“Making her way from her small apartment in the city where she grew up, passing bombed out buildings, crowded cafes and ubiquitous security checkpoints, Nagham ventures daily to the studio where she first honed her internationally recognized skills as a ballerina.”
Archives for February 2016
Highlights From This Week’s ArtsJournal
Arguably, the dominant cultural issue of our time is the changes in how people are finding and getting culture. In response, business models supporting culture and the kinds of culture being made are also changing. It also underpins debates about diversity, engagement and power. Some broad themes this week.
Has The Minnesota Orchestra Come Back From The Brink After Its Long, Painful Lockout?
“The stakes will be high [at Carnegie Hall] when Vänskä and his musicians face a packed house of some of the sharpest ears in classical music, anxious to assess the orchestra’s rebound from a bitter 16-month lockout.”
Is There A Case For Classical Music Radio In This Time Of Spotify And Pandora And Apple Music?
“My go-to platform is radio. Since I spend so much of my work week choosing music for other people to listen to, I take immense pleasure in consuming playlists that other humans have curated when I’m on my own time. I listen terrestrially if I’m in my car or at home and stream the audio on my phone if I’m walking or bussing.”
The Great Abyss Of Missing Stories About Women
“We are always looking to tell something from a fresh perspective and with a fresh insight and it just so happens that, because of the way history is told, a lot of the untold stories are female. We are drawn to it from a storytelling point of view rather than specifically because it is based around women.”
The Met Museum Admissions Lawsuit Has Been Settled
“To dispel any remaining confusion, signs at the museum’s admission desks will also include two new sentences: ‘The amount you pay is up to you’ and ‘Please be as generous as you can.'”
Books Provide The Best Oscars Fodder, The Numbers Say
“When a book has been terrifically popular, when people love the story and the characters, there’s almost a public demand that it be turned into a movie. The studio can be confident that the film will make money, and it may even turn out to be a really remarkable film.”
All An American Musical Audience Wants Is A Good ‘I Want’ Song
“Time has proven that the pre-inciting incident I Want Song is the most successful with audiences. It gives the characters the power to make choices and influence the plot. When the characters are making choices, they are more sympathetic.”
Al-Jazeera America Bows Out With A Valedictory Look Back
“AJAM online’s legacy, some of it captured on these pages, is a journalism of value and of values not tied to any ideology or political entity but morally committed when confronted by racism and bigotry, violence against the innocent, injustice and inequality, sexism and homophobia. We tried in our brief tenure to uphold the fine tradition of an American journalism that comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable.”
In Honor Of These Oscars, Let’s Look At All The Times The Academy Picked The Wrong Best Picture
“Let’s take a walk through the past four decades of Best Picture winners of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. It’s an almost unbroken chain of incorrect decisions!”
Study: A Clean Desk Might Impede Creativity
“Clean up your desk too much and you might find you’ve accidentally cleaned out your mind.”
People Are Stealing The Stones That Stonehenge Came From And Selling Them On EBay
A quarry which scientists have recently identified as being the source of Stonehenge’s famous rocks is being plundered at a “terrifying rate” by thieves selling them on eBay for £8, tourism bosses say.
When Audience Accessibility Is Part Of The Art
“Theatres are increasingly making their work accessible for deaf and disabled audiences in a more creative, integrated fashion and are placing issues of access right at the heart of their design.”
Mapping How Antiquity Sounded
“What was truly surprising for me was going into a space that was ancient, and to crawl around the ceiling and look at the walls and realize that they were looking at things acoustically. It wasn’t just about the architecture. They had these big jugs that were put up there to sip certain frequencies out of the air … They built diffusion, a way to break up the sound waves by putting striations in the walls. They were actively trying to tune the space.”
Check Out These Unpublished Pics Of Picasso In His Studio
“The black-and-white photographs, taken in the 1940s and ’50s by different photographers, are being exhibited by Cahiers d’Art, the gallery of the eponymous art magazine.”
Why Michael Flatley Is Excited About Retiring From The Dance
“This type of dance is particularly brutal. I was the first person to do it for an extended period of time. … I have a lot of friends who are professional athletes, and we like to get together and have a couple of beers and exchange horror stories. I always win.”
Opera’s Gender Problem
“According to Operabase, an online opera database, in the years 2009 to 2014 there are only 3 women amongst the 60 most performed living opera composers in the world. Saariaho comes in highest at number 33. In all opera composers performed in that period, living or dead, women fare far worse with not a single female composer in the top 30. And in the most performed 50 operas worldwide in that same period, there is not a single work by a woman.”
Indie Music World Is Rife With Sexual Harrassment
“Despite its outward appearance as being more female-friendly, despite there being less puppeteering than in pop music, despite the seeming prevalence of “male feminists” in the scene, women in the indie music scene say that sexual harassment is rampant and just as much a reality for them.”
The Most Politicized Pencil In History
“The Mongol 482 may be just a ‘middle-range, everyday’ pencil. But it’s also one of the most famous pencils in history … Because the Mongol 482 has written its autobiography” – with the “as told to” services of a libertarian economist. Thus, like so many autobiographies, this one had an agenda – and, also like so many autobiographies, it isn’t entirely accurate. (podcast with transcription)
Record Profits As Concert Business Booms
“Live Nation Entertainment, the world’s largest concert promoter whose holdings include Ticketmaster, on Thursday reported revenue of $7.6 billion in 2015, up 11 percent from the previous calendar year on a constant currency basis.”
Trevor Nunn Directs An American Cast For The First Time
“When he introduced himself to the actors on the first day, he said that he found beginning work with an American cast both exciting and ‘paralyzingly terrifying – maybe I will find that it’s a whole new ballgame.’ By the time a reporter could observe him in rehearsal, though, he seemed to have learned the rules.”
Advertisers’ Awkward Oscars Dilemma
“Advertisers, who are paying record prices for air time, find themselves in an awkward position. They want to attach themselves to the glamour of Hollywood without having their brands tarnished by the controversy over the all-white slate of acting nominees.”
The Demographics Of The Academy Of Motion Pictures, By The Numbers
“In 2012, The Times reported that Oscar voters were 94% white and 77% male. Four years later, the academy has made scant progress: Oscar voters are 91% white and 76% male, according to a new Times study. Blacks are about 3% of the academy, up from 2%; Asians and Latinos are each just over 2%, with both groups up slightly.”
A ‘Bizarre, Noble Experiment’ – When They Tried To Put Magazines On CD-ROM
“A handful of magazines saw the potential of the CD-ROM and saw dollar signs. Problem was, this was an idea without an audience at first, and there was no clue if creating multimedia content in lieu of a mag would actually work. (It didn’t.) Today’s Tedium into the world of the magazine-on-disc – the publishing world’s bizarre, noble experiment in multimedia.”
Looking For Creativity In Movies? Short Films Are Where It’s At
“Some of the most creative and engaging stories today are being told through short films, even as the genre remains marginalized in the cultural mainstream.”