Frank Siebert’s writing system was an obstacle for people who were eager to learn the language. “It was a giant pain for everyone,” he said. “Why did this white guy come in and introduce such a nonintuitive alphabet? It was really off-putting. Like, ‘This is the language my grandmother spoke, and now there’s all this technical stuff I have to learn?’ ” – The New Yorker
Archives for 2021
How NFTs Fit Into The Performance Art Tradition
“As a scholar of communication and performance studies, what interests me is how NFTs are redrawing parts of the art world in radical ways by raising questions about how artists, audiences and critics understand performance, criticism or protest in a capitalist society.” – The Conversation
‘I’m Just Free, Now That I Don’t Have To Worry About Fees’: Frank Gehry At 92
“Buzzing through his sprawling work space, the architect said he has now reached a point in his career where he has the luxury of focusing on what matters to him most: projects that promote social justice.” – The New York Times
Filtered
As I hear my student playing the piano through Zoom, just for a moment, I think I am hearing Paderewski in 1912. The sound is imperfect. At moments it drops out. There are distortions of speed and rhythm. Yet, my ear, my mind is hearing music: completing and linking together the aural information that is there. – Bruce Brubaker
Raising the flag
As it happens, I don’t care at all for Childe Hassam’s better-known etchings — I find them fussy — but lithography brought out a freer, more adventurous streak in his work, and there is one print of his that I have long sought, Avenue of the Allies. Also made in 1918, it is a lithographic monochrome pendant to the well-known series of thirty-odd brightly colored “flag paintings” that Hassam made during and after World War I. – Terry Teachout
How Social Media Has Collapsed Our Expression Of Thoughtful Ideas
“Without the distance between self and thought, self and utterance, we are unable to entertain, probe, or debate ideas. We are unable to change our minds or to persuade others. We are not even in a position to form our views in thoughtful, disinterested ways. But there may yet be a way out. Precisely by codifying and accelerating the collapse of the distinction between ideas and identity, Twitter might ironically be alerting us to the absurdity and shallowness of intellectual life practiced on its terms.” – Hedgehog Review
A Year Into The Pandemic, Dancers Talk About How They’ve Adjusted Their Movement And Approach For Online Performance
“How are dancers developing performance energy? How can artistry best be communicated through the camera? What is the best angle to present technique? Dance Theatre of Harlem’s Derek Brockington explains that dancing for film is ‘about acknowledging that it’s not going to be the same experience — it’s a different way of dancing.’ Below, Brockington and several other dancers share their takeaways after a year of dancing on camera.” – Pointe Magazine
New Director Of Pompeii Talks Culture Of Archaeology
“I would like to reiterate the concept I have of archaeology not only as a study of beautiful objects or monuments but also of very ephemeral traces. The real discovery, in fact, was not the object itself but the landscape that has been transformed over the centuries. Today that landscape is still agricultural but in it we have found layers of history, of prehistory, showing the exploitation of agricultural resources by the Greek colonists and the subsequent modifications in medieval times.” – The Art Newspaper
A Lawsuit About AI And Intellectual Property Law Now Involves R2D2 And WALL-E
An American company is suing a Chinese company in U.S. federal court for copyright, trademark, and other intellectual property violations. The goods in question? Interactive toy robots. And both the defendant’s motion to dismiss the case and the plaintiff’s response have invoked the famous movie robots. – The Hollywood Reporter
Two Beloved California Movie Theatre Chains To Close
ArcLight’s stable includes the prized Cinerama Dome Hollywood. The Dome, built in 1963 by Pacific Theatres’ parent company the Decurion Corp., is the crown jewel of the small theater complex that was later reconstructed in the early 2000s. Throughout the decades, the Dome, in particular, has been a favorite site place to stage premieres — it timed its opening to the global launch of It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World — and is beloved among many cinephiles. – The Hollywood Reporter
Singing By Hand: How To Translate Songs Into American Sign Language
“A good A.S.L. performance prioritizes dynamics, phrasing and flow. The parameters of sign language — hand shape, movement, location, palm orientation and facial expression — can be combined with elements of visual vernacular, a body of codified gestures, allowing a skilled A.S.L. speaker to engage in the kind of sound painting that composers use to enrich a text.” Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim watches how a couple of pros signed their own cover of the old Gladys Knight and the Pips song “Midnight Train to Georgia.” – The New York Times
When 1970s Boston Was A Hotbed Of Contemporary Music
In its own buttoned-up New England way, it was a modernist hotbed. Each of those institutions was like a little fief, with eminent composers on the faculty. Each maintained active student ensembles, including many devoted exclusively to new music. – The New York Times
The Saga Of The Jefferson Davis Chair Comes To An End (And No, It Wasn’t Really Used As A Toilet)
A shadowy art/activist collective calling itself White Lies Matter made a bit of a stir earlier this month when it stole a chair dedicated to the first and only president of the Confederate States from a cemetery in Selma, Alabama and threatened to turn it into a commode if their demands weren’t met. Here’s an explainer covering what exactly the group demanded, why it chose the particular target it did, and what ultimately became of the 3,000-pound piece of outdoor furniture. – Slate
