“Under-fire arts quango Creative Scotland has been forced to hold crisis talks to “review” controversial funding cuts. An emergency board meeting is to be held within days to ‘take stock’ of the fall-out from moves to strip 20 companies of long-term funding. The Scottish Government has revealed that the summit has been called to ‘review certain decisions,’ raising the prospect of an embarrassing climbdown for the quango.”
Archives for January 2018
Bénédicte Pesle, Who Brought American Avant-Garde Performance To France, Dead At 90
“[She] did her work behind the scenes, eschewing labels like ‘producer’ and ‘presenter’ while performing a wide array of functions – go-between, convincer, fund-raiser and more – that might in fact have fallen under those job descriptions. When pressed, she would use a humble term to characterize her role: ‘secrétaire d’artistes‘ – secretary of artists.” Among those artists were Merce Cunningham, Trisha Brown, Meredith Monk, Richard Foreman, Philip Glass and Robert Wilson (she engineered the commissioning of Einstein on the Beach).
Top Posts From AJBlogs 01.30.18
Share What You Have
This is part of a series, introduced in Baby Steps, about arts organizations’ initial efforts in community engagement. … The essence is that simple, inexpensive initial steps offer the best way to embark upon community engagement. … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2018-01-30
Correspondence, Illustrated: Shoemake On Nash
Vibraphonist Charlie Shoemake has instructed hundreds of aspiring jazz musicians in the techniques and mysteries of improvisation. Among his early students was Ted Nash, who as a young man … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2018-01-30
Joe Henry, Poetry, and The Blues
Like a lot of listeners, I’ve long considered Joe Henry to be a smart and vaguely literary songwriter – smart, more-or-less sensitive, good with words. But I was pleasantly surprised when Joe … read more
AJBlog: CultureCrash Published 2018-01-30
Did Telling Stories Help Us To Evolve As Humans?
Anthropologists have long theorized that humans developed “moralistic high-gods” as a way of promoting shared norms and prosocial behaviors. What is religion, after all, but a patchwork quilt of stories reminding humans how to behave—and, more importantly, how not to behave? But religion is thought to have emerged only with the advent of agriculture and large-scale, politically complex human settlements.
Increasingly, Artistic Directors Have To Fund Raise. Is This A Problem?
“Artistic directors are our stars. What has changed is that they also need to be civic leaders. This is a new profile for the next generation. We have moved away from the period where it was enough to do great work which would ensure funding. The artistic director is the personality who personifies the mission and makes it feel vibrant to the community.”
New Research Suggests Medical Students Do Better With Art
“The humanities have been pushed to the side in medical school curricula,” said Mark Kahn of the Tulane University School of Medicine, the paper’s senior author. “Our data suggests that exposure to the arts is linked to important personal qualifies for future physicians.”
Turkish Military Destroys Significant Ancient Syrian Temple
The Turkish air strike hit near the main doorway to the temple, causing severe damage to the central and southeastern parts of the building. The site appears to have no military significance and the fact that the bombs destroyed the temple entrance suggests that the archaeological site was directly targeted. If so, this would be a breach of the Hague Convention on the protection of cultural property during armed conflict.
Trump Supporters Flood Social Media With Bad Reviews Of Guggenheim Museum
An army of amateur art critics soon flooded social media, from Facebook to Yelp, with their grievances. One particularly pissed off Yelper gave the museum a one-star review, the same paltry rating he bestowed upon a Connecticut Cheesecake Factory and the Art Lounge at Newark airport, commenting, “This POS institution thinks its funny to offer our president a toilet. GFY Guggenheim.”
Culture Is Being Priced Out Of Our Cities. What To Do?
As cities lose their creative communities and the spaces they operate from, they become at risk of becoming what Mark Auge referred to as “non-places”—homogenized cities in which aesthetic diversity and local authenticity is diminished. This impacts cities’ vibrancy and distinctiveness, economic dynamism and capacity for innovation. These cities face a dilemma: How can they continue to attract new residents and investment while preserving the cultural and creative milieu that made them desirable in the first place?
Jeff Koons Defends Giant Tulip Work That Sparked Protest In Paris
The work is not imagined as a memorial but as a message of hope to deliver to the present and future generations: “Created as a symbol of remembrance, optimism and healing, Bouquet of Tulips symbolizes the act of offering, represented by the outstretched hand holding the brightly colored flowers.” The artist rather wished to express the painful context of the attacks into a symbolic work, both in its iconography and in its aesthetic experience.”
Why Art Selling Has Been Slow To Succeed Online
While other industries, such as music and publishing, have been transformed by online retailing, the needle has been slower to move in the art market.
‘Call Me By Your Name’ Author André Aciman On Watching A Fraught Scene In The Novel Be Filmed
“For me, the message was clear: film cuts and trims with savage brevity, where a shrug or an intercepted glance or a nervous pause between two words can lay bare the heart in ways written prose is far more nuanced and needs more time and space on the page. But the thing is, I couldn’t write silence. I couldn’t measure pauses and breaths and the most elusive yet expressive body language.”
