US Media Giants Invade The UK
The vaunted “special relationship” between the U.S. and Britain is thriving in the media and entertainment space. But with Brexit clouds overhead and other countries emerging as international content hubs, the question is whether the feverish trans-Atlantic dealmaking will cool down — or whether it might actually heat up further as the FAANGs (digital players Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix and Google) enter the game. … Read More
How Funders Distort Artistic Vision
“There’s a push from the politicians to constantly fund something new. And what we really need is sustainable, long-term development. That’s how you build inclusion – because people who are excluded need to understand how they can get involved. If you keep changing the rules it’s bloody difficult for the people who are on the inside, and it becomes impossible for anyone on the outside.” … Read More
This Was Paul Taylor
Gia Kourlas: "I began interviewing Mr. Taylor in 1995, and talked with him (and his dancers) many times over the years. I realize I probably only scratched the surface of his singular, probing imagination, but that’s something. He would tease me relentlessly; that was fine. His amusement bought me time to ask another question. We talked about dance, of course, but we also talked about his life, his hobbies, his pets." … Read More
The Viola’s Big Problem
The viola is an inherently quixotic instrument. Its construction is a compromise between an acoustic ideal and human limits: For its sound to bloom as effortlessly as that of a violin or cello, its neck would need to be impossibly long. For most of the instrument’s history, composers have conspired to keep it out of the limelight, assigning it a supporting role. And chamber music conventions dictate that on the rare occasion that a viola does get the melody, it’s facing the wrong way. … Read More
English Critic Wrings Hands About Too Many American Musicals In The West End
Mark Shenton: "As welcome as all this activity is, it is also slightly worrying that the deluge of productions arriving simultaneously could dissipate the audience. Yes, musical aficionados will want to see them all; but a wider public may not have the funds or inclination to do so. It will also be an added challenge for producers to establish their shows in such a crowded marketplace." … Read More
Why Is Music Pleasurable? (No Really…)
"Perhaps then, pleasure and music are connected in some way further removed from both the obvious sonorous tickle that music affords or the formal demands that music places on the listener. Perhaps we haven’t gone far enough when we suppose that pleasure in music derives from the recognition within it of a passionate utterance, or an imitation of nature, or an intense game of challenging listening to be played. Perhaps we’ve been asking too many questions about what in music is pleasurable, and too few about how pleasure is a phenomenon with musical qualities." … Read More
Can Autistic People Really ‘Get’ Literature? (Yes)
"According to experts, autism's 'triad of impairments' (in communication, imagination and social interaction) made literature a bad fit for the autistic brain. ... If the mental states of others are beyond their reach, how can they possibly manage the moody jungle-gym of make-believe conflict that we call fiction? And if autistic people struggle with the dowsing rods of metaphor and irony, how can they divine a work's deeper meanings?" Well, Ralph James Savarese begs to differ. … Read More
DC’s African American Museum Opens Admission WIthout Reservations
Visitors began lining up before 8 a.m. on the last day of the holiday weekend, which was the first of the museum’s September Walk-up Weekdays. Several hundred were waiting when the doors to the Smithsonian’s newest venue opened at 10 a.m. … Read More
Buying, Selling, And Collecting Conceptual Art (A Brief History)
Nate Heller surveys the, er, concept - from Marcel Duchamp right up to Tino Sehgal's no-paper-trail-whatsoever performance pieces and Darren Bader's "lasagna on heroin" (a hunk of lasagna injected with heroin) - and considers such issues with conceptual art as insuring it (tricky) and storage (doesn't need much). … Read More
So You Think Immortality Would Be Grand, Do You?
The moral philosopher Samuel Scheffler at New York University has suggested that the real problem with a fantasy of immortality is that it doesn’t make sense as a coherent desire. Scheffler points out that human life is intimately structured by the fact that it has a fixed (even if usually unknown) time limit. We all start with a birth, then pass through many stages of life, before definitely ending in death. … Read More
DC’s National Book Fair Smashes Attendance Records
The festival, sponsored by the Library of Congress since 2001, drew at least 200,000 readers to the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in downtown D.C. They listened to talks and interviews with more than 100 authors, including Amy Tan, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Dave Eggers, Meg Wolitzer and Roxane Gay. Packed rooms were the order of the day for almost all the presentations. … Read More
Virginia Woolf’s ‘Orlando’: The First Triumph Of Trans Literature?
Jeanette Winterson: "The novel ... begins with a famously disingenuous sentence: 'He, for there could be no doubt about his sex ... ' and then we spend the rest of the novel doubting exactly that. Is Orlando the first English language trans novel? It is, yet in the most playful way. Orlando manages his transition with grace and a profound truth. On seeing himself as a herself for the first time in the mirror, she remarks: 'Different sex. Same person.'" … Read More
How We Separated Art From The Middle Classes
For all its sundry failings and inexcusable prejudices, conventional art history provided a fundamental framework for assessing quality. Grouping works according to such commonalities as place of origin, period and circumstances of execution, artistic intent, function and medium facilitated comparative judgments. In the last decades, academia largely rejected this sort of connoisseurship, because it was too often tied to “great man” narratives. Over the same period, professional art criticism was effectively obliterated by a journalistic obsession (both in the surviving print media and online) with glamour, scandal and money. While the art world was never entirely free from market forces, those forces are now essentially left alone to determine value. … Read More
Is It Exploitive To Use Real-Life Terrorist Attacks As Subjects For Feature Films?
