Penny Arcade: Here’s What It Takes To Have An Art Career These Days

“Art was done the same way for a long time — you were young, you came, you watched a lot of other people and you started to struggle to make your own work, and eventually people came to see you and you made a little bit of money. Now that economic structure is totally broken. Young people only go to see a few other people; they only go to see people whose careers they want to emulate. And they mostly stay within their own age group. So you have tons of people who are all 22 who make their work with other 22-year-olds. You can’t get much mileage out of that. You need the inter-generational thing, I believe: the energy of the young and the wisdom and experience of the old.”

In Praise Of Know-Nothing Criticism

“The problem with demanding a certain kind of knowledge or a certain kind of expertise in criticism, then, is that it can end up presupposing, or insisting upon, a certain kind of conversation. And often that seems like the point: expertise is used as an excuse to silence critics — and especially negative critics.”

How Shostakovich’s “The Bolt” Changed Ballet History

“Despite its seemingly impeccable narrative of industrial espionage being routed by heroic factory workers, its creators were too tempted to have fun with their cast of baddies (the Lazy Idler, the Petty Bourgeois Woman, and the decadent, western types satirised by the local amateur theatre troupe). They were too obviously bored by the decent workers, the earnest members of the local Komsomol group – the young communist league.”