Yearly Archives: 2023
Alex Ross: Being Realistic About Dudamel
Unlike its future-oriented counterpart on the West Coast, the New York Philharmonic is always looking back to its glory days under Mahler, Toscanini, Bernstein,...
Why So Many Choreographers Want To Set “The Rite Of Spring”
Since Nijinsky created the original in 1913, there have been, starting in 1920, more than 150 different dance settings to Stravinsky's score. Most follow...
The Hammer Museum’s Building Transformation Has Taken 24 Years
After a 24-year renovation and expansion and a $180m capital campaign (of which $156m has been raised), the Hammer has announced 26 March as...
Why Exactly Is That BBC Documentary About Narendra Modi So Controversial? (An Explainer)
For a start, the TV film — titled India: The Modi Question — deals with a very sore subject for the Prime Minister: his...
How Google Lost Its Creative Edge
Google was incredibly insecure—always was, and still is. The company, which had toppled a market leader by building better technology, is haunted by the...
The Biggest New Bollywood Hit, The Comeback For Its Biggest Star, Has Quite A...
Before Pathaan — which just knocked Avatar 2 out of the top spot on the global box office chart — Shah Rukh Khan hadn't...
AI Is Coming For Music
This technology “is generating infinite music that isn’t actually composed by anybody, and that’s a terrible, scary, awful way of thinking about where music...
Why Disney More Or Less Surrendered In Its Struggle With Gov. Ron DeSantis
"When Florida stripped Disney of its special tax zone around the company's theme parks, it led observers to wonder: Why would Disney cede this...
Advertising For Broadway Shows Isn’t Working Like It Used to. Here’s What Needs Fixing.
"Great advertising does not create success. Great shows do. But advertising can expand success from a limited audience and make it larger. Much larger....
Rio’s First All-Female Samba School
"The community-tied music and dance clubs have always included women, commonly as seamstresses and dancers. They've played the schools' smaller instruments; Carnival queens lead...
Bruce Willis Diagnosed With Frontotemporal Dementia
Last year the 67-year-old actor retired after receiving a formal diagnosis of aphasia. His condition has now worsened: he's suffering progressive loss of nerve...
The Architect Who’ll Renovate Greece’s National Archaeological Museum Is David Chipperfield. Some Greeks Are...
"Before the proposed design had been chosen, the Association of Greek Architects had threatened to (go to) the country's supreme administrative court after it...
Judge Orders Paris’s Musée d’Orsay To Restitute Four Major Impressionist Paintings Stolen By The...
"The group includes Renoir's 1883 seascape Marine Guernesey, and a study, completed around 1908, for The Judgement of Paris (in the collection of the...
How Craft Beer Creates Community
In 2015 there were 4,803 craft breweries in the US, by 2021 there were 9,118. Equally important is the ideological shift in the beer market...
Defending JK Rowling
This campaign against Rowling is as dangerous as it is absurd. The brutal stabbing of Salman Rushdie last summer is a forceful reminder of...
The Case For Everything-Is-Math
The mathematics that's all around us, after all, doesn't come to us smoothly, in neatly formed themes or topics or packages. It's not separated...
The Culture Battle Over Snark And Superficial Knowingness
The current state of public discourse, if it’s even worthy of that name, is a strange fusion where smarm and snark wrestle and embrace...
Japan’s Anti-Disney Theme Park
Disney is, famously, a vast corporate content farm, with all artistic choices carefully examined by an assembly line of executives, marketers, focus groups, etc....
Theatre Audience Behavior Is Getting Worse, In Part Because Of… Marketing?
West End Theatres: “We are talking to them about marketing. So, when we market shows let’s not have phrases such as ‘best party in...
Why Bertolt Brecht’s Plays Still Attract Directors And Audiences On Six Continents
Even 67 years after his death, the left-wing firebrand's work gets produced from Germany to Japan to Togo (Mother Courage is currently being staged...
Why AI-Produced Art Makes Artists More Valuable
Instead of thinking of AI-generated art as a doomsday development — a cluster-bomb thrown by Big Tech into the heart of the art world...
A “Documentary Opera” Asks What Russians Really Think About Russia
In what seems to be a cross between an Anna Deavere Smith interview-based theater piece and Gavin Bryars's Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet,...
Tate Britain To Rehang Its Collection For First Time In Ten Years, Giving More...
As part of its commitment to diversifying its collections, great female artists from the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries – including some never seen...
All Those Dealers Selling Stolen Antiquities? This Man Was Their Biggest Customer
"Starting in the 1980s, (Michael) Steinhardt amassed one of the world's great collections of antiquities. Renowned for their breadth and quality, his private holdings...
Ukrainian National Orchestra Arrives At Carnegie Hall
The Carnegie performance was added last spring. The hall’s leaders heard about the tour and thought that hosting the orchestra would help show solidarity...
