Today’s Universities Are Broken. So How Do We Fix Them?
“It’s clear that universities will have to figure out the balance between commercial relevance and basic research, as well as how to prove their value beyond being vehicles for delivering content. But lost in the shuffle of commentary here is something arguably more important than and yet containing all of these factors: culture.”
Broadway Joke: Adele Dazeem Now Substituting For Idina Menzel
“In a social media joke circulating on Twitter, a fake playbill notice for the Broadway musical “If/Then” states that its star, Idina Menzel, will be replaced by her alter-ego, Adele Dazeem.”
Venezuela’s Artists Increasingly Speaking Out Against Government
“From pop culture to high culture, Venezuela’s conflict is leading actors, artists, athletes and fashion designers to voice their support for the antigovernment protesters, with a minority backing President Nicolás Maduro.”
The Power Of Music: For Good AND For Bad
Music is power. In his 2010 book on noise and silence, George Prochnik asked a series of provocative questions that began with this one: “Is it really true that all our reactions to sound are dictated by simple equations: loud, low sounds equal something powerful, so be scared or be prepared to mate; soft, little sounds equals something small, so be calm, be prepared to mate, or both?”
How Our “What Is Art?” Debate Got Going In The Wrong Direction
“To a large extent, the art world today represents the institutionalization of Duchamp’s early-twentieth-century pranks. The great irony is that Duchamp intended not to extend the boundaries of art but to short-circuit the entire project of aesthetic delectation.”
11th Century Indian Sculpture In Toledo Museum May Have Been Stolen
“The Toledo Museum of Art said it saw no signs of trouble when it bought the small bronze statue of a Hindu deity in 2006 from a New York dealer now charged in India. The statue resembles an idol now listed as stolen in India.”
Russian Court Reduces Sentence Of Man Convicted In Bolshoi Acid Attack
“Pavel Dmitrichenko, a Bolshoi soloist, was convicted in December of organizing the attack and sentenced to six years in prison. The Moscow City Court on Thursday reduced his sentence by six months to 5½ years.”
Big Concerns About The Scale Of Massive Picasso Restorations In Paris
“What comes as a truly horrible surprise is that all of Picasso’s 5,000 works have been “cleaned, restored and reframed” for the opening. It beggars belief that some urgent “conservation” necessity should have struck all of these modern works at the same time.”
Stunning Move: Getty Images Makes 35 Million Images Free On The Web
“Getty’s not doing this out of the good of its heart. It recognizes that images on the Internet are treated as de facto public domain by many people on social networks, blogs, and the scummier parts of the content web. It knows it’s highly unlikely to ever get significant money out of any of those people.”
Canadian Theatres Have Their Own Pipelines (Or Do They?)
“Has the theatre pipeline that supplies Canada’s regionals really sprung a leak? One piece of good news is that, this season, for the first time in recent memory, the most-seen new play in the country hasn’t been a recent Broadway or West End hit, but one born in Toronto.”
Denver’s New Cultural Plan: Lots More Art In The City
“The plan calls for more art in just about every venue within city reach, from its buildings and theaters to its parks and even the streets themselves. In addition, it lays the groundwork for more funding of art projects, as well as incentives for planners and developers who make art a priority.”
This Year’s PEN/Faulkner Fiction Prize Finalists
This year’s judges were Madison Smartt Bell, Manuel Muñoz and Achy Obejas. They considered more than 400 titles published by American authors in 2013.
The People Who Bought Charles Ives’ House (And What They’re Doing To It)
“They have not just [hired] renovation architects, they’ve got restoration architects – historical, sensitive architectural work going on, so things are improved without changing.”
Here We Go Again: This Year’s Whitney Biennial – A Lot Of Dead Art
Jerry Saltz: “I kept hearing myself think, I see dead art: Work that looks and behaves like it is supposed to look and behave but that doesn’t make us see differently, that doesn’t rethink form, reimage structure, or explore material, color, or new orders.”
Are Big Tech Companies Gentrifying Buddhism?
“Ire at Google buses, tech-driven gentrification in San Francisco and Silicon Valley’s close collaboration with the NSA has been all over the news, but the demonstration at Wisdom 2.0 was different. It wasn’t just aimed at the tech industry; it was also aimed at what some see as an elitist streak in American convert Buddhism.”
Longform Writing – Turns Out There’s An Audience For It On The Web
Self-identifying as “longform” has become hot. The start-ups posed an alternative to magazines, which still publish featurettes and front-of-the-book copy, not simply lengthy, in-depth features. The new publications were, by contrast, specialized, and not bound by tradition.
BBC to Shut Down TV Channel BBC3, Save BBC4
The youth-oriented channel BBC3 will be pulled from the airwaves, with programming available only online, as part of BBC Director General Tony Hall’s planned £100 million in budget cuts. “His decision also signals a reprieve for its sister channel, the arts and culture specialist BBC4, which has faced calls for it to be axed and merged into BBC2.”
