What 2023 Work of Art or Culture Would You Recommend to Anyone?

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What 2023 Work of Art or Culture Would You Recommend to Anyone?

Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Barbenheimer. This has been a blockbuster year for art and culture. Have you been impressed by what has come out so far?

What have you seen, read, watched, listened to, visited or otherwise experienced in 2023 that you found so meaningful, memorable or simply extraordinary that you would urge everyone to experience it? Why?

To give you some examples, here are excerpts from three critical raves published in the pages of The New York Times on three works that debuted in 2023. Do these reviews make you want to experience the work if you haven’t already?

Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour earned a Critic’s Pick from Jon Caramanica, The Times’s chief pop music critic. He writes of the opening performance in Glendale, Ariz., in March:

Around halfway through Swift’s three-hour performance at State Farm Stadium here on Friday — the opening night of the Eras Tour, her first roadshow in five years — she was at the center of the long runway stage, elevated on a platform, holding 70,000 people rapt with this tale of righteous fury and anguish. Plenty were singing along with her, but somehow, the accumulated voices sounded like one huge hush, students in awe of the master class.

Oppenheimer,” one half of the movie event of the summer, was also a Critic’s Pick. Manohla Dargis, The Times’s chief movie critic, writes:

“Oppenheimer,” Christopher Nolan’s staggering film about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the man known as “the father of the atomic bomb,” condenses a titanic shift in consciousness into three haunted hours. A drama about genius, hubris and error, both individual and collective, it brilliantly charts the turbulent life of the American theoretical physicist who helped research and develop the two atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II — cataclysms that helped usher in our human-dominated age.

And in Wirecutter, Arthur Gies writes that the new video game Super Mario Bros. Wonder is “some of the most fun we’ve had playing a game this year”:

Nintendo has built its legacy creating family-friendly games for all ages full of clever gameplay and charming characters, but even in this regard, Super Mario Bros. Wonder sets itself apart. Every level offers a fresh twist on the traditional ways in which Mario and friends run, jump, swim, and more through increasingly weird worlds and challenges. In a banner year for video games, especially for Nintendo, Super Mario Bros. Wonder stands out, and it has the same all-ages appeal that has made Mario a household name for almost 40 years.

Students, read one or more of these pieces, and then tell us:

  • What is an artistic or cultural experience you have had this year that you could rave about? It can be a book, a movie, music, a TV show, a live performance, fashion, architecture, dance, a work of visual art, a video game, a restaurant, a podcast or even a piece of technology. It can be local, national or global, but it has to have debuted in 2023. Think about something that has deeply impressed, moved, delighted or taught you, something you think others would benefit from experiencing too.

  • What details from the work or experience stood out to you most? How do these details make this work different from others like it?

  • Why, in your opinion, does this work or experience matter? What interesting ideas or questions does it raise? In what ways does it reflect or comment on the larger world?

  • What could you say to convince others that the experience is worth having?

Write a short review, taking all these questions into consideration, and then post it in the comments. When you are finished, read what other students have posted and comment on, or “recommend,” some that are most interesting.