ArtsJournal Classic (Text)

Two years after she took the helm, “it appears that Kent’s fame has not attracted enough ticket buyers and donors to fund the new vision of the Washington Ballet, with more and better dancers performing the ‘Great Books’ of ballet. It’s a big risk, because the transformation will be costly and take years. And then […]

Alastair Macaulay: “How many admirable policies can any company honor at one time? Currently it looks as if Ballet Theater has discarded Fokine, Ashton, Tudor, and — a big departure — the international stars from its scheduling. And who can notice Ballet Theater’s admirable purity of classical style? Its too-many-cooks approach to ballet obscures that.”

Svetlana Zakharova has devoted her life to ballet since she was a child, and as an adult, she’s been one of the Russian president’s favorite dancers. She’s also been a member of the culture ministry in Russia, and she’s one of Vladimir Putin’s favorite dancers. When asked about Putin, she says, “The most important thing […]

A pair of essays, by Gia Kourlas on how New York City Ballet’s dancers are standing up for decency and respect rather than defending the behavior of their now-departed colleagues, and by Siobhan Burke, wondering why the union that’s supposed to represent all the dancers is fighting for the two who were fired rather than […]

“Dance to Health started with a hunch: that the arts have the potential to deliver health improvement more effectively and more cost-effectively than the NHS. We needed a major health challenge that the arts might solve. We lighted upon older people falling over.”

It is only now, a decade after the financial crisis, that the American public seems to appreciate that what we thought was disruption worked more like extraction—of our data, our attention, our time, our creativity, our content, our DNA, our homes, our cities, our relationships. The tech visionaries’ predictions did not usher us into the […]

The idea is simple. Within these algorithms, notes are treated like the DNA of music. It all starts with an initial population of ‘songs’– each a random jumble of notes stitched together. Over many generations, the algorithm breeds from the songs, finding and rewarding ‘beautiful’ features within the music to breed ‘better’ and ‘better’ compositions […]

What makes something offensive is that it presents an unwelcome viewpoint that creates discomfort, bruises egos, and hurts feelings. When people take offence, they are trying to silence those who offend them. Call this concept of offence offence-as-hurt. The main theoretical counter to this view is to argue that offence is not about ‘hurt feelings’, […]

For the moment, these machines remain at the dawn of their potential, as likely to botch your request as they are to fulfill it. But as smart-speaker sales soar, computing power is also expanding exponentially. Within our lifetimes, these devices will likely become much more adroit conversationalists. By the time they do, they will have […]

Over the past few decades, labor force participation has sharply dropped for men ages 20-34. Theories about the root cause range from indolence, to a lack of skills and training, to offshoring, to (perhaps most interestingly) the increasing attractiveness and availability of leisure and media entertainment. In this essay, we propose that the drop in […]

The Nathan Rapaport sculpture Monument to Six Million Jewish Martyrs has been at the site, near the eastern end of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway, since 1964, but around it has been built a new $13 million plaza that includes those artifacts — plus testimony about them from survivors, available via a free app.

“The five fragments now believed to have ‘characteristics inconsistent with ancient origin’ have been displayed at the Museum of the Bible since it opened in November. Labels on the exhibit since it opened have warned guests that some scholars were skeptical of the fragments’ authenticity.”

“The mooted cut – which would amount to just under £1m (30%) across the entire arts portfolio – would be on top of a combined £1.7m reduction in 2017 (34%), and a 25% cut the year before. It comes less than a year after the [city] council announced its intention to hold arts funding at […]

By turns galumphing and graceful, the roughly £260m hulk contains an opera house, concert hall, theatre and recital hall, seating up to 7,000 people within its curvaceous shell. As Taiwan faces ever more pressure for assimilation from mainland China, whose cultural building boom has led to a new museum or concert hall open practically every […]

Florida’s central aim, as I read it, was to have cities and states rethink industrial policy—but not by ignoring housing, transportation, health policies and other important aspects of running large cities. Rather, I read it as forcing a serious look into the economic consequences of cultural spaces. Sadly, his book and corresponding creative class thesis […]

