The Arts Fuse Newsletter, February 28
Coming Attractions, Taking on Tech Giants, and a High Modernist Male Artist
From The Editor's Desk:
Recently, Dan Kennedy related in his Media Nation blog that, along with the designation of Dhiraj Nayar as the President of Boston Globe Media, there was an announcement [to its newsroom] of an ambitious goal to increase the newspaper’s number of paid digital subscribers. For Kennedy, that suggested the paper must be planning “a significant expansion into parts of New England where the Globe isn’t especially visible. Currently the paper has digital editions focused on Rhode Island and New Hampshire, and has bolstered its coverage of Greater Boston as well.”
It is that word “bolstered” I would like to kick around, particularly regarding the newspaper’s coverage of arts and culture in Greater Boston. The fact is, given the desperate situation professional journalism finds itself in, media expansion often means contraction. It is a kind of sleight of hand: extending one way often means shrinking in another. Now you see it, now you don’t. If not enough readers miss it, it stays gone. If the fish don’t jump for the clickbait, head for another virtual pond.
The Globe’s arts section continues to dry up. This dehydration was underlined (once again) when the paper didn’t review two noteworthy films — screened in local theaters — critiqued in this magazine. How to Have Sex won the 2023 Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes and was nominated for three BAFTA Awards, including Outstanding British Film, and four categories at the London Critics Circle Awards. As for veteran director Wim Wenders’ Perfect Days, former Globe film critic Ty Burr opined (on WBUR) it was among the best films of 2023. The newspaper’s “bolstering” hasn’t been even or fair: its increasingly skeletal grasp of arts and culture is proof.
—Bill Marx, Editor-in-Chief
Book Review: Kara Swisher’s “Burn Book: A Tech Love Story”
By Preston Galla
This is an honest, incisive examination of the good and bad of technology and the people who create it. Journalist Swisher has fought with just about every important tech bro titan — and has always come out on top.
Coming Attractions through March 12 — What Will Light Your Fire
Compiled by Arts Fuse Editor
You want to know what to do over the next two weeks? Our expert critics, Jon Garelick, Tim Jackson, Noah Schaffer, and Peter Walsh among them, supply a guide to what's happening in film, visual art, theater, author readings, and music.
Theater Review: “Becoming a Man” — Making a Statement
By Bill Marx
If only Becoming a Man‘s pathos were less streamlined, its theatricality more ambitious.
Film Review: “Perfect Days” — Plumbing the Depths
By Peter Keough
In his latest feature, filmmaker Wim Wenders extols the simple life.
Book Review: "The Path to Paradise: A Francis Ford Coppola Story" -- Still Carrying On
By Gerald Peary
This is yet another bio in praise of a high modernist male artist who is seen as that much more colorful because of his excesses and failures.
Book Review: “Jazz With a Beat: Small Group Swing, 1940-1960” — Told With an Edge
By Steve Provizer
Understandably, Tad Richards’ revisionist history of small group swing/jump has a chip on its shoulder. For jazz critics at the time, shouting and honking saxes degraded what should have been ‘Art.’
Film Review: “Dune: Part Two” — A Stunning Achievement
By Michael Marano
Despite its flaws, Dune: Part Two is a grand, sprawling, and deeply intelligent science-fiction epic.
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Questions, comments, concerns?
Editor-in-Chief
Bill Marx
wmarx103@gmail.com
