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The Avant-Garde Never Left: Robert Hughes Described the Revolution and Then Declared It Over

Robert Hughes wanted it both ways. In the final moments of “The Shock of the New,” his landmark 1980 BBC series on modern art, he declared the avant-garde dead and then, in the same breath, described its beating heart. He told us that the radical project of art was finished, that the market had swallowed it whole, that the institutions had filed its teeth down to nothing. And then he said this: the task of art is “done by individuals, each person mediating in some way between a sense of history and an experience of the world.” That sentence is the avant-garde. Hughes described the thing he claimed to be burying.

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The Unfinished Work: Why Artists Demand Proof of Life

A playwriting teacher of mine once said something that has rattled around in my head for decades: “You can write a play, but it doesn’t exist until it finds life in the first production.” The Chair of our department disagreed with that assertion, and vehemently so. The script is the work, he argued. The text is complete in itself. The playwright’s obligation ends when the final period strikes the page.

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Geographic Information Systems and Crime Mapped Crime Alerts

Geographic Information Systems — GIS — is a visual way to map and geolocate data.  There’s Big Money in GIS mapping when it comes to matters of Public Health trends and systems and in proactively predicting the where, how and why crime will appear in your local municipality.

Because New York City is so big and massive and filled with folks from across the socioeconomic spectrum, crime mapping the Big Apple makes for a rich experience.

Here’s a recent, and keen, GIS visualization of SpotCrime’s report for Greenwich Village in New York City:

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Tommy Tune and Guzintas and Getoutzahs

Tommy Tune — one of the tallest and most imaginative directors and choreographers on Broadway — loves to button a scene, but he also takes the idea of a button one step beyond by needing to create a proper “Guzinta” that dramatically leads one scene into another.  “Guzinta” is Tommy Tune shorthand for “goes into” and the idea behind the ideal is quite necessary, precise and well-reasoned.

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Sport in Live Performance

Today’s modern sporting events reflect the most seductive part of live performance:  Creating Dramatic Tension — and the buildup to the annual Super Bowl celebration is one of the finest examples of spectacle in performance wrapped in football pads and held tight with crossed fingers.  The countdown clocks on NFL.com today directly inherit, and reflect, the innate sense of doom and pending explosion that so many modern dramas lack on the live stage.

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Removing the Hiss from Your Lyric

I have one hard rule about lyric writing:  Use the Singular form over the Plural in every instance.  “Boy” is better than “Boys” and “Snake” is better than “Snakes” and “Love” is better than “Loves.”

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Melodrama is Not Right Drama

All good drama should convey the essence of the human condition and melodrama can never meet that mandate.  A righteous dramatic experience can be uplifting, serve as a warning against degraded morality, and every play must end with a proper catharsis. 

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If Your Writing Gets Stuck, Go Somewhere Else

Here is one of the greatest pieces of advice I can offer you when you get stuck with your dramatic writing.  I stumbled upon this solution and it has saved me many times over the years.

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Stand Up if You Plan to Play the Blues

If you want to effectively play The Blues — or any style of guitar, really — you need to get off your chair, strap in your guitar, and stand up!

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The Residue of Founding Intention

In my professional work as a script doctor at ScriptProfessor.com, I am always struck numb by those that believe anyone can write and that everyone can fix a dramatic work.  Nothing could be farther from the truth.  Understanding how to make a script work is a tough task that few people in the world really understand and even fewer are able to perform at any price.

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