“There are real, prestigious journals and conferences in higher education that enforce and defend the highest standards of scholarship. But there are also many more Ph.D.-holders than there is space in those publications, and those people are all in different ways subject to the “publish or perish” system of professional advancement. The academic journal-and-conference system is subject to no real outside oversight. Standards are whatever the scholars involved say they are.”
Archives for December 2016
2016 Was The Year That Book Sales Turned A Corner
“The notion that owning a bookstore is akin to an act of altruism has become a little outdated. In fact, 2016 offered encouraging evidence that after years of dire news stories about the literary industry selling books has once again become sensible business. To be fair, the past year was less a book boom than a hold-steady.”
Is Experience Neurological? So What’s Real?
“Neuroscientists can correlate activity in the brain with specific kinds of experience, but they cannot say this activity is the experience. In fact, the neural activity relating to one experience often seems nearly indistinguishable from the neural activity relating to another quite different experience. So we remain unsure where or how consciousness happens. All the same, the internalist model remains dominant and continues to be taught in textbooks and broadcast to a wider public in TV documentaries and popular non-fiction books. So our questions today are: Why this apparent consensus in the absence of convincing evidence? And what new ideas are internalists exploring to advance the science?”
Reconsidering JS Bach And His Relationship With God
Many of us grew up with an Enlightenment Bach, a nondenominational divinity of mathematical radiance. Glenn Gould’s commentary on the “Goldberg Variations” spoke of a “fundamental coordinating intelligence.” One German scholar went so far as to question the sincerity of Bach’s religious convictions. But the historically informed performance movement, in trying to replicate the conditions in which Bach’s works were first played, helped to restore awareness of his firm theological grounding.
Critics, Writers, Bookstores Push Back Against Simon & Schuster For Signing White Nationalist To Big Contract
Many in the publishing world reacted with outrage over the S&S signing. “Soon, however, pushback against the publisher transitioned from simple outrage to calls for organized resistance. One literary journal announced a boycott on coverage in 2017.” Authors announced they’d leave S&S and others were contemplating boycotts.
What Are The Most Important Books Of The Last 20 Years (The Experts Don’t Agree)
“I reached out to some of my favorite contemporary writers and asked them to name the most important books published over the last two decades. To my surprise, there wasn’t a lot of overlap in their respective choices: only 14 titles were chosen by more than one author.”
Joyce’s ‘Portrait Of The Artist’ At 100: Colm Tóibín On The Book’s Ongoing Relevance
“When I read the hellfire sermon in A Portrait, I had heard some of those very words, even though I was born 40 years after the book came out. The Christmas dinner scene, with the bitter argument about Parnell between Stephen’s father and his aunt, could easily have come from many Irish tables in the 1970s and ’80s … Since corporal punishment in schools continued until as recently as the early ’80s, anyone who had the misfortune to be educated by priests or Christian Brothers (or indeed nuns) would have fully recognised the scene where Stephen is unfairly punished. It happened to us all.”
America’s Reading Crisis – Something Has To Change
“Whether it takes phonics, whole-language learning, all-singing, all-dancing teachers, or the gradual introduction of criminal penalties for illiteracy, something has to change. A national reading push would be the moonshot that makes all others possible. How many more studies will it take? We know that readers vote more and volunteer more, and that reading literature deepens empathy. And — as finally, categorically demonstrated in a landmark Yale study last year — that readers live longer.”
How Adam Driver, Of All Unlikely Personalities, Became A Movie Star
“If you, in 2012, watched Adam Driver on Girls – an unhinged, distasteful walking id, as magnetic as he was bizarre – and said to yourself, ‘This guy is going to be the cast’s biggest star,’ you should probably start betting on horses. … Especially considering that the only thing more obvious than Driver’s gifts might be his presumed limitations – that topographic map of a face, that woodwind voice – the actor’s ascent raises the question of how exactly he became Hollywood’s go-to young actor of excellence.”
Daniel Kramer: How A Great Big Artistic Flop Prepared Me To Lead English National Opera
“I would say aged 37 I went through a complete midlife crisis. There’s this thing with an artist, you have to be very careful your self worth is not bound with your work. You’re not a bad person if you get one star. I started to meditate and I’m very proud of that and I started to work with a different community of people, and I started to work in service and sat with people in a hospice who were dying of cancer, I worked with Zen Bhuddist monks, I started to teach more.”
Flash Fiction: The State Of The Super-Short Story
David Galef, who wrote the book on flash fiction, and Len Kuntz, one of the form’s most singular practitioners, have a dialogue about where a genre that can range from a few hundred words to a single sentence is headed.
How Our Sense Of Time Became Defined By Economics
“Time’s unknowable perils contributed to the flourishing of economic thought. But then something interesting happened. The creature became the creator: The economy re-invented time. Or, to put things less obliquely, the age of exploration and the industrial revolution completely changed the way people measure time, understand time, and feel and talk about time.”
Can You Make A Dance About Race And Politics That’s Also Truly Good Art? This Man Can
“The ideal, of course, is a piece in which the artistic qualities – in dance, those would be shape, tempo, rhythm, attack, etc. – are such as to elicit a feeling that you recognize as being on the side of justice. But you never know whether that’s really justice or just your wish for a piece you admire to share your politics.” Joan Acocella writes that choreographer Kyle Abraham manages to transcend the dilemma.
