“Some experienced show business hands wonder if Hollywood has worn out moviegoers by blasting them with too much nomination-related marketing.”
Archives for February 21, 2014
Today’s Top AJBlog stories 02.21.14
University of Maryland Blindsided by Corcoran’s Surprise Deal
Source: CultureGrrl | Published on 2014-02-21
My Own Secret Drone Program
Source: PostClassic | Published on 2014-02-21
Are Artists Really Eccentric?, and Forgetting the Beatles
Source: CultureCrash | Published on 2014-02-21
Risk and privilege
Source: The Artful Manager | Published on 2014-02-21
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How A New Zealand Theatre Rose From The Dead After An Earthquake
“We were far too busy gathering family, collecting what we could from our devastated home and fleeing the city to notice that the Court Theatre – the largest theatre company in the country – was effectively dead. No home, no show.”
Canadian Fans Say Olympic Ice Dance Results Were Fixed
“The villainy of ice dancing knows no bounds. If the fix is not in against Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, then I’m the Princess of Wales.”
Author James Patterson Gives Away $1 Million To Help Independent Bookstores
“The money is heading toward smaller bookstores, which are under pressure from competitors like Amazon and e-books. Patterson’s own books are big sellers everywhere — he doesn’t depend on small bookstores to succeed. But his giveaway is driven by a broader concern.”
Phoenix Symphony Picks A New Music Director
“Tito Muñoz, who currently serves as music director of the Opéra National de Lorraine and Orchestre Symphonique et Lyrique de Nancy in France, will take the baton at Phoenix’s Symphony Hall for seven classics concerts in the 2014-15 season. A native of Queens, N.Y., he is 30 years old — the same age of his predecessor, Michael Christie, when Christie came to the Valley in 2004.”
Plans To Convert Abandoned Paris Metro Stations Into Nightclubs, Swimming Pools
“Most of the ghost stations have been closed since France entered World War II in 1939. And although they haven’t seen passengers in 75 years, many of them have still led a somewhat active life.”
Brain Scan: How Dog Brains Are Similar To Human Brains
“Like humans, dogs appear to possess brain systems that are devoted to making sense of vocal sounds, and are sensitive to their emotional content. These systems have not previously been described in dogs or any non-primate species.”
Collectors Sue Keith Haring Foundation Over Authentication
“The lawsuit says the foundation stopped authenticating his works in 2012. It alleges the goal was to limit the number of authenticated works so they would be worth more money.”
The School Of Merce Cunningham And John Cage On A Downward Spiral
Seattle’s Cornish College “could revolutionize into a destination school, or it could keep on the way it’s been keeping on, responding to lower enrollment by continuing to make cuts, feeding a downward cycle. After 100 years, could Cornish shut down forever?”
The Critics’ “Best Year”? (Maybe It Wasn’t The Best Year For Critics!)
Rather than single out 2013 as an exceptional year for drama on stage and screen, I posit a different reason for its noteworthiness: It marked the period in which grade inflation by critics became a commonly deployed strategy for dealing with the cultural and economic insecurity that shows no signs of abating in post-recessionary America.
Why Did It Take 10 Years For The FCC To Require Closed Captioning Be Accurate?
“Closed captioning is designed to help the deaf and hearing-impaired enjoy television and receive important news and weather reports. Unfortunately, captions are often riddled with typos and incomplete sentences that leave viewers struggling to make sense of what is being said.”
A Plan To Find, Recover 20th Century Music Lost Through Repression/Supression
Since the Nazis’ concept of “degenerate music” was driven mainly by racial ideology, the works they suppressed cover a wide range of styles, from atonal modernism to idioms influenced by cabaret and jazz. The Soviet notion of “socialist realism” was sufficiently elastic that almost anyone who didn’t pass muster politically could be targeted as an anti-Soviet composer.
One Man’s Quixotic Attempt To Recreate A Vermeer
“What seemed to make this the height of folly was that Tim Jenison, born in 1955, had no training or experience as a painter. Moreover, in Johannes Vermeer, he was embracing an artist whose canvases, for all their immense charm and quotidian content, are among the most complex, difficult and well … mysterious in the annals of great Western art.”
The Case Of The Illustrator (Who Earned Little) And The Painter (Who Got $5.7 Million)
“There is, then, an undercurrent of injustice to the astronomical price of Glenn Brown’s imitation: he has reaped a larger financial reward. Chris Foss must settle for something else: the plain knowledge that he defined and popularized a niche—a noble success, but one that seizes fewer headlines than seven-figure auction prices.”
Dallas Museum Of Art – A Tsunami Of New Friends (It’s All About The Data)
“Since introducing the program in January 2013, the museum has registered more than 50,000 DMA Friends, as free members are known. It continues to add more than 1,000 Friends per week. Before free memberships were introduced, the museum had 18,000 paid members.”
The Very Curious Case Of Why USC Is Closing Its Creative Writing Program
The official explanation — that it was a “business decision” — doesn’t sway most of the students.
About The Oscars: Turns Out His Name Wasn’t Really Oscar At All
“With his square chest, broad shoulders, and tapered legs, Oscar is an art deco god. But, as familiar as he may be, it turns out we don’t know Oscar very well. For one, Oscar’s name isn’t Oscar.”
Candy Crush: Addictive Game, Incredible Business, Horrible Investment
Derek Thompson: “Last year the company took in $1.88 billion with $568 million in profits – half $1 billion in profits! To put this in perspective, a mobile gaming company specializing in colored sugar baubles made more than a quarter of Amazon’s lifetime earnings in a year.” But can that possibly last?
Meet the Billionaire Who Does ‘Patriotic Giving’ to D.C. Arts
David M. Rubenstein has donated $200 million to cultural institutions that belong to, and are usually funded by, the Federal government: the National Archives, the Kennedy Center, the National Zoo, and even the Washington Monument.
Turkish TV’s ‘Ottomania’, And The Political Problems It Poses
“In this video, [author Elif] Batuman reviews scenes from the first episode of [the wildly popular prime-time series] Magnificent Century and explains why a show fascinated by the past is a problem for Turkey’s political present.”
Yes, Fund More Theatres Outside London, But Do It Carefully
Lyn Gardner: “Hacking away at London funding and simply throwing it at the big regional theatres outside the M25 would be easy but not helpful. The right help needs to be targeted in the right places … Get it wrong, and we might just as well sit around burning £50 notes.”
Now Martha Graham’s Dances Can Be Archived the Way Merce Cunningham’s Are
The Mellon Foundation has given a $1 million grant to the Martha Graham Center of Contemporary Dance to organize and digitize its archives and to create “toolkits” to help revive and restage Graham’s works.
Saving a Fellow Photographer’s Work Amid the Chaos of the Central African Republic
AP photographer Jerome Delay tells how, while covering the horrific violence in the capital city, Bangui, he came across – and managed to salvage from a house in the midst of being looted – 30 years’ worth of photos, prints and negatives belonging to his friend Samuel Fosso, who had escaped to the safety of Paris. (audio)
This Company Wants to Print All of Wikipedia As 1,000 Dead-Tree Books
The company PrintPedia, whose product is an app to print Wikipedia content on demand, is trying to raise $50,000 on Indiegogo to produce the complete English-language Wikipedia as a 1,193,014-page, 1,000-volume set of books. Isn’t that completely beside the point? Depends on what exactly the point is.