AJ Four Ways: Text Only (by date) | headlines only
DANCE
IDEAS
- Another Study Of Violinists Sheds More Doubt On The 10,000-Hours-Of-Practice Idea
“The ‘10,000-hour rule’ is one of the most repeated ideas in popular writing about skill and success: put in 10,000 hours of practice, the story goes, and elite performance follows. … A 2019 study … redid the underlying comparison and found practice hours didn’t cleanly separate the best violinists from merely good ones.” – Science Blog
- Met Museum Calls Off John Galliano Costume Institute Show
“The Metropolitan Museum of Art is canceling its planned exhibit honoring British designer John Galliano, which had led to severe backlash in the Jewish community and beyond because of the designer’s past antisemitic and racist statements.” – AP
- Miss Piggy Is An Icon Of Feminism And Our Last Fabulous Movie Star
“She is part of a lineage that has gone dormant: larger-than-life, carefully curated personas bolstered by their market value at the box office and by how their sheer artistry shapes the texts that end up on the silver screen. These are women like Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Mae West.” – Vulture (MSN)
- How An Aging Actor With Dementia Does Samuel Beckett
One might argue that Beckett is the perfect playwright for an actor with that condition to perform — especially when the play is Krapp’s Last Tape, which Peter Marinker is preparing to do this week. Here’s how he, along with the director and crew at London’s Cockpit Theatre, are making it work. – BBC (MSN)
- What — Or Who — Persuades You To Buy That Particular Book?
“The reality is that our reading choices are directed and massaged at every turn. … And who are the persuaders? They’re the booksellers, the supermarket stock buyers, the publishing houses and their ranks of marketers and publicists. And, more recently, persuasion often comes from (social media). How is all this changing publishing?” – The Guardian
ISSUES
- Met Museum Calls Off John Galliano Costume Institute Show
“The Metropolitan Museum of Art is canceling its planned exhibit honoring British designer John Galliano, which had led to severe backlash in the Jewish community and beyond because of the designer’s past antisemitic and racist statements.” – AP
- Like It Or Not, Yayoi Kusama’s Infinity Mirror Rooms Changed Visual Art
“She made more than 20 variants of her mirrored chambers, which use light, sculpture and reflection to create a kind of 360-degree celestial infinity. They have traveled around the world and reached enormous popularity, forever changing the types of exhibits that are staged and the way the public engages with them.” – CNN (Yahoo!)
- Rotterdam’s Major Art Museum Caught Up In Alleged Municipal Corruption Scheme
“Two municipal employees in the Dutch city of Rotterdam have been dismissed following an investigation into alleged corruption involving construction contracts. They include work connected to asbestos removal at Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, one of the country’s most important museums.” – ARTnews
- Controversy Over Peter Thiel’s Private Viewing Of Bayeux Tapestry
While the exhibition of the massive medieval embroidery at the British Museum hasn’t yet opened to the public, the right-wing tech billionaire was hosted by the museum’s director of development for a private viewing — for which he is reported to have made no donation — on August 18. – The Guardian
- The Ridiculous Claims For Trump’s Ballroom
The design is rapidly descending into parody—even as Sauer told the court it has been built so solidly that it cannot be demolished, should the court (correctly) so rule. Just like the “unsinkable” Titanic. The ridiculous grand stair from nowhere to nowhere has reappeared on the prominent elevation facing President’s Park. – Architecture and the City
MEDIA
- New York’s Arts Ed Programs Are A Powerhouse For The City
Across the city, community-based arts education organizations employ thousands of music educators, teaching artists, arts therapists, accompanists and administrators — together, one of the city’s largest employers of working artists. New York’s real competitive advantage is the ability to attract and retain creative talent. But artists need reliable employment, benefits, professional networks and room to grow. – Crain’s New York
- The Problem That Can’t (Currently) Be Fixed At The Kennedy Center
Each new development and court filing in opposition makes the same structural problem clearer: A judge can restrain the board’s actions time and time again, but “if the problem is a governance problem, there is not much that a court can do.” – The Atlantic
- Kennedy Center Board Says It Will Delay Putting Trump’s Name Back On The Building
The announcement followed an emergency court hearing prompted by a Justice Department filing this week warning that the Kennedy Center could be demolished and potentially replaced with an outdoor amphitheater if the board is not allowed to close the building for two years for repairs. – ARTnews
- What Happened To Philadelphia’s Arts Funding?
“Philadelphia experienced the greatest contraction of all of the cities that we were looking at. It has gone from 7 percent of local government coverage of expenses in 2019 down to 1 percent in 2024.” – Philadelphia Citizen
- Lessons From The Edinburgh Fringe: How To Manage Controversy
At a time when mainstream media coverage of festivals such as Edinburgh has shrunk significantly, her debut inevitably pulled headlines towards the infamy of one performer and risked becoming the token fringe story – the celebrity whom everybody outside the festival bubble recognises. – The Stage
MUSIC
- What — Or Who — Persuades You To Buy That Particular Book?
