Cultural Resources
Art
Articles/Essays/Op-eds
‘The Wire’ Stands Alone, James Poniewozik (behind paywall).
After 20 years, the classic drama is much praised and rarely imitated. For a series based on the idea that institutions don’t change, that’s fitting.
When critics get to assessing a classic TV show, we have a weird tendency to turn into evolutionary biologists. We pull out the old television family tree and gauge the series’s achievement by how many branches we can trace back to it — how many series modeled one or another aspect on it. “Dragnet,” “The Simpsons,” “Lost” — you shall know them by their copycats.
And sure, influence is one measure of greatness. But so is inimitability. There is the painter who leaves behind a school of disciples, but there is also the artist who sees a color that no one has envisioned before or since.
“The Wire” premiered on HBO on June 2, 2002. In the two decades since, its reputation has only grown, as has its audience. It is one of those series, like the original “Star Trek,” that future generations will refuse to believe struggled with low ratings during its entire run. (Let alone that it was nominated for an absurd two Emmys, and won exactly none.)
But has anyone made another “Wire” since?
READ MORE (behind paywall)Why Is Every Young Person in America Watching ‘The Sopranos’? Willy Staley.
“The show’s new audience is also seeing something different in it: a parable about a country in terminal decline... The show’s depiction of contemporary America as relentlessly banal and hollow is plainly at the core of the current interest in the show, which coincides with an era of crisis across just about every major institution in American life. “The Sopranos” has a persistent focus on the spiritual and moral vacuum at the center of this country, and is oddly prescient about its coming troubles: the opioid epidemic, the crisis of meritocracy, teenage depression and suicide, fights over the meaning of American history. Even the flight of the ducks who had taken up residence in Tony’s swimming pool — not to mention all the lingering shots on the swaying flora of North Jersey — reads differently now, in an era of unprecedented environmental degradation and ruin..." (read more)
Things as They Are, Valeria Luiselli.
“Dorothea Lange created a vast archive of the twentieth century’s crises in America. For years her work was censored, misused, impounded, or simply rejected.”
How Leonora Carrington Feminized Surrealism, Merve Emre.
“Each time the work of the British-Mexican artist and writer is reborn, it seems more prescient.... The women have no use for frozen institutions. What they seek are living communities for all creatures, forged not through domination and cruelty but through care and mutual assistance. The community that the novel creates is what distinguishes “The Hearing Trumpet” as a delicious triumph of world-making.”
What Are Artists For?, Peter Schjeldahl.
“A new MOMA exhibition surveys a time when artistic independence was often sacrificed to ideology…. Art happens when someone wants to do it. Advertising and propaganda start from given ends and work backward to means.... No living artist I know of, however fervently activist, is renouncing art as a distraction from moral commitment, as the more extreme Constructivists did. But a good deal of recent polemical art suggests a use-by date that is not far in the future. Aesthetic judgment, based in experience, confirms differences between what is of its time and what, besides being of its time, may prove timeless.”
Podcasts
Why this Hollywood Actor Stays Off Social Media (Mostly).
Kara Swisher interviews Andrew Garfield, who starred in The Social Network about Facebook and Tick, Tick…Boom” about the producer of the breakthrough, landmark musical Rent. Garfield addresses the deadly allure of status and the need for prophetic voices.
Photography
Things As They Are, Victoria Luisettit (behind paywall). UM ERROR
“Dorothea Lange created a vast archive of the twentieth century’s crises in America. For years her work was censored, misused, impounded, or simply rejected.”