“In Washington and around the country, Mrs. Mondale became known as a tireless advocate for the cultivation of the arts. … She traveled around the country attending museum exhibitions, dedicating new works of art and otherwise directing national attention on artists, noted or undiscovered, whom she admired.”
On a cloudy December afternoon, Joshua Hammer follows the Nobel laureate from his native Cihangir (once the Greek quarter, later a red-light district, now Turkey’s Greenwich Village) to a lunch cart in a muddy plaza on the Bosporus, across the Golden Horn and past the grand and faded buildings of the late Ottoman government, to a favorite hole-in-the-wall near the Fatih Mosque,
“Muti has honed these winter season announcements into a sort of high-wire performance art. It is something he clearly enjoys and always proves entertaining for the assembled press, if nerve-wracking for CSO staff who never know what the irrepressible maestro is going to say next.”
He led orchestras in Denmark and Japan as well as in a number of German cities, and he spent a notable decade as music director of the Hamburg State Opera. Most famously, perhaps, he served a brief and stormy tenure as the first foreign chief conductor of the Czech Philharmonic.
On Channel Four’s Big Ballet, former Royal Ballet soloist Wayne Sleep and Ballet Ireland founder Monica Loughman train a newly-assembled company of larger women (many of whom studied dance seriously) for a new staging of Swan Lake.
“Composers have spent 40 years adapting” what remains of the score of Queenie Pie, “trying to figure out what the Duke wanted for his unfinished opus.”
Reporting, the Digital Age, and the Disappearing Middle Class
Source: CultureCrash | Published on 2014-02-03
More On Damage To Egypt’s Heritage
Source: Real Clear Arts | Published on 2014-02-03
Curator Barry Bergdoll Explains MoMA’s “Frank Lloyd Wright and the City”
Source: CultureGrrl | Published on 2014-02-03
Seahawks Sweat-Soda (a Partial Repost)
Source: Out There | Published on 2014-02-03
“He often played creeps, but he rarely played them creepily. His metier was human loneliness — the terrible uncinematic kind that has very little to do with high-noon heroism and everything to do with everyday empathy — and the necessary curse of human self-knowledge.”
“I am concerned with YouTube entering the market because for YouTube everything is about dominance, and dominance is connected to destruction. I would rather prefer perhaps Google not being in music.”
“A big question about her performance was, would she do it straight? Would she sing the anthem how it was written, or would she adopt the embellishments that have become de rigueur at big sporting events?”
“Suddenly we find ourselves living in an online realm where the old is just as easy to consume as the new. We’re approaching an odd sort of asymptote, as our past gets closer and closer to the present and the line separating our now from our then dissolves.”
“Both Sotheby’s and Christie’s now frequently coordinate with buyers, sellers, restitution lawyers and private art-loss databases to broker deals on art they discover was looted by the Nazis.”
“Together, the two controversies are this year’s contribution to an emerging insistence by many who watch the Oscar process, and some who participate in it, that Academy members should take into account moral, ethical and social factors when marking a ballot or enforcing the rules.”
“Authenticating art of all types has become more challenging in recent years as a widening circle of scholars and artists’ foundations refuse to offer opinions or publish a catalogue raisonné — the definitive compendium of an artist’s work — for fear of being sued by buyers or sellers unhappy with their conclusions.”
“Not everyone’s going to the strip clubs. Some people are actually, you know, writing poems when they’re at home or they’re working on a short story.”
The project in Dundee, Scotland, is going to open three years late – and doesn’t have all the answers about long-term funding for the museum – but a lottery grant of £9.4 million has set it back on track.
“Scientific publishing is clearly in flux. Not that long ago, most colleagues I spoke with saw the push for open-access publishing as the quixotic crusade of a few enthusiasts. Today, open-access journals are major players who fill the scientific community’s growing demand for places to publish.”
“Towers will spring up in Bay Area greenfields, just like Detroit back in the day. Fifty years going forward, these hulking structures will be suburban ruin porn and people will be shocked that San Francisco used to be the wealthiest city in the United States.”
“When programmers say what they do is just like what writers do, or painters, the error is that they aren’t claiming enough, the fault is that they are being too humble. To compare code to works of literature may point the programmer towards legibility and elegance but it says nothing about the ability of code to materialise logic.”
Daria Klimentova: “I have worked with some incredible people, who I will always remember. I have given my ballet life to English National Ballet, with all the ups and downs.”
“Because of financial issues the symphony says that its current season will be the final one in its current configuration.”
“I have no empirical proof, but I’m convinced symphony orchestras have gotten significantly louder even in my lifetime. Hearing loss has become a real danger for orchestra musicians. Next time you’re at an orchestra concert, notice how often players are popping earplugs during performances.”