Might Compassion Be Racially Biased? "The brain is not an equal opportunities organ, it seems. An imaging study of Chinese and Caucasian people has found that their brains respond less strongly to the pain of strangers whose ethnicity is different when compared with strangers of their own race." - New Scientist 07/01/09

email this story | Posted 07/01/09@09:56PM

You Are What You Speak: Grammar Really Does Shape Thought "Do English, Indonesian, Russian, and Turkish speakers end up attending to, partitioning, and remembering their experiences differently just because they speak different languages?" - Edge 06/12/09

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Hey, Rugby Players! Are You Man Enough To Get Through A Ballet Class? This week the coach of South Africa's national rugby team defended an eye-gouging incident by one of his players by saying, in effect, that rugby ain't ballet, it's a violent sport. So South African Ballet Theatre invited the players to take a class with them and see how they fared opposite some real men in tights. - The Times (South Africa) 07/01/09

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Does Facebook Activism Translate Into Real-World Action? "[W]hether our virtual virtuousness will result in real-world action is unpredictable, and has as much to do with human nature as it does with amassing enough numbers. This is the problem with activism born of social networking sites. ... Do our Facebook groups -- which are today often treated as the official barometer for a cause's importance; more members must signify more gravitas -- ever translate into significant change?" - Washington Post 07/02/09

email this story | Posted 07/02/09@05:45AM

What Are Critics Really For, Anyway? Anne Midgette: "The role of a critic is to cover a field. This doesn't mean simply pandering to popular taste. It means doing one's best to convey a sense of what is going on in a given discipline by writing about every possible side of it. It means trying to convey a perspective that a reader who doesn't spend every night going to concerts/plays/films may not be able to gather himself; or offering a thoughtful take that might stimulate a reader who does go to everything to see something in a different light." - Washington Post 07/01/09

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NYC's Film & TV Tax-Credit Fund Runs Out Of Money "New York City has exhausted its budget for tax incentives for film and TV productions as of Tuesday, city officials announced.... 'New York City's "Made in NY" tax credit for qualified film and television production -- the only one of its kind administered by a city in the U.S. -- has reached its full allocation of $192.5 million and funds are no longer available for new applications,' the NYC Mayor's Office of Film, Theatre and Broadcasting said." - Hollywood Reporter 07/01/09

email this story | Posted 07/02/09@08:21AM

Bad Economy Means Good Times For Public Service Ads "[S]upport for public service campaigns is usually stronger during economic downturns because media companies often prefer to run classy-looking, altruistic ads to fill space and time rather than sell that inventory to dodgy marketers whose ads may be cheesy, misleading or deceptive." In 2008, particularly in the fourth quarter, the number of public service ads rose significantly over 2007 -- and the trend is continuing. - The New York Times 07/01/09

email this story | Posted 07/02/09@05:21AM

Project  Runway  Gallery: Art Gets The Reality TV Treatment "In the series [on the Bravo cable network], 13 contestants will compete for a gallery exhibition, a cash prize and a sponsored national tour. The artists will create works in the fields of sculpture, painting, photography, industrial design and more. Their completed works will be judged by a panel of art world figures including gallerists, collectors, curators, critics and fellow artists. The finalists' work will be featured in a nationwide museum tour." - Los Angeles Times 07/01/09

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Surge In Private Commissions Enlivens Concert Repertoire "[S]mall-scale commissions by individuals are becoming increasingly popular as new types of networks link composers with potential patrons. While many of these commissions arise out of private occasions, the resulting music is set to revitalize the concert repertoire for generations to come." - Wall Street Journal 07/02/09

email this story | Posted 07/02/09@06:18AM

At Last, Some Good News: St. Louis Symphony Sees Increases In Audience And Revenue "Though the SLSO performed the same number of concerts at Powell Hall as it did in 2007-'08 - 109 - this season it reported a 15 percent increase in revenue: $5.57 million, up from $4.84 million. In addition, total attendance rose … [by] 7.8 percent. Between January and May, the orchestra played to seven near-capacity or sold-out houses." - Riverfront Times (St. Louis) 07/01/09

email this story | Posted 07/01/09@09:57PM

A Grant To Keep Opera Alive In Orlando "United Arts of Central Florida Board of Directors voted to earmark $200,000 for a proposal to keep opera alive in Central Florida" - with a semi-staged opera-in-concert presented by the Orlando Philharmonic next year - "following the Orlando Opera Company's Chapter 7 bankruptcy filing in early June. […] The [ultimate] goal is for a new opera company to be in place when the $425 million Dr. P. Phillips Orlando Performing Arts Center opens." - Orlando Business Journal 06/29/09

