Actually, not all such depictions sported miniature manhoods. But most of the surviving ones do – and that was a deliberate choice, based on both aesthetic and philosophical ideals. Kerry Sullivan explains. (And no, the likenesses weren’t necessarily meant to be realistic.)
Archives for May 2017
To Trim Multi-Million Operating Deficit, Australian Ballet To Do Co-Productions For First Time
“The Australian Ballet has begun sharing the costs of some productions with companies overseas in an attempt to rein in an operating deficit which blew out by $2.5 million in 2016.”
No, Wait – Australian Ballet Has Multi-Million Surplus
“The nation’s richest performing arts company posted a $4.1 million surplus from its 2016 program of 158 main-stage performances and numerous other activities, with a new production celebrating the life of dancer Nijinsky emerging as the season’s hit.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 05.30.17
A new lens on ‘excellence’
Arts initiatives that seek social change often face an identity crisis: They are driven by passion, purpose, meaning, and making, but they are generally described and evaluated by more traditional measures. Worse than the challenge … read more
AJBlog: The Artful Manager Published 2017-05-30
Paul Desmond, Gone 40 Years
Several Rifftides readers have sent messages reminding me that Paul Desmond died 40 years ago today. Thanks to all of them. I hadn’t forgotten. … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2017-05-30
Renzo Piano Talks About Architecture Expressing A City
If you’re an architect in the right place and time, you don’t change the world but you do get to build something that reflects the changes that are happening.
Why The Arts Need Think Tanks
“Given the disparity between what the public says about arts and culture and their actions, given the repeated and regular attacks on the Arts, given both the suggested and proven value of the arts on multiple levels and given the extent to which the arts and creativity are a major facet of the American job market and economy, one would think the many disciplines under the banner of Arts and Culture would be a prime area for the formation of a Think Tank dedicated to the study and consideration of the field.”
When Dreams Guide Civilizations (And Nations)
“Many societies throughout human history have taken dreams as important, worldly documents. The history of human dreaming shows time and again how dreamers have come to a new understanding about themselves and their world through the processing of their nighttime minds. Dreams have proven to be mental activities through which humans have come to a novel idea, a much-needed methodology, and a revolutionary way of perception.”
The Essential Art Of Improvisation (In Life As Well As Music)
“Anyone who has played improvisational music with others is familiar with the virtuoso who has great skill and expertise but bad social sensitivity. In performance, he tears into melodic acrobatics, but never listens enough to know when to stop, or hand it over to another player, or modify and adapt to the aural environment. His narcissism undoes his own musicality. And it can go the other way too, since the overly shy improviser never gets courage enough to assert his musical ideas. A psychological balance of humility and hubris facilitate good improvisation, not just in music but in art, science and business.”
Can You Ever Really “Know” Classical Music? (The Virtues Of Ignorance)
“Many people, myself included, have criticised classical concert programming for an over-reliance of a limited pool of familiar music. But would we want a concert series like the ‘antilibrary’, a constant stream of new discoveries and world premieres? You could argue that a narrow repertoire is a sensible response to an overwhelming avalanche of potential scores – that at least it allows audiences to develop a deep relationship with a certain set of pieces.”
How Nick Serota Built The Tate Into The World’s Most Popular Modern Art Museum
With 3.71 million followers, Tate (which dropped its “the” when Tate Modern opened in 2000) has a bigger Twitter following than any other museum in the world. It makes millions from its shops and restaurants. But Tate has also helped rebrand London – and perhaps even Britain. Serota was part of a delegation that travelled to China with then Chancellor George Osborne in 2005.
How We’re Creating Games That Change People’s Minds, And Even Their Real-Life Actions
Lindsay Grace: “In American University’s Game Lab and Studio, which I direct, we’re creating a wide range of persuasive games to test various strategies of persuasion and to gauge players’ responses. We have developed games to highlight the problems with using delivery drones, encourage cultural understanding and assess understanding of mathematics. And we’re expanding the realm beyond education and health.”
How Deriding America’s Midwest Became A Thing (It Wasn’t Always So)
Books such as Edgar Lee Masters’s “Spoon River Anthology,” Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio” and Sinclair Lewis’s “Main Street” quickly exemplified what has been called “the revolt from the village.” City slickers like H.L. Mencken and magazines such as the New Yorker further ridiculed the Midwest as a backward, second-class culture of yokels and rednecks who lacked a dedication to the intellect, let alone sensitivity to the arts.
An Unknown Play By Edith Wharton (!) Emerges
As Rebecca Mead reports, the manuscript of The Shadow of a Doubt wasn’t hidden in a trove of papers in some remote attic; it was right there in a collection of theater manuscripts at a well-known research library.
