"I confess I feel somewhat bewildered by what you have just told me..."

"... to be born, or at any rate, bred , in a handbag, whether it had handles or not..." Via Terry Teachout .

PBS effort to expand arts coverage yields "the usual safety-first pledge-week fare."

Says Terry Teachout (in a very amusing WSJ column). Excerpt: This week the network launches its new arts initiative with a "festival...

"Why, then, is [John] Marin so underappreciated by the art-world elite?"

Asks Terry Teachout: The standard explanation is that even though he marched to the edge of abstraction, it seems never to have occurred to ...

"Poetry, not special effects, is the engine that drives lyric theater, and 'Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark' is as unpoetic as you can get."

"[The] book is flabby and witless. The score, by U2's Bono and The Edge, sounds like a double album of B-sides ("Don't thi...

"Now that Althouse's powerful spell has worn off," Mark Schmitt is still opposed to Linda Hirshman's WaPo op-ed.

You remember Hirshman's "maybe goddesses have some hypnotic effect on policy wonks," which I flagged here without comment (be...

"The Santaland Diaries, Tuesdays With Morrie, and anything with the word 'magnolias'..."

= plays not to produce if you're hoping to entice theater critic Terry Teachout to review your regional theater production in The Wall ...

"Politics makes artists stupid."

Let's check out the part of the Wall Street Journal we can all read. They've got a piece by my favorite Wall Street Journal writer, ...

"Do you know the best service anyone could render to art? Destroy all biographies."

"Only art can explain the life of a man—and not the contrary." Orson Welles, quoted by Simon Callow ("Orson Welles: The Road ...

"The very idea of an institutional blog is a contradiction in terms."

Writes Terry Teachout. (This comes up in the context of talking about the trouble Lee Siegel got into blogging at The New Republic.) The be...