email this story | Posted 07/01/09@09:50PM

The New-And-Improved Alice Tully Hall? Not Everyone Is So Impressed Allan Kozinn: "I hate the new Tully Hall. To me it is everything Lincoln Center and its enthusiasts insist it is not. I find it corporate, sterile, claustrophobic and as acoustically arid a hall as I've ever heard. Similarly, everything now being said about the old Tully rings false to me." - New York Times 07/02/09

email this story | Posted 07/01/09@09:39PM

Things Aren't Really That Bad At The Belgrade Philharmonic That newspaper ad last month offering the musicians' services "at weddings, funerals, baptisms, birthdays, divorces and saints' days"? The orchestra's music director says, "This was our way of drawing the attention of a broader public to the problems of the Philharmonic, to somehow present our financial problems in an absurd, Monty Python way." And it worked: "Within 36 hours a Facebook support group had sprung up with several thousand members … [and] the advertisement attracted a surge of support from new, younger music fans." - The Independent (UK) 06/30/09

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Thomas Jefferson, A Young Nation's First Violinist Music was Thomas Jefferson's "particular delight, 'an enjoyment, the deprivation of which . . . cannot be calculated,' he declared in 1785. From early boyhood, he pursued this 'passion of my soul,' studying the violin with a teacher in Williamsburg, Va. By the time he matriculated at the College of William and Mary in 1760, his playing was so fluent that he was invited for weekly chamber music gatherings with the royal governor of Virginia." - Wall Street Journal 07/02/09

email this story | Posted 07/02/09@06:12AM

Pina Bausch, Tender Mother Figure (Yes, Really) Mark Swed: "Again and again Bausch stopped the dancers, praised them and ever so sweetly asked them to start over, as she lithely sidestepped falling bodies. … When the tension became unbearable or it looked as if the dancers would be beaten to a pulp, Bausch flashed a sly smile and handed out cookies. She had baked them that morning. They were delicious." - Los Angeles Times 07/01/09

email this story | Posted 07/01/09@09:31PM

Philip Roth, Dance Remix Sensation When critic James Marcus interviewed Roth for an L.A. Times profile, the author gave a demonstration of what he described as "shouting. Jewish shouting." (Roth was talking about the film version of Goodbye, Columbus.) Marcus liked the demo so much, he remixed it into a dance track. That track is now a "viral sensation" which has been blogged about by The New York Times, Gawker, The Guardian and MediaBistro. (And now it's a ringtone, too.) - MobyLives 07/1/09

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In Open Library, Imagining Books As Networked Objects The Open Library's goal "is to create a single page on the web for every book that has ever been published; an enormous, searchable catalogue of information about millions of books. ... But with information about books already being processed by hugely popular websites such as Google and Amazon, the question remains - why bother?" - The Guardian (UK) 07/01/09

email this story | Posted 07/02/09@07:59AM

Salinger Wins Preliminary Injunction Vs. Swedish Author "In a victory for the reclusive writer J. D. Salinger, a federal judge on Wednesday indefinitely banned publication in the United States of a new book by a Swedish author that contains a 76-year-old version of Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of 'The Catcher in the Rye.' ... While the case could still go to trial, [the] ruling means that [Fredrik] Colting's book cannot be published in the United States pending the resolution of the litigation, which could drag on for months or years." - The New York Times 07/02/09

email this story | Posted 07/02/09@05:05AM

Amazon.com Fights Back Against Sales Taxes In Three States "Seattle-based Amazon notified associates" - independent Web sites which link readers to the e-tailer in exchange for a commission on any resulting sales - "in Rhode Island and Hawaii that the company was no longer working with them as of Monday and Tuesday, respectively, because the states have passed laws to collect sales taxes on these transactions." This move follows similar action by Amazon against associates in North Carolina. - Forbes (AP) 06/30/09

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John Malkovich As A Latter-Day Jack The Ripper In The Infernal Comedy: Confessions of a Serial Killer, a chamber music-theater piece opening this week in Vienna, Malkovich plays Jack Unterweger, an Austrian poet/journalist/murderer who was released from prison in 1990 following a campaign by "Viennese cafe intellectuals" - and went on to kill 11 prostitutes by strangling them with their bra straps. "[A]s a journalist for the state broadcaster, he was reporting on the very crime wave for which he was responsible." - The Guardian (UK) 06/30/09

