Man Saved By Pianos In NYC Building Collapse
“The pianos flew in the air — pianos were all around me,” he said. “They were literally on their side. I was stuck in some miraculous cocoon” of pianos, he said of the massive wood and steel instruments that fell benignly around his body — shielding him from the weight of five stories worth of debris.
Association Of Art Museum Directors Condemns College Art Museum Sale
“The prohibition against the sale of works of art from museum collections for such purposes is a violation of one of the most fundamental professional principles of the art museum field,” the museum directors’ association said in a statement.
Is Your DNA As An Actor Set In The Womb?
“While raw talent and rigorous training are clearly vital, recent research suggests the importance of an even more fundamental factor: The level of testosterone the budding thespian was exposed to in his or her mother’s womb.”
John Banville Talks About The Agony Of Being A Writer
“Doing what you do well is death. Your duty is to keep trying to do things that you don’t do well, in the hope of learning.”
Conductor Christoph von Dohnanyi On The Responsibilities And Rewards Of Being An Artist
“I don’t like the idea that artists should keep out of politics. The more you know and understand art, the more you have to defend values. You should speak up—and early enough to matter.”
Budapest Launches An Architectural Competition To Build Five New Museums At Once
“Officials say that the total estimated costs for the five museum buildings in the cultural quarter is 75 billion Hungarian forints (€239m), with much of the money coming from funds allocated to the country by the EU.”
A Utopian Society – One Group’s Quest To Build A Floating Country That Creates Its Own Culture
“About six years ago, a group based in California’s Bay Area, led by the grandson of U.S. economist Milton Friedman, began designing and raising money for a floating ocean city-state, whose citizens could harness the sea to solve hunger, cure sickness and fix climate change.”
Sotheby’s Under Attack (And How What The Auction House Does Might Utterly Change)
There’s a “battle between the Sotheby’s Old Guard and a financier who views artworks as financial assets that trade in a market made by the auction houses. The confrontation figures to get bitter and bruising between now and May, but at its center there sits a rather more exalted question: How do you properly value art?”
Is This True: Audiences Are More Open To New Choral Music Than To New Instrumental Music?
“Choirs routinely look for and program new music and that draws audiences, but instrumental ensembles suffer at the box office when presenting new works. In my opinion, there are a few reasons for this, with the main reason having to do with the difference between the human voice and instruments.”
10,000 Hours Of Practice Can Let You Master Anything? Science Weighs In On The Idea
Different levels of deliberate practice can only explain one third of the variation in performance levels in chess players and musicians, the authors found, “leaving the majority of the reliable variance unexplained and potentially explainable by other factors.”
36 Ways The World Wide Web Has Changed Us
“With more than 4 billion indexed Web pages, thousands imploding and starting up by the day, any thorough accounting of the Web’s impact would be impossible.”
What They Almost Called The Internet 25 Years Ago
Tim Berners-Lee: Mine of Information, The Information Mine, The Mesh. None had quite the right ring.
Getty Endowment Recovers
“An audited financial statement posted on the Getty’s website reflects investment gains totaling $766.74 million from mid-2012 to mid-2013, enough to cover expenses while socking away about $534 million for the endowment. Officials said the endowment gained an additional $300 million during the second half of 2013, reaching $6.2 billion by year’s end.”
Canada Gets Its Version of the U.S. Justice Dept.’s E-Book Price-Fixing Suit
“Kobo is beginning to feel the pinch of prospective lower profit margins in Canada. The Canadian Government is forcing them to renegotiate contracts with all of their major publishing partners.”
Missing Norman Rockwell Turns Up in Ohio
“The 1939 painting, called Sport, was used as one of the many Saturday Evening Post covers for which the artist is well-known. It sold last spring for more than $1 million at an auction in New York and disappeared later last year” – in Queens, yet again.
Who’s Designing the Serpentine Gallery Pavilion This Summer?
A Chilean architect named Smiljan Radic – and it will look like a cross between a flying saucer and Stonehenge.
Why Can’t Conservatives Pull Off a ‘Daily Show’?
“Political philosophy isn’t what keeps Republican-leaning comics from succeeding – it’s corporate hurdles, cultural forces, and the demographics of show business.”
Okay, Folks, Don’t Expect ‘Cosmos’ to Save Science in America
“If only Americans loved science a little more, the thinking goes, we could end our squabbling about climate change, clean energy, evolution, and funding NASA and the National Science Foundation. These are high hopes to pin on a television show, even one as glorious as Cosmos.”
Why We Can’t Stop Liking the Brands We Loved as Kids
Derek Thompson describes it as the Concrete-Mix theory of habit formation.
