Venice is an artificial miracle, a metropolis of gold and marble and crumbling brick and peeling stucco improbably set afloat upon the Adriatic, anchored in its lagoon by alder stakes confidently driven into a shifting subsoil of silt and sand….
Crowds have been flocking to the Metropolitan Opera to take in a heart-wrenching tale of religious persecution that continues into the next two weekends. Dialogues des Carmélites is one of the most well-respected operas of the 20th century. By opera…
It started last Oct. 6, when an adjunct instructor at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, showed the students in her online course on “World Art” two Islamic works containing images of Muhammad. One Muslim student complained to the professor,…
Did we judge 2020’s statue vandals too harshly? Boston’s Martin Luther King Jr.–Coretta Scott King “Embrace” sculpture with any luck coaxes a comeback. Alternatively, locals might imitate their Puritan forefathers, who essentially evicted the only European settler, William Blaxton, from…
In the age of disappearing Snapchat messages, Insta stories, and 280-character tweets, it is reasonable to ask why building lasting monuments matters. It matters because in this sea of 21st-century distraction, we must be pulled out of our everyday lives…
What do we possess today as “art”? A faked music, filled with artificial noisiness of massed instruments; a failed painting, full of idiotic, exotic and showcard effects, that every ten years or so concocts out of the form-wealth of millennia…
Most of the U.S. has finally come to its senses on the inefficacy of masking, but in some niche markets, the political theater persists. Last Tuesday, Broadway mainstay Patti LuPone once again proved herself a diva after LuPone-ing an unmasked…
James Bama, a nationally regarded painter, died in Cody, Wyoming, recently, four days short of his 96th birthday. I regret being out of touch with him for most of the last 14 years since I moved to Idaho. Jim was…
While the Oscars, Emmys, and other American award shows are fading into irrelevance, Europe’s big splashy annual entertainment competition, Eurovision, whose 2022 finals took place in Turin, Italy, last Saturday, seems to get bigger every year. Bigger, and worse. There…
On the evening before Easter Sunday, the Holy City of the Wichitas held its 97th annual passion play, the Prince of Peace Pageant. Volunteers reenacted the gospel, from the Annunciation of Mary to Christ’s resurrection, to onlookers sitting on a…