Cultural Criticism

But the question remains: Why was the Palace of the Soviets to be erected precisely where the Temple of Christ the Saviour had stood? (Let us add that the temple stood on extremely poor ground, porous and constantly underrun by water. It was treacherous soil for building on, pushing up the costs of construction.)

The explanation that atheism now... See more

What do they say? Nothing at all. Life goes on. In the morning, adults hurry to work; children go to school; grandmothers go stand in lines. More and more frequently, a family member is taken away, now a friend from work, now a neighbor. That’s life. Only the residents of houses next door to the temple seem to take an interest. In spare moments,... See more

The man we call an adventurer...is one who remains indifferent to the content, that is, to the human meaning of his action, who thinks he can assert his own existence without taking into account that of others. The fate of Italy mattered very little to the Italian condottiere; the massacres of the Indians meant nothing to Pizarro; Don Juan was

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Goldman Sachs’ latest Music In The Air report is forecasting that the “superfan” market could be worth $4.3bn globally next year. The subtext here is that this needs to become a priority focus for the music business as recorded music revenues actually fell short of Goldman Sachs’ expectations in 2024, causing it to downgrade its forecasts for this... See more

if you drive through Culver City you will see billboards for Amazon movies everywhere. Why? Because the directors who come to the studio lot to take a meeting there to make a movie, they drive there and they’re like, ‘Oh they’re marketing my movie.’ But they’re not.”

these figures remain a sham. To get to 6.7 million, Netflix first tallies the film’s “viewing hours,” the total amount of time that users have spent streaming the movie. Here, Netflix makes no distinction between users who watch Sweet Girl all the way through, those who watch less than two minutes, and those who watch just a few seconds thanks to... See more

Earlier this year, English National Opera were subject a small Twitter storm when somebody realized that the composer biographies on their website included a number of embarrassing errors: that Benjamin Britten—still alive—had written the music to Franco Zeffirelli’s film “Romeo and Juliet,” and that “the apple didn’t fall far from the tree” with... See more

Like a town built around a mine, an entire ecology has sprung up around the seemingly inexhaustible resources of Kononenko’s fortune and Ishkhanov’s energy as an organizer. That ecology is Shorworld: a labyrinthine network that intersects with the mainstream classical music industry while duplicating many of its structures. And though the... See more

The qualities of the Met’s new pieces—literalness, signposting, pat plotlines, an impatience with the slightest ambiguity—are key tenets of second-screen television. They are also irreconcilable with good opera, in which text and music subvert one another and pieces permit manifold interpretations. In Don Giovanni, for example, Mozart quite

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