The Most Famous Playwright Most of Us Have Never Heard Of
Jon Fosse is “perhaps Europe’s most-performed living dramatist, translated into 40-odd languages. In 2010, he won the biggest prize in global theatre, the £275,000 Ibsen award,” and last year he was thought to be a frontrunner for the literature Nobel. Why does the English-speaking world know so little of him?
Russia’s Upstart Ballet Company Finally Schedules U.S. Debut
The Mikhailovsky Ballet, the well-funded St. Petersburg company that famously lured Natalia Osipova and Ivan Vasiliev away from the Bolshoi, was going to appear in New York in 2012 – until ABT, which also engaged the couple, invoked a non-compete clause. But they’re coming stateside at last.
What Do These ‘Kings of the Dance’ Think of the Title?
Ivan Vasiliev is sort of inspired by his kingship; Roberto Bolle is more amused.
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Master of Arts in Arts Administration – Goucher College
Keep your job and earn your master's degree wherever you are - office, home, backstage, or on the road. Limited-residency, nationally recognized faculty, practical … [Read More...]
Executive Director, Western Folklife Center
The Western Folklife Center is searching for a new executive director to succeed Charlie Seemann, who is retiring. Headquartered at Elko, Nevada, a historic ranching, mining, and railroad town in the … [Read More...]
Sam Mendes’ 25 Tips For Directors
Avoid, please, all metaphors of plays or films as “pinnacles” or “peaks”; treat with absolute scorn the word “definitive”; and if anyone uses the word “masterpiece,” they don’t know what they’re doing. The pursuit of perfection is a mug’s game.
Here’s What LA’s Creative Economy Looks Like In 2014
“The distinction in creative labor, put simply, is that artists have autonomous control over the direction of their creative output, whereas members of the “creative industries” produce products on spec. While both trade the products of their labor for capital, the latter, professionalized class dwarfs the former in economic clout, and so is dramatically more lucrative and stable an avocation.”
Why Repetition Is Fundamental To Our Enjoyment Of Music
“Music didn’t acquire the property of repetitiveness because it’s less sophisticated than speech, and the 347 times that iTunes says you have listened to your favourite album isn’t evidence of some pathological compulsion – it’s just a crucial part of how music works its magic.”
The Advantages Of Disadvantage
“There is this weird thing where having a little bit of resources is worse than having none. Or: having a few numbers of options is worse than having no options. It can be freeing to be at the very bottom.”
Van Gogh Museum Resumes Ban On Photographing In Galleries After Complaints
“Permitting photography led to constant tension between those who wanted a clear view for their camera and those who wished to look at the paintings. Many also insisted on photographing their companion or themselves in front of a picture. This led to numerous complaints from other visitors.”
The Future Of Books: A Netflix-Like Subscription Model?
“So now that we know that it’s possible to deliver books like magazines, to sell them like magazines, and to target them at clusters of readers like magazines, the big question looms: Do book enthusiasts actually want to engage with literature the way they engage with magazines? And can they afford to?”
Should America’s Broadcast TV Networks Abandon Free And Move To A Subscription Model?
“By going all-subscription now, the big networks would have a chance to define that future rather than becoming its victims.”
Tone-Deaf Minnesota Orchestra Board Bobbles Leadership
“This talented orchestra and Vänskä, who resigned as a show of support for his players, have almost come to represent a blue-collar crew who took on the elite in the city. But now with deadlines looming and the newfound attention the orchestra is receiving, there’s also a new pressure on the board to act.”
“Mozart In the Jungle” Gets Picked Up As A Series
Blair Tindall’s memoir turned into an Amazon.com series. “Amazon Studios has settled on four series orders among the 10 pilots the company announced last month were under consideration, according to sources close to the deals.”
Critics Hated This Show But It’s Finding An Audience. Here’s How
“So how come a show with no press support and a tiny marketing budget (we’ve had some tube posters) found an audience? The answer seems to be social media.”
How 20,000 Lines Of Code Became One Of The World’s Most Recognized Sounds
“The THX Deep Note was played in front of 4,000 movie theater audiences a day, or around once every 20 seconds. Yet despite its distinctive crescendo, the THX Deep Note wasn’t actually composed so much as it was programmed, which makes it a fascinating success story of early computer audio design.”
City Of Seattle Creates Musician Loading Zones
“Seattle’s music scene is a critical part of our city’s cultural draw and the quality of life in our city,” said Mayor Ed Murray. “We want to better serve local music venues’ needs and the musicians that play there.”