It turns out that budding arts writers are anxious to learn how to master the demanding nuts and bolts of reviewing, especially given how few examples of first-rate criticism can be found in…
Come celebrate the music of Sun Ra: legendary jazz composer, bandleader, piano and synthesizer player, poet, theatrical ringmaster, and lyricist of the extra terrestrial.
Mayer's report deals with David Koch throwing his weight around at WNET and PBS. Unfortunately, she does not talk about whether Koch's powerful presence has influenced WGBH.
Deadpan sarcasm perfectly pitched, absurdity of target (and publisher) punctured with a minimum of muss and fuss.
Any American arts critic worth his or her salt is part of a bohemian fringe, is aware of the political resonance of their reviews, and is dedicated to sparking serious dialogue about arts an…
The Zeitgeist Stage Company provocatively lives up to its name by taking audiences into the netherworld of horrific violence via a powerful production of Simon Stephens' drama "Punk Rock."
Something emotional (perhaps even passionate) whirls underneath the well-worn modernist pieties of "Old-Fashioned Prostitutes," though not to the point of disrupting the daffy routine.
Criticism is vital to our time because it is a form of witnessing, testimony to the possibility that the richness and joy of the arts can be articulated in ways that invite intellectual cont…
Susanne M. Sklar's study is the best exploration of William Blake's miraculously bewildering masterpiece that I know of " thoughtful, scholarly, imaginative, and supremely sympathetic to the…
A system in which no one takes responsibility for editorial decisions works out great for the inside gamers, like Nathaniel Rich.
Nowhere do I say in the piece that The Arts Fuse is all good and everyone else is all bad.
According to our docile mainstream media, Boston enjoys a perpetual Renaissance -- the merchandise in the cultural window is always worth buying. And that predictability makes for very borin…
Ballet program administrators in Cuba will be happy I'm telling the true story in "Secundaria," the one they're not allowed to tell themselves.
Recent changes in Boston's media landscape do not bode well for substantial coverage of the arts. What do those in the arts world think about what is happening?
Mr. Selfridge drives me nuts because the storyline, the rise of a mercantile empire, calls for edgy  Darwinian conflict rather than paternal benevolence sprinkled with layers of powered s…
All is not well with the classical music scene in Boston. Boston's Church of St. John the Evangelist has pulled funding from its Wednesday Concert Series.
If we are not diligent in maintaining high editorial standards, arts coverage will morph into misshapen forms of infotainment and advertising. Once those monstrosities are set in profitable …
"There is a difference between blood and guts, as celebrated in the current vogue of horror-slasher flicks, and the capacity of the darkest of the Grimms' tales to pierce the thin skin of ci…
With your help, The Arts Fuse will launch its first-ever advertising campaign atop taxi cabs this spring. We want to encourage Greater Boston's arts and cultural communities to see the artsf…
"Clybourne Park" was expressly written to be in conversation with Lorraine Hansberry's "A Raisin in the Sun." The former gives us a new perspective " actually new perspectives -- on the latt…
Both authors generate humor out of the casual inhumanity of the bourgeoise, dramatizing how the farce of middle class success distorts its victors and victims.
Unlike fellow apostate (and friend) Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne didn't have the chutzpah to be a proto-existentialist -- for him, it was better to cling to questionable moral pietie…
"As a white atheist male I am told it is none of my business to deal with what's going on in the so-called de-colonized societies enforcing their religious laws on their citizens." -- Joshua…
"What Sherwood Anderson knew and understood was the nature of inarticulate lives and what people do when they're in the grip of strong feelings and words fail them."
For all of its earnest interest in healing some of the great divides in American life, Other Desert Cities ends up slighting the desert spaces that lie between us.