“A particular problem with English people: they seem to think that everyone in Ireland is a writer, and very few of us are writers. And that somehow or other writing comes naturally to us, which it doesn’t. So people love saying to you, “‘h, you Irish—you’re such MAR-velous storytellers, all of you!'”
The piece “shows that criticism is art, which means that it doesn’t need a purpose or a rationale other than truth, or beauty, or keeping faith, or doing whatever it is we think art is trying to do.”
“When I see smashing new theatres that have come up in the last few years that are now just providing one-nighters, it’s tragic. I don’t know what you do about that – it is a huge, huge problem.”
Retha Powers, editor of the newly-published first edition, says that people ask her, “Why have this book if we have a President who is black? Is it really necessary for us to do this?” She says that the reason is to add stories to our collective memory: “The lens through which we look at history, when it’s narrow, tells us a very, very narrow story, a narrow impression of what the truth is.”
In choreograher Mourad Merzouki’s Boxe Boxe, “as the protagonists come into the ring (complete with stripe-shirted umpire), boxing mitts turn into glove puppets, a dancer’s body curves in a feline swoop only to be caught in a firm headlock, and limbs jab, swipe and kick while a string quartet roams the stage.”
“The brainchild of Amsterdam-based, Italian-born choreographer Emio Greco and Dutch dramaturge Pieter C. Scholten, Rocco explores brotherhood, masculinity, and the mythology of boxing, while pushing its four male dancers to physical extremes.”
“The Stratford Festival has generated a surplus of $1.4 million and an increase in attendance of 50,000 theatregoers in 2013, a year after posting a deficit of $3.4 million.”
“The cost of the burgeoning reproduction industry mirrors other facets of China’s explosive growth. Painters toil for long hours to meet quotas. Some receive monthly stipends, some are lucky enough to be boarded by their galleries.”
“A new, lavish coffee-table book, Libraries, pays homage to 44 of these vaults of wisdom around the world. In these photos, spines of shelved books appear like ornate mosaics; labyrinthine stacks seem like architectural gestures.”
“We stay in for amusement and leave the house for dinner. Film will always be dominated and controlled by what consumers are buying.”
“My haven for solace in and away from home is in the world of composers, harmonies, and possibilities. My musical haven has shaped my character and without it, my life would not be half as wonderful as it is today,” he writes.
“A pair of paintings by French artists Paul Gauguin and Pierre Bonnard that had been missing for four decades has been recovered by Italian authorities who said that the works of art were hanging in a kitchen of a retired Sicilian autoworker who was unaware of their value.”
The creators of the app Spritz argue that “only around 20% of your time is spent processing content. The remaining 80% is spent physically moving your eyes from word to word.” They mean to reverse those percentages. If they’re right, what does that mean for how we experience the written word?
“A respected Swiss art historian and curator has been drawn into the legal tangle surrounding the sale of dozens of high-priced forgeries by the shuttered New York art gallery Knoedler & Company.”
Bonnie Burnham, president of the World Monuments Fund, argues that the Middle East in particular – especially Syria – needs the help of those heroic men and women to save the region’s irreplaceable cultural heritage.
“Every year, thousands of paupers’ funerals – for those without the means to pay for burial – take place across the UK. The Nine O’Clock Slot pieces together the stories of those who die alone.”
“One of the most enduring stereotypes in all of comedy is of the road-weary, alcohol-soaked, and/or drug-addled comedian. Certainly there is a long line of victims.” (The L.A. comedy club the Laugh Factory even has an in-house therapy program.)
“On a crowded dance floor, a group of 50 women are swaying, stomping, lunging, and gyrating to singer Jason Derulo’s ‘Talk Dirty,’ Pitbull’s ‘Don’t Stop The Party’, and other popular numbers blasting over loudspeakers. It could be any trendy New York club, except here the dirty words and sexually explicit lyrics are missing from the raps, and no men are allowed. Ever.”
On the Value of the Arts
AJBlog: Field Notes | Published 2014-04-03
Delaware Art Museum’s Deaccession Debacle: My Q&A with Its Former Director, Danielle Rice
AJBlog: CultureGrrl | Published 2014-04-03
Betsky Asked To Leave Early?
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts | Published 2014-04-02
Disassembling something that nobody owns
AJBlog: The Artful Manager | Published 2014-04-02
The choir who came in from the cold (for Joyce DiDonato)
AJBlog: Slipped Disc | Published 2014-04-02
“Today PlayhouseSquare manages more than 2.3 million square feet of office and retail space in northeast Ohio. Just under half of that is in the PlayhouseSquare district, which includes five historic theaters, dating back to the 1920s, that after decades of neglect were renovated as part of a 27-year, $55 million campaign of public and private funds.”
It’s for ”We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves.” The $15,000 prize honors the best work of fiction published in the preceding year by an American.
“We found that the data doesn’t appear to support the persistent Hollywood belief that films featuring women do worse at the box office. Instead, we found evidence that films that feature meaningful interactions between women may in fact have a better return on investment, overall, than films that don’t.”
“Despite our recession-era reckoning with economics and inequality, fiction that examines both the macro and micro experience of poverty is all too rare. Of the writers who do venture forth in the tradition of John Steinbeck, many are finding new and riveting approaches to an age-old subject. But there are crucial gaps, still. And as brilliantly as Steinbeck wrote about poverty, we cannot rely on him to comprehensively tell today’s story.”
The Americans for the Arts Annual Convention in Nashville this June 13-15 is your opportunity to learn from and network with more than 1,000 arts professionals from across the country. [read more]