You’re Sadly Mistaken If You Think Libraries Are Just For Storing Books
“If a library is just where a society keeps its books, then it’s easy to see why many people no longer perceive libraries as relevant. In the days of yore, a building full of books was a clear metaphor for collective knowledge. But today, knowledge is no longer bound to the printed page, and electronic and non-textual forms of media proliferate. Our cultural knowledge is no longer represented primarily as text within books. Moreover, with the internet, we can access our multimedia cultural knowledge from virtually anywhere.”
This Artist Was Ancient Greece’s Greatest Painter Of Vases (And We Don’t Even Know His – Or Her – Name)
James Romm writes about the “Berlin Painter” – “an artist whose name, nationality, and even gender remain unknown, but whose distinctive and confident illustration in the red-figure style stands out as clearly as any signature.”
Czeslaw Milosz: Poetry As Sunlight
Unlike many great twentieth-century writers, who saw truth in despair, Milosz’s experiences convinced him that poetry must not darken the world but illuminate it: “Poems should be written rarely and reluctantly, / under unbearable duress and only with the hope / that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.”
What Shakespeare Can Teach Us About Language And Cognition
“A cognitive scientist looking at [scholar Stephen] Booth’s explanation of Shakespearean effects would spot many concepts from her own discipline. Those include priming – when, after hearing a word, we tend more readily to recognize words that are related to it; expectation – the influence of higher-level reasoning on word recognition; and depth of processing – how varying levels of attention affect the extent of our engagement with a statement. (Shallow processing explains our predisposition to miss the problem of whether a man should be allowed to marry his widow’s sister.)”
Why This Collector Paid $110 Million For A Basquiat
“You’re talking about a handful of masterpieces, which are distributed among a few collectors who are not sellers,” said the art dealer Brett Gorvy, a former Christie’s chairman. “You’re going to have to wait a long time if you are a major collector to see another extraordinary painting like this.”
How Hedwig Finds The Newly Annoying Neighborhood In Every City She Visits
Hedwig and the Angry Inch, now nearing the end of its national tour, always works in local references. Erik Piepenburg finds out how those references get chosen and offers a few choice examples.
How Big Data Is Replacing Execs’ Taste And Intuition At The Center Of The Music Biz
“Whereas in the past, the industry relied primarily on sales and how often a songs were played on the radio, they can now see what specific songs people are listening to, where they are hearing it and how they are consuming it.”
Devastation, Triumph, And A Naked Guy With A Boa Constrictor: Steven Lavine Remembers His 29 Years As President Of CalArts
“In this edited oral history, he reminisces how he battled deficits, rebuilt a shaken campus, opened a downtown performance outpost and contended with the student who showed up at graduation wearing nothing but a snake.”
‘Testosterone Rex’ – There’s Some Serious Hidden Sexism In The Ways We Think About Risk-Taking
“Testosterone Rex” is historian of science Cordelia Fine’s term for “the idea that women are driven by biology and evolution to be cautious, and men to be daring.” Fine argues that this idea is way too simplistic (unsurprising) but still undergirds way too much social science (surprising, but perhaps not to female social scientists).
Opera And Broadway Have A Fruitful Relationship – If Only More Opera Fans Understood That, Says Anne Midgette
“It seems arbitrary to assert that Broadway musicals exist in a separate category from an art form that happily embraces popular forms such as opéra comique, Singspiel and operetta (all of which involve spoken dialogue interspersed with sung numbers). Those opera lovers who profess to look down on musicals act as though the genre were best represented by Aaron Slick from Punkin Crick.”
Why Are So Many Americans So Hostile To Government Funding Of The Arts?
In most wealthy countries, the idea of completely abolishing the equivalents of the NEA and NEH would be politically poisonous if not unthinkable; in the United States, there have been factions calling for those agencies to ve terminated for pretty much their entire existence. Why is the U.S. such an outlier on this issue? Josephine Livingstone argues that the reasons lie deep in the nation’s history.
How David Hallberg Got His Dancing Mojo Back
In 2014, he was a genuine ballet celebrity, admired enough to become the first American ever invited to become a principal at the Bolshoi Ballet. Then he suffered a complex ankle injury, and a year later, he was ready to give up dancing entirely. (And he was already getting offers to direct companies.) But ABT artistic director Kevin McKenzie convinced him not to abandon the stage just yet. Candice Thompson has the story of how Hallberg struggled through a surprisingly difficult recovery, reworked his technique and returned to performing.