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Minnesota Orchestra Board Wants Vänskä Back, But Not as Music Director: Report
“Vänskä might be asked to take a limited role as a principal guest conductor, leading perhaps eight to 10 concerts a season, but without administrative duties, two sources within the orchestra’s board of directors said Monday.” The same sources say that the board voted strongly in support of controversial CEO Michael Henson.
Minnesota Orchestra Fans Press Board Hard for Vänskä’s Rehiring (As Music Director)
“Members of Save Our Symphony Minnesota have made it clear they’re not going away now that the lockout has ended. More importantly, they’ve made it clear to the board that they want Henson gone and Vänskä back … But understand, many of the board members are corporate heavyweights. Most corporate heavyweights don’t react well to ultimatums.”
George Saunders Is First Winner of Folio Prize
For his short story collection Tenth of December, “Saunders, a former Guardian columnist, became the first winner of the £40,000 Folio prize, an award created by people in the books industry who felt frustrated by what they see as the shortcomings of the Man Booker.”
Joe McGinniss, 71, Author of ‘Fatal Vision’ and ‘The Selling of the President’
“More recently, Mr. McGinniss made headlines in 2010 when, for his next book, he moved in next door to Sarah Palin and her family in Wasilla, Alaska.”
Musicals Storm Olivier Award Nominations
Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Merrily We Roll Along take seven nominations each, while The Book of Mormon, Once and The Scottsboro Boys each get six. Meanwhile, in the best director category, women outnumber men 3-to-1.
‘Inherent Dullness’? Pah! How About ‘Soul-Searing Passion’? A Sports Journalist Goes to the Symphony
“I heard drama; I saw drama, great swaying, soaring playing full of determination and vigour, its pace never letting up. (I’m stunned how still the rest of the audience appeared to manage to sit. My head had gone a bit I think.)” Soccer writer Neil Atkinson visits the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic.
Actress Wendy Hughes, 61
“Her career spanned four decades, from … iconic Australian television series Homicide and Number 96, through to numerous film projects including My Brilliant Career and Careful, He Might Hear You.
Christie’s Postpones Basquiat Auction Following Forgeries Lawsuit
“Christie’s has postponed its online-only sale, ‘Jean-Michel Basquiat: Works from the Collection of Alexis Adler,’ as it faces allegations in a federal lawsuit filed by the late artist’s heirs claiming that works in the collection may be fakes.”
Death of a Creation Myth: Jackson Pollock’s ‘Mural’
“Despite claims made and repeated for decades” – including by Lee Krasner (Pollock’s wife), Peggy Guggenheim (who commissioned the work) and critic Clement Greenberg – “Pollock did not paint the epic canvas in one great, glorious burst of nonstop creative fervor.” Christopher Knight explains how the myth got busted.
It’s Official: Amtrak Is Now Accepting Applications for Writer’s Residencies
“On Monday the company announced that up to 24 writers, chosen from a pool of applicants, will be given a round-trip ticket on a long-distance train, including a private sleeper-car room with a bed, a desk, and electrical outlets. The trains promise the romance. The writers will have to do the rest.”
$100K Nemmers Composition Prize Goes to Esa-Pekka Salonen
In addition to the cash award, the prize, given by Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music, will do four residencies at the school over the next two years and have a work performed by the Chicago Symphony.
Korean Food Porn Is a Big Online Hit
“Every night at 10, thousands of Koreans tune in to watch Choi Ji-hwan eating on streaming video. The chubby-cheeked 24-year-old offers up a cooking lesson and then, in his main online act, devours a dish like kimchi pork stew in a wild, comic performance meant to make clear how much he enjoys a good meal.” (includes video)
See the Languages English Has Pillaged for Vocabulary In One Cool Graphic
Philip Durkin of the Oxford English Dictionary gives us a cunning interactive timeline.
