Gerard Mortier on his last day at Salzburg
AJBlog: Slipped Disc | Published 2014-03-09
An Art Museum For Las Vegas After All?
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-03-10
Public Artists earn $37,000 annually in England
AJBlog: Aesthetic Grounds | Published 2014-03-09
‘America: How It Works’ by Heathcote Williams
AJBlog: Straight|Up | Published 2014-03-09
Odious Comparisons: Arts and Sports
AJBlog: We The Audience | Published 2014-03-09
Of course it’s in an American advertisement. “A philosopher and the city’s councillor for culture, Sergio Givone, claimed in newspaper La Repubblica the depiction was ‘a real abuse’. ‘It is an act of violence towards the sculpture; like taking a hammer to it and perhaps, actually, even worse,’ he said.”
Partly by doing outreach at places like Ikea. Yes, Ikea flash mob Beethoven 9.
“While the Chinese film market is booming – box office was $3.6 billion last year and is expected to reach $4.6 billion in 2014 – there is still a feeling among domestic filmmakers that scripts need to improve, production needs to become more professional and the industry generally needs to learn from the Hollywood model.”
“Ken Russell – about to direct Peter Maxwell Davies’s opera Taverner – tried to tempt him into designing the Royal Opera House production. Jarman got as far as suggesting lighting the auditorium blue instead of blusher pink, costuming the orchestra, and hanging dead cattle up with the chandelier. … Ralph Koltai got the job instead.”
The ballerina who wants to bring dance lessons into the schools: “I have two young daughters and they’re growing up with such a facility for communicating online. It’s amazing the way they can communicate in so many different ways, but then they forget to communicate with their bodies.”
Show them the money. Harvey Weinstein: “There’s no reason for us not to shoot here, except when you do the numbers here and when you do the numbers in New Orleans, it is much more attractive financially.”
“Streep isn’t interested in inhabiting a character as much as presenting her latest incarnation in the manner of a student presenting the flawlessly constructed jigamajoo she’s rigged up for the Science Fair, waiting for the ribbons to be pinned to her chest. After eight Golden Globes, three Oscars, and 46 nominations between the two ceremonies, it’s working.”
It’s called “Milk Music,” and you can only listen to it if you have a Samsung Galaxy phone.
“Even teachers who know very little about traditional music could assign interesting fiddle tunes to their students as a break between scales and etudes. It would be a moment in the middle of a practice session to reflect on just how much musical tradition exists in America. It would be a moment to recognize that most, if not all music comes, in some way, from folk traditions.”
“Recently a former biscuit factory in Bermondsey that was home to 400 artists was sold to convert it into 800 high-end flats. The colour in the capital that comes from the energy and creativity of artists, among others, is drained.”
“‘I was merely a fool poet,’ he said, ‘with nothing but poetry in his bag, hoping the energy and joy that brought poems from chaos would carry me to the children.’ The school, the Children’s Storefront, has flourished in three adjoining townhouses on East 129th Street, becoming a fully accredited, tuition-free school with a $4 million budget and a student body of about 170 children, from prekindergarten through eighth grade.”
Walter Kirn: “Here’s the problem: I’d met rich eccentrics at Princeton and Oxford. If I’d never met one, I probably would have seen through him — but because I’d met them and they were so crazy, he just seemed like another crazy one of them.”
“An architecturally harmonious capital rose from the rubble, a city of spectacle, built for a new, modern economy, but homogeneous and no longer welcoming to many of the poor souls who had helped make the place run and had always been deep in its cultural lifeblood.”
“Ted Kaczynski was not improved by his obsession with Conrad’s The Secret Agent, nor Timothy McVeigh by his fascination with The Turner Diaries. Mark David Chapman was not healed by his love of The Catcher in the Rye. The disturbed reader—or, in my case, the merely immature reader—won’t always be ennobled simply by cracking open a great book.”
Um … “Barriers to the industry include the requirement for high-level qualifications and the preference of employers to use unpaid workers, the report says. Another obstacle is the need for industry newcomers to have an informal network of ‘insiders’ within the sector before they can secure a job.”
“Nobody who’s ever been online would be surprised that comments can get nasty. But book reviews are new ground for this fight. Reviews are one of the only places where saying whether you don’t like the thing you’re discussing is kind of the point.”
“Hirst will be neither the first author nor the last to invent portions of his memoirs. In fact, it’s pretty unfair to expect to anyone to really remember their own life particularly accurately, without going around scribbling on their body like Guy Pearce in Memento.”
“I had this feeling of complete ecstasy,” actor Ed Harris says. “It’s probably the most high I’ve been ever, in any way.”
“A number of rocks, when struck, made ‘distinctive (if muted) sounds.’ They judged that enough made sounds such that once, they all would have rung, and furthermore saw marks on the rocks that might—upon further forensic testing—prove to be strike marks.”
“Bach’s restless, radical new style fits within history — with the upheaval of the Seven Years’ War, the shifting of nations and the Enlightenment, which encouraged individualism.”
“The 25th anniversary the fall of the Berlin Wall is approaching this autumn, and the anniversary is set to be marked by the unveiling of two major memorials in central Leipzig and Berlin. But their ceremonial inauguration is unlikely to happen in the foreseeable future — there are just too many problems with the schedules and the budgets of both.”
“Any fool could put a bucket of cockroaches on a table. But it takes somebody knowledgeable to know how to make them act for a camera.”
“He is putting songs on smartphones in Africa, reviving moribund American record labels and making Lorde into a Grammy-winning global sensation. Above all, he wants to forge new partnerships with his industry’s erstwhile adversaries — the technology firms that have upended the way people get their music.”
“The video had flimsy production values and was just 14 minutes long, but internet service providers fear they will pay a lasting price for Innocence of Muslims. A court order to remove the anti-Islamic film from YouTube has paved the way for attempts to menace other creative visual works under cover of copyright, some legal experts have warned.”
“I am so sick of being exhorted, as a writer, to improve the world by representing it in a more hopeful way. And the pressure, I feel, is growing, not just from provincial academics such as Friess but from my own peers, whom I witness daily lacerating themselves – perhaps under the influence of the academics who are the only people now able to give them employment – for their moral failings.”
“I didn’t need a Ph.D. to work at Kickstarter, just like I wouldn’t have needed a Ph.D. to wait tables (though it adds color to both). In truth, nobody needs a Ph.D. Ok technically you need one to be a college professor, but it is not an indicator of whether you will be a good college professor.”
“Participants across the board were better at identifying the more accomplished groups by watching them, not by listening to them. In fact, even when music and video were combined in clips, it was actually harder for participants to identify the top groups than by video alone.”
“Appropriation can be insensitive or disrespectful in all sorts of particular instances. But often, it is wonderful.”
In 2012, “180,000 people were prosecuted for not paying their licence – which is needed to watch or record live broadcasts on any device – accounting for more than one in 10 criminal prosecutions that year.”