Could an L.A. Dance Hub Grow from a Mapping Tool?
AJBlog: Fresh Pencil Published 2015-03-31
Opening the Door, Inviting Visitors In
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2015-03-30
Lookback: on being sensitive to voices
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2015-03-31
Jazz Appreciation Month 2015
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2015-03-31
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Archives for March 2015
So It’s Come To This: An Offer To Buy The New York Daily News For $1
“The offer would come one month after New York media and real estate magnate Mortimer Zuckerman said he was considering selling the newspaper and had hired Lazard Ltd (LAZ.N) to assist with the process. It underscores the declining readership and plunging advertising revenue that have plagued the tabloid for years.”
Competition To Design New Helsinki Guggenheim Shows How Architecture Has Been Transformed By Technology
“Witness the competition for the next proposed Guggenheim museum, in Helsinki. It attracted 1,715 entries online, arguably the largest number ever in an architectural competition. The winners flooded social media and were picked over on design blogs within hours. If one is built, it will likely employ complex geometries rendered with the help of robots.”
Canada’s Largest Non-Profit Theatre Balances Its Books As Audiences Shrink
“The Stratford Festival ended its 2014 season in the black – but the latest news on the Ontario theatre festival’s attendance is less black and white.”
Have Humans Been Evolving Themselves?
“People want to know if humans are getting taller, smarter, better looking or more athletic. My answer is truthful but disappointing: We’re almost certainly evolving, but we don’t know in what direction or how fast.”
Why We’re Still Fascinated By Jane Austen
“What explains the continued popularity of Jane Austen and the handful of novels she wrote? It is, after all, rather remarkable that a woman who spent her life in quiet provincial circumstances in early 19th-century England should become, posthumously, a literary celebrity outshining every author since then, bar none.”
Don’t Underestimate The Classics: “Cinderella” Tops The Weekend’s Global Movie Box Office
“The rags-to-riches story of a woman who captures a prince’s heart while losing her shoe is also the studio’s second highest-grossing live-action release in China, having made $65.1 million in the People’s Republic. Globally, its total stands at a regal $336.2 million.”
America’s Most Prolific (And Generous) Art Forger
“It obviously isn’t a crime to give a picture to a museum, and they treated me like royalty. One thing led to another, and I kept doing it for 30 years,” says Mark Landis, one of the most prolific art forgers in US history.
The Psychology Of Tall Buildings
“The current architectural zeitgeist, whereby form invariably follows finance, finds its purest expression in the skyscrapers de nos jours, with their parametrically designed waveforms that positively billow with opportunism.”
How To Develop An Instinct For Understanding Data
“One thing I try to argue is that it’s not just about bigger machines to crunch more data, and it’s not even about pattern recognition. It’s about frameworks of recognition; how you choose to look, rather than what you’re trying to see.”
Think You Can Make A Living Writing A Book? Not With These Advances
“The median advance for traditionally published authors is “well under £6,600”, according to early findings of a survey into authors’ attitudes towards their publisher. The survey also found that bigger publishers pay more.”
Why American Education Needs To Focus On More Than The Basics
“America’s last bipartisan cause is this: A liberal education is irrelevant, and technical training is the new path forward. It is the only way, we are told, to ensure that Americans survive in an age defined by technology and shaped by global competition. The stakes could not be higher. This dismissal of broad-based learning, however, comes from a fundamental misreading of the facts.”
WQXR Boss: Here’s How To Pick The New Music Director Of The New York Philharmonic
Graham Parker: “What has frustrated me more in all the articles I have read since Alan Gilbert announced his conclusion as music director, was the complete lack of considering the audience in the short listing of candidates. The audience, in this case, are: current patrons of the New York Philharmonic; future audiences who like classical music but don’t buy tickets; folks who don’t yet like classical music but have a latent reason to like it at some point; and then the wider audience of New York and all that it stands for as a leading cultural capital of the world.”
