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Joseph Cermatori

@cermatori.bsky.social

1.6K followers 1.2K following 110 posts

criticism - literature, art, & performance 🌿 associate professor @ skidmore college www.josephcermatori.com

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Joseph Cermatori @cermatori.bsky.social · Oct 23

For the last issue of *PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art*, editor Bonnie Marranca invited me to contribute something on the subject of criticism. The issue's now available online and my essay’s available for open access. (Link in comments below.)

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Joseph Cermatori @cermatori.bsky.social · 24d

Hear, hear.

Joseph Cermatori @cermatori.bsky.social · Aug 30

@chronicle.com

Joseph Cermatori @cermatori.bsky.social · Aug 30

“The crisis in criticism is not just about fewer jobs but about the intellectual health of of our culture. If we let art criticism become an exclusive club for the well-connected and well-funded, we risk creating an echo chamber that flatters power...” @nyobserver.bsky.social #artswriting #criticism

The Death of the Full-Time Critic and What It Means for the Future of Art Writing

If we let art criticism become an exclusive club for the well-connected and well-funded, we risk creating an echo chamber that flatters power rather than interrogates it.

observer.com

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Joseph Cermatori @cermatori.bsky.social · Aug 30

“UChicago is just one of multiple highly selective universities—including Boston University and the University of Pennsylvania—that have announced over the past year that they were freezing or scaling back Ph.D. admissions and programs amid financial pressures and other factors.”

More UChicago Ph.D. Programs Will Pause Admissions

The arts and humanities dean said “nearly all” faculty leaders preferred “a broader pause for the division.” Some social sciences programs also aren’t accepting new students.

www.insidehighered.com

Joseph Cermatori @cermatori.bsky.social · Aug 30

Dispatch from the University of Chicago: “The university’s trustees and leaders view it preeminently as a tax-free technology incubator, and its debt load is so great that it is abandoning ideals it once held dear in order to sustain that goal. We are simply choosing not to be a university.”

The Crisis of the University Started Long Before Trump

The University of Chicago is in crisis. Under extraordinary financial strain, it has diminished its faculty-student ratio and hired hundreds of “lecturers”: teachers whom it pays little and whom it do...

www.compactmag.com

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Joseph Cermatori @cermatori.bsky.social · Aug 22

Portait of the sculptor Alessandro Vittoria, Giovanni Battista Moroni, 1551-1552, oil on canvas, 87.5 cm × 70 cm (34.4 in × 28 in), Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. #portraiture #arthistory #moroni

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Joseph Cermatori @cermatori.bsky.social · Aug 22

😡😡😡😡😡

Joseph Cermatori @cermatori.bsky.social · Aug 5

Grateful for the glimpses I had of his world, however fleeting. He was a great light in darkness.

Joseph Cermatori @cermatori.bsky.social · Aug 5

(14/14)
And Bob appears near the end of 'Baroque Modernity' (pp. 185–86)...
A passage that allowed me space to reflect on his monumental presence in the contemporary theater — and on all that Watermill summer had stirred up in me. #BaroqueModernity #baroque

Joseph Cermatori @cermatori.bsky.social · Aug 5

(13/14)
...a meditation on grief and grace. That short review is available online here < bit.ly/4514Tkb >.

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Joseph Cermatori @cermatori.bsky.social · Aug 5

(12/14)
But I was fortunate to have the chance to write about him several times. For 'PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art,' I reviewed 'Adam’s Passion' (2015), a visionary music-theater collaboration with Arvo Pärt inspired by the Biblical tale of Adam...

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Joseph Cermatori @cermatori.bsky.social · Aug 5

(11/14)
On the rehearsal stage, while he was demonstrating the precise and elegant gestures he desired from his actors, he seemed oracular, otherworldly.

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Joseph Cermatori @cermatori.bsky.social · Aug 5

(10/14)
Although I got to observe Bob's rehearsals for a fortnight, I only got to meet him once or twice. He could be stern and forbidding in person.

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Joseph Cermatori @cermatori.bsky.social · Aug 5

(9/14)
And as recently as March of this year, his work commanded attention: I'm so grateful I had the chance to see 'Mary Said What She Said' (his latest collaboration with Darryl Pinckney and Isabelle Huppert) when it played at NYU's Skirball Center. @nyuskirball.bsky.social

Joseph Cermatori @cermatori.bsky.social · Aug 5

(8/14)
And then — what an experience it was to see the revival of 'Einstein on the Beach' live at BAM @bambrooklyn.bsky.social in 2012. Another revelation.

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Joseph Cermatori @cermatori.bsky.social · Aug 5

(7/14)
These melodies were composed when opera was in its infancy, when Shakespeare was alive and walking the earth — and they were now being reimagined by Wilson, whose work André Breton had once praised as “the baroque of the future.”

Joseph Cermatori @cermatori.bsky.social · Aug 5

(6/14)
In the opera's famous ritornello, I felt I could hear its heartbeat: act and repetition, birth and rebirth, death and immortality, all echoing each other in a musical pulse.

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Joseph Cermatori @cermatori.bsky.social · Aug 5

(5/14)
That summer during the evenings, I’d sometimes walk along the Long Island shoreline, score in hand, with Monteverdi’s ghostly strains on repeat through my iPod.

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Joseph Cermatori @cermatori.bsky.social · Aug 5

(4/14)
...to observe two weeks of rehearsals of Monteverdi's 1607 opera 'L'Orfeo,' which Wilson was preparing for a new production at La Scala.

Joseph Cermatori @cermatori.bsky.social · Aug 5

(3/14)
By August 2008, with the generous help of Princeton University librarian John Logan and his sister Margaret Logan, I'd found my way to Wilson's Watermill Center in the Hamptons…

Joseph Cermatori @cermatori.bsky.social · Aug 5

(2/14)
I first encountered his work as a student, when I saw his production of Ibsen's 'Peer Gynt' at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2006. To call that experience revelatory wouldn't begin to do it justice; I was instantly obsessed.

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Joseph Cermatori @cermatori.bsky.social · Aug 5

(1/14)
So many tributes these past few days in honor of Robert Wilson (1941–2025) — widely hailed as the most significant American theater director of his generation. Here’s a memorial thread. #RobertWilson #avantgarde #contrmporary #opera #performance #theaterhistory #theater #InMemoriam

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Joseph Cermatori @cermatori.bsky.social · Jun 23

😨😨😨

Reposted by Joseph Cermatori

Tim Howles @timhowles.bsky.social · May 8

We should be ok then:

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