What If The Met Museum Did Less With More?
Serious attention to these areas alone would negate the need for a $25 admission charge, which incidentally is more than three times America’s minimum hourly wage. Given that the trustees didn’t put the brakes on the spending spree long ago, isn’t a penitential boost in their annual giving appropriate?
This Journalist Asked Chimananda Ngozi Adichie The *Wrong* Question
“Caroline Broué, the French journalist conducting the interview, initially asked Adichie if people in Nigeria read her work, to which the writer replied, ‘They do, shockingly.’ From there, she decided to ask ‘Are there bookshops in Nigeria?’ When the audience responded with audible shock, she doubled down on her question.” (includes video)
Remember When The iPad Was Going To Transform Publishing?
“I’m not saying News Corp. or Conde Nast, publisher of Vogue and GQ, would have been worth as much as Google if they hadn’t bought into the iPad hype. But they did lose precious time and money following Apple down the iPad rabbit hole when they could have focused on Facebook, internet video, smartphone apps, mobile websites, their own subscription products or other promising areas. Newspaper and magazine publishers no longer treat the iPad as a priority, if they devote resources to it at all.”
Planned Holocaust Museum At Babi Yar Bogged Down In Ukraine’s Political Battles
The Babi Yar Holocaust Memorial Center would be the first dedicated Holocaust museum in the former Soviet Union. “Yet some in Ukraine question whether there is a need for a Holocaust memorial at Babi Yar, and not a few of the politically charged arguments that opponents are employing seem to be aimed squarely at making it go away.”
Ferry McFerryface? Social Media Naming Vote Goes Wrong (But Not The Way You Think)
When the name was announced back in November, Transport Minister Constance tweeted as though his hands were tied and there was nothing he could do. He said that while Ferry McFerryfacce wasn’t “everyone’s cup of tea,” the “people voted for it.” It turns out that was a lie.
Did You Know That Ursula K. Le Guin Wrote An Opera? (Have A Listen!)
Rigel 9, a 1985 work with libretto by Le Guin and music by composer David Bedford, “tells a pretty classic space story. Three astronauts, named Anders, Kapper, and Lee, are sent to explore a strange world. After Anders goes off to collect plant samples and is kidnapped by extraterrestrials, Kapper and Lee argue over whether to rescue him or save themselves. In the end, Anders is faced with a difficult choice.” (includes sound clips)
Mort Walker, 94, Creator Of ‘Beetle Bailey’ Comic Strip
“In contrast with the work-shirking soldier he immortalized, Mr. Walker was a man of considerable drive and ambition. He drew his daily comic strip for 68 years, longer than any other U.S. artist in the history of the medium.”
England Faces More Arts Funding Cuts As Lottery Income Falls
“Arts Council England has been forced to cut its budget for 2018-22 by £156m and completely restructure several funding streams following a collapse in Lottery sales.”
The Taj Mahal Is Getting Its First-Ever Deep Cleaning – With A Mud Bath
“For more than 350 years, monsoon rains in Agra, the bustling city where the monument sits, were enough to wash dirt off the structure’s walls. But pollution has worsened over the last couple of decades, and parts of the marble facade have turned yellow and black. … Cleaning the monument is time-consuming and challenging. To remove discoloration, workers suspended on scaffolding are caking Fuller’s earth – a mud paste that absorbs dirt, grease and animal excrement.”
As Local News Outlets Disappear, Libraries Step Into The Breach
“In some cities, libraries are partnering with established news sources, teaming up in Dallas to train high schoolers in news gathering or hosting a satellite studio in Boston for the public radio station WGBH. In San Antonio, the main library offers space to an independent video news site … In smaller communities starved for local coverage, some libraries are playing a hands-on role, even if it is an expansion of traditional duties.”
Coco Schumann, Jazz Guitarist Who Survived The Holocaust, Dead At 93
“[He] performed alongside Ella Fitzgerald and Marlene Dietrich during a decades-long musical career, but who gave his most consequential performances as an inmate of the Nazi concentration camps where, he said, music saved his life.”
Why Did Instagram Censor This 26-Year-Old Poem?
“‘I want a dyke for president,’ artist Zoe Leonard writes in her 1992 poem. Inspired by the author Eileen Myles’ run for president, and written at the height of the AIDS epidemic, the poem, ‘I want a president,’ has since been shown in museums, galleries, and outdoor installations around the world. More than a quarter-century after it was written, the poem made its way to Instagram – and became the center of a controversy over censorship on social media.”
Sundance 2018: Gay Conversion Therapy Drama Wins Grand Jury Prize
“Directed by Desiree Akhavan and starring Chloë Grace Moretz, the adaptation of Emily M Danforth’s 2012 novel [The Miseducation of Cameron Post] secured admiring reviews … for its compassionate study of Christian teenagers struggling with religious disapproval and the injunction to ‘pray away the gay’.”