AJ Four Ways: Text Only (by date) | headlines only
DANCE
IDEAS
- When Next You Go To Donate Blood, The Chicago Symphony May Be Playing The Soundtrack
There’s a new way to distract oneself while donating blood – to play immersive virtual reality games. And the games’s soundtracks? “Abbott commissioned the Chicago Symphony Orchestra … to record them in a whirlwind, one-day recording session in the spring.” – The New York Times
- How David Hockney Celebrated, Sometimes Mischeviously, Gay Life
“What’s so revolutionary about Hockney’s paintings is not just that they portray male nudity and desire, but scenes of domesticity: men swimming, showering and brushing their teeth together.” – The Guardian (UK)
- Dito Van Reigersberg, Philly’s Beloved Theatre Founder And Performer, Has Died At 53
“Antic yet elegant, Mr. van Reigersberg was closely associated with two important strands of 21st-century performance: devised physical theater — in which an ensemble works together to create a script through improvisation — and a playful, let-the-chest-hair-show take on drag.” – The New York Times
- The Sensual, Forbidden Pleasures Of Touching Art
“One of the cardinal rules of museum-going is that art should be enjoyed from a comfortable distance and never touched. However, in the 1960s, a cohort of artists began inviting audiences to interact with, and thus alter, their works.” – Aeon
- This Los Angeles Museum Knows How WWII Shaped Global Soccer
As the men’s World Cup gets underway, LA’s Holocaust Museum has a show on the “beautiful game” that “shines a light on the important but largely overlooked relationship between Jewish life and the global game” – and how WWII changed everything. – Los Angeles Times (MSN)
ISSUES
- How David Hockney Celebrated, Sometimes Mischeviously, Gay Life
“What’s so revolutionary about Hockney’s paintings is not just that they portray male nudity and desire, but scenes of domesticity: men swimming, showering and brushing their teeth together.” – The Guardian (UK)
- The Sensual, Forbidden Pleasures Of Touching Art
“One of the cardinal rules of museum-going is that art should be enjoyed from a comfortable distance and never touched. However, in the 1960s, a cohort of artists began inviting audiences to interact with, and thus alter, their works.” – Aeon
- This Los Angeles Museum Knows How WWII Shaped Global Soccer
As the men’s World Cup gets underway, LA’s Holocaust Museum has a show on the “beautiful game” that “shines a light on the important but largely overlooked relationship between Jewish life and the global game” – and how WWII changed everything. – Los Angeles Times (MSN)
- In Houston, Two Young White Men Scraped And Punctured A Painting By A Black Man
“The museum initially removed the painting to have it repaired but later decided to display it — with the damage — on the last day of the exhibition.” – The New York Times
- How David Hockney Taught His Beloved, Adopted Los Angeles To See Itself
“‘He loved the sunlight, the weather, the boys,’ said Richard Benefield, a veteran museum executive who served as the first director of the David Hockney Foundation.” – The New York Times
MEDIA
- They Just Had To Take That Man’s Name Off The Kennedy Center From Behind A Curtain
After blowing the deadline and begging for more time – and being denied – workers took Donald J. Trump’s name off the Kennedy Center on Friday night. But “a spokeswoman for the center, said the institution was … evaluating ‘legal options.’” – The New York Times
- Kennedy Center As De-Trumpification Warning
Trump’s threat to walk away from the Kennedy Center suggests an additional danger: He could lose interest and doze off, as if at yet another Cabinet meeting or NBA Finals game, leaving parts of the government to fend for themselves. – The Atlantic
- Trump Kennedy Center Board Appeals Judge’s Order On Removing Trump’s Name
The board voted Thursday to seek a stay of U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper’s May 29 ruling that said Trump’s name was illegally added to the Kennedy Center. – NPR
- International African-American Museum Institutes Rolling Furloughs For All Employees
Just under three years after opening, the museum on Charleston’s waterfront is facing financial troubles severe enough that all staffers, including senior executives, are taking mandatory 20-day unpaid furloughs on a staggered schedule from July through December. The IAAM will remain open throughout this period. – WCIV (Charleston)
- Demand For Workers With Creative Skills Is Growing
Nearly 50% of employers are looking to expand their workforce in the next three to five years. Video games, music, design and fashion were particularly expecting to grow over that time. – The Conversation
MUSIC
- Debut Authors Take Home Women’s Prize For Fiction, Nonfiction
The fiction award is well-known (as is, in this case, the award winner), but the Women’s Prize added the nonfiction award in 2023 to help redress an imbalance in nonfiction award winners in the UK. – The Guardian (UK)
- Oh, The Drama: Someone Tries To Trademark A Bookstagram Term, And It Does Not End Well
Can ‘Hot Girls Read’ be trademarked? One creator thought so. “She is using the trademarking this common phrase to retroactively target small businesses who very likely had the idea before her, or at the very least had it around the same time as her.” – Slate
- The Guardian’s Pretty Solid Summer Reading List
That is, if you like taking the advice of Zadie Smith, Mark Haddon, Anne Enright, Sarah Waters, Bernadine Evaristo and more. – The Guardian (UK)
- What Virgil Thought About Bees
“(The Latin poet) recognized that bees had what we might call social being — co-dependent, organized, enterprising — and he praised them for having all the virtues of a Roman citizen: industrious, hardworking, loyal, and (willing) to die to defend the colony.” – Literary Hub
- BookTok Is Turning Some Authors Into Bona Fide Stars, And Hollywood Is Noticing
“The streamers are newer. They don’t have established libraries of ‘80s and ‘90s movies to reboot, and yet they’re still looking for familiarity of titles. (Finding hot titles on BookTok to adapt is) one way to compete at an IP level.” – Los Angeles Times (Yahoo!)