West End Will Close Without Lower Ticket Prices, Says Michael Grandage
The much-awarded director warns that we “make sure that young people have access to West End theatre, and the only way you can do that is through pricing. It stands to reason that if we don’t do it, the West End will close when this generation becomes senior citizens. Because who will replace the people who are now old?”
Even More Trafficked Art Seized In Queens
“The hunt for Indian antiquities allegedly smuggled into New York by Subhash Kapoor, a former Manhattan gallery owner accused of overseeing a $100 million art trafficking ring, led to a Queens warehouse Tuesday where federal officials seized hundreds of Southeast Asian and Indian items that they valued at $8 million.”
Creative Writing Courses Are a Waste of Time, Says Hanif Kureishi
“A lot of my students just can’t tell a story. They can write sentences but they don’t know how to make a story go from there all the way through to the end without people dying of boredom in between. It’s a difficult thing to do and it’s a great skill to have. Can you teach that? I don’t think you can.”
Creative Writing Courses, On the Contrary, Can Serve Very Useful Purposes
Anna Davis: “I knew this course would give me dedicated time to write, feedback from tutors and fellow students, and that most useful of all things – a deadline.” (Davis does think that a graduate degree in creative writing may not be worth the money.)
What’s Up With the Feud Between 12 Years a Slave‘s Director and Screenwriter?
No, you weren’t imagining the tension you saw during the Oscars telecast. “Long before each came away with an Academy Award, … director Steve McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley were embroiled in a bitter feud regarding credit for the film’s screenplay, a fight they kept quiet for the good of the campaign before it came to a head Sunday night at the Dolby Theatre.”
Meet the Doctor Using Sports Medicine to Heal Dancers’ Battered Bodies
Patrick Rump, “a broad-chested, broadly smiling German” and former karate champion, is working “to start a revolution in dance health.”
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Immortality, Philosophy, and ‘Her’
The Spike Jonze film “raises two questions that have long preoccupied philosophers. Are nonbiological creatures like Samantha capable of consciousness – at least in theory, if not yet in practice? And if so, does that mean that we humans might one day be able to upload our own minds to computers, perhaps to join Samantha in being untethered from ‘a body that’s inevitably going to die’?”
Venezuela’s Conflict Moves From Caracas’s Streets to Hollywood Boulevard
“From pop culture to high culture, Venezuela’s conflict is leading actors, artists, athletes and fashion designers to voice their support for the antigovernment protesters, with a minority backing President Nicolás Maduro.” And those celebrity statements have inspired conspiracy theories from both sides of Venezuela’s political divide.
Watching ‘The Act of Killing’ in Indonesia
Just this past weekend, The New York Times ran an article on how Joshua Oppenheimer’s award-winning documentary about the massacres after Indonesia’s failed 1965 coup is having little visible effect in Indonesia itself. Here another author describes a screening in Yogyakarta and suggests that the film is having a quiet but powerful effect in the country.
Sean Potts, Co-Founder of The Chieftains, Dead at 83
A virtuoso of the humble tin whistle, Potts joined Paddy Moloney and colleagues in 1962 to join the group that went on to become global megastars of Irish folk music.
Amid the Chaos, There’s One Italian Opera House That’s Actually Functional
That’s Turin’s Teatro Regio, “where performances increased to 110 in 2012 from 85 in 2005, even with a reduction in staff. Its orchestra and chorus have also just announced an ambitious North American tour.” And there’s one individual who seems to deserve a lot of the credit.
Mediums and Spiritualists as Theatre Artists
Using Angela Lansbury’s upcoming West End turn as Madame Arcati as a jumping-off point, Lyn Gardner looks at the theatrical techniques and elements used by the early-20th-century séance conjurers who inspired Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit.
‘The Tension Between Taylor Swift’s Legs and the Arctic Melt Is Not Just a Journalistic Problem, It’s a Problem for Our Society’
So said Alain de Botton in a talk at the Brooklyn Academy of Music about the way we consume news today.
RSC’s ‘Wolf Hall’/'Bring Up the Bodies’ Headed to West End
The Royal Shakespeare Company’s two-part staging of Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize-winning novels about Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII have been playing to packed houses in Stratford-upon-Avon since December.
‘The Best Six Months of My Writing Life’: Hilary Mantel on Putting Her Cromwell Novels Onstage
“I’ve had so much inspiration from what happens on stage night by night – and I’ve understood things that I don’t think I did understand before about the characters.”
Obama Arts Budget – Meh…
“President Obama’s proposed federal budget for the coming 2014-15 fiscal year would lift spending 3.5% overall for the six main federal arts and culture agencies but provide no increase for the three grant-making bodies that disburse money to nonprofit groups outside Washington, D.C.”
Where The Oscars Orchestra Was (Not In The Theatre)
“While TV viewers could hear the song, they couldn’t see the orchestra in the Dolby Theatre. That’s because the orchestra was about a mile away from the stage.”
Rafael Vinoly Talks About What The Cleveland Art Museum Makeover Does For The City
“The people that put money in this place could have gotten a villa in Italy, too, or bought more apartments in New York City. So there is a decision on the part of the citizens here that reflects that attitude.”