CNN Discovers That Ballet Can Be Manly
“Tutus have been replaced with bare chests and tights, pointe shoes have been tossed aside for slippers, and delicate décolletages have been swapped for beefed-up biceps. Once the traditional arena of lithe ladies, ballet is seeing an increasing number of all-male shows – in one of the biggest shake-ups in the history of the profession.” (includes video)
Why Most Actors Are Crazy
Or, as The Atlantic‘s headline-writer so dispassionately puts it, “How Actors Create Emotions: A Problematic Psychology.”
Drunk Disrupts Dude at Disney
Gustavo Dudamel had to stop the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s performance of John Corigliano’s First Symphony on Friday night when an inebriated latecomer decided – very loudly and a bit violently – that he shouldn’t have to wait for a break in the music to enter the auditorium.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 03.10.14
Collector Jonathan Demme Joins The Sellers
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-03-10
Breaching The Fourth Wall
AJBlog: Dancebeat | Published 2014-03-10
Where One Looks for It, Evidence Will Be Found
AJBlog: PostClassic | Published 2014-03-10
Jazz Telepathy: Fred Hersch and Julian Lage
AJBlog: CultureCrash | Published 2014-03-10
Slipped Disc editorial: Why can’t anyone find the right word for Gerard Mortier?
AJBlog: Slipped Disc | Published 2014-03-10
Smithsonian Chooses A New Director
“He brings a record of noteworthy fundraising, having brought in more than $5 billion during his time at Cornell and $1 billion in a previous presidency at the University of Iowa.”
French Photographer JR Decides To Try His Hand At Ballet
“While JR has been hard at work creating the piece” – an eight-minute theatrical dance for New York City Ballet – “he’s also been relentlessly documenting its evolution via Instagram.” Of course.
Record Just Broken: The Longest-Running Theatre Production In History
“So exactly how long-running is the Charlottetown Festival production that plays at Confederation Centre in the greater scheme of things? Well, this season, Anne of Green Gables – which features music by Norman Campbell and words by Campbell, Don Harron, Elaine Campbell and Mavor Moore – by will be performed for a 50th consecutive summer in Charlottetown.”
Body Work: Grueling Training, Schedules Take Toll On Dancers
“Four out of five will suffer a severe injury during the course of their dancing career — and two out of those four will never fully recover. Injuries, more often than not, are the result of fatigue and repeated strain on muscles and joints, rather than unpredictable accidents.”
Weighing Over A Deal For Detroit Institute of Arts
“Formally severing Detroit’s ownership of the DIA would be at once revolutionary and conservative. It would represent a landmark in the the history of the museum, forever liberating it from the vagaries of city finances and politics at the root of many of the DIA’s struggles through the decades. Moreover, no city has ever ceded ownership of an art collection of such stature or financial value — estimates range in the billions.”
Glenn Beck, Culture Producer?
“Beck has three major motion pictures in development, and they will have a decidedly different outlook from the doom-and-gloom scenarios his Fox News viewers became accustomed to.”
“Smart Thinking” Books – Self-Help For Smart People?
“It has been called intelligent self-help, but since most potential readers would not appreciate the implied association with the dumber varieties, “smart thinking” has a certain advantage.”
Is The London Review Of Books The World’s Best Literary Magazine?
“This is, in many respects, a key part of the LRB’s ethos: it provides a space in which intelligent people can think differently; in which discomfiting thoughts can be voiced and provoking arguments can be aired with enough room to breathe.”
Bloomberg News Quits Arts Coverage
“It is especially inexplicable that Bloomberg News would ignore arts and design when award-winning and insightful architecture and design in its own facilities and terminals has abetted the company’s success. Contemporary art is widely found in the Bloomberg workplace.”
Devastating: The World Heritage Sites That Will Be Lost To Climate Change
“A new study released last week emphasizes the severity of this impact on culture: a whole fifth of the 720 listed UNESCO World Heritage Sites could be lost.”
