Art Beat

Of Dollars and Spidey Sense: Disney Has Much to Gain by Purchasing Marvel

Disney's plan to buy Marvel Entertainment, Inc. for $4 billion opens up the gates of the Magic Kingdom to a whole host of new characters and helps complete the evolution of comics from a dime-store fringe market to a global…

A New Deal for Artists

Artists today have a number of safety nets to help ease the pain brought on by a battered economy, but during the Great Depression it took a federal stimulus program of sorts to protect many of the nation's painters and…

Slide show: a Look at Festivals

By Arts Desk

Images from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Scotland, the "300% Spanish Design" expo in Mexico City and the Hindu Ganesha Festival in India.

Weekly Poem: ‘Erasers’

Mary Jo Salter is a poet, lyricist, playwright and essayist, whose latest collection of poems, "A Phone Call to the Future: New and Selected Poems," was published in March 2008.

Conversation: Josh Neufeld Revisits Katrina

By Arts Desk

Josh Neufeld's "A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge" tracks the lives of New Orleans residents as they fled or remained, and then struggled to cope in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.

Jessye Norman, the Roots Team Up for Langston Hughes’ ‘Ask Your Mama’

Five years ago, Emmy Award-winning composer Laura Karpman stumbled across a copy of Hughes"Ask Your Mama." She was instantly struck by the power and potential of the piece, believing it cried out to be realized as a 21st century multimedia…

Island Hopping

As hip-hop has evolved into an established international culture and multi-billion-dollar industry far removed from its underground urban origins, some artists are bringing the genre back to its conscientious and groundbreaking roots. The Blue Scholars, a Seattle-based, Hawaiian-influenced duo, is…

Conversation: Whit Stillman

Before the re-release of Whit Stillman's "The Last Days of Disco," obscure copies of the cult auteur's film were selling on the Internet for as much as $150. Now Stillman's 1998 movie (and his latest to date) is now being…

Secrets and Lies in ‘Await Your Reply’

In Dan Chaon's "Await Your Reply," three independent story lines revolve around one another, as characters attempt to keep their secrets secret.

Weekly Poem: ‘Physical Portrait / Retrato fisico’

Cecilia Vicuna's visual work has been exihibited at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the Whitney Museum of American Art and MoMA. She is also co-editor of the Oxford Book of Latin American Poetry, which was published this month.