How Kazakhstan Became The Starchitects’ Fantasy Playground
“No other modern-day leader has used the myth-making power of architecture to construct a sense of national identity like Nazarbayev,” says Frank Albo, author of a new book on the Kazakh capital, Astana: Architecture, Myth and Destiny. “What you see here is a blend of postmodernism, Central Asian art, Islamic decor, Russian baroque, neoclassicism, orientalism, all melded into something that looks like Las Vegas meets Disneyland on nationalist steroids.” In a bid to cast off the shackles of the Soviet era, the president has embraced practically everything else. … [Read More]
Study: Students Don’t Learn As Well Reading Screens As They Do Reading Print
As researchers in learning and text comprehension, our recent work has focused on the differences between reading print and digital media. While new forms of classroom technology like digital textbooks are more accessible and portable, it would be wrong to assume that students will automatically be better served by digital reading simply because they prefer it. … [Read More]
How Opera Made The “Liabilities” In My Life Into Virtues
"The system of values that is manhood in the American south held up as its virtues firmness, reserve, self-containment, reticence, mastery of emotion. I longed to adhere to this system, but however hard I tried, I failed. I felt too much. I was prone to sudden rushes of emotion, to enthusiasms, affections, to tears... When I sang opera, the same things that had been sources of shame were sources of value. The gestures that embarrassed me in life made sense when I was on stage." … [Read More]
The Real Problem With Making Good Movies Today Isn’t “Rotten Tomatoes.” It’s The Audiences Hollywood Is Trying To Capture
"The real problem is much bigger than Rotten Tomatoes—it’s that so much of Hollywood is now fixated on capturing the widest audience possible with every film. Blockbuster action movies, superhero franchises, jolty horror pictures, and animated family films that can draw large crowds are the order of the day. Even mother!, which was light on actual scares but heavy on mood and allegory, was marketed as a horror movie in an attempt to pull viewers; theatergoers who felt misled by the advertising may have contributed to the F CinemaScore rating." … [Read More]
When You Take Dance Out Of A Theatre, You Get… Lots Of Questions
"In taking dance out of the theatre, Is This a Waste Land? not only takes the theatre out of dance, but most of the dance too. We’re left with a kind of social choreography, and an open expanse of questions that can – like other projects that venture outside theatre’s contained space – revitalise our experience of performance, spectatorship, sometimes even the world itself. Like seeing a familiar landscape anew." … [Read More]
Lauren Gunderson Is America’s Most-Produced Playwright This Season. So Why Don’t You Know About Her?
"Her plays are staged almost twice as often as anyone else’s on the list, far ahead of venerated figures like Eugene O’Neill and August Wilson, who edged her for the top spot last year. (The survey excludes Shakespeare, America’s perennial favorite.) Although men still write three-quarters of the plays that get produced, Gunderson has built a national reputation with works that center on women’s stories. And, though most playwrights also teach or work in television, she has managed to make a living, in San Francisco, by writing for the stage." … [Read More]
Bill Nighy Says It’s Become Fashionable For Actors Not To Learn Their Lines In Advance (For “Artistic” Reasons)
They mistakenly believe it improves their performance, he says. Saying actors must refocus their attention on preparing properly, Nighy argues the trend has been propagated by those who simply “don’t want to do their homework”. … [Read More]
The Ways We Abuse Art Are Terrible. There Are Plenty Of Culprits To Blame
Why make art when buyers treat works as an alternative currency, hiding them away like bullion bars in storage facilities? Can anything be done about questionable corporations and oppressive regimes using contemporary art to generate a spot of positive PR for themselves? And what links can be made between fuzzy surveillance images and abstract art? … [Read More]
How Britain’s Public Library System Was Dismantled
"Local councils have seized on the volunteer idea as an easy answer to budget cuts. Each local authority has struggled to find its own solutions, with local residents doing whatever they can. The commitment of volunteers is wholly admirable, but the result is that as a country, we have been left without a coherent library service and we have seen no real attempt to find out how well community-run libraries work." … [Read More]
