The Latest Classical-Pop Crossover Is The Worst Yet
It’s a “breathtakingly crass, spectacularly point-missing wave of pop-classical crossover. It makes one fantasise about re-education camps for the compulsory internment of whoever’s listening to this brazenly misguided bilge.”
Met Opera Debacle – It’s About Leadership
Peter Gelb is “right that opera in its current form is not sustainable — something of a given in a field that has literally no independent commercial viability, relies entirely on donations, can’t hope for significant European-style government funding in this country, and is paying hundreds of people very large salaries. The unions are also right that the problem is partly artistic.”
50,000+ Artists Apply for 89 Affordable Studios In Harlem
“Developers for the space, known as El Barrio’s Artspace PS 109 and located between Second and Third avenues, fielded 51,313 online applications via a city website by the July 14 deadline, officials said. That’s on top of more than 2,000 paper applications filed.”
Maria Abramovic Raised A Ton Of Money For Her New Project. So Why Is She Staffing With Unpaid Interns?
“Abramović raised over $660,000 for her institute on Kickstarter in June and recently “collaborated” with Adidas. Yet somehow she cannot afford to pay people to work for MAI.”
Why Does A Vancouver Theatre Critic Write Under A Pen Name? (And Other Arts Journalism Lapses)
“Since the practice of pen names fell out of favour in the mid-20th century, after newspapers began promoting themselves with their new brand of ethics, I wondered why any daily newspaper would go along with it?”
Met Opera Extends Contract Deadline At Last Minute
“The Metropolitan Opera postponed a threatened lockout late on Thursday night, saying that it had done so at the request of a federal mediator who was brought in at the 11th hour to try to salvage its contract negotiations with the unions representing its orchestra and chorus.”
How Sotheby’s And Christie’s Locate New People To Spend Massive Sums Of Money On Art
“If you’re even remotely curious about starting a blue-chip art collection, there’s a good chance the world’s biggest auction houses already know who you are, and exactly how much you might spend to own a masterpiece. … They’ve dispatched armies of experts to identify potential bigwigs, and satisfy their ever-expanding art whims.”
ABT’s Misty Copeland Is Now A Major Underwear Spokesmodel
“[Copeland] will become the new face of Under Armour’s ‘I Will What I Want’ campaign, which focuses on the apparel giant’s women’s business. To appreciate Under Armour’s out-of-the-box thinking in tapping a ballerina to front its national ads, one has to grasp the complexity of Copeland’s story.”
Dick Smith, Hollywood’s Master Of Makeup, Dead At 92
“As the grandmaster of special-effects makeup, Dick Smith broke ground in the movies in the early 1970s when he transformed Dustin Hoffman into a 120-year-old for Little Big Man and an adolescent Linda Blair into a diabolical demon [sic] in The Exorcist. When he received an Academy Award in 1985 for aging F. Murray Abraham into an elderly composer in the film Amadeus, many industry observers wondered: What took so long?”
Big Data Reveals How Cities Beckoned The Brainy For 2,000 Years
“How do you keep them down on the farm, once they’ve seen Paris? You don’t, suggests a study of 150,000 historical figures that shows cities have … acted as cultural magnets” for many centuries.
World’s Richest Man Calls For Three-Day Work Week – Could That Really Work?
Carlos Slim: “People are going to have to work for more years, until they are 70 or 75, and just work three days a week – perhaps 11 hours a day.” Other business icons, among them Google co-founder Larry Page, think similarly. Is this a practical idea? Possibly …
Robert Drew, 90, Pioneer Of Cinéma Vérité
“[He] altered both journalism and filmmaking when he helped develop the hand-held camera and a synchronized sound recorder and put the new equipment to use making documentaries in the put-the-audience-in-the-room style.”
When The Fourth Wall Is The Naked City: Tales Of Outdoor Theater In New York
“Alfresco settings have their advantages – the fireflies, the moon, the breeze – and their complications, too: the bicyclists, the boomboxes, the gaze of raccoons that live just below the Delacorte’s stage and often scamper on. The Times asked performers, producers and directors to talk about the perils and pleasures of acting under the sky.”
Actually, Some Material Goods CAN Make You Happy
“It’s been the refrain of behavioral economists … for years: Spend your money on experiences, not things. A vacation or a meal with friends will enrich your life; new shoes will quickly lose their charm. That’s true, but it’s not the whole story, argue psychologists Darwin A. Guevarra and Ryan T. Howell in a new paper … Not all goods, they say, should be lumped together.”
