“Local artists are struggling to find meaning in the city’s upheavals, art professionals said in interviews. And while some of their recent works are more overtly political than others, many are infused with a sense of helplessness toward what is widely seen here as the city’s increasing subjugation to Beijing’s authoritarianism.”
Archives for March 2017
In Praise Of… Indexers?
“It would be a cliche to say that indexers are the unsung heroes of the publishing world. But unsung they generally are: no indexer usually expects or receives credit by name in books where everyone from the font designer to the snapper of the author photograph tends to get a solemn shout-out. And heroes they are, too: the index is, in any nonfiction book, more useful than almost anything else in the apparatus. It is a map of the text; a cunningly devised series of magical shortcuts that can in the good case save a scholar many hours of work, and in the bad one save a bookshop-browsing cabinet minister from having to buy a former colleague’s memoirs.”
Harry Potter Festival Canceled After Massive World-Wide Interest Overwhelms Organizers
“The festival has been cancelled amid concerns that it had got out of hand. Mr Hamilton, one of the co-ordinator’s of the Bearsden Festival, said people had been planning to travel from all over Europe and some had compared it to T in the Park, a music festival that attracts 80,000 a day. He said it was a small, local event that had been held for five years.”
LA Philharmonic Names Interim President
“Gail Samuel, a native Angeleno, has worked at the Minnesota Orchestra, Yale University, the Tanglewood music festival and the Young Musicians Foundation. She has been with the L.A. Phil for 25 years in various capacities, starting as orchestra manager and assuming her current role, in which she runs Hollywood Bowl operations and programming, in March 2015.”
Getty Gets Massive Trove Of Frank Gehry Archives
“The content of the contribution, which was part purchase and part gift, is massive: about 1,000 sketches, more than 120,000 working drawings, more than 100,000 slides, 168 working models, 112 presentation models and hundreds of boxes of office records, personal papers and correspondence.”
Museums Have Dramatically Increased The Number Of Shows They’re Presenting
“The average number of shows increased by 7.4% between 2007 and 2015 (from an average of 8.8 shows per year to 9.5), according to an analysis of 2,360 exhibitions at 29 US museums conducted by The Art Newspaper. Institutions are also keeping shows running for longer periods of time. We found that the average number of exhibition days increased by almost 25% during this period.”
Why Do Your Friends Insist On Forcing Their Favorite TV Shows On You?
“Watching TV is fun, talking about TV is fun — it’s all great fun. But I’ve begun to dread these four words: Wait, you haven’t seen —-? Fill in the blank with the current or classic prestige show of your choice: Mad Men, The Wire, Stranger Things, whatever. The second someone says this, the TV banter takes on an irritatingly insistent tone, with everyone present who has watched the show piling on the person who admits that they have not, until this poor soul agrees that, yes, okay, they’ll finally start watching Westworld. This weekend. Promise. It’s supposed to rain, anyway.”
It’s Called FOBO – Fear Of A Better Option
People who over-analyze, wanting to make the best possible decision. “They want to find the absolute best option. They become so focused on doing the ‘right’ thing that even after they make a decision, they still ruminate on their earlier options, which leads to frustration and regret with the decision process.”
Analysis: Contemporary Art Shows Now Dominate American Museums
It was not always this way. Just 20 years ago, Impressionism was king; no contemporary shows cracked the top ten most visited exhibitions in US museums in our 1997 attendance figures survey. Back then, only around 20% of the shows organised by US institutions were devoted to the art of their time. “It’s a definite cultural shift,” says Robert Storr, the former dean of the Yale University School of Art.
Is This Really A Surprise?
“A report from the Motion Picture Association of America found that the number of African-Americans who go to the movies frequently (at least once a month) hit its highest mark in 2016 with 5.6 million, up nearly two million from 2015.”
Podcasts Are Hugely Popular Right Now. Why?
“Many of those podcasts are destined to sail out into the ocean and never be heard from again. They are often too detailed, too niche, too chatty. A lot of people produce podcasts in which they simply ramble on for hours about themselves and their lives. There is something very poignant about the volume of human desire to be heard out there in the Wild West of podcasts. One gets the impression that for many podcasters, audience size is almost irrelevant. The point is to put your voice on record (which is now easy and cheap to do), and leave it there for someone to find, ponder, and perhaps even enjoy.”
‘We Didn’t Know What We Were Doing’ – Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s Leading Actress Talks About Surviving The Messes He Made
“His muse was Hanna Schygulla, who brought her enigmatic, haughty allure to 23 of his film and television works. Now 74, with a wild mane of grey hair, she has collaborated with directors such as Godard, Béla Tarr and Carlos Saura … But she only ever gets asked about one person. Seated in the window of an empty restaurant in west Berlin, she tells me: ‘It’s because I’m one of the survivors.'”