Nature Documentaries Are A Lot More Like Porn Than You’d Like To Think
It’s not just that they’re wildly popular and can be addictive. It’s because nature documentaries have at least as much artifice as any studio-produced adult video and maybe more. (“Are these seabirds supposed to be majestic or comical as they enact their mating dance? The music tells us. Whom are we to root for in this interaction of predator and prey? Listen for the menacing strings.”) Emma Maris argues that “the solution to the way [nature docs] might warp our expectations is the same as it is for porn — not to ban them, but to diversify them.” – The Atlantic
The Surrealists Would Have Loved TikTok
In fact, reporter Angela Watercutter compares the 15-second-video service old Surrealist game Exquisite Corpse: “The platform, thanks to its duetting and stitching functions, automates a lot of what the Surrealists were doing. It’ not exactly an exquisite corpse, since TikTok records the entire genealogy of any given work, and there is a want for continuity with what others have contributed before. But there is a similar spirit of spontaneous collaboration, and a kindred quest for the absurd.” – Wired
Where Second City’s New Chief Means To Lead The Improv Institution
Says Jon Carr, who came to the company’s Chicago headquarters from Dad’s Garage in Atlanta four months ago, “It’s a little strange, because there’s nothing routine happening at any of [our theatres] right now, so it’s a lot of rebuilding of things from scratch.” – American Theatre
Is The CEO Who Saved Waterstones Turning Around Barnes & Noble, Too? Well, He Says So
To be fair, James Daunt was not at all as self-aggrandizing as that headline suggests when he spoke to the Independent Book Publishers Association last week. But he did say that the long-troubled chain has been hanging on despite the pandemic, and that B&N has used the lull in business to start making in earnest the changes that Daunt had introduced at Waterstones in the UK with so much success. – Publishers Weekly
New Turn In Saudi Arabia-vs.-Louvre ‘Salvator Mundi’ Drama (It’s Still About Spite, Though)
Last week several news outlets reported, based on a French TV documentary, that the world’s most expensive artwork wasn’t in the Louvre’s big 2019 Leonardo show because Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (reputedly the work’s buyer) was angry that the Louvre’s curators refused to guarantee that it was Leonardo’s work. Now David D. Kirkpatrick and Elaine Sciolino report that French experts did, in fact, determine that Salvator Mundi is genuine — and that the reason that the Saudis didn’t let the painting be included in the Louvre’s exhibition was rather more petty. – The New York Times
Fabio Luisi, Dallas Symphony Music Director, Takes A Third Orchestra
The Italian maestro, who is also chief conductor of the Danish National Symphony and is now winding up his term as music director of the Zurich Opera House, has been named chief conductor of the NHK Symphony, widely considered to be Japan’s leading orchestra, beginning with the 2022-23 season. – Dallas Morning News
Benin Bronzes Are Not Safer Held In The West, Say Researchers
“They have been equally unsafe in the hands of British, not least because of attack in 1897, which destroyed so much royal and sacred landscape,” said Dan Hicks, an archaeology professor at the University of Oxford in England who has written extensively on the Benin Bronzes. And, he added, many Benin Bronzes have headed to market in Europe, leaving their whereabouts and their safety uncertain. “The most important of the collections have been sold off in the West.” – ARTnews
Top Music Industry People Weigh In On The State Of Streaming
Senior figures from Spotify, Apple and other streaming services have commended the virtues of streaming, and few in the world of music would dispute that the platforms saved the music industry. Music streaming in the UK now brings in more than £1bn a year in revenue. But the fact remains that artists can be paid as little as 13% of the income generated, receiving as little as £0.002 to about £0.0038 per stream on Spotify and about £0.0059 on Apple Music. – The Guardian
Dallas Symphony Invites Out-Of-Work Metropolitan Opera Orchestra Musicians To Play Joint Concert
“Someone on our team said, ‘Wouldn’t it be fun if we could bring together musicians around the U.S. who are not working, for some project?’ It morphed into involving Fabio Luisi, who’s been really bummed out about the Met, which has had such a hard year. He thought about Mahler 1, and bringing in about half the Met Orchestra. – Dallas Morning News
And Now: Virtual DJ’s Powered By AI
“Virtual entertainment is the new cultural center of gravity,” Authentic Artists founder and CEO Chris McGarry told Protocol. Authentic Artists has developed a dozen such virtual DJs thus far, and is powering their performances with a custom-built AI music engine that uses a catalog of 130,000 MIDI files to generate performances in real time. The resulting music is being fed into the company’s animation pipeline, and there’s a feedback mechanism for Twitch audiences to change the course of a set. – Protocol
Doubting Thomas: Greenville County Museum Sells “Alma’s Flower Garden” in a Non-Transparent Transaction
Taking a page from the problematic playbooks of the Berkshire, Everson and Baltimore museums, the Greenville County Museum of Art, South Carolina, has become the latest poster child for deplorable deaccessions. – Lee Rosenbaum
Marshall Marcus Talks the UN and Arts Organizations
The Secretary General of the European Union Youth Orchestra shares about the connection between the UN Sustainable Development Goals and the mission of arts organizations. – Aaron Dworkin