Today’s Stories
You Can’t Think Your Way To Being Creative. Here’s What To Do Instead
Some of the earliest scientific studies of creativity focused on personality. And some evidence suggests that innovation comes easier to people with certain personality types. A 1998 review of dozens of creativity studies found that overall, creative people tend to be more driven, impulsive, and self-confident. They also tend to be less conventional and conscientious. – Nautilus
It Doesn’t Have To Be Netflix OR Movie Theatres
Netflix is a business like any other, one locked in a seemingly unresolvable war with the movie-theater industry, which it views as a rival. Twelve percent of Americans see at least one movie a month in theaters; Netflix has about 60 million U.S. subscribers, or a fifth of the country. Both are huge money-making endeavors, and the idea that one has to die for the other to prosper is hard to grasp. – The Atlantic
Hospital As Sound Experience: A Musician’s Critique
It may take a musician’s vocabulary to identify the devil’s interval, but it doesn’t take a musician’s ear to notice that hospitals are acoustically stressful places. Noise is one of the top complaints in hospitals. – The Atlantic
Is Upright Citizens Brigade Circling The Drain?
Just three years ago, it seemed (at least to the outside world) that the company was turning into an improv empire: multiple locations in NYC and LA, a TV deal, corporate workshops, thousands of paying students, and hundreds of comic actors willing to perform for free. Now some of those locations are closing, staff are being laid off, and the owners signed a lease on a new flagship space without knowing that the company was running at a deficit. Writer Seth Simons looks at whether UCB can be saved and whether it should. – Slate
Is It Time To Boot Renoir From The “Great Artists” Canon?
Sebastian Smee: “I ask this knowing it is the wrong question. It is wrong not just because huge numbers of people think Renoir is, in fact, great, as well as adorable, joyous and life-affirming. But also because, for many of the rest of us, Renoir is not ‘less than great.’ He is awful. Hideous. Beyond the pale.” – Washington Post
What Happens To Modern Dance Companies — And What Happens To Modern Dance Itself — When The Founders Are Gone?
Joan Acocella: “A lot of modern-dance companies are talking about ‘legacy’ and trying to come up with ways to perpetuate it. Why? Well, the art form is more than a century old. Many modern-dance companies are now big institutions, prestigious features of our cultural landscape. If they disband, a ton of people will lose their jobs. More important, there will no longer be anyone to perform the dances properly, in the style passed down through generations of dancers. The work will cease to exist. It would be as if, when Rembrandt died, all his canvases were taken out into the back yard and burned.” – The New Yorker
What Is America’s Culture?
Encouraging distinctly American artistic habits stands a chance of making art more accessible without making it unserious or “middlebrow.” The arts are so irrelevant to most Americans’ lives in no small part because they have diverted so sharply from that tradition. Without reconnecting to the “soil” of the life experience of most Americans, the art world exists with and for the Hamptons. – National Affairs
Septime Webre Is Starting To Do For Hong Kong Ballet What He Did For Washington Ballet
In the two years he’s been artistic director of Hong Kong Ballet (where he arrived one year after leaving the same job in DC), Webre has added to the company’s repertoire, brought in high-profile guest artists, and seen subscriptions more than double. – Pointe Magazine
Has Magic Been Displaced By Science? Not At All
Far from having evaporated, ‘folkloric disenchantment’ is still common today in the writings of self-described magicians, shamans and witches. But we also find its analogue in academic disciplines. In this academic version of the myth, nostalgia for vanished magic has been replaced by the idea that a scientific worldview has stepped in to replace more primitive folk-belief systems. – Aeon
Oregon Bach Festival’s Executive Director Out, Two Years After Firing Of Artistic Director Matthew Halls
A Friday afternoon announcement said that Janelle McCoy would be leaving after this year’s festival (which begins Friday) and that her job is being eliminated due to budget cuts. In 2017, she was behind the dismissal of Halls, ostensibly for a racist remark made to a singer who insisted that the remark wasn’t racist and he wasn’t offended (except by the firing). – Eugene Weekly
Who Gets Duped By Fake Online Images
The main factors that determined whether a person could correctly perceive each image as a fake were their level of experience with the internet and digital photography. – The Conversation
Soprano Measha Brueggergosman Comes Through Emergency Double-Bypass Surgery
“[She] wrote a Facebook post late Friday … ‘Just 30 teensy hours after a five-hour open-heart surgery (10 years after my OTHER open-heart surgery to repair a dissected aorta), I am tube- and oxygen-free and have even walked around the nurse’s station three times!'” – CBC
David Esterly, Self-Taught Master Wood Carver, Dead At 75
He’d completed a doctorate in literature at Cambridge and wasn’t sure what to do with himself next when, on a visit to London, he saw the 17th-century woodcarvings by Grinling Gibbons in St. James’s Church, Piccadilly. He was so amazed by them that he taught himself the craft, and he got so good that he was eventually commissioned to recreate some of Gibbons’s own work, lost in the 1986 fire at Hampton Court Palace. – The New York Times
How The Mueller Report Was Turned Into A Play And Live-Streamed By A Superstar Cast
Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Robert Schenkkan (The Kentucky Cycle) adapted the special counsel’s notoriously careful report into a drama titled The Investigation: A Search for the Truth in Ten Acts — each act covering an act of possible obstruction of justice detailed in the report. And on Monday, a cast featuring Annette Bening, Kevin Kline, Michael Shannon, Alfre Woodard, Jason Alexander, and many others read and streamed the play live; John Lithgow played Donald Trump. – Los Angeles Times
Calm Down, Folks — Netflix Has Not Locked Down The Future Of Cinema
Not, argues David Sims, that you could tell from the big New York Times package on the future of movies. We need to keep in mind that “Netflix is still a young company, one that’s sitting on a mountain of debt and creating new film and TV at a rate that feels unsustainable,” that studios are building their own streaming services to compete with Netflix, and that last year’s box office grosses from actual cinemas were the biggest ever. – The Atlantic
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That Google-Docs Arts Workers Salary Spreadsheet: A Seattle Analysis
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Sviatoslav Richter Was One Of The World’s Great Pianists. But Then He Met A Lobster
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Why The Audio Quality Of Your Music Player Sucks
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Is It Time To Boot Renoir From The “Great Artists” Canon?