How An Artist In 1915 Pointed The Way To Today’s Robots
“By mixing moving bodies with mechanically repeating geometries, Oskar Schlemmer pointed us at today’s world of work, where automation is everywhere in the transcendent projects of globalizing neo-liberalism. Yet the smooth, cute, and joyous mood of Schlemmer’s robotic sensibility conveys something that at least temporarily alleviates the feeling that we are living in an epoch of click-bait robotics fueled by predatory virtual capital, where memes and farcical fragments of vanity culture keep repeating before our eyes, ad infinitum.”
So What’s ‘Hamlet’ Really About, Anyway? And How Do You Pitch That To An Audience?
“Judging by the way several theatres have answered the question in recent and upcoming promotional copy, this is far from a settled matter.” Hailey Bachrach looks at that marketing copy and the approaches it takes.
How The Grinch Got Sued (Recounted In Seussian Verse)
Matthew Lombardo’s one-woman show Who’s Holiday – about the heroic dastardly deeds of the Grinch’s wife – got cancelled last month when Dr. Seuss Enterprises grinched about copyright infringement. Now Lombardo is fighting back, in Federal court. (And yes, Robin Pogrebin tells the tale with rhyming couplets in dactylic tetrameter.)
That Pink Pigment Anish Kapoor Isn’t Allowed To Buy? He Got His Hands On It Anyway
His middle finger in particular. Kapoor strikes back on Instagram at the artist who dissed him with the pinkest-pink ban.
How Art Auctioneers Get Buyers Riled Up Enough To Pay Tens Of Millions For One Painting
“With such astonishing sums of money being tossed around, one might assume that art buyers are making cool, levelheaded decisions, especially when they’re in a room full of people they know and are trying to impress. This is often not the case. To the contrary, scientists see mounting evidence of ‘auction psychology’.” Here’s how it works.
The Showbiz Folk We Lost In 2016
Playbill helps us bid farewell to David Bowie and Brian Bedford, Patti Duke and Patrice Munsel, Edward Albee and Zsa Zsa Gabor, and all too many more.
Daniel Barenboim’s New YouTube Channel Has Terrific Intros To Classical Music
“The playing is beautiful, of course – Mr. Barenboim is one of the greatest pianists of his generation – but it’s the talk that matters. It turns out that in addition to being a great pianist, Mr. Barenboim also has a knack for getting straight to the point.”
How Music Streaming Is Changing The Ways Artists Think About Their Music
It’s a cliche of course that tools define the art. The recording industry is declaring 2016 the year that streaming became the primary way people are getting their music. But it’s not just that streaming is a vehicle. It’s changing the ways artists are thinking about their projects.
Streaming music services such as Apple Music, Spotify and Tidal are shifting not just how music is consumed, but increasingly how it is funded, created and marketed. The talk of the industry is increasingly about playlists and how labels and artists can seed their music into high-rotation mixes on streaming services to blend their new offerings with old favourites.
When vinyl ruled, musicians thought about creating albums of songs, some using the form to create series of songs that fit together or played off one another. Downloading killed the album as listeners went directly for the songs they were after.
But as streaming has become the preferred format and playlists are a thing again, artists are playing with the format.
Where downloads and playlists favored the lone song, streaming gives the artist and the album a fighting chance again. Anyone interested in a particular artist, from die-hard fans to novelty seekers, can listen to a whole album repeatedly — not just song samples, not just YouTube choices — and let subtler material sink in. Musicians don’t need to think so exclusively about what sounds, beats and structures the radio gatekeepers will allow; they can get poetic, political, sonically weird or all of the above. While big and glossy still works, it’s just possible that odd and heartfelt will, too.
And because streaming reveals precisely how people are listening, artists can see exactly what works and what doesn’t:
Because streaming services automatically count clicks, they make it possible to tabulate more precisely what people are listening to. In years past, a sale of a disc or a download revealed only that the transaction had been made. But a streaming service knows exactly how many plays every song is getting; it measures usage beyond the one-time purchase. And those streaming statistics, along with sales and radio plays, are now included in compiling the pop charts (though it takes 1,500 streams to equal one album sale purchase). The combination of sales, radio and streaming is arguably a far more accurate assessment of which music is finding an audience at any given moment. And because the music business, like all creative industries, runs on ego as well as revenue, a higher chart position is positive feedback for a star who’s thinking about taking chances.
Even better, streaming changes the incentives for listeners. Paying for individual songs as downloads tore apart the album; getting a song legally for 99 cents was a commitment, one that limited the audience for the album cuts beyond radio-approved, video-promoted hits.
Inevitably this will change our expectations about music and what artists give us. And the business model that supports music. Not a minute too soon.
Benjamin Millepied Says Paris Opera Ballet Has A Racism Problem
“I heard someone say a black girl in a ballet is a distraction. If there are 25 white girls, everyone will look at the black girl. Everyone must be alike in a company, meaning everyone must be white.”
When Actors’ Roles Invade Their Dreams (It Gets Pretty Weird)
“What happens during REM sleep if your daily routine involves assuming a new identity in front of hundreds of strangers for several hours? Even in small doses, does that repeated performance generate emotional muscle memory?” The answer is yes – Sandra Oh, Judith Light, Simon McBurney, and other actors share their examples.
The Top 15 Art Shows In America In 2016 That Weren’t In New York Or L.A.
And only one of them was in D.C. Other major museum/gallery towns are well-represented, though, as are two pretty out-of-the-way spots.
The Top Dozen Theatre News Stories Of 2016
It wasn’t only all-Hamilton-all-the-time, though that certainly leads the list. Among the other big news was the debut of BroadwayCon, the hit show stopped in its tracks by what should have been surprising good news, and the rise of Broadway’s next dynamic duo.