Research Archive Meets Warehouse Meets Database Meets Flea Market: Behold The Accumulibrary
“Unlike modern libraries, the Accumulibrary doesn’t segment or segregate media types. It fails to differentiate documents from things, books from periodicals from pamphlets, devices from objects, the new from the used from the old, the rare from the common. The sole laws that it holds sacred are the law of number and the law of stuff.”
Look What They’ve Done To St. Ignatius Loyola: They’ve Made Him Twee
“A Catholic publishing house” – Loyola Press, naturally – “is encouraging the people of the Internet to ‘find your inner Iggy’ and explore Ignatius’s vision of spirituality. In doing so, it appears that they have created the first-ever twee saint.”
Chicago Symphony Exec Named New Director Of San Diego Symphony
“Martha Gilmer’s role has been large. In addition to working with the music directors, their ideas and complex personalities and overseeing all programming, she worked with and enlisted guest conductors and guest artists and created new ongoing programs to move the organization into the 21st century.”
Indie Movie Makes More In Video-On-Demand Than In Theatres. Is This A More Viable Path?
“The movie, directed by Bong Joon-ho, made $3.8 million in its first two weeks of VOD release, compared with $3.9 million from five weeks in theaters.”
Newport Jazz At 60 – Grandad To The Modern Festival
“For the past 60 years, no institution has done more to help establish jazz as a legitimate art form than Newport and the notion of the jazz festival that Mr. Wein created. Where jazz once rubbed shoulders with pop stars like Frank Sinatra, it now competes for government and corporate funding with opera and chamber music.”
UK Teenager Quits School After His Drawing Goes Viral Online
“I reckon I wasted two years sat at school doing nothing. I didn’t expect this to happen a month ago. I feel honoured people appreciate my work and that I can hopefully make a living off it.”
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Director of the Arts Journalism Program
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Israeli Show Canceled In Edinburgh After Protests
“The hip-hop opera is presented by a company that receives money from the Israeli government which campaigners said made it legitimate to boycott, particularly due to the current situation in Gaza.”
Will Creating An “Arts District” Make A City More Dynamic?
“Dallas is trying to create more “vibrancy” downtown; trying to attract more people and keep them there for longer. One way it is doing that is through its arts district, a truly phenomenal collection of cultural institutions housed in equally impressive buildings, which is just now completing the commercial infrastructure it believes will activate the streetscape both day and night.”
Protests Over Light Installation In Toronto
The public art project, known as Nyctophilia, or love of the night, is set to be officially unveiled Wednesday night. In June, when the poles went up at the corner of Weston Rd. and Dennis Ave., it sparked a flurry of negative comments to the Star and other media outlets.
Why The Vienna Philharmonic Sounds Different From Other Orchestras
“The “Vienna sound” has been the subject of reams of music criticism, academic research, acoustical experiments and more than a little debate. Not everyone agrees on precisely what it is — it is sometimes described as plush, warm and rich or sumptuous — but many listeners say that they know it when they hear it.”
Amazon: Hachette Dispute Is About Lower Prices And More Money To Authors
“Books compete against mobile games, television, movies, Facebook, blogs, free news sites and more,” Amazon said in the statement, which was posted on the forum for its Kindle ebook reader. “If we want a healthy reading culture, we have to work hard to be sure books actually are competitive against these other media types, and a big part of that is working hard to make books less expensive.”
International Study: Culture Is Big Travel Appeal For Young People
“Of the 15 countries with the largest economies in the world, the participants – plus 1,000 additional young people surveyed from the UK – said that France was the most attractive place as a source of arts and culture, followed by Italy, the US and then the UK.”
“Save The Corcoran” Court Hearing Has An Uninhibited Star Witness
Philanthropist Wayne Reynolds, who was first wooed for the Corcoran’s board chairmanship and then rejected, “led a packed courtroom Wednesday on a rollicking and highly critical narrative account of his interactions with gallery leadership, at one point likening the Corcoran’s executive suite to ‘a goat rodeo,’ and asserting that he could do better, if given a chance.”
Met Opera Proposes Federal Mediator For Last-Minute Labor Talks
“With time running out before a lockout of its workers threatened for later this week, the Metropolitan Opera proposed on Wednesday that federal mediators be brought in at the 11th hour to facilitate negotiations with several of the company’s unions. But it was unclear if the unions would agree to a mediator, or if there was enough time left to forge a deal.” (includes video)
Orlando Ballet “Needs To Take A Deep Breath,” Says New Boss
“‘We all need to take a deep breath,’ says Jim Mitchell, the ballet’s fourth executive director in three years. During that time, the leadership was in flux and the organization was left homeless after a mold infestation shut down its headquarters in the former Orlando Utilities Commission building.”