ART ACADEMY OF CINCINNATI
An institution that’s been in existence for a century and a half must be doing something right, including response to changing times. The Art Academy of Cincinnati, which will celebrate 150 years in 2019, fits these criteria. Although modern memories may assume the school’s earliest existence was as an appendage to the Cincinnati Art Museum, […]
Dayton Visual Arts Center: A Trip to A Small Contemporary Arts Center
Take an hour-long ride to Dayton from Cincinnati and discover the Dayton Visual Arts Center, a proponent of contemporary art, in a small building on 118 N. Jefferson St. in the heart of downtown. Open the doors and you will find a narrow, white-washed gallery of 1,800 square feet with a current Urban Landscapes show. […]
A Remembrance of Someone I’ll Never Forget: Jackie Demaline
When I moved into a condo on the river in Covington in 2007, I heard that my neighbor across the hall was the drama critic for the Enquirer.I say heard, since I never saw her. She was up and out before I could walk the dog, and back late—after some performance. So Jackie Demaline was a […]
Jackie Demaline: In Memoriam
Jackie Demaline, long The Enquirer’s theater critic, and truly a force field of energy, died very recently. She’d been a friend of mine and colleague for decades, and she changed the face of theater in Cincinnati, partly by expecting excellence in all things theater, and partly through the sheer force of her personality. Her departure […]
Carter’s “Metafilm” and the Affect of Sociological Virulence
Professor Christopher Carter’s intermedia/new media theory text “Metafilm: Materialist Rhetoric and Reflexive Cinema” proverbially instrumentalizes the paradoxical rhetoric of visual culture by analyzing films that immerse viewers in violent narratives and examining the ethics of these transactions. Carter anaylzes the films of Michael Haneke, Atom Egoyan, Icíar Bollaín, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Ryan Coogler. Using […]
Richard Power’s “The Overstory”
“The Overstory”, this year’s National Book Award winner by Richard Powers, may be the finest novel of 2018 so far (though Rachel Kushner’s “The Mars Room” is a close second). Since this novel was reviewed at some length in The New York Times Book Review by Barbara Kingsolver, one of my favorite writers, who’s also […]
Rachel Kushner’s “The Mars Room”
The preposterously talented Rachel Kushner, who I consider to be America’s finest young writer, has returned with her astonishingly fine new novel “The Mars Room”. (We note that she is not related to President Trump’s not-so-talented son-in-law, Jared Kushner). This novel is so finely researched, like Jennifer Egan’s most recent novel about life in and […]