“The acquisition gives the university a gracious formal parlor a few blocks from its Broad Street campus in a neighborhood populated by many of the city’s most generous arts donors. … The change marks a bittersweet epoch for the Art Alliance, which had once brought to the city the likes of Man Ray, Martha Graham, and Andrew Wyeth, but which lost a good deal of its cutting-edge sheen in recent decades. Its six small galleries now mostly exhibit contemporary crafts and design.”
Get A First Look Inside A Newly-Opened 3,500-Year-Old Egyptian Tomb
“Discovered at the Dra Abul Naga necropolis on the west bank of the Nile [near Luxor], the newly opened tomb holds statuettes, mummies, pottery, and other artifacts … One of the statues depicts a goldsmith named Amenemhat sitting beside his wife. A figure of one of their sons stands beneath them. The archaeologists say the family lived during Egypt’s 18th Dynasty.” (includes video)
Ian Buruma Talks About Launching A New Era At The New York Review Of Books
“Some shoes are harder to fill than others. Robert Silvers .. ran the left-leaning intellectual magazine with single-minded fervor from the time he co-founded it in 1963 until he died at 87 in March. His shoes may as well be Shaquille O’Neal’s.” But Buruma is up for the challenge, and, as he tells John Williams, he’ll do his job differently: “It was a monarchy, and I think perhaps it will be a slightly more democratic operation. Certainly I think I’ll be more collaborative.”
Meet Ira Lightman, Poetry Plagiarism Detective
Lightman is feared, reviled and lauded in the poetry world. For some, he’s a tireless vigilante, bravely aiming his chin at his enemies. For those enemies, he’s a bully and a witch-finder with an unnatural obsession. For others still, he’s in error; some of his targets aren’t plagiarists at all, they argue, just sloppy note-keepers. Moreover, Lightman makes no allowances for the practice of “intertextuality”: when you take someone else’s poem and use its structure, mood or language as a foundation for something new.
Artist Creates Image Of Giant Boy Peering Over US Wall With Mexico (And Crowds Gather)
Another Proms Summer For The Books (and A Celebration For Classical Music)
“The 2017 Proms welcomed nearly 300,000 concert-goers through the doors of the Royal Albert Hall, with one in five purchasing standing tickets which are sold on the day for £6. More than 35,500 tickets were bought by people attending the Proms for the first time and 10,000 under-18s attended concerts across the season.”
It’s Unanimous: “The Shape Of Water” Wins Venice Film Festival
The world’s oldest film festival has crowned some contentious and controversial winners over the years, but this time, the press and the jury are in agreement: “The Shape of Water” was rapturously acclaimed by critics when it unspooled on the festival’s second day, and has been has been firmly installed as a Golden Lion frontrunner ever since.
A Dance Company For Dancers In Wheelchairs
“People with disabilities lived with the stigma that they can’t do this, they can’t do that, they can’t dance, they can’t walk, they can’t talk. When you dance with a partner, you really forget who you’re dancing with. You forget their age, you forget their ability, disability, ethnicity, height, weight, you know, forget all of that. You start to see people and feel people as people, not a person in a wheelchair.”
Greg Escalante, 61, King Of The Lowbrow
Escalante is one of the key figures associated with Lowbrow, a pop-inflected school of art that emerged in 1970s California, and which drew inspiration from underground comics, punk music, tattooing, the custom car scene, and surf and skate culture — the exact opposite of what the minimalist-minded mainstream art world was into during that era.
Oregon Bach Festival Music Director Fired Over Joke?
“Matthew Halls was removed as artistic director of the Oregon Bach Festival following an incident in which he imitated a southern American accent while talking to his longstanding friend, the African-American classical singer Reginald Mobley. It is understood a white woman who overheard the joke reported it to officials at the University of Oregon, which runs the festival, claiming it amounted to a racial slur.”
Broadway Composer Michael Friedman, 41
Public Theater Artistic Director Oskar in a statement said “Michael Friedman was one of the most brilliant, multi-talented theater artists of our time. He was also a miracle of a human being: loving, kind, generous, hilarious, thrilling. His loss leaves a hole in the theater world that cannot be filled, and a hole in the hearts of those who loved him that will last forever.”
A New String Quartet Festival Highlights Difficulties Of The Art Form
“Although one of the greatest in classical music, the quartet literature is designed to be played in small venues, and performance fees have to be divided four ways. Making a secure living is hard. With the honourable exception of the University of Victoria, which has engaged the Lafayette String Quartet, Canada’s universities seem reluctant to emulate the example of their American counterparts in providing a secure working environment for these custodians of some of our greatest music. Meanwhile, they soldier on.”