“In comments that circulated widely in social media, self-exiled Venezuelan pianist Gabriela Montero on Thursday posted an open letter on her Facebook page criticizing Dudamel, saying he was ignoring ‘the toxic oasis’ in which she says El Sistema now operates.”
“What I find odd is that biographers apparently feel a need to depict their subjects as especially admirable human beings, something that in the end makes their lives less rather than more interesting and harder rather than easier to relate to their writing.”
Just compare us to Paris, Rome or even New York. The arts are cheap – 14 pence a week per taxpayer goes to the arts, a third of what the French spend. It’s a tiny sum of money.” But the subsidy is shrinking. “I don’t use the word ‘subsidy’. It’s a wet, tedious word. I use ‘investment’. ‘Subsidy’ sounds so passive.”
It points out excessive adjectives, tiresome uses of the passive voice and so on. What it doesn’t do, sadly, obviously, is get you any closer to Papa’s prose.
“The streaming service Pandora is squaring off against Ascap in a closely watched trial over royalty payments. Big music publishers like Sony/ATV and Universal are calling on the government to overhaul the system, and technology companies are accusing the publishers of trying to skirt federal rules meant to protect them.”
“The deal could impact satellite TV, television programmers like ESPN and Fox, online video providers like Netflix and YouTube, and the massive networks at the very heart of the internet.”
“Digital audio gives us the opportunity to control any sound with a bunch of buttons floating beneath a glass screen, but it also offers the chance to create instruments that take new forms and inspire new types of performances, unbound by strings, sound holes, hammers or acoustics.”
It may well be that Aby Rosen is “legally empowered to take down ‘Le Tricorne,’ and in so doing run the very real risk of destroying it. We’ll find out a few weeks from now. But it shouldn’t have to come to that. Mr. Rosen claims to appreciate art. Well, here’s the acid test of his appreciation.”
James Wood: “When I left this country 18 years ago, I didn’t know how strangely departure would obliterate return: how could I have done? It’s one of time’s lessons, and can only be learned temporally.”
“Final regulations are due Friday, but the department hasn’t even started writing them. Transportation spokeswoman Meghan Keck said the agency hasn’t had enough money to do the work needed to write the regulations.”
These national academies in Eastern Europe maintain the academic figurative art traditions. They’re clearly out of step with the contemporary world. And yet, do they preserve traditions we might rediscover and value again?
A new analysis by the Design Management Institute, a Boston-based nonprofit focused on design management, puts numbers to what design junkies suspected all along: in the past 10 years, design-driven companies outperformed the Standard & Poor’s 500–a stock market index of 500 large publicly traded companies–by 228%.
They argue that dressing in an unconventional way “signals that one has the autonomy needed to act according to one’s own inclinations.”
“Gone are hundreds of once-independent broadcast outlets. In their stead is a truncated list of nationwide, homogenized, and de-journalized empires that respond more to quarterly reports than to the information needs of citizens.”
“Every single step that they [the board and the school administration] have taken is counterproductive to music education,” he says. “It was like an abusive relationship. You only take so much for so long and then you ask, “Why am I killin’ myself here?”
There have been countless comedies, musicals and tragedies, but only a few pure horror plays. Why is that?
“How do you discover new music? Some companies have bet on human editors, while others put their weight behind clever algorithms. One company thinks the solution is actually more like a pendulum that swings back and forth between the two.”
Philip Kennicott on arts in the Obama Administration: “Why has it neglected one of the fundamental tools it has for shaping attitudes to American culture? Why did President George W. Bush manage to use the NEA so effectively while Obama has manifested only indifference? Is this the sad reality of the technocratic mindset, that culture is secondary or tertiary, and not worth the bother?”
George Packer: “Recently, Amazon even started creating its own ‘content’ … In the book business the prospect of a single owner of both the means of production and the modes of distribution is especially worrisome: it would give Amazon more control over the exchange of ideas than any company in U.S. history.”
George Packer: “Perhaps a sector that monetizes information is more likely to become obsessed with protecting it than if the product were oil or cars. But even in this atmosphere, Amazon is reflexively, absurdly secretive … From Amazon’s point of view, there might be nothing to be gained from greater openness … But I would argue that a culture of secrecy is bound to end up harming the institution itself.”
“Penguin India has agreed to recall and destroy all remaining copies of a book on Hinduism by a leading American academic … Wendy Doniger’s book The Hindus: An Alternative History had been the subject of a legal challenge claiming the text was offensive to Hindus.
“Dinanath Batra has arm-twisted … Penguin India into recalling and destroying American scholar Wendy Doniger’s book, The Hindus: An Alternative History. Here’s why he has a problem with it.”
“As we discover more about love’s neural basis, we are getting closer to a pill to diminish heartbreak.”
“Breaking up is hard to do. If drugs could ease the pain, when should we use them, asks neuro-ethicist Brian D. Earp.”
“While arranged marriages are considered the moral norm, pursuing individual love fantasies are potentially frowned upon and discouraged in a lot of traditional … homes.” (Can you guess? Probably.)
“An unnamed American collector paid $70 million [£42 million] for Portrait of George Dyer Talking, a 1966 canvas depicting the artist’s lover perched on a stool, his twisted body positioned under a naked light bulb as though he were being interrogated.”
Christopher Knight looks at how the men and women who rescued so much great European art from the Nazis affected U.S. museums – much for the better – after they came home.
The Arts Council of Ireland has engaged London-based consultants to conduct a top-to-bottom review of the Republic’s national theatre company. While the Abbey has a high reputation in the U.S., observers at home have lately found it to have serious problems with both costs and artistic quality.
He’s best remembered for his Emmy-winning portrayal as Pa Walton, but he continued to work frequently in television through last year and founded a theater company in Los Angeles.
“Recently hired general director Rob Tannenbaum has resigned as head of the Sacramento Region Performing Arts Alliance – the merged organization formed out of the Sacramento Philharmonic and Opera … for ‘personal and professional reasons’.”