A Century After It Was Proposed, The National Museum Of African American History And Culture Opens
”There were some who said it couldn’t happen, who said ‘you can’t do it,’ but we did it,’ said Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who led the charge to make the museum a reality. ‘This place is more than a building. It is a dream come true.'”
France Announces $100 Million Fund For Middle East Cultural Preservation
“Besides appealing for sites to be protected, Francois Hollande also called for a strengthened commitment to cultural preservation that might include “intervention”, for which he gave no details. Restoration of damaged sites would also be part of his new mission, he said. So would “asylum” for some endangered works of art, a curious term, given the resistance towards accepting Syrian refugees in Europe and the Gulf States.”
Does Free Admission To Museum Change Who Comes (Or What They Do?)
“Many of those museums that have altered their admissions models have noticed a shift in visitor patterns. Attendance doubled after fees were waived to England’s national collections in 2001, said the director of London’s Natural History Museum to The Guardian. When the Dallas Museum of Art nixed its $10 admission fee, its annual attendance swelled from 498,000 to 668,000, and the institution saw a 29 percent increase in minority visitors, Fortune reported.”
Why Did Brexit Succeed? A Failure Of Philosophy
“For this continental European, it seems as if the famed British practicality didn’t quite work out this time, and the challenge came precisely from thinking that issues are always practical, forgetting that what truly matters are the foundation, the philosophy. Well-worn stereotypes say that the Germans resort to Kant and the French to Voltaire, while the Brits weigh the pros and cons (and Italians, like myself, just sing a song). But beyond the pros and cons, there are motivations, impulses, values and ideals, and ultimately that is what drives history.”
Seriously? Did China Just Pave Over The Great Wall?
“Chinese preservationists, internet users and media commentators have been incensed this week after pictures showed that officials repaired part of the Great Wall in northeast China by slapping a white substance on top of the crumbling, weathered stones.”
Are These The World’s Best New Highrises?
To qualify for “the world’s most important prize for high-rises,” buildings have to present at least 100 m (328 ft) in height and must have been completed in the previous two years.
Art Critic John Bentley Mays, 75
“His life’s work was as a critic and he was for four decades one of Canada’s great observers, interpreters and explainers of art and architecture.”
Feel Lonely A Lot? It May Be Genetic
“A large new study published online last week in the Nature journal Neuropsychopharmacology …finds that loneliness appears to be a ‘modestly heritable’ trait. A predisposition to feeling lonely may run in the family, in other words. But there’s a caveat here.”
The Trial Of George W. Bush And An Audience’s Verdict
“Don’t worry if you didn’t know the 43rd president was on trial. This was an off-Broadway verdict, the conclusion to a new play called The Trial of an American President. The trial was fiction, but the vote, from nine members of the audience chosen to be the jury, was very real.”
TV – Even Peak TV – Does Not Work In A Film Festival
“Frankly, it felt weird to be watching TV at a film festival. A movie is a closed loop: it begins and an hour and a half or two or three hours later, it ends.”
Incoming Arts Council England Boss Surprised By Plan For Arts Quality Assessments
Tate boss Sir Nicholas Serota responded with disbelief to presenter Sue MacGregor when she told him of ACE’s plans to introduce Quality Metrics to measure artistic quality and said “the Arts Council is going to say if it doesn’t tick these boxes we’re not going to give money to it.” Serota responded: “I suspect you caricature the decision”, which MacGregor denied, saying: “No, I’m almost quoting it word for word from the press release.”
Staging Death: A Brief History
From Sophocles through Roman spectacles and the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol to Sarah Kane, a look at the means – decorous, horrifying, inventive – playwrights, directors and stage managers have used to depict characters’ ends.
Coding Is Not “Fun.” It’s An Expression Of Values And Ethics
“The machine does what you say, not what you mean. More and more ‘decisions’ are being entrusted to software, including life-or-death ones: think self-driving cars; think semi-autonomous weapons; think Facebook and Google making inferences about your marital, psychological or physical status, before selling it to the highest bidder. Yet it’s rarely in the interests of companies and governments to encourage us to probe what’s going on beneath these processes.”
There’s No Need To Fret About Today’s Decline In ‘Proper’ Punctuation
“Punctuation started out as free and easy prosodic units, meant to help the reader read out loud to an audience with all the requisite intonation, tone, pitch and pauses intended by an absent author. … With the more speech-like IM, texts, tweets, punctuation is just getting back to its roots, as a way to convey prosodic and speech cues in the absence of sound and vision.”
The Phone Call, R.I.P.
“The phone call always was an invasive form of communication, so perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that as soon as a plausible substitute presented itself we grabbed it.”
The Trouble With Sombreros At Tequila Parties: Francine Prose On Lionel Shriver’s Cultural Appropriation Speech
“The topic is a complicated and sensitive one, and Shriver’s first mistake, I think, was to ignore that complexity and sensitivity by adopting a tone that ranged from jauntiness to mockery and contempt. … To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a hat is more than just a hat.”