Nearly every company that makes video is finding its way into the streaming media business. Disney is planning its own Netflix competitor for 2019, backed by content holdings like Marvel, Lucasfilm, and Pixar. AT&T plans to launch its own Time-Warner focused equivalent around the same time. Similar competitors from Amazon and Comcast are already taking […]

“The proposal will force platforms, like YouTube, to prioritize content from a small number of large companies. The burden of copyright proof will be too high for most independent creators to instantly demonstrate. There is a better way forward for copyright online but it’s critical you speak up now as this decision may be finalized […]

“You want to honour the victims, but you also want to provide a thrilling night at the movies. Maybe there is no way of squaring that circle.” Steve Rose considers the two new films about the 2011 mass murders by a white nationalist terrorist in Norway.

Six years of shooting in dozens of locations, famous film auteurs playing versions of themselves, the cast and crew posing as film students to get a cheap rental rate for the MGM backlot (they smuggled Welles in a van), half a dozen or so different kinds of film stock — and that’s only the beginning […]

OK, it’s not actually super-secret, and it’s not a vault – it’s the Walt Disney Animation Research Library, “a silent, temperature-controlled labyrinth that underlines Disney’s zealous protection of its past and huge ambitions for its future.”

“Debussy accomplished something that happens very rarely, and not in every lifetime: he brought a new kind of beauty into the world. … His influence proved to be vast, not only for successive waves of twentieth-century modernists but also in jazz, in popular song, and in Hollywood. When both the severe [Pierre] Boulez and the […]

Laurent Jeanneau is an amateur ethnomusicologist who has traveled across the Zomia collecting sounds. In an update to the old colonial ramblers, under the name Kink Gong, Jeanneau is also a composer who incorporates his sound recordings into live performances. Between 1996 and 2014, he amassed a huge collection of field recordings, totally nearly 160 […]

More than 255,000 people attended SLSO concerts at Powell Hall. Also, more than 8,000 attended performances in California and Nebraska this year. SLSO sold out 20 of the more than 300 total concerts during the season.

The 27-year-old pianist Daniil Trifonov was named Artist of the Year, while Julia Wolfe took Composer of the Year honors. Carlos Miguel Prieto, music director of the Louisiana Philharmonic, the National Symphony Orchestra of Mexico, and the DC-based Orchestra of the Americas, is Conductor of the Year. Vocalist of the Year is countertenor Anthony Roth […]

A costly experiment? Surely, since box office revenue in these spaces is small relative to cost of production. Without philanthropic support, the project would be untenable. What Opera Philadelphia is discovering is that there are donors particularly anxious to invest in the future

“A leading figure in the history of Chinese art, Professor Fong taught for 40 years at Princeton University, where in the 1950s he established the nation’s first doctoral degree program in Chinese art and archaeology. Beginning in the early 1970s he was a driving force behind the Met’s ambitious effort to expand its collection of […]

The Trump Organization has filed a lawsuit seeking $90,000 in unpaid common charges and fees from a Trump Tower resident– six months after he died in a fire that engulfed his Fifth Avenue apartment. Trump Tower did not have sprinkler system that might have put out the blaze

In a span just shy of two decades, they gave away more than $1.3 billion to charity — money spent on expansions at the Curtis Institute of Music and Philadelphia Museum of Art, to substantially fund the creation of the Museum of the American Revolution, for college scholarships to students in rural Pennsylvania, to fund […]

Eve Ewing has had quite the year, with a book of poetry, a play co-authored with Gwendolyn Brooks, and then a new work of sociology coming out this week. But then there’s Marvel. “In August, Dr. Ewing caused minor pandemonium on the internet when she announced that she had been hired to write Ironheart, the […]

The British actor who won the Emmy, Grammy and Tony as Celie in the Broadway revival of A Color Purple is about to be on the big screen in two different movies. “I am not aiming for [the Oscar]. … I’m aiming to do the work well, and if by chance that comes in my […]

Lyn Gardner, who sees more plays in more places around the country than just about anyone, will swear by the high quality of the UK’s regional companies. Yet, she writes, with every effort they make to bring in more revenue, more funding cuts just set them further back.

