Be Unruly
For Habermas, the function of public debate is not to find a reasonable common ground. Rather, the public sphere ‘is a warning system’, a set of ‘sensors’ that detect the new needs floating underneath the surface of a supposed political consensus. And if we worry too much about civility and the reasonable middle, we risk limiting the ability of the public sphere to detect new political claims. To get those claims on the agenda in the first place often requires uncivil and confrontational political tactics.
How Copyright Laws Have Shaped Theatre
One of the things that copyright law allows some courts to do in the nineteenth century is to essentially exert control over what gets put onstage, because in theory, if you say this has no copyright, you’re saying an author can’t realize any value from it, economic value from it, because you can’t monopolize it. In fact, if you say, you don’t have any right to prevent other people from doing it, things that one might want to censor, for example, the display of partially nude women onstage, which is one case I discuss, tends to proliferate rather than to disappear.
Max Hollein’s Plans For The Met Museum
Coming to the Met at a time when nearly every aspect of the universal museum is coming into ethical question, Hollein has to confront daunting challenges including the re-evaluation of the colonial era, the advent of transformative technology, the changing nature of modern information consumption, the fusion of contemporary art with global capital, and the foregrounding of issues of identity in the cultural agora. It’s a sign of the times that the most frequently heard knock against the well-liked Hollein is that he is a white European male.
Rembrandt: Master Market Manipulator
Rembrandt: Painter as Printmaker, which opened Sept. 16 at the Denver Art Museum, showcases the known glories of his work—but with an eye-opening twist.
Monday Recommendation: Miller And Staaf
Allison Miller and Carmen Staaf, Science Fair (Sunnyside)
Graffiti In Wales Told This Photographer To ‘Go Home,’ So He Walked Back To Poland
Michael Iwanowski walked 1200 miles in as straight a line as he could from Cardiff, where he lives, to his home village, Mokrzeszów, in Poland. He documented the journey on Instagram, of course. What did he find? “My experience was so overwhelmingly positive that it has made me question everything I read in the media about the hardening of attitudes that Brexit has supposedly provoked.”