Even After 20 Years, ‘South Park’ Gets Thrown Together On The Fly Each Week
Said co-creator Trey Parker one day earlier this month: “There are times where we go, ‘How do we tell Comedy Central we don’t have a show?’ This is one of those.” Dave Itzkoff watches how they pull it off.
Monty Python’s Terry Jones Diagnosed With Dementia
“The 74-year-old is suffering from primary progressive aphasia, which affects his ability to communicate. As well as appearing in the BBC TV shows and films, Jones also directed the features The Life Of Brian and Monty Python’s The Meaning Of Life, and co-directed Monty Python And The Holy Grail with Terry Gilliam.”
‘Sick Joker Or Avant-Garde Savior?’ Romeo Castellucci Makes Theater That’s Powerful, Confounding, And Icky
“His often-abrasive theater pieces won’t let you look away – whether it’s an elderly man struggling to control his bodily functions beneath a benevolent painting of Christ (On the Concept of the Face) or a klatch of Amish women cutting off one another’s tongues (The Four Seasons Restaurant).”
Meet The NYC Sanitation Department’s Artist In Residence
“For an artist obsessed for nearly half a century with the concepts of maintenance and sanitation, Mierle Laderman Ukeles keeps an office in desperate need of a cleaning. Or maybe an intervention by a department of doctoral students.”
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Buffalo Philharmonic Board Chair Arrested On Corruption Charges
“[Louis P.] Ciminelli has been chairman of the BPO’s board for two terms, assuming the office in 2012. He has been generous to the orchestra, and his tenure has been a time of prosperity. In 2015, when his 60th birthday coincided with the BPO’s fall season-opening gala, Ciminelli gave the orchestra a gift of $1 million. “
Teacher Steps On An American Flag During Free Speech Lesson, Gets Death Threats And Investigation By School District
“The civics teacher from Massey Hill Classical High School in Fayetteville, N.C., was giving a lesson last week about the Bill of Rights that touched on Texas v. Johnson, the Supreme Court case upholding the constitutional right to burn the American flag. To illustrate the landmark decision, Francis pulled out a full-size Star-Spangled Banner and laid it on the classroom floor. ‘Does anybody have a lighter,’ he asked the class. When no one responded, Francis stepped on the flag several times.”
Marina Abramović’s Ex Wins Intellectual Property Suit Against Her
“Abramović and Ulay, born Frank Uwe Laysiepen, had been lovers and co-creators for more than a decade before their separation in 1988 … Ulay launched a lawsuit last year in which he claimed that Abramović has violated a contract they signed in 1999 covering works they had created together.” On Thursday, a Dutch court agreed.
Balanchine’s ‘Divertimento No. 15’ – Alastair Macaulay Does The Arithmetic
“Three men to partner five women! … I’ve often wondered if the name Divertimento No. 15 gave him the idea: 15 = 5 x 3, a kind of numerical pun. Having eight principals (5 + 3), he matches them with a corps of eight women. As you watch the changing corps patterns, Balanchine shows how neatly divisible the number eight can be – two fours, four twos: symmetries abound. But then you see those eight principals. Eight, after all, can contain an imbalance.”
A Rising New Opera Star In The Rarest Of Voice Ranges
Says conductor Thomas Crawford of 25-year-old contralto Avery Amereau, “I don’t mean to exaggerate, but this woman made my knees shake.”
God, Did I Write That? New York Times Gets Playwrights To Look Back At Their Teenage Work
“How mortifying would it be to page through the creative writing you did as a teenager? And then, years or even decades later, actually see it in print? That’s what we recently asked a set of notable playwrights” – among them Lynn Nottage, Neil LaBute, Tina Howe, Nicky Silver, and Marcus Gardley – “to do.”
Professional Byzantine Chant (!) Choir In Oregon (!) Has Thrived For 20 Years
“[Cappella Romana], the Portland-based vocal ensemble, which performs annual concert series in its hometown and Seattle, has released more than 20 recordings. Its tours have brought the group’s sometimes ethereal, sometimes austere, always powerfully moving music to venues such as New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Los Angeles’ Getty Center, the Smithsonian Institution, Stanford and Yale universities and festivals throughout Europe.”
Battle Bots: Wikipedia Bots Keep Editing And Re-Editing Each Other In Dance Of Futility
“Wikipedia editors sometimes use bots to help them keep on top of changes that users have made to the online encyclopedia. But when two editors task different bots with making incompatible edits, each bot will keep finding that its work has been undone.”
Arts And Technology – A Natural Complement (Until They Go To War)
“It was the assertion of the Romantic movement that art makes us appreciate the beauty, richness and sheer size of the world. And technology, used appropriately, brings us closer to that sublime… Even if that was true in 1939, it’s not true now: not now our drones do our flying for us; not now our technology has got away from us to the point where large portions of nature are being erased; not now we live mired in media and, indeed, have to make special efforts to escape it.”
Communication Isn’t Just About Efficiency. Theatre, For Example…
“Life is both ever-various and surprising, and, at the same time, one long uninterrupted (and, admit it, sometimes awfully boring) conversation with ourselves.”