“I am resigning now because I do not believe the current leadership has the vision to restore the Orchestra to its place among the great orchestras of the world,’’ longtime principal clarinetist Burt Hara wrote in a letter to his colleagues.
“Dudamel has stopped short of taking a political stand; Gergiev, to Western eyes, has taken the wrong one. How much condemnation do they deserve? And is it reasonable to expect them to take a stand at all? Do we have the same expectations of leading figures in other fields — athletes, actors, dancers, poets?”
How You View the Pie
AJBlog: Audience Wanted | Published 2014-03-14
Can arts organizations be both art-focused and community-focused?
AJBlog: Jumper | Published 2014-03-14
Picasso Museum: Reopening With What?
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-03-14
Will Gentrification Kill Music Scenes?
AJBlog: CultureCrash | Published 2014-03-13
Respecting the craft
AJBlog: The Artful Manager | Published 2014-03-13
Pavarotti estate takes action to stop illicit child duet
AJBlog: Slipped Disc | Published 2014-03-13
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El Sistema was founded in 1975 by Jose Antonio Abreu, a musician and economist, and it has flourished under eight different governments while aiming to keep many impoverished kids on the straight and narrow. “Ultimately, we have no idea how Dudamel, maestro Abreu and others are functioning in El Sistema. Abreu’s way of working has always been to try and influence the politics subtly from the inside. The second he takes a public stand, he can’t do that anymore.”
“What it does do is give the listener—as well as actors and directors—a snapshot of what the play sounded like when it was new. Such snapshots can serve as invaluable points of departure for the present-day performer, a benchmark against which to measure subsequent interpretative developments.”
“I always worry today when I see everybody has to pass – there’s very little failure these days. I think failure is the best thing for some people.”
His dramatic range, from Olympian-thunderous to comic-goofy, suited him for trailers for movies as diverse as “Philadelphia,” “Forrest Gump,” “Coneheads,” “Meet the Parents” and “Lethal Weapon.” (“Under 17 not admitted without a parent.”)
“Hearing-damaged infants become hearing-damaged teenagers who listen to loud music that further damages their hearing, who then become hearing-damaged adults who go to events that further damage their hearing, who then have children whose hearing is damaged because their parents cannot hear.”
“International art and antique market sales totaled €47.4 billion ($66 billion) last year, their highest sum since the pre-recession days of 2007, according to the European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF)’s annual art market report, released yesterday.”
“A generation ago, political scientists were public intellectuals. We wrote lucid prose. We spoke to the issues of the day. We advised President John F. Kennedy. But now all we care about is math, jargon and one another.”
“If critics want to avoid irrelevance, they might relinquish their duties made redundant by the internet, and focus on reviewing film in terms that draw from their deep knowledge of film as a unique artform. Almost every review—whether in newspapers, magazines or websites—currently follows a similar blueprint: plot synopsis, recap of director’s work, brief appraisal of the acting and/or writing, cursory sentence about the camera work and/or score, and then a long dissection of the narrative and themes.”
“Over the years, the ROM, beloved, popular and populist, has become less a pinhole to faraway worlds than a primer for the present and increasingly diverse future outside its doorstep. That fact is not lost on them.”
“Director of media content at the National Media Center in the UAE, Juma Al-Leem, told The Associated Press on Thursday that the movie will not be allowed in cinemas because it contradicts a generally agreed upon taboo in Islam of depicting a prophet.”
“Library bureaucrats aren’t books. A single author isn’t the written word. We in the book business are paid poorly for our work, so we tend to inflate the importance of our jobs to the point where any negativity aimed at us becomes an assault on the worthy cause to which we’ve fed large and juicy chunks of our lives: literature, and books, and ideas.”
Gaps in research include the sector’s impact on people’s health, how participation in cultural activities may reduce rates of re-offending among criminals, and how these may save the government money, the study reveals.
“If anyone who declares herself to be a writer is one, then what is the point of a professional organization? Will the group be taken at all seriously?”
“The publications administration at the [Riyadh International] book fair, one of the biggest of its kind in the Arab world, ordered the removal of all books containing [the Palestinian poet's] work after youths from the religious police complained about the content of the books. … Darwish, who died in 2008, is considered a modern Arab literary giant.”
“Amazon Publishing is starting a new German-language publishing program that will be based in Munich … Many of the titles first released in Germany will [subsequently] be published in English-language editions by AmazonCrossings.”
“‘I prefer to think I’m going to live forever,’ said Mr. Taylor, 83 years old. ‘At some point, they’re going to not let me make dances anymore, so I have to think ahead.’”
“When I heard pleas from several friends in the week leading up to the last episode that True Detective would ‘stick the landing,’ it wasn’t just out of a hope that the narrative would tie up in a satisfying catharsis. The statement was filled with more anxiety than that – the need for a tangible return on obsessive investment.”
David Bezmozgis: “As I was writing the book, I kept changing when the action was set, constantly pushing the date ahead by another year … I closely followed the news to see if real events had yet outpaced my inventions. I expected this to happen at any moment in Israel, … [not in] Ukraine and Crimea, places I’d believed to be locked in a dismal kleptocratic stasis.”
As part of its series “You Hate My Job”, Marketplace sends a correspondent to work with guerrilla celebrity photographer and photo agency head Giles Harrison. (includes video and audio)