The Uphill Battle To Build A Performing Arts Center At The World Trade Center
“To succeed, it will need to assemble a high-octane board, win over a thusfar noncommittal mayor and explain why the project is vital to New York at a time when a handful of similar theater spaces have opened in recent years, cultural leaders and arts-management experts said.”
Why We Need To Reinvent The Ways We Write Online
“The way media is changing isn’t entirely positive when it comes to creating a more informed citizenry. Now that we’ve made sharing information virtually effortless, how do we increase depth of understanding, while also creating a level playing field that encourages ideas that come from anywhere?”
The Onion Breaks The Story: National Endowment For The Arts To Award $80 Million For Talentless Hacks
“The independent federal agency said it intends to provide the nation’s exceptionally unskilled and deluded artists with cash grants ranging from $10,000 to $25,000 in order to sway them from continuing with their derivative and atrocious work, thereby significantly bolstering the overall quality of art in the United States.”
The World’s Rarest Jazz 78s Were Found Here
“In the 1940s, the Jazz Record Center became the default clubhouse for a cabal of distinctive gentlemen: exiles, recluses, characters so outsize in their eccentricities that they felt invented, except better. Here there was not a sense—as with the archetypal Outsider—that a choice had been made. Here, the earliest collectors of 78 rpm records found each other.”
Ukraine’s Most-Influential Poet Is Beaten
“It may sound like an old-fashioned ‘poet stands up to tyranny’ story, like something out of ‘Les Miz’—‘Can you hear the people sing?’—but it’s really kind of like that.”
The Ignorance Economy (It’s Thriving In The Age Of Information)
“The myth of the ‘information society’ is that we’re drowning in knowledge. But it’s easier to propagate ignorance.” That’s especially so when issues are so complicated that it’s easier to present them as the topics for discussion in which both sides are granted equal time.
David Carr: The Quality Of TV Has Gotten So Good It’s Edging Out Other Art Forms
“The vast wasteland of television has been replaced by an excess of excellence that is fundamentally altering my media diet and threatening to consume my waking life in the process.”
Where Are The Real Scholars Of Technology? (It Matters Because The World Is Changing)
“Technology comforts, surrounds, and confounds us. When we argue about MOOCs, hydraulic fracturing, NSA surveillance, or drone warfare, we’re arguing about technology. Unfortunately, the conversation is impoverished by the absence of a robust cadre of scholars who can engage with and critique the role of technology in society.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 03.09.14
Gerard Mortier on his last day at Salzburg
AJBlog: Slipped Disc | Published 2014-03-09An Art Museum For Las Vegas After All?
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-03-10Public 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 2014-03-09Odious Comparisons: Arts and Sports
AJBlog: We The Audience | Published 2014-03-09Michelangelo’s David Carrying A Rifle? Not If Italy Can Help It
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.”
How Did The Detroit Symphony Orchestra Reinvent Itself?
Partly by doing outreach at places like Ikea. Yes, Ikea flash mob Beethoven 9.
Why China Will Partner With Disney
“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.”
What Derek Jarman Meant To The Stage, Not Just The Screen
“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.”
If Dance Gets Back Into UK Schools, Will Kids Learn To Express Their Feelings More Clearly?
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.”
Movie Moguls Say They’d Really *Like* To Film In California, But …
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.”
What’s The Problem With Meryl Streep?
“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.”
Another Free Streaming Music Service, This One From Samsung
It’s called “Milk Music,” and you can only listen to it if you have a Samsung Galaxy phone.
Hey Classical Musicians, You Need To Learn Folk Music
“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.”
London’s A City In Thrall To Money And Greed
“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.”
Ned O’Gorman Wanted To Give Kids ‘Literature, Latin, And Love’
“‘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.”
How Did A Famous Novelist Get Sucked Into A Psychopath’s Lies And Life?
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.”
Paris, Before It Was Destroyed/Saved By Gentrification
“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.”
Loving Good Books Doesn’t Make You A Good Person
“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.”