Louis Khan Believed The Walls Could Talk
“For Kahn, the ultimate source of architecture’s power was its ability to communicate. He believed that buildings are composed of “universal elements” that have remained essentially unchanged throughout the ages, and so constitute a kind of ancestral spatial language shared by all of humanity.”
Okay, Guys, Here’s Garrison Keillor Explaining How To Write Poetry For Your Beloved
“Men are wired for combat, to bash the enemy into submission, and it’s hard to wipe the blood and gore off your hands and sit down and write, ‘O wondrous thou, the wonderment of these my happiest days, I lift my pen to praise thy shining beauty’ and so forth. But you can do it. The first step is: Imitate.”
How Do You Turn John Cage Into Staged Theater? With A Chess Match, Of Course
In Chess Match No. 5 from Anne Bogart’s SITI Company, “the two people onstage are conspicuously playing chess; they also make toast, fiddle with a radio, drink tea and trade disconnected aphorisms and anecdotes [from Cage]. They are not visibly doing theater, if that means plot, traditional characters or singing cats.”
Should Translators Of Books Receive Royalties Just As Authors Do?
This is one of those questions that becomes more complicated the more you think about it – not to mention the fact that the views of translators, book publishers, and original authors on the matter may vary. Tim Parks, both author and translator, gives the issue a serious look.
Destruction Of Cultural Heritage Is Officially A War Crime, Per UN Security Council
Resolution 2347, adopted unanimously last Friday, reads in part, “directing unlawful attacks against sites and buildings dedicated to religion, education, art, science or charitable purposes, or historic monuments may constitute … a war crime and that perpetrators of such attacks must be brought to justice.”
One Of Calder’s Greatest Mobiles Goes Into Storage As Fight Over Ownership Drags On
Universe, which has been on view in the lobby of Chicago’s Sears Tower (now Willis Tower) since 1974, is being packed up as the building’s latest owners prepare for a major renovation of the building as two previous owners (including Sears, which commissioned Universe and claims title to it) continue a years-long struggle.
Making An Opera Libretto Out Of The My Lai Massacre
It’s not easy, obviously – especially when you know nothing about opera. Harriet Scott Chessman writes about how she met the challenge when composer Jonathan Berger invited her to write the text for his opera My Lai.
World-Leading Experts On Cambodian Art Under Scrutiny For Helping Fence Looted Antiquities
Collector Douglas Latchford, 86, and scholar Emma Bunker, 87, together wrote three books that are core reference works in the field of golden-age Khmer art and have been invaluable consultants to the national museum in Phnom Penh as it assembled a collection in the aftermath of Cambodia’s late-20th-century calamities. But a current criminal case suggests that the pair also spent decades providing false ownership histories for looted art.
‘President Trump vs. Big Bird’: NY Times Columnist Nicholas Kristof Argues For NEA, NEH, CPB
“The humanities may seem squishy and irrelevant [in a time of crisis]. … Yet the humanities are far more powerful than most people believe. The world has been transformed over the last 250 years by what might be called a revolution of empathy driven by the humanities.”
William Powell, 66, Author Of ‘The Anarchist Cookbook’
The author of the “diagram- and recipe-filled manifesto that is believed to have been used as a source in heinous acts of violence since its publication in 1971” (as William Sandomir puts it here) actually died last July, though word didn’t make it to the media until a documentary about him was released in theaters last week.
Belarus Free Theatre’s Shows Will Go On, Despite Arrest Of Actors In Crackdown
The NewsHour‘s Elizabeth Flock talks to BFT artistic director Natalia Kaliada about the large (and rare) demonstrations that broke out last weekend against the government of longtime dictator Alexander Lukashenko and the company’s activities connected with them.
Hermitage Museum’s Deputy Director Arrested For Fraud
“Mikhail Novikov, a deputy director in charge of construction at the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg has been placed under house arrest on charges of suspected fraud … connected to a larger case of over Rb100m in embezzled funds during major Russian Ministry of Culture restoration projects.”
Jazz Saxophonist Arthur Blythe Dead At 76
Nate Chinen: “Blythe was a commanding figure whose music connected jazz’s root system with its freer outgrowths, seemingly without a second thought. It was implicit in his broad-shouldered tone – ’round as Benny Carter, ardent as John Coltrane,’ in the words of Gary Giddins – and through the vibrato that often amplified the sensation of fervency.”