AJ Four Ways:
Text Only (by date) | headlines only
- Juneteenth Is A Big Deal In Parts Of Mexico
Why? It all goes back to enslaved people escaping their captors across the South, and fleeing to Spanish-controlled Florida. – NBC News
- Why Are We So Obsessed With Aliens?
“You can keep it pretty simple. There are the alien movies where the aliens come in peace and the alien movies where the aliens do not come in peace.” – NPR
- The 91-Year-Old Venezuelan Artist Says No To Weaving With Electronic Machines
“Mora, who is 91 and tiny, wearing head scarves around her weathered face, has clung to a mix of ancestral Indigenous and Spanish traditions.” – The New York Times
- Where Did This Family’s Looted Artworks Go?
“Despite evidence that Neumann did appropriate the Zoellners’ furniture and paintings, he was not convicted; in 1947 he was deported from the Netherlands as an ‘enemy subject’ under the Nazi regime, and emigrated to the United States with his family.” – El País English
- As The Knicks Win, All Of New York City Becomes A Dance Stage
“Of all the joy blooming throughout the Knicks championship run, the most visible has been the jubilant transfer of energy from body to body.” – The New York Times
- Even In The UK, Music Festival Central, Costs Are Causing Collapse
Womad in Glasgow “is the 20th casualty so far this year as small and independent festival operators enter another tough summer facing myriad challenges, from belt-tightening consumers becoming more picky about how they spend their cash, to soaring energy and labour costs.” – The Guardian (UK)
- If People Aren’t Reading, Why Are Bookstores Thriving?
“The bookstore boom is a story about a certain educated, culturally aspirational demographic doing what it has always done, while the literacy crisis unfolds elsewhere, namely in under-resourced schools, rural communities, and households without the discretionary income to browse a charming bookshop on a Saturday afternoon.” – LitHub
- Jane Yolen, Award-Winning Author Of Some 450 Books, Has Died At 87
“Yolen never encountered a genre she didn’t like; among her early books was a history of kites. Yet running through almost all her writing was a strong through-line of deep psychological insight and a sense of wonder.” – The New York Times
- A Spielberg Alien Movie Is Simply Irresistible In The Summer
According to analysts, it’s “an encouraging sign for what could be a big summer for theaters.” – Los Angeles Times
- What Nineteenth Century American Art Star Frederic Church Is Trying To Tell Us
“The American art world that Church entered in the 1840s was more an aspiration than an entity. Great painting, everybody knew, was Europe’s bailiwick. American collectors bought European art, and many talented American painters hightailed it to Europe at the first opportunity.” – The Atlantic
- Ruth Ozeki Knows The Power Of A Good Book
And that good book is Charlotte’s Web. – The Guardian (UK)
- If You Want To Read More Books This Summer, Here’s How To Do It
“I have this daydream where I go to the park and read under a tree. The sun is shining. It’s not too hot. The ground beneath me is comfortable. I have snacks on hand, I’m hydrated, and I am captivated by the book in front of me.” – NPR
- Treasure, Trash, And A Blood-Drive Symphony
Good Morning,
Where does art actually get its value? Not always where you’d expect. The Chicago Symphony is now part of the soundtrack at a downtown blood-donation center (The New York Times). The Atlantic looks at America’s “treasure to trash to treasure” pipelines and finds an object’s worth has almost nothing to do with the object (The Atlantic); it’s all about the story behind it. And Aeon makes the case for the forbidden pleasure of actually touching the work (Aeon), the value living in the encounter, not the frame.
The Kennedy Center finally gets its name back. Workers hammered off the other guy’s name off the side of the building in the middle of the night behind a curtain (The New York Times).
On the lighter side: Somebody has memorized all 154 of Shakespeare’s sonnets (NPR).
All of our stories below.
Doug
- What Might the Kennedy Center Best Become?
Today’s “Arts Fuse” publishes my latest thoughts about the Kennedy Center:
With the fate of the Kennedy Center for the
- 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)
- Building A Jazz Trilogy Based On Black British History
Renell Shaw: “Our story is of growth, and it’s a love story, too. I mean, my grandmother came over here from Jamaica looking for work, and my grandfather came over to chase my grandmother!” – The Guardian (UK)
- Could You Memorize All Of Shakespeare’s 154 Sonnets?
This actor did, though he adds, “When I first had the idea, oh, yeah, I’m going to learn them all. I … I did not realize how much work it actually was.” – NPR
- 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)
- Let’s Talk About How Sondheim Made Order Out Of Chaos In Sunday In The Park With George
Or more specifically, in one song: “Sunday.” – The New York Times
- 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
- 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
- Why Is Tupac’s Likeness Appearing Again – In A Video Game?
“The announcement was the latest in a series of creative decisions that have earned the studio a growing amount of skepticism.” – CBC
- 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
- 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
- Canada Has Stepped Out Of The Shadows Of Hollywood North
Said one presenter at the Canadian screen awards, “A country that doesn’t tell its own stories in its own way is just a market for someone else, and we’re better than that.” – The New York Times
- There Are Now Plans For A New Black Box Theatre In Seattle
The plan – after extensive renovations of the now unprepossessing building – is for ExoArts to “offer six six-week blocks a year at subsidized sliding-scale rates that can be rented by outside theater companies to perform full-scale production” and to have its own programming as well. – Seattle Times
- Gene Shalit, Legendarily Moustached Today Show Film Critic, Has Died At 100
After moving over from the book critic desk, “Shalit proved to be a spirited counterbalance to the heavier news of the day, entertaining audiences with celebrity interviews and insights into moviegoing choices during his ‘Critic’s Corner’ segment.” – The Hollywood Reporter
- 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
- 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)
- Sterling Elliott talks about the role arts organizations play in a journey toward leadership
Sterling Elliott, Sphinx Artist & Cellist, shares the role arts organizations and family played in his journey to leadership.
- Why Gustav Mahler’s New York Career Was a “Failure”
