Today’s Stories
Getty Trust Commits $100 Million To Conserve Antiquities Around The World
The trust, which operates the Getty Museum, has long focused on ancient Greek and Roman antiquities. This new program, however, is designed to expand the conservation efforts it underwrites to countries where they have not worked before, including Southeast Asia and Central and South America. – The New York Times
Get Politics Out Of Classical Music? Well, Er…
These invectives against “political” music seem to stand out more due to our current contentious climate, which may create the impression that there has been an uptick in the number of modern pieces with a political orientation. But the truth is that there has always been a desire on the part of artists to respond to the issues of the moment. – NewMusicBox
Dublin’s Quirkiness Is Being Scrubbed. Why?
The past few years have seen several of Dublin’s murals painted over, street markets canceled, and bars and cultural venues closed. Often, the things replacing them are facilities for tourists. With many fearing that the city’s vitality and character is being permanently stripped away, there’s a growing concern that Dublin risks being totally surrendered to pressures created by developers and the tourist industry. – CityLab
The Guardian Picks The Best New Architecture Of The Modern Age
Twenty-five projects make the list – from Tate Modern to housing in South America to New York’s High Line. – The Guardian
How Tate Modern Became An Iconic And Celebrated Building
“Twenty years on, the project is no less powerful. In fact, it seems eerily ahead of its time. The turn of the millennium was a time when “iconic” architecture was in its overblown prime, every city desperate for a piece of the “Bilbao effect”, following Frank Gehry’s thrashing titanium fish for the Guggenheim Museum. To take what seemed like a gloomy 1950s brick shed and strip it out, adding a bare minimum of new elements in raw concrete, glass and steel, was a deeply strange thing to do.” – The Guardian
British Council Urged To Clarify The Role Of Culture In International Promotion
“Artists should not feel like salespeople. There’s a real danger around [perceptions of] Empire 2.0 as a consequence of Brexit. They [the British Council] need to be very careful that UK PLC is not running the show, otherwise what UK culture is considered as becomes very reductive, and the subtlety of soft power gets lost.” – Arts Professional
Despite Death Threats And Rocket Attacks, She Runs A Feminist Radio Station In Afghanistan
Sediqa Sherzai founded Radio Roshani in Kunduz in 2008. The Taliban fired rockets at the station the next year. In 2015 they stole the station’s equipment and planted mines in the building. Nevertheless, she persists. – BBC
£1 Billion Investment In London To Create Cultural Events Centre
Investment includes plans to include a 1500-seat theatre, a 1000-seat performing arts venue, a four-screen cinema and a 670,000 square foot creative co-working space, as well as two hotels, shops, cafes and a “jazz-club style restaurant and venue”. When completed in 2023, the site is projected to attract up to £9m in consumer spending and 10 million visitors to the borough each year. – Arts Professional
Architects Explain How Those Super-Tall, Super-Skinny New York Apartment Towers Stand Up In The Wind
“As the wind goes around the building, it accelerates, and it creates vortices that alternate, causing the building to move from side to side. Sometimes we can use that phenomenon, cutting openings for the wind and converting it to energy with turbines. Here, we’re not trying to bring the wind through the building; we’re managing it, shaping the notches to optimize wind flow.” Justin Davidson talks with the designers of the 130-story Central Park Tower. – New York Magazine
Street Theatre With Giant Moles
“These tufty mammals are the stars of Philippe Quesne’s The Moles, which ran at N.Y.U. Skirball over the weekend and kicked off with a Friday afternoon parade through the West Village. A rock concert, a nature mockumentary, a collective hallucination and a goof on the idea of underground theater, The Moles welcomes audiences, wordlessly, to Caveland, a stalactite-studded subterranean lair that the moles invade and then enjoy, sometimes in the company of a neighborly purple teddy bear.” – The New York Times
Architecture That Redefines The Relationships Between In And Out
Whether any of these gestures will mitigate the pressing problems of global warming and rising sea levels is still unknown — the fix likely requires more than what one landscape architect calls “boutique wetlands.” But projects debuting this fall suggest that hard barriers between the designed environment and the natural one are softening — maybe for good. – The New York Times
Scans Of Artists Painting Using Their Feet Show The Brain Rewiring Itself
In typically developed people, the “foot” part of the map is a solid region, with no distinct representation of the toes. But in the brains of Tom Yendell and Peter Longstaff, there were clear toe areas, arranged in order. – The New York Times
Diversity, Gender Equity, Innovation — Here’s A Ballet Company That’s Living Up To The Ideals
“With just 10 dancers, [Ballet X is] a model of what is possible for small contemporary ballet troupes — and it embodies many of the ideals that larger companies are striving for today. It commissions lots of women. Half of the company members are dancers of color. The work pushes ballet in new directions, whether through innovative story ballets or genre-bending collaborations. It’s deeply rooted in its Philadelphia community, and has fostered an open company culture rarely found in ballet.” – Dance Magazine
