The Arts Fuse Newsletter, May 15
The MFA is into "Dress Up," a chat with playwright Lydia R. Diamond, a dance-theater look at the "Naughty Bits," a Short Fuse Podcast about the legacy of William Faulkner, and other critical delights.
From The Editor's Desk:
“When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” This quotation of Maya Angelou’s has been given too much mileage of late, especially in the political realm. But it fits our far too easy acceptance of Apple’s apology for its revelatory IPad Pro advertisement, whose recent release triggered a huge backlash on social media. Entitled “Crush!”, the ad presents a hydraulic press slowly pulverizing — into multi-colored smithereens — various instruments of art-making, among them a trumpet, a metronome, a globe, paint cans and tubes, a typewriter, books, a piano, a guitar, and an aged TV set. Once the flattening is finished, the press rises to reveal — on a clear and sanitized surface —the new, thinnest of the thin, iPad Pro. The soundtrack for the mayhem is Sonny and Cher’s “All I Ever Need Is You.” But just who is you? Note that various anthropomorphic figures — including eyeballed tennis balls, small mannikins, and the head of statute — are steamrolled into pancakes.
Apple says the ad is a misfire, but I beg to differ. For the corporation, the value of the human imagination is monetary. It can be cut down to size — shrink-wrapped so it can be reborn, sleekly re-packaged for AI automation. “Crush” is a chilling playlet of mechanized death and resurrection worthy of Samuel Beckett at his most parodically apocalyptic, though the absurdity is much more pitiless because human beings have been extracted. Who is in charge of the hydraulic press? Apple, most likely, unless it is the Godot of technology. Everything in view is completely squashed — paint sprays everywhere, picture tubes are shattered — but there is no debris, no mess, no sweat. Who did the cleaning up? And this fable about high tech “creative destruction” ends with a bit of religious hype: the dead and obliterated comes back to gleaming life — in spirit if not in letter? — in a form that is more profitable for Apple, if not mankind.
"Our goal is to always celebrate the myriad of ways users express themselves and bring their ideas to life through iPad. We missed the mark with this video, and we’re sorry,” Apple explained to Ad Age. Au contraire, the mega-corporation needn’t be contrite about its homage to forced miniaturization. Apple’s hydraulic press is slowly lowered down on the vulnerable bull’s eye — a two-ton curtain falling on the future of the creative class.
—Bill Marx, Editor-in-Chief
Visual Arts Review: A New Fashion Statement from the MFA — Consumer Dreaming and Catwalk Preening
By Trevor Fairbrother
This midsized MFA project is a solid bid for summer foot traffic from the fashionista demographic.
Theater Interview: Playwright and Director Lydia R. Diamond on “Toni Stone”
By Robert Israel
“I believe folks coming to the theater will have a great time; they’ll learn about the Negro leagues and about a phenomenal woman.”
Film Review: “Evil Does Not Exist” — Goodness on Trial
By Peter Keough
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s latest film is a lucid but dreamlike fable about the often fraught confrontation between humanity and nature.
Book Review: “The Jazzmen” — Three Private and Public Lives, Intertwined
By Steve Provizer
Larry Tye's "The Jazzmen" gives readers a full taste of the lives of three complicated musical artists
Opera Album Review: “Circé,” A Big Hit from the 2023 Boston Early Music Festival, Now Enchantingly Recorded
By Ralph P. Locke
The BEMF performed the work in July 2023 in New England Conservatory’s Jordan Hall, to enormous enthusiasm.
Dance Review: “Naughty Bits” — Pushing Back on a Culture of Sexual Abuse
By Jessica Lockhart
In his entertainingly provocative dance-theater piece, performer Sara Juli proves herself to be a master of using humor to examine subjects that are uncomfortable and not at all comic.
Short Fuse Podcast #67: Reflecting on William Faulkner
Hosted by Elizabeth Howard
A chat with Jay Watson, the Howry Professor of Faulkner studies at the University of Mississippi, about how William Faulkner’s writings continue to influence culture and readers around the globe. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the first book he published — “The Marble Faun.”
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Questions, comments, concerns?
Editor-in-Chief
Bill Marx
wmarx103@gmail.com
Thanks, Bill Marx, for your elegantly written and spot-on critique of Apple's appropriation of the creative process.