The Burnley Empire Theatre is on the list of Theatres At Risk in the UK, and might be moving up from its spot at 14th after the fire. But it’s not alone, says an adviser at the Theatres Trust: “Heritage crime is a blight on the historic buildings in the UK and unfortunately it is […]

Or rather, she took her mother’s story and melded it into a new play. Playwright Jaclyn Backhaus on why her new play includes pirates: “It’s a pirate attitude that got my mom to where she is. … t’s a pirate attitude that lot of people with dreams face when they’re trying to attain them.”

The 21st publication is just out and reports the lowest age attendance since 2000, a significant bit of hope for Broadway’s long-term health. During the 2017–2018 season, the average age of Broadway theater-goers was 40.6, the lowest since 2000. For a second year in a row, there was a record total number of kids and […]

“Certainly American culture is different from European culture. So I had expected the life of a theatre artist in Paris or London to be more refined, somehow easier, and at the same time more gratifying on a creative level than mine here in the States. But it turns out that their struggles, passions, fiscal concerns, […]

The deal was simple: The city would let developers build tall at Cityfront Center, Chicago’s largest real estate development of the 1980s. In exchange, there would be beautiful buildings, streets, parks, plazas and a riverwalk. Yet the architecture, with rare exceptions, is mediocre. The public spaces were supposed to be vibrant and interconnected. Instead, they […]

“The various chunks of meth were part of a 90-pound package of miscellaneous Mexican souvenirs. Each piece had been intricately carved or molded and then painted to resemble items like masks, wall hangings, statues, and ancient calendars. However, a simple breakage in the decorative replicas revealed the deception.”

Antonio DiMarco, an interior designer from Broward County, and New York art consultant Joakim von Ditmar have been charged with identity theft and conspiracy to commit wire fraud: they allegedly bid $7.5 million for a Rothko and an Ad Reinhardt under the name of an 80-year-old client of DiMarco’s.

“Major museums across Europe have agreed to loan important artifacts back to Nigeria for a new museum the country plans to open in 2021. The African nation’s Royal Museum will house a rotating display of artifacts, including the Benin bronzes that were looted during the Benin Expedition of 1897. The agreement marks a significant step […]

This artist makes ink from the things he finds outside, in the city. That’s right, he’s an ink forager. “Logan doesn’t just focus on nature in his foraging; he also makes ink from the detritus. … He stops suddenly, picks up a rusty nail and puts it in his pocket. Rust, he says, can make […]

“Literature — the top-shelf, award-winning stuff — is positively ectoplasmic these days, crawling with hauntings, haints and wraiths of every stripe and disposition. These ghosts can be nosy and lubricious, as in George Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo … [or] confused by their fates, as in Martin Riker’s new novel, Samuel Johnson’s Eternal Return … […]

Erica Eisen tells the story of the Dunhuang Diamond Sūtra, a Chinese block-printed scroll dated 868 CE that was bricked up in a cave for eight centuries and ended up at the British Library (which the Chinese government is not happy about).

The Los Angeles Library Foundation on Wednesday announced the hiring of a new programming director, weeks after the organization became enmeshed in a controversy over the firings of two previous longtime directors at the library, Louise Steinman and Maureen Moore.

The day that Patti Smith and Sam Shepard met, she didn’t even know his real name (nor did she for a very long time afterward), but their meeting changed theatre, poetry, and punk.

The British poet says that “Patricia Smith’s Blood Dazzler teaches me what a book of poetry can look like. In form, heart, focus and humility it’s everything I hope to give to the reader. Smith is the greatest living poet. Every book is better than the last.”