Arts News

(Visual Art, Toledo) To look at the art! It wants them to look at the art! That’s all! Don’t flip out, this is actually really great. ...more...

(Opera, Philadelphia) Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, the channel now known as TLC was still known as TLC, but back then it was an actual acronym, imagine that, for The Learning Channel. ...more...

(Theater, Chicago) Okay, not explicitly; she doesn’t remove her thumb or ask people to pick a card. ...more...

(Dance, Atlanta) In the pantheon of expletives, “motherfucker” has always had a certain cachet, due probably to the rhythm of its four syllables, or maybe the fact that in certain circumstances, it doesn’t sound much like an insult at all. ...more...

(Visual Art, Denver) Ray Mark Rinaldi has a point: you see a traveling exhibition called Off the Beaten Path that’s subtitled “Violence, Women and Art”, you might be compelled to think: wait, it’s really called Off the Beaten Path? ...more...

(Classical Music, Cincinnati) The World Choir Games are still a fairly new competition, and, quite honestly, less a competition than a chance for choirs from all over the world to get together and lift their voices in cheer and harmony ...more...

(Dance, National) In the late 1990s, for some reason, swing music was all of a sudden everywhere. Seriously, it felt like a giant switch had been thrown somewhere, and all of a sudden, wherever you looked: swing music. Swing music. ...more...

(Theater, Chicago) There are pretty much two ways it can go: either you’re groomed to be something in particular, or people start saying things like “You can be whatever you want!” to you when you’re far too young to have any idea what you might want to be, or even what the options are, really. ...more...

(Visual Art, New York) Late spring, becoming early summer, to be more precise, as the last of the four exhibits closes on July 1. ...more...

(Art Museums, New York) Cy Twombly ran with Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg back in the day but never really wound up with the brand recognition that those two did. ...more...

(Theater, Hartford)Giulia Melucci published I Loved, I Lost, I Made Spaghetti in 2008; in it she recounted a spate of less-than-ideal boyfriends, all of whom, apparently, she made homemade pasta for ...more...

(Theater, New York) People talk more about the musicals, because musicals are SPECTACLE and GLITZ and Liza Minnelli in a top hat or whatever, but very quietly in the last couple of years the “straight play” has made a considerable comeback on the GWW. ...more...

(Art Museums, Los Angeles) Land art is great, okay, land art, art made from the LAND, you know? The trouble is getting to it. Seeing it. ...more...

(Theater, Washington DC) There’s no profit, and no dignity, in trying to make someone quit before he or she is ready. Here’s the way the equation works: If (a) has desire, and (b) has a willingness to satisfy that desire for mutual gain, then (a + b) = (c)ome on back, dude, let’s find you a jersey. ...more...

(Theater, New York) What a time it must have been, the age of the Warhol Superstars, Andy Warhol and his Factory, holding court downtown, the early ’60s – shooting speed, holding happenings, the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, unleashing the Velvet Underground on the world, ...more...

(Theater, Austin) We speak here from experience: The Hideout Theatre might be nuts. ...more...

(Visual Art, Philadelphia) There aren’t many public debates more sensitive and heated than that over the death penalty, so we’re not even going to begin to wade into them. We’d just like to say: Cameron Todd Willingham and Carlos DeLuna. ...more...

(Visual Art, Columbus) Columbus, Ohio is not scared of self-reinvention at ALL. You got an abandoned prison from the 19th century, moldering down near the river? Tear that sucker down and build an arena! ...more...

(Theater, New York) A couple of years ago, Avatar came out and started setting CRAZEE box office records, like that you’d maybe think everyone in America had seen Avatar at least once. ...more...

(Opera, Dallas/Ft. Worth) Here’s the thing about war: It’s bad. Controversial, I know. Generally speaking, even those wars fought for absolutely noble ends are, in the end, ehhh not so much fun. ...more...

(Theater, Los Angeles) One of the big bombshells last week, depending on where you’re sitting, was the report that minority births in 2011, for the first time, outnumbered Caucasian births in America. Whuh-oh! ...more...

(Theater, Bay Area) Memphis came from TheatreWorks and American Idiot from Berkeley Rep, and though that’s only a pair of shows, the two of them combined probably played more performances than any half-dozen randomly selected Broadway productions. ...more...

(Theater, Chicago) Marvin Gaye’s life was a minefield, and in many ways a disaster, and that’s putting it mildly, and easily, and kindly. ...more...

(Theater, New York) The Delacorte turns 50 this year! Yay! Fifty years ago we were still putting men who had the Right Stuff into tin cans and shooting them into space on rockets, which is not something we do any more, so… hooray, future? ...more...

(Theater, Columbus) (Please get that.) It will, somehow, be June by the time this week ends, which not only means that – whee! – our lives are rapidly ending, but also that the weather will soon begin to get very, very hot for most of us, at least in the places where it is not already very, very hot. ...more...