Books & the Arts

The Show They Love to Hate The Show They Love to Hate

There is an overall disposition to approach each Whitney Biennial as a State of the Art World Address in the form of an exhibition, organized by a curatorial directorate, present...

Apr 11, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Arthur C. Danto

African Queen African Queen

Filmmakers in sub-Saharan Africa tend to divide their attention between city life today and village life once upon a time. This rule has its exceptions, of course; but if you're s...

Apr 11, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans

The Body Shop The Body Shop

There are those opposed to the use of cloning technology to create human embryos for stem-cell research whose concerns emanate from commitments to social justice. One of their arg...

Apr 4, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Ralph Brave

The Keyboard Campus The Keyboard Campus

"Thirty years from now the big university campuses will be relics," business "guru" Peter Drucker proclaimed in Forbes five years ago. "It took more than 200 years for the printed...

Apr 4, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Stephen Brier and Roy Rosenzweig

Folk’s Missing Link Folk’s Missing Link

I was in high school in the 1960s when I first saw Dave Van Ronk at the Gaslight, one of those little cellar clubs that used to line a Greenwich Village that now lives in myth an...

Apr 4, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Gene Santoro

The Fishnet Fallacy The Fishnet Fallacy

When a girl becomes her school's designated slut, her friends stop talking to her. Pornographic rumors spread with dazzling efficiency, boys harass her openly in the hallways, gir...

Mar 28, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Elaine Blair

Song of the Sunshine State Song of the Sunshine State

Campbell McGrath's entertaining and frustrating fifth book of poems--every single one of them devoted to some aspect of Florida--raises two large questions. One has to do with rep...

Mar 28, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Stephen Burt

Oscar Opens the Door Oscar Opens the Door

As Halle Berry elegantly strode to the podium to accept her best actress Oscar, the first for a black woman, she wept uncontrollably and gasped, "This moment is so much bigger tha...

Mar 28, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Michael Eric Dyson

Have Car, Will Travel Have Car, Will Travel

If you're in the mood to see great acting, I recommend that you watch Aurélien Recoing get caught in a lie in Laurent Cantet's Time Out. As Vincent, a French management con...

Mar 28, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Stuart Klawans

The China Syndrome The China Syndrome

Like it or not, America has been able to achieve and maintain its supremacy as a global power because of its capacity to absorb the best from the rest of the world. This dependenc...

Mar 28, 2002 / Books & the Arts / Peter Kwong and Dusanka Miscevic

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