“The reality is that our reading choices are directed and massaged at every turn. … And who are the persuaders? They’re the booksellers, the supermarket stock buyers, the publishing houses and their ranks of marketers and publicists. And, more recently, persuasion often comes from (social media). How is all this changing publishing?” – The Guardian
- Yayoi Kusama Also Had A Career As A Serious Author
“(She) produc(ed) 12 novels, four volumes of poetry, one collection of short stories, and an autobiography between 1977 and 2002. … Kusama’s novels are dark, violent, and, in many cases, clearly informed by her decade in New York, no matter how emphatically she entreated readers to interpret them otherwise.” – Artnet
- Google Releases An AI Tool For Books That Publishers Actually Like
“Expert Intelligence (is) a feature that allows someone reading an e-book purchased on Google Play’s e-bookstore to interact with the title — by asking questions about the book, taking a quiz after reading it, or producing an infographic of key data.” And it respects copyright. – Publishers Weekly
- AI Paul Gigot Responds To WSJ Opinion Page Editor Paul Gigot
“I have been thinking about this for close to 20 minutes, and I have concluded that human writing is finished.” – The Atlantic
- Making Books The Old Fashioned Way
Arion bills itself as the only printer in the country that makes books entirely by hand under one roof, from casting metal type to printing pages to binding them together into exquisite volumes prized by collectors. – The New York Times
PEOPLE
- Another Study Of Violinists Sheds More Doubt On The 10,000-Hours-Of-Practice Idea
“The ‘10,000-hour rule’ is one of the most repeated ideas in popular writing about skill and success: put in 10,000 hours of practice, the story goes, and elite performance follows. … A 2019 study … redid the underlying comparison and found practice hours didn’t cleanly separate the best violinists from merely good ones.” – Science Blog
- Met Museum Calls Off John Galliano Costume Institute Show
“The Metropolitan Museum of Art is canceling its planned exhibit honoring British designer John Galliano, which had led to severe backlash in the Jewish community and beyond because of the designer’s past antisemitic and racist statements.” – AP
- Miss Piggy Is An Icon Of Feminism And Our Last Fabulous Movie Star
“She is part of a lineage that has gone dormant: larger-than-life, carefully curated personas bolstered by their market value at the box office and by how their sheer artistry shapes the texts that end up on the silver screen. These are women like Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Mae West.” – Vulture (MSN)
- How An Aging Actor With Dementia Does Samuel Beckett
One might argue that Beckett is the perfect playwright for an actor with that condition to perform — especially when the play is Krapp’s Last Tape, which Peter Marinker is preparing to do this week. Here’s how he, along with the director and crew at London’s Cockpit Theatre, are making it work. – BBC (MSN)
- What — Or Who — Persuades You To Buy That Particular Book?
“The reality is that our reading choices are directed and massaged at every turn. … And who are the persuaders? They’re the booksellers, the supermarket stock buyers, the publishing houses and their ranks of marketers and publicists. And, more recently, persuasion often comes from (social media). How is all this changing publishing?” – The Guardian
PEOPLE
- Another Study Of Violinists Sheds More Doubt On The 10,000-Hours-Of-Practice Idea
“The ‘10,000-hour rule’ is one of the most repeated ideas in popular writing about skill and success: put in 10,000 hours of practice, the story goes, and elite performance follows. … A 2019 study … redid the underlying comparison and found practice hours didn’t cleanly separate the best violinists from merely good ones.” – Science Blog
- Met Museum Calls Off John Galliano Costume Institute Show
“The Metropolitan Museum of Art is canceling its planned exhibit honoring British designer John Galliano, which had led to severe backlash in the Jewish community and beyond because of the designer’s past antisemitic and racist statements.” – AP
- Miss Piggy Is An Icon Of Feminism And Our Last Fabulous Movie Star
“She is part of a lineage that has gone dormant: larger-than-life, carefully curated personas bolstered by their market value at the box office and by how their sheer artistry shapes the texts that end up on the silver screen. These are women like Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, Bette Davis, and Mae West.” – Vulture (MSN)
- How An Aging Actor With Dementia Does Samuel Beckett
One might argue that Beckett is the perfect playwright for an actor with that condition to perform — especially when the play is Krapp’s Last Tape, which Peter Marinker is preparing to do this week. Here’s how he, along with the director and crew at London’s Cockpit Theatre, are making it work. – BBC (MSN)
- What — Or Who — Persuades You To Buy That Particular Book?
“The reality is that our reading choices are directed and massaged at every turn. … And who are the persuaders? They’re the booksellers, the supermarket stock buyers, the publishing houses and their ranks of marketers and publicists. And, more recently, persuasion often comes from (social media). How is all this changing publishing?” – The Guardian
THEATRE
VISUAL
- How Social Media Changed The Ways We Remember
There were ups and downs in the stories I saw people telling, but the trajectory I observed most frequently was an upward one. Growth, expansion, improvement, overcoming. Vacations as burnishments to the image. Illnesses as stress tests, ways of ultimately proving fitness. – The Walrus
- Why Dictators Fear “Common Knowledge”
The difference between private knowledge, even when widely shared, and common knowledge is not a mere logical nicety. It can unify knowers in coordinated action and sometimes explode a social status quo. – Persuasion
- The Very Definition Of Kitsch
In one moment, you see children playing on the grass, and you are genuinely moved. In the second moment, you see the children playing, and you think how nice it would be to be moved. The latter is the substance of kitsch. – 3 Quarks Daily
- Group Chats: Our Own Little Neighborhoods
In one chat that I share with literary friends, we sometimes joke that after we’re all dead, if historians try to unearth our correspondence, they will find only this sprawling, years-long museum of absurdities. – The New Yorker
- Study: To Get Employees to Use a Benefit, Make Signing Up a Little Harder
In some cases, you need to make it (ever-so-slightly) harder for people to sign up for the program to help them feel like it’s worth the effort, suggests research forthcoming in Management Science. – Harvard Business Review