Renoir, Picassos, Warhols Seized In Romanian Corruption Probe
“Romanian prosecutors investigating an alleged bribery scheme have questioned the former finance minister about the origins of 100 paintings,” including three Picasso sketches, several works by Andy Warhol, and an apparent Renoir that was found in a safe along with gold bricks.
Anti-Curator Hysterics And Falsehoods Won’t Fix MOMA
Greg Allen: “Christian Viveros-Fauné’s artnet News column earlier this week, which purported to pull back the curtain on Klaus Biesenbach’s reign of curatorial terror at MoMA, is not going to help; it is not only poisonous and pointlessly personal, it’s inaccurate.”
Jeffrey Deitch Says He Was Persecuted At L.A. MOCA, Just Like Klaus Biesenbach Is Now At MOMA
“‘Some of you may have read the diatribes against one of my favorite colleagues Klaus Biesenbach raging today,” he said … “[It] reminds me of the diatribes that went on against me when I was at MOCA. … So with Klaus, it’s Bjork; with me, it was James Franco, unfortunately.’ This generated much laughter from the audience.” (Deitch also says he wish he’d presented the Björk show.)
Reading Shakespeare In Tehran
Professor Stephen Greenblatt on his lecture at the first Iranian Shakespeare Congress: “Most of the questions were from students, the majority of them women, whose boldness, critical intelligence, and articulateness startled me. Very few of the faculty and students had traveled outside of Iran, but the questions were, for the most part, in flawless English and extremely well informed.”
Beyond Ai Weiwei: How China’s Artists Handle Politics (Or Avoid Them)
Thirty-something artist Cao Fei: “Criticizing society, that’s the aesthetics of the last generation. When I started making art, I didn’t want to do political things. I was more interested in subcultures, in pop culture.”
Tony Award-Winning Director Gene Saks Dead At 93
While his career in both theater and movies included such hits as Mame, Same Time Next Year and I Love My Wife, Saks was best known for a long series of collaborations (stage and screen) with Neil Simon, from Barefoot in the Park and The Odd Couple through to the “Brighton Beach Trilogy.”
Michael Rush, Director Who Led Rose Art Museum Through Deaccessioning Fight, Dead At 66
Following the successful struggle to keep Brandeis University from closing the Rose and selling off its collection, Rush went on to become founding director of the Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University.
Here’s What Angel Corella’s First Season Running Pennsylvania Ballet Will Look Like
“Justin Peck, Liam Scarlett, Wayne McGregor, Christopher Wheeldon: They’re among the hottest young choreographers in ballet today. And Pennsylvania Ballet will dance their works and more next year in a blockbuster-packed season, artistic director Angel Corella announced Monday. This is the sort of world-class programming that dance fans anticipated when Corella was hired in the fall.”
“The Wiz” To Be Performed Live On NBC, Then Eases On Down To Broadway
“On Dec. 3, a live version of The Wiz will make its debut on the network, produced in partnership with Cirque du Soleil’s theatrical division, which will then take it to Broadway for the 2016-17 season.”
Venice’s Opera House Is Staying In The Black By *Adding* Performances
How do they do it? Don’t opera houses lose money on every performance? Not necessarily. And La Fenice is taking advantage of something Venice has more of than almost any other Italian city. (No, not water.)
Court Orders Turkish President To Pay Damages For Insulting Artist’s Work
Four years ago, when he was still prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan described a peace monument by sculptor Mehmet Aksoy near the Turkish-Armenian border as a “monstrosity.” Under libel laws that Erdoğan has been quick to use himself against critics, he was ordered to pay Aksoy 10,000 lire (about $3,800). The president is appealing.
When People Were Scared Of Computers
“In the early 1980s, the age of the personal computer had arrived and ‘computerphobia’ was suddenly everywhere. … [The subject] came up in magazines, newspapers, computer training manuals, psychology studies, and advertising copy.”