PEOPLE
- When Next You Go To Donate Blood, The Chicago Symphony May Be Playing The Soundtrack
There’s a new way to distract oneself while donating blood – to play immersive virtual reality games. And the games’s soundtracks? “Abbott commissioned the Chicago Symphony Orchestra … to record them in a whirlwind, one-day recording session in the spring.” – The New York Times
- How David Hockney Celebrated, Sometimes Mischeviously, Gay Life
“What’s so revolutionary about Hockney’s paintings is not just that they portray male nudity and desire, but scenes of domesticity: men swimming, showering and brushing their teeth together.” – The Guardian (UK)
- Dito Van Reigersberg, Philly’s Beloved Theatre Founder And Performer, Has Died At 53
“Antic yet elegant, Mr. van Reigersberg was closely associated with two important strands of 21st-century performance: devised physical theater — in which an ensemble works together to create a script through improvisation — and a playful, let-the-chest-hair-show take on drag.” – The New York Times
- The Sensual, Forbidden Pleasures Of Touching Art
“One of the cardinal rules of museum-going is that art should be enjoyed from a comfortable distance and never touched. However, in the 1960s, a cohort of artists began inviting audiences to interact with, and thus alter, their works.” – Aeon
- This Los Angeles Museum Knows How WWII Shaped Global Soccer
As the men’s World Cup gets underway, LA’s Holocaust Museum has a show on the “beautiful game” that “shines a light on the important but largely overlooked relationship between Jewish life and the global game” – and how WWII changed everything. – Los Angeles Times (MSN)
PEOPLE
- When Next You Go To Donate Blood, The Chicago Symphony May Be Playing The Soundtrack
There’s a new way to distract oneself while donating blood – to play immersive virtual reality games. And the games’s soundtracks? “Abbott commissioned the Chicago Symphony Orchestra … to record them in a whirlwind, one-day recording session in the spring.” – The New York Times
- How David Hockney Celebrated, Sometimes Mischeviously, Gay Life
“What’s so revolutionary about Hockney’s paintings is not just that they portray male nudity and desire, but scenes of domesticity: men swimming, showering and brushing their teeth together.” – The Guardian (UK)
- Dito Van Reigersberg, Philly’s Beloved Theatre Founder And Performer, Has Died At 53
“Antic yet elegant, Mr. van Reigersberg was closely associated with two important strands of 21st-century performance: devised physical theater — in which an ensemble works together to create a script through improvisation — and a playful, let-the-chest-hair-show take on drag.” – The New York Times
- The Sensual, Forbidden Pleasures Of Touching Art
“One of the cardinal rules of museum-going is that art should be enjoyed from a comfortable distance and never touched. However, in the 1960s, a cohort of artists began inviting audiences to interact with, and thus alter, their works.” – Aeon
- This Los Angeles Museum Knows How WWII Shaped Global Soccer
As the men’s World Cup gets underway, LA’s Holocaust Museum has a show on the “beautiful game” that “shines a light on the important but largely overlooked relationship between Jewish life and the global game” – and how WWII changed everything. – Los Angeles Times (MSN)
THEATRE
VISUAL
- What America’s Treasure To Trash To Treasure Pipelines Say About All Of Us
After WWII, “single-family homes spread across the nation like fireweed. In a distinctively American architectural feature, many of them were joined to a small dungeon dedicated to the tidy storage of automobiles—and other items.” – The Atlantic
- Please! Bring Back The Gatekeepers
Gatekeeper, here, doesn’t mean the patriarchal bogeyman of progressive fever dreams. It means the picky curator who maintains a necessary membrane between your half-formed, typo-addled thoughts and the wider world. It means the tastemaker who triages opinions and batters the better ones into readable form. – The Walrus
- The Great Divide: Creativity Before And After AI
On one side are texts produced before the arrival of generative LLMs. On the other, everything that has followed—texts that might still be useful, even compelling, but that will always face a lingering suspicion of not being entirely human, of having been smoothed by systems trained to predict the word that comes next. – LA Review of Books
- Has The 21st Century Been A Creative Blank Space?
The years from 2000 to 2025 as a period of creative emptiness and stagnation so intractable that it will be remembered (or, rather, is being remembered, through the anticipation of remembrance) as voided time, a dark age. – Yale Review
- If It’s Art And People Like It, Then…
Our reigning cultural ideology has been poptimism—the idea that if a lot of people like a work of art, then it has to be good. Now sloptimism, which holds that if there’s a lot of art out there and people are engaging with it then how bad can it be? – The New Yorker
