Word: yorkerism
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...native New Yorker, Gewanter studied writing and literature at Madison and Berkeley. His own college projects tended towards the esoteric, including a one-act drama starring a deconstructionist who is charged with writing a bomb threat. (The gist of the excessively postmodern plot is derived from Foucault's "What is Author?" essay. It will not be airing after Married With Children anytime soon...
Jones' concert, as he calls it, opened a new front in the continuing culture wars. In the year-end issue of the New Yorker, Croce wrote a piece, titled Discussing the Undiscussable, in which she declared that she would not review Still/Here-would not even see it-because she considered the show beyond the reach of criticism: "The cast members of Still/Here-the sick people whom Jones has signed up-have no choice other than to be sick." By presenting them on videotape, she reasoned, the choreographer has "crossed the line between theatre and reality. I can't review someone I feel...
Last week's issue of the New Yorker kept the pot bubbling by printing a dozen letters, several solicited, from cultural pillars of various persuasions. Tony Kushner, author of the Pulitzer-prizewinning Angels in America, said he felt "dissed." Croce, he argued, has her semantics wrong; she uses the word victims to describe "politically engaged progressive people." Libertarian terror Camille Paglia largely agreed with Croce but seized the occasion to chide her for not paying proper attention to the pop heroes Paglia champions. In short, the powwow was predictable but entertaining...
There are several reasons why the piece became combustible. For one, the New Yorker under editor Tina Brown has developed a knack for getting itself talked about, and this piece was placed up front in the issue, not back in the critical ghetto. For another, the article was well timed. Croce used it to deplore what she considers the politicization of National Endowment for the Arts grants and the effects of political correctness on the arts in general. To Croce, a conservative, a work of art should be judged by its realization of truth and beauty, not its adaptability...
...anyone interested in dance, Croce's ability to inflame does not come as a surprise. For the past 22 years at the New Yorker, she has written stringent criticisms that though models of logic and clarity, can also sting. A devotae of George Balanchine, whose biography she is writing, she has unmercifully chastised Peter Martins, his successor as artistic director of the New York City Ballet, when she felt he was flouting the master's style. Her judgments have resonated through the ballet world...