"This year sees the release of two films which centre on the 2011 attack in Norway by rightwing extremist Anders Behring Breivik, which left 77 people dead. ... Questions arise around the ethics of this particular docudrama style of film-making – what can a film based on real events tell us that documentary footage or eyewitness testimony cannot?" … Read More
Why Are We Shaming Actors For How Much They Earn?
We can’t help making presumptions about their bank accounts, as if acting is less a career than a ticket to dreamland. Perhaps it’s time to stop differentiating what kind of work we think is “real”—whether it’s acting, bagging groceries, writing (hi!), governing a state, or tilling the fields—and start valuing hard work in whatever form it comes. … Read More
Premium Classifieds
Ballet Austin: Expanding Audiences for Unfamiliar Works
In 2015, Ballet Austin embarked on a six-year project to get some answers, spurred in part by a grant from The Wallace Foundation. Hewing to principles of what’s loosely known as “continuous … [Read More]
Publicity Manager, The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center seeks a creative, high energy Public Relations Manager, with proven success achieving consistent high visibility for a classical arts or other … [Read More]
Columbus Considers Ticket Tax To Fund Local Arts, And Local Artists Are Divided On It
"Under the proposal, tickets for events like concerts, movie showings and professional sports games would be subject to a 7 percent tax. The tax, if passed by Columbus City Council, would help fund local arts as well as maintenance at Nationwide Arena. But members of the arts community are divided on how much it would actually benefit the city." … [Read More]
The Oh-So-Brief Glory Of The Tangent Piano
That's brief in two senses: the instrument had a heyday of just a generation or so in the second half of the 18th century (only about 20 instruments survive), and the decay of the sound is quick enough that, as musical instrument historian Cleveland Johnson puts it, "on the tangent piano, one hears not only the beginning of every note, but the end. The instrument allows [its player] to play with this space between notes." (includes sound clips) … [Read More]
Ellie Mannette, Who Perfected The Steel Drum As Instrument, Dead At 90
"As a child in Port of Spain, Trinidad's capital, Mr. Mannette became fascinated with the bands he saw using trash cans and buckets as drums, hitting them in different ways to create different sounds. For the rest of his life, he sought to elevate and expand the craft of steel-pan music, and to share it with the world. He became a master tuner, builder and teacher." … [Read More]
Choreographing To Get The Obsessions Out Of His Head: Reggie Wilson
"An idea hits me and I think, Oh, that's cool. I usually don't follow it when it first happens. And then it will recur and recur, over and over again. It gets to the point of obsession. Making a dance will help me process it, think about it on multiple levels ... Then I have to 'get rid of it,' which means incorporating it into my everyday existence. Then it stops being disruptive." … [Read More]
A Crowdsourced Virtual Museum Commemorates Houston’s 2017 Floods
"What is the Houston Flood Museum? First off, it's somewhere that can be visited only online. It's a website, which went live last week, whose creators envision a platform where people can pool their stories from [Hurricane] Harvey and, perhaps one day, future storms. From shared experiences, they hope, will come understanding. And healing." … [Read More]
FBI Sting Recovers Stolen Ruby Slippers From ‘Wizard Of Oz’
"The slippers were on loan to the Judy Garland Museum in the late actress's hometown of Grand Rapids, Minnesota, when they were taken in 2005 by someone who climbed through a window and broke into a small display case. ... The FBI said a man approached the insurer in summer 2017 and said he could help get them back. ... After a nearly year-long investigation, the slippers were recovered in July during a sting operation in Minneapolis." … [Read More]
Jazz Pianist And Composer Randy Weston, 92
"[He] was among the most prominent ambassadors for traditional African music in the United States. A revered jazz pianist and composer, he incorporated that continent's complicated rhythms, tonalities and call-and-response patterns in records that ushered in a new era of transatlantic fusion." … [Read More]
At Old Vic, First Preview Changed To Dress Rehearsal, Then Cancelled When Star Collapses Onstage
It's been a difficult beginning for the new hip-hop musical Sylvia at the London theatre. Sept. 3 was to have been the first preview performance of the show about suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst, but the previous day, director Matthew Warchus, worried about the readiness of the production, rebranded the evening as an open dress rehearsal. Then, just after the second act began, the lead actress, Genesis Lynea, became ill and the performance was stopped. … [Read More]
UK National Theatre Artistic Director Goes Onstage With 30 Minutes’ Notice
Rufus Norris stepped in for ailing lead actor Richard Harrington in last Friday's sold-out performance of Laura Wade's Home, I'm Darling. "It's a last-resort situation," he said, "But it was only a few days before the show finishes and we couldn't add an extra date. We had a full house who wouldn't be able to see it again." … [Read More]
Staffers Ran Into Burning National Museum Of Brazil To Rescue Parts Of Collection
"[Paleontologist Paulo] Buckup, who has worked at the National Museum since 1996, led the group's harrowing entry into the museum. 'There were constant collapses while we were inside. There were falling objects and lots of smoke. In one area we realized there was a real risk of the ceiling collapsing, we could not assess when the third floor would fall.'" … [Read More]