Many Wonderful Writers Have Been Lost To History. Christopher Fowler Looks At Reasons Why
Ultimately, the reasons for a noteworthy author’s obscurity are as various as the authors themselves. Fowler’s findings show that other contributing factors seem to include underrating their own work, reclusiveness, and genre (with notable exceptions, comic writers tend not to be taken seriously enough to preserve). The caprices of fashion hit populist fiction especially hard; striving as it does to capture the mindset of its time, it’s inevitably more perishable. … [Read More]
New Film ‘The Death of Stalin’ Is A Madcap Farce – But In Russia, They’re Not Amused
The satire by Armando Ianucci (creator of Veep) is getting great early reviews in Britain (The Guardian's critic called it the movie of the year). The Russians beg to differ - even though no one there has seen it and the distributor hasn't even applied for a license for it yet. A pro-Kremlin newspaper pro-Kremlin newspaper called the film "a nasty sendup by outsiders who know nothing of our history"; one politician said it was a "planned provocation" and another described it as an "unfriendly act by the British intellectual class ... [part of an] anti-Russian information war." … [Read More]
Historian Gives The Real Story Of The Death Of Stalin – And Argues That A Film Comedy About It Was A Bad Idea
Richard Overy points out where Armando Ianucci's new The Death of Stalin gets the history wrong but allows that cinematic license could be legitimate. But the caricature, he writes, is just wrong, and not only because Stalin's victims deserve better: "The presentation of Stalin and his cronies as a collection of foul-mouthed misfits ... will certainly not help to understand the Russia of the 1950s while it mocks by implication the Russia of today, a country still shaped in some ways by the legacy of Stalin's modernisation drives and the operation of the Stalinist state." … [Read More]
Thousands Of Languages Are Dying. A New Project Aims To Save Their Poetry Before It Falls Silent
“Languages are dying out at an astonishing rate: a language is being lost every two weeks. And each of those languages has a poetic tradition of some sort, whether it’s written or aural – within that poetry will be all the different approaches and styles of writing poetry, as well as everything that poetry can tell us about those people: what they’re interested in; what their concerns are.” … [Read More]
The Best Optical Illusions Of 2017
The prize-winning images, chosen by readers of Scientific American, play with our perceptions of shape, motion, and length. Neuroscientist Susana Martinez-Conde talks with the three winners about how their illusions work. … [Read More]
Puzzle: A Painting Attributed To Leonardo Gets Science Wrong. Does That Mean It’s Not A Leonardo?
The painting is estimated to fetch $100m (£75m) at auction next month. But "in a forthcoming study, Leonardo da Vinci: the Biography, Walter Isaacson questions why an artistic genius, scientist, inventor, and engineer showed an 'unusual lapse or unwillingness' to link art and science in depicting the orb." … [Read More]
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Banff Centre Leadership Programs | Register Today
Hone your creative leadership approach and make your unique contribution to society. Banff Centre is a champion of arts and creativity, and Banff Centre Leadership programs prepare and empower … [Read More]
The Getty Leadership Institute – Apply Now for 2018 Programs
Executive Education for Museum Leaders: The Getty Leadership Institute at Claremont Graduate University is now accepting applications for GLI 2018 and NextGen 2018 programs. Join a dynamic and diverse … [Read More]
New Internationally-Focused MFA Program in Dance
THE UNIVERSITY OF THE ARTS | SCHOOL OF DANCE PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA USA www.uarts.edu/mfadance new internationally-focused mfa program including both year and low residency cohorts summer 2018 :: … [Read More]
Director, Presenting – Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity. Banff, AB Canada
Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity is seeking a dynamic and collaborative Director of Presenting who will be responsible for building and developing a presenting calendar which delivers on … [Read More]
The Top-Tier Medical School With Its Own Theater Company…
A reporter visits Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons to watch the Bard Hall Players rehearse Sondheim's Into the Woods. Every member of the cast and crew is a medical student; several have degrees and/or previous professional experience in music or theater. … [Read More]
