“I don’t mean to sound cynical, but when I look at the films nominated for Best Picture, I can’t help but feel disappointed that such a glittery, bloated event, which costs roughly $38 million to produce, doesn’t have more substance to justify its self-congratulatory pride.”
Archives for February 28, 2014
Women At The Top: Museum Directors Run Majority Of American Museums
Evidence-Based Philanthropy? I Have A Problem With That
Who Owns “Happy Birthday”? (And Why That’s A Problem)
“Happy Birthday” generates an estimated $2 million each year in licensing fees for Warner/Chappell, largely from television and movie producers, and it’s not currently set to lose copyright protection until 2030. Avoiding these fees is why restaurant chains like Red Robin and Joe’s Crab Shack serenade customers with their own unique birthday songs.
How Publishing Is Failing Science
Are We Wrong About Who We Are In The Universe?
How NBC Kept Fan Videos Of The Olympics Off The Internet
Why Coverage Of That Smashed Ai Wei Wei Vase In Florida Was So Bad
“Stories of vandalism, destruction, forgery, and theft fascinate us because they are such tidy allegories of our relationship to art, a relationship that, at least since the time of the Armory Show, has consisted of a bizarre admixture of suspicion, discomfort, and occult reverence. Today, these attitudes are neatly characterized by the large fortunes that art sometimes commands.”
Metropolitan Opera To Ask Unions To Take Pay Cuts (First Time In 134 Years)
Should Artists Get Royalties When Their Work Is Resold? Here’s California As A Cautionary Tale
Liverpool’s Famous Everyman Theatre Reopens After £27 Million Makeover (And The City Chops Arts Budget In Half)
Why Doesn’t Dance Get The Serious Scholarly Attention That The Other Arts Do?
“Where is the equivalent to Adorno on Stravinsky and Schoenberg? Where the monographs to match those on Cubism, or the modern novel? If the link between the “Demoiselles d’Avignon” and temporality in fiction is worth examining, why not between that same painting and Nijinsky’s Sacre du Printemps?”
The Wellesley Sleepwalker After The Viral Controversy Dies Down
“The sleepwalker, now knee-deep in snow, has turned into an attraction akin to a meteorite that lands in a farmer’s field. People are coming from all over to see it. It has been clothed, posed with, and photographed almost constantly. Oddly, given the reaction of some at Wellesley, the general feeling generated by the work (at least while I was present) seems to be one of bemused endearment rather than trepidation.”
Why Is The Vienna Philharmonic So Slow To Change?
Sixteen years after the Philharmonic became one of the last big European orchestras to admit women, they are still an exotic sight onstage. Despite a blind audition policy, in which candidates are not visible when they play, the orchestra currently has just seven female members out of 130 total.
It’s Decision Day for Minnesota Orchestra Board
“The Minnesota Orchestra board meets Friday to consider the fates of former Music Director Osmo Vänskä and President and CEO Michael Henson. Hanging in the balance is the return of Vänskä, who resigned in October during the historic, 16-month labor lockout, as well as the question of the board’s confidence in Henson.”
Boston Museum of Fine Arts Director Steps Down
More Forged Abstract Expressionist Paintings Found in Queens House
Craig Lucas, Climbing Back From the Bottom
The playwright and screenwriter (Reckless, Prelude to a Kiss, Longtime Companion, Marry Me a Little, The Light in the Piazza) talks about drinking with his mother, running out of money and work even after he became famous, overcoming addiction, and what Philip Seymour Hoffman literally chased him down to say.
Well, They Won’t Be Shutting Down the Rome Opera Just Yet
“Threats of a strike at Rome’s Teatro dell’Opera, which would have prevented Thursday’s opening night performance of Puccini’s Manon Lescaut and damaged the company’s account books, were averted at the last minute.” The theater’s finances are so bad that Rome’s Mayor has been saying that a strike could force the company to close its doors.
Why I’m Asking My Dancers to Improvise an Entire Evening Work
The Most Unlikeable Hero in Children’s Literature
Laura Miller: “So she’s kind of creepy and something of a hypocrite. She may be the most unlikable hero in any children’s book, yet children, by the millions, insist on liking her. What’s [her] appeal?” (Miller includes in passing quite a pithy little takedown of Jonathan Franzen.)
Is Pussy Riot’s Music Actually Any Good?
“Victims of state persecution, ambassadors for day-glo knitwear and wank fodder for beardy liberals the world over, the members of Pussy Riot have been filling both prison cells and column inches since 2012. In the process, they’ve also become one of the most famous bands on the planet. But let me ask you this – have you ever actually heard any of their music?”
Here’s The First Ticket Agency to Accept Bitcoin
Racial Categories Aren’t Hardwired in Our Minds
The Limitations of Eve Ensler’s Dance-Based Activism
“Last year, when I first heard about One Billion Rising, the day of action Ensler had declared to ‘break the silence’ about violence against women, I did not immediately think (as 999,999,999 other women evidently did), ‘Oh hooray, the famous vagina lady is doing something about violence!’ Instead I thought, ‘They’re going to tell us to dance, aren’t they.'”
Who Else Wants a Guggenheim Now?
Here’s the Internet’s Most Internet Sentence
Mothers, Sons, AIDS, Terrence McNally, and What a Difference 25 Years Make
McNally’s 1988 play Andre’s Mother is a cry of rage and pain by a man who just buried his lover at his lover’s ever-disapproving mother. His new Broadway outing, Mothers and Sons, “dramatize[s] the head-spinning changes in gay America since that earlier play, affecting not only same-sex couples but also people like [that still-disapproving mother].”
