MASS MoCA Expands, With State Funds
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-03-07
The Case for Cultural Fluency
AJBlog: Field Notes | Published 2014-03-06
Photography on the Web: Getty Images Goes Free
AJBlog: CultureCrash | Published 2014-03-06
Serge Dorny sues Dresden for unfair dismissal
AJBlog: Slipped Disc | Published 2014-03-06
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“It’s clear that universities will have to figure out the balance between commercial relevance and basic research, as well as how to prove their value beyond being vehicles for delivering content. But lost in the shuffle of commentary here is something arguably more important than and yet containing all of these factors: culture.”
“In a social media joke circulating on Twitter, a fake playbill notice for the Broadway musical “If/Then” states that its star, Idina Menzel, will be replaced by her alter-ego, Adele Dazeem.”
“From pop culture to high culture, Venezuela’s conflict is leading actors, artists, athletes and fashion designers to voice their support for the antigovernment protesters, with a minority backing President Nicolás Maduro.”
Music is power. In his 2010 book on noise and silence, George Prochnik asked a series of provocative questions that began with this one: “Is it really true that all our reactions to sound are dictated by simple equations: loud, low sounds equal something powerful, so be scared or be prepared to mate; soft, little sounds equals something small, so be calm, be prepared to mate, or both?”
“To a large extent, the art world today represents the institutionalization of Duchamp’s early-twentieth-century pranks. The great irony is that Duchamp intended not to extend the boundaries of art but to short-circuit the entire project of aesthetic delectation.”
“The Toledo Museum of Art said it saw no signs of trouble when it bought the small bronze statue of a Hindu deity in 2006 from a New York dealer now charged in India. The statue resembles an idol now listed as stolen in India.”
“Pavel Dmitrichenko, a Bolshoi soloist, was convicted in December of organizing the attack and sentenced to six years in prison. The Moscow City Court on Thursday reduced his sentence by six months to 5½ years.”
“What comes as a truly horrible surprise is that all of Picasso’s 5,000 works have been “cleaned, restored and reframed” for the opening. It beggars belief that some urgent “conservation” necessity should have struck all of these modern works at the same time.”
“Getty’s not doing this out of the good of its heart. It recognizes that images on the Internet are treated as de facto public domain by many people on social networks, blogs, and the scummier parts of the content web. It knows it’s highly unlikely to ever get significant money out of any of those people.”
“Has the theatre pipeline that supplies Canada’s regionals really sprung a leak? One piece of good news is that, this season, for the first time in recent memory, the most-seen new play in the country hasn’t been a recent Broadway or West End hit, but one born in Toronto.”
“The plan calls for more art in just about every venue within city reach, from its buildings and theaters to its parks and even the streets themselves. In addition, it lays the groundwork for more funding of art projects, as well as incentives for planners and developers who make art a priority.”
This year’s judges were Madison Smartt Bell, Manuel Muñoz and Achy Obejas. They considered more than 400 titles published by American authors in 2013.
“They have not just [hired] renovation architects, they’ve got restoration architects – historical, sensitive architectural work going on, so things are improved without changing.”
Jerry Saltz: “I kept hearing myself think, I see dead art: Work that looks and behaves like it is supposed to look and behave but that doesn’t make us see differently, that doesn’t rethink form, reimage structure, or explore material, color, or new orders.”
“Ire at Google buses, tech-driven gentrification in San Francisco and Silicon Valley’s close collaboration with the NSA has been all over the news, but the demonstration at Wisdom 2.0 was different. It wasn’t just aimed at the tech industry; it was also aimed at what some see as an elitist streak in American convert Buddhism.”
Self-identifying as “longform” has become hot. The start-ups posed an alternative to magazines, which still publish featurettes and front-of-the-book copy, not simply lengthy, in-depth features. The new publications were, by contrast, specialized, and not bound by tradition.
The youth-oriented channel BBC3 will be pulled from the airwaves, with programming available only online, as part of BBC Director General Tony Hall’s planned £100 million in budget cuts. “His decision also signals a reprieve for its sister channel, the arts and culture specialist BBC4, which has faced calls for it to be axed and merged into BBC2.”
The much-awarded director warns that we “make sure that young people have access to West End theatre, and the only way you can do that is through pricing. It stands to reason that if we don’t do it, the West End will close when this generation becomes senior citizens. Because who will replace the people who are now old?”
“The hunt for Indian antiquities allegedly smuggled into New York by Subhash Kapoor, a former Manhattan gallery owner accused of overseeing a $100 million art trafficking ring, led to a Queens warehouse Tuesday where federal officials seized hundreds of Southeast Asian and Indian items that they valued at $8 million.”
“A lot of my students just can’t tell a story. They can write sentences but they don’t know how to make a story go from there all the way through to the end without people dying of boredom in between. It’s a difficult thing to do and it’s a great skill to have. Can you teach that? I don’t think you can.”
Anna Davis: “I knew this course would give me dedicated time to write, feedback from tutors and fellow students, and that most useful of all things – a deadline.” (Davis does think that a graduate degree in creative writing may not be worth the money.)
No, you weren’t imagining the tension you saw during the Oscars telecast. “Long before each came away with an Academy Award, … director Steve McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley were embroiled in a bitter feud regarding credit for the film’s screenplay, a fight they kept quiet for the good of the campaign before it came to a head Sunday night at the Dolby Theatre.”
Patrick Rump, “a broad-chested, broadly smiling German” and former karate champion, is working “to start a revolution in dance health.”
The Spike Jonze film “raises two questions that have long preoccupied philosophers. Are nonbiological creatures like Samantha capable of consciousness – at least in theory, if not yet in practice? And if so, does that mean that we humans might one day be able to upload our own minds to computers, perhaps to join Samantha in being untethered from ‘a body that’s inevitably going to die’?”
