The Future of Alternative Weeklies, and Chiming Indie
AJBlog: CultureCrash | Published 2014-03-05
“Morning Canvas” Debuts, But When?
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-03-05
A Giant Come Too Early
AJBlog: PostClassic | Published 2014-03-05
Indispensability
AJBlog: Engaging Matters | Published 2014-03-05
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“President Obama’s proposed federal budget for the coming 2014-15 fiscal year would lift spending 3.5% overall for the six main federal arts and culture agencies but provide no increase for the three grant-making bodies that disburse money to nonprofit groups outside Washington, D.C.”
“While TV viewers could hear the song, they couldn’t see the orchestra in the Dolby Theatre. That’s because the orchestra was about a mile away from the stage.”
“The people that put money in this place could have gotten a villa in Italy, too, or bought more apartments in New York City. So there is a decision on the part of the citizens here that reflects that attitude.”
“Interestingly, it was the categories that seemed more objective such as ‘melodic memory’ and ‘beat perception’ that showed the strongest statistical correlation with wealth.”
“Viennese insist that theirs is an open, diverse, and liberal society, but their cultural envoy to the world is a living reliquary of long-ago revolutions. The orchestra lingers on those periods when the city was at the vanguard of musical culture, issuing a constant rat-tat-tat of shocks.”
“Much like the original Turing tests, designed in the 1950s as a benchmark for machine intelligence, the differences can prove difficult to parse — particularly since certain branches of poetry are intended to sound like an algorithmic jumble, anyway.”
“Just like the clip of Charlie White scratching out a few notes on a violin for Al Roker, the recent news from Sochi about violinist Vanessa Mae’s skiing exploits for the Thailand Olympic team was met by fellow musicians on social media not with support, but with a significant heaping of snark and vitriol.”
Italian Culture Minister Dario Franceschini said he was “unblocking many measures which will get the machine working”. He added the EU could be “sure that Italy is taking care of Pompeii, both in terms of emergency measures and in the long term”.
“A long list of problems, mainly tied to the country’s cripplingly slow bureaucracy, still threatens to engulf the plan and sink it before it can be put into action.”
“One view in the publishing industry is that bestseller lists are the product of a skill-based meritocracy. But the reality is that the popular perception of a book itself is colored by the strength of the author’s brand. When we view bestseller list, part of what we’re seeing is a brand ranking.”
“Chinese ministries continue to demand high fees for tightly controlled, often highly censored, travelling exhibitions. The only result of the ban is that US citizens and institutions cannot import or collect items traded freely in other parts of the world, including in mainland China and Hong Kong.”
Missing costumes, a fire…
His student performance of Monteverdi’s Vespers on 5 March 1964 put a rocket under the musical establishment.
Published in 1979, the book “ends with Russia annexing Crimea after its citizens are snookered into requesting the invasion themselves: in other words, it eerily anticipates this week’s news.”
Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing, about the killing of half a million people following a failed 1965 coup against Suharto, has won a slew of awards and lots of attention seemingly everywhere but Indonesia, where even the Oscar nomination was largely ignored. (The massacres are still an extremely sensitive subject there.)
“Last week, Steven Soderbergh – retired from filmmaking, but still with many tricks up his sleeve – posted, on his Web site, a feature-length mashup version of Psycho that splices together the Hitchcock classic and Gus Van Sant’s shot-by-shot remake. … At the film’s violent junctures, … Soderbergh overlays the two versions, creating a disorienting blur of Hitchcock’s horror and its latter-day identical twin. (includes video excerpt)
Currently in his ninth season in Missouri, the American conductor has brought the orchestra back to (and maybe beyond) the national prominence it enjoyed under Leonard Slatkin. (He also recently began a second major post: artistic director at the Sydney Symphony.)
“I was in the middle of a circle of actors and I was being bombarded with stinking fish and rotten eggs – or rather, scraps of paper bearing the names of such things. Each missile was accompanied by an accusation, to which I had to respond.”
The oil-on-panel Christ figure, titled Salvator Mundi, was identified during a 2011 estate sale; Sotheby’s brokered its sale last May. (And no, they’re not going to tell us who bought it.)
“The siblings of the late New York artist Jean-Michel Basquiat slapped Christie’s auction house with a $1 million lawsuit Tuesday, claiming an upcoming sale of his works may be full of fakes.”
“After more than two years of sometimes prickly debate, … the City Council voted 6-3 Tuesday night to approve a 50-year agreement with the Community Foundation of Greater Greensboro on how the Tanger Center for the Performing Arts will be funded and governed.”
“The British designer Thomas Heatherwick has been chosen to convert a 1920s [waterfront] granary in Cape Town into a museum for contemporary African art collected by Jochen Zeitz, the former chairman of sportswear company Puma.”
“Decades ago, the thousands of Tibetan-language books now ensconced in a lavishly decorated library in southwest China might have ended up in a raging bonfire. ”
Choreographer Peter Quanz: “I decided to make a group of dancers – which I’ve called sculptures, like a Greek chorus that is omnipresent through the ballet. At one point they are mud and they are born out of the mud. … I use those sculptures as a way to articulate my viewpoint on the relationships throughout the ballet.”
The news quiz’s Official Judge and Scorekeeper will step down following a series of farewell shows this spring, when he turns 80. No replacement has yet been named. (Pssst! Corva Coleman!)