Did Kenneth MacMillan Revolutionize British Ballet Or Ruin It?…
"By reputation, Kenneth MacMillan was the dark genius of British ballet - its destroyer, if you listen to some. They think this country's classical ballet reached its pinnacle under the Apollonian hand of Frederick Ashton, before MacMillan stomped in with his working-class neuroses and rape simulations and took ballet down to the psychological underworld." Ismene Brown looks at his body of work - especially the little-performed short ballets - in this 25th anniversary year of his death. … [Read More]
After Four Years Off, Mabou Mines Revives Itself And Gets A New (Old) Theater Of Its Own…
The 50-year-old company, a legend of the late 20th-century downtown avant-garde theater scene, is back at the old P.S. 122 building, just renovated, in Manhattan's East Village. Reporter Zachary Small visits the new Mabou Mines HQ and talks with co-artistic director Sharon Fogarty and company co-founder Lee Breuer, who - at age 80 - is premiering a new play there. … [Read More]
When Nazis Hired Jewish Intellectuals To Assemble A Yiddish Archive, The Scholars Hid The Best Stuff (Which Is Now Found)…
"In one of their odder and more chilling moves, the Nazis occupying Lithuania once collected Yiddish and Hebrew books and documents, hoping to create a reference collection about a people they intended to annihilate. Even stranger, they appointed Jewish intellectuals and poets to select the choicest pearls for study." … [Read More]
Sam Shepard’s Final Work To Be Published In December…
The novel Spy of the First Person, on which the playwright/actor began working just after he was diagnosed with ALS (of which he died in July) and which his daughters and his old friend Patti Smith helped him complete, is "the story of an unnamed narrator who retraces the memories of his life as he undergoes treatment for a medical condition that renders him dependent on the loved ones who are caring for him." … [Read More]
Two Picasso Murals And The Anders Breivik Bombing Make For A Bitter Battle In Oslo…
A few hours before right-wing terrorist Anders Behring Breivik shot 69 people dead at a summer camp outside the Norwegian capital in 2011, he left a car bomb in the city's government district that killed eight and severely damaged two landmark Brutalist buildings which have been empty ever since. Now the Norwegian government plans to tear down and replace one of those buildings and relocate its two murals, created by Pablo Picasso with Carl Nesjar. "Opponents of the decision see it as an affront to Norwegian and global artistic heritage, and a capitulation to Mr. Breivik." Says one official, "We don't want the ministry to tear down the building when the terrorist didn't manage to do that." … [Read More]
Danielle Darrieux, Great Beauty Of French Postwar Cinema, Dead At 100…
"[Her] poise, languid glamour and fine singing voice catapulted her to stardom as a teenager in the early 1930s and kept her there for decades, whether in melodramas, frisky comedies or light musicals. ... If her pre-war movies emphasized her sparkle and charm, the postwar years elicited some of her most riveting dramatic performances. Much of her critical legacy rests on three celebrated films she made with director Max Ophuls: La Ronde (1950), Le Plaisir (1952) and The Earrings of Madame de ... (1953). … [Read More]
Harlem School Of The Arts, Back From The Dead And Growing…
"Just seven years ago, the school, founded in 1964, was $2 million in debt and temporarily closed. Today, the school has not only recovered, but is pivoting from a place that primarily provided arts education for children to a full-fledged performing arts center." … [Read More]
Looted Benin Bronzes To Be Lent Back To Nigeria…
"A group of major cultural institutions in the UK and Europe ... is seeking a way to end decades of wrangling over the estimated 4,000 bronze and ivory artefacts looted by the British army from what is now southern Nigeria as part of a punitive expedition in 1897. Since the 1960s, Nigeria has repeatedly called for their repatriation." … [Read More]
Chicago Launches A Citywide Dance Festival…
"This weekend, Chicago dance artists and venues are opening their doors and inviting the public to stages all over the city to witness excerpts, works-in-progress and studio processes from our rich community of independent artists and small to midsize dance companies. Called Elevate Chicago Dance, the Chicago Dancemakers Forum (CDF) is the presenter of the multiday, multivenue, mostly free festival aimed at highlighting Chicago dance and increasing the visibility of established dance artists across a range of genres and disciplines." … [Read More]