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Restored Fresco Said To Reveal Michelangelo Self-Portrait "The restoration of frescoes by Michelangelo in the Vatican has revealed what is believed to be a self-portrait of the artist. The face is in a wall mural in the Vatican's Pauline Chapel or Cappella Paolina, according to Maurizio De Luca, the Vatican's chief restorer. The chapel, which is used by the Pope and not open to the public, was unveiled this week after a restoration costing €3.2 million (£2.7 million)." - The Times (UK) 07/02/09

email this story | Posted 07/02/09@07:43AM

What Rub Might Do With Gehry, He Did With Vinoly In Ohio While Timothy Rub, incoming director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, "brings to his new job a resume strong on all the essential art-world skills, one of the qualities that surely impressed the Philadelphia trustees is his ability to manage a big construction project and a big architectural ego." This is key as the museum embarks on a $500 million expansion designed by Frank Gehry. - Philadelphia Inquirer 07/02/09

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Gap Founder Gives Up On Plan For Presidio Art Museum "Gap founder Donald Fisher and his family have decided to abandon their efforts to build a contemporary art museum at the Main Post of San Francisco's Presidio.... The question now is whether the Fishers will invest additional time and money on a local proposal, trusting the word of critics who have said they would like to see the renowned collection stay in the city as long as a museum was built at a less sensitive location." - San Francisco Chronicle 07/02/09

email this story | Posted 07/02/09@07:03AM

Not All $$$ News Is Bad: Ten L.A. Artists Get $20K Grants "Forget the recession for a minute. The California Community Foundation, in partnership with the Getty Trust, is still doling out money to Los Angeles County's visual artists. In this year's round of fellowships, to be announced today, 10 mid-career artists will receive $20,000 apiece and four emerging figures will each get $15,000." - Los Angeles Times 07/02/09

email this story | Posted 07/02/09@06:55AM

Auctions Aren't Always The Best Way To Deaccession Daniel Grant: "In most cases, museums prefer going to auction. Whatever criticism these institutions receive for selling objects only increases if they don't do it that way." But that doesn't mean auctions are the smartest choice. "The method of disposing of deaccessioned objects needs to be evaluated on a case-by-case basis, and museum directors fearful of public criticism might want to broaden their outlook." - Wall Street Journal 07/02/09

email this story | Posted 07/02/09@05:53AM

'Floating In Space' On A Glass Ledge Atop The Sears Tower "It's a glass ledge, 1 1/2 inches thick and poking out about four feet from the 103rd floor of the Sears Tower. There is no frame under the floor, only air -- 1,353 feet of it, straight down to the miniature taxis on Wacker Drive." The trick to it "is an intriguing feat of engineering, a team of designers and builders said Wednesday, swearing on a stack of liability policies as they unveiled the project. " - Washington Post 07/02/09

email this story | Posted 07/02/09@05:24AM

Dutch Arts Official On The Lam After Embezzling Millions "The former head of finance for the Dutch national arts funding body, the Foundation for Visual Arts, Design and Architecture (BKVB), is the subject of an international police hunt after the discovery that he had siphoned around €15.5m from the organisation's accounts." - The Art Newspaper 07/01/09

email this story | Posted 07/01/09@09:35PM

Portrait Of The Artist (Rembrandt) As A Young Card Sharp "[It] is the earliest depiction of Rembrandt as a hopeful teenager, not as he would have liked to have been seen but how he looked to a fellow art student in Amsterdam. Jan Lievens painted Rembrandt at the age of 16, as the central figure in The Cardplayers, which is believed to have been completed in 1623-24." - The Independent (UK) 06/29/09

email this story | Posted 07/01/09@09:34PM

A 'Bizarre Union Of Dr. Frankenstein And Georgia O'Keeffe' "Forget the notion of a reverent nature photographer tiptoeing through the woods, camera slung over one shoulder, patiently looking for perfect light. Robert Buelteman works indoors in total darkness, forsaking cameras, lenses, and computers for jumper cables, fiber optics, and 80,000 volts of electricity." - Wired 06/22/09 (includes images)

email this story | Posted 07/01/09@09:24PM

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