Premium Classifieds
Director of Collections and Research – National Museum of Wales
National Museum Wales – Amgueddfa Cymru – is the most important cultural institution in Wales and a leader in the UK in public engagement and cultural participation. It holds internationally … [Read More...]
Arts Professionals: Would You Like to Work with a Ghostwriter on Your Memoirs?
Before you dismiss the idea... Read Lillian Shelton's "A Shelton Story: Memories of a Secrest Series of Events," which I ghostwrote. In it, Lillian draws on her memories of directing the … [Read More...]
The Chamber Music Society seeks a Public Relations Manager
The Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center seeks a creative, high energy, collaborative Public Relations Manager to design and execute all public relations outreach for this premier international … [Read More...]
In The Age Of Amazon, The Few Queer Bookstores Left Are Lifelines For Queer Teens
Even as the number of LGBTQ stories told in young adult literature keeps growing, there are still many teens whose libraries don’t offer it and who don’t feel comfortable asking for that subject matter in a regular bookstore. Giovanni’s Room, Philadelphia’s LGBTQ bookstore, is still in business; Abbey White visits it and talks to some teens about why it’s important to them. – The Philadelphia Inquirer
The Website That Broke The Aziz Ansari #MeToo-Or-Bad-Date Story? It Was A Mess, And Here’s How It Collapsed
Babe.net, which marketed itself as “for girls who don’t give a fuck,” was an HR professional’s nightmare, and a journalism professor’s nightmare, too. Allison P. Davis reports on how its biggest story was only a part of what brought it quietly crashing down. – The Cut
Other Buyers May Be Ready To Pay More Than $2.66 Billion For Sotheby’s
“The 275-year-old auction house — which agreed … to sell itself for $2.66 billion to French telecom tycoon Patrick Drahi — could soon get at least two counteroffers from rival investors, The Post has learned.” – The New York Post
New York City’s Public Libraries Drop Access To Streaming Movie Service
The Brooklyn, Queens, and New York Public Library systems began offering cardholders free access to the well-regarded service Kanopy in 2017, and last year about 1% of cardholders used the service. Now the libraries have said that rising costs (Kanopy charged the libraries $2 per view) have made offering the service “unsustainable.” – The New York Times
Guelph Treasure Case: Berlin Museums Will Appeal To US Supreme Court For Dismissal
“The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, the organisation that oversees Berlin’s state museums, says it will appeal to the United States Supreme Court to dismiss a claim for the Guelph Treasure filed by the heirs of a consortium of Jewish art dealers who say they sold the artefacts under duress in the Nazi era. The heirs say the treasure is worth at least €200m.” – The Art Newspaper
There’s A Whole New, And More Diverse, Generation Taking The Helm At British Theatres
Susannah Clapp: “There used to be a template for the artistic directors of theatres. A template about as restricted as candidates for the Tory party leadership. White and male. Obviously. This was so continuous with the default position for power in Britain that for ages it went unremarked. Not any more. … British theatre is in the process of a massive change. More far-reaching than any I have seen in more than 20 years as The Observer‘s drama critic. Accelerating. Overdue. Irrevocable. Welcome.” Here are Q&As with half a dozen of the new leaders. – The Observer (UK)
The Sultan Of Oman Is Trying To Establish A Major Opera House
He’s already got the building: the spectacular Royal Opera House, Muscat, which opened in 2011 and is reportedly the Omani capital’s second-most-popular tourist attraction. The Economist looks at Sultan Qaboos’s reasons for funding European opera and a few of the difficulties in making the form work in the conservative Arab Gulf. – The Economist
That Queer Sex Video Jair Bolsonaro Tweeted? It Was Guerrilla Performance Art, Say The Men In It
In March the Brazilian president posted a video clip shot at a gay street party during São Paulo’s Carnival, tweeting, “We have to expose the truth so the population are aware of their priorities.” Now the pair caught on the video have spoken to the media for the first time since Bolsonaro’s tweet: they say they’re part of a six-person queer art collective called Ediy. “We want to perform in public places. Places where this sort of thing is not expected. We refer to it as ‘hacking the imagination’.” – The Guardian
Elizabeth Banks: Making Money In Hollywood Is Getting Tougher
“There’s a lot more work, but it’s a lot harder to make money on anything. It’s one of the reasons the unions are up in arms right now. For low-end workers, the people on the tail of those big productions, it’s a lot harder to get by. And that’s true for middle-class actors and writers, too.” – The New York Times
How “Hamilton” Changed The Broadway Touring Business
The 2018-19 touring season that just ended set records in box office ($1.6 billion) and attendance (18.5 million). “Hamilton” had a clear hand: There are now four productions beyond New York, up from three the previous season. The total number of “Hamilton” weeks on the road sprang from 121 to 177, according to Charlotte St. Martin, president of the Broadway League. – Washington Post