Three Trans-Gender Opera Singers Talk About Their Careers
Baritone Lucas, who decided to keep singing with her booming, low-voice type after her physical transition rather than trying to retrain her voice to sing soprano or mezzo roles, is rising to the very top of her profession. In May, she became the first trans singer to perform a lead role in a classic operatic work in the U.S. when she starred in “Don Giovanni” with the Tulsa Opera in Oklahoma. In October, she will play a lead role with the English National Opera in London. – KQED
The Entire ‘Creative Industries’ Construct Is Hurting Artists, Not Helping Them
“The accompanying political narrative was that the creative industries would champion the social utility of arts and culture as progressive realms to engage fractured communities, realise progressive values and create a more sustainable economic world. … Now it seems impossible to doubt the economic success story that is the creative industries,” at least in terms of the size of their contribution to the economy. “The trouble is that all this ‘success’ has come at the expense of any cultural, artistic or creative integrity that the sectors once had before they were herded into a single political concept.” – Prospect (UK)
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Harlem Nonprofit Providing Art Education In Public Schools Expands To Two More Cities
“As the 2019 school year gets underway, ProjectArt, an initiative founded by Ardash Alphons in Harlem in 2011, is expanding to New Orleans and San Francisco, bringing arts access to two cities with large communities of homeless young people and giving the organisation a presence in a total of eight cities across the US (By 2021, ProjectArt plans to be in ten cities.)” – The Art Newspaper
MIT Invents A Black Even Blacker Than Vantablack
Three years ago, the invention of Vantablack, a carbon nanotube coating that absorbs up to 99.965% of all light, made headlines, especially when artist Anish Kapoor acquired exclusive rights to its use in artworks, infuriating other artists. Now MIT scientists have discovered — by accident, they say — a carbon nanotube material that absorbs 99.99% of light. And to demonstrate, they’ve coated a $2 million yellow diamond with the stuff. (Meanwhile, BMW has made a car coated with Vantablack.) – Newsweek
Yannick Nézet-Séguin Signs Lifetime Contract With His Montreal Orchestra
The Orchestre Métropolitain, where native Montrealer YNS held his first music director position (beginning in 2000) and which he brought to international attention, has appointed him Artistic Director and Chief Conductor for life, an extremely rare move in the orchestra world. – Ludwig Van
L.A. Philharmonic CEO Simon Woods Resigns, Effective Immediately
“After a great deal of reflection,” said Woods in a statement, “I have concluded that my hopes and aspirations lie elsewhere, and as a result, I have tendered my resignation.” He served in the position for less than 21 months, succeeding Deborah Borda at the beginning of 2018. – Los Angeles Times
Is Gary Larson About To Revive ‘The Far Side’?
“Fans of the surreal, the bizarre and sardonic anthropomorphic cows are in a fervour after The Far Side cartoonist Gary Larson’s website was updated this weekend with promises of ‘a new online era’, 24 years after the reclusive creator retired at the age of 44.” – The Guardian
Kentridge, Hatoum, Mutter, Bando, And Williams & Tsien Win Praemium Imperiale
The 2019 laureates for the ¥15 million ($141,000) award, created by the Japan Art Association as a sort of Nobel Prize for the arts, are William Kentridge (painting) Mona Hatoum (sculpture), Anne-Sophie Mutter (music), Tod Williams and Billie Tsien (architecture) and kabuki master Tamasaburo Bando V (theatre/film). – Deutsche Welle
Historic Find: Milton’s Notes On Shakespeare’s Plays
The astonishing find, which academics say could be one of the most important literary discoveries of modern times, was made by Cambridge University fellow Jason Scott-Warren when he was reading an article about the anonymous annotator by Pennsylvania State University English professor Claire Bourne. – The Guardian
A Little Art With That Wine? Wine Country Experiments With Installations
Some are dubious of the so-called Vine Art Movement. “Equating wine with art flatters the people who buy wine into thinking they’re participating in something larger than they are,” said James Conaway, the author of “Napa at Last Light.” And there have been some spectacular busts: Copia, an ambitious museum dedicated to wine, food and the arts, opened to much fanfare in 2001 then closed in 2008. – The New York Times
How Rich People Like Jeffrey Epstein Are Corrupting Science
“Money corrupts—which, duh—but the Epstein episode tells an even bigger story. The entire system for metabolizing philanthropic gifts, particularly private ones, into academic research is a poorly illuminated pile of broken guardrails. Even if most institutions and foundations are cautious internally, even if the unfolding scandal with Epstein and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is an outlier, the system is essentially a pool of dark money.” – Wired
The Internet Is Changing How We Write (For Bad And Good)
The Internet is speeding up the evolution of English by increasing our ability to stay loosely in touch with, and mutually influence, one another. – Washington Post