Not Just Bad for Business
AJBlog: Audience Wanted | Published 2014-02-25
Blow the past open
AJBlog: Performance Monkey | Published 2014-02-25
Community Adopted: Grasshopper Bridge by Ed Carpenter
AJBlog: Aesthetic Grounds | Published 2014-02-25
“Jenifer Ringer, who retired this month from New York City Ballet, has been appointed head of the Colburn Dance Academy. The Colburn School, where music, dance and drama are currently taught, is starting the new, more specialized program in the fall, in partnership with the L.A. Dance Project and its director, Benjamin Millepied.”
“Even as the museum hurtles toward ground-breaking later this year, what remains unresolved is exactly what it will be: an elevated backlot tour designed to celebrate Hollywood and pack in tourists, an important institution devoted to telling the real and not-always-laudatory history of film, or a potentially awkward hybrid?”
“Turnarounds like the Paris Review’s make it clear that with the right editorial effort, putting more sustainable gender practices into action isn’t too difficult for these magazines at the top of the major market heap.”
Dominic Antonucci, one of ballet’s biggest stars, “was attacked and robbed by a group as he took a walk in a park, just before the company was due to perform on stage.”
“Lord Lloyd-Webber is a pick-yourself-up-and-dust-yourself-down kind of guy. He is also getting used to these kinds of box-office rebuffs – his last triumph, as he himself pointed out, was 20 years ago with Sunset Boulevard.”
“Literary publishing’s uneasy relationship with fan fiction has been complicated by the realization that fandom is a huge potential market—one stocked with both prolific authors and enthusiastic readers. But tapping that market is a dilemma few publishers seem quite prepared to engage.”
It’s an “increasingly universal phenomenon: the public square as an epicenter of democratic expression and protest, and the lack of one—or the deliberate manipulation of such a space—as a way for autocrats to squash dissent through urban design.”
“Today, the pipeline flows in many directions at once. Theaters genuinely interested in serving their communities would do well to develop twenty-first century ways of making theater.”
What once was a level playing field is now skewed by algorithms that favor the “haves” over the “have nots.” While it makes good business sense for Facebook, making artists, businesses and brands pay to “promote” content has taken some of the sheen off the Facebook experience.
Here’s a gallery of performances by some of the piano world’s best artists when they were very old.
“In the course of the Saturday protest, we were outraged to learn about the inadequate pay of the museum’s security guards. As part of their efforts to keep us and the priceless art on display safe, they are paid a mere ten dollars an hour by one of the wealthiest institutions in New York and indeed globally.”
In 2008 I sold a book-in-progress for $200,000 ($170,000 after commission, to be paid in four installments), which still seems to me like a lot of money. At the time, though, it seemed infinite. The resulting book—a “paperback original,” as they’re called—has sold around 8,000 copies, which is about a fifth of what it needed to sell not to be considered a flop. This essentially guarantees that no one will ever pay me that kind of money to write a book again.
The photographer got word of the Banksy removal via social media. He said that despite being busy with other projects, he grabbed his cameras and headed for what locals call the ‘Umbrella Girl.’ When he arrived, he said he saw that “guys had shown up and were chopping the Banksy out of the wall.”
A successful concert musician in Prague before World War II, she was interned at the Nazi’s Potemkin concentration camp, Theresienstadt, where she played in the now-famous orchestra. She is the subject of the short documentary The Lady in Number 6, in contention for an Oscar this weekend.
A major star during the 1970s, he made headlines when he abruptly retired from the stage at age 35, when many observers thought he was at his peak. He went on to direct three ballet companies – Santiago (twice), Cincinnati, and English National – where he raised standards, garnered international attention, and always seemed to bring turmoil.
“Kiev’s Independence Square has been home to many writers and artists. The Ukrainian playwright Natalya Vorozhbit spent the last three months conducting interviews around the area. Her intention, she writes, is to create a piece of theatre to capture what happened when a peaceful protest escalated into horror.”
A court in Bermuda has ruled that the trust controlling the estate of the Swiss magnate Christof Engelhorn may not renege on the pledge he made before he died to donate 130 million Swiss francs toward the construction of a modular opera house near Lucerne’s famous Cultural Center.
“If you live somewhere with easy access to Variety or an I-95 exit, it might be impossible to imagine finding somebody who hasn’t heard of (or hasn’t sat, bleary-eyed, ingesting the entirety of) House of Cards … But how many people actually watched the show?” (It may not matter as much as you’d think.)
Alain de Botton: “Beneath the rage, one senses a touching belief that the problems of the world are basically solvable, it’s just they aren’t being dealt with swiftly or decisively enough for the simple reason, to which every new day provides fresh testimony, that we are ruled by crooks and idiots. The relevant insights are there, just in the wrong hands.”
The Spanish choreographer has extended his contract for an additional five years, through the company’s 50th anniversary season.
In a short video titled Dancing on Rough Ground, “Anastasia Kurkova describes the challenges she faced after leaving her home country to join one of the most competitive ballet companies in Germany.”
The 29-year-old New Jersey native first came to notice as (arguably) the anti-hero in the documentary The Audition, about the 2007 Met National Council Auditions.
Colin Fleming: “And it is absolutely bonkers, mad, brave, cheekily pugnacious, punchy, and akin to what Lear’s Fool, Samuel Beckett, and a young Mozart might have come up with if those three ever got together to have a musical bash.”