ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

Stories

Why Is Spotify Getting Into Virtual Concerts Just As In-Person Performances Are Coming Back?

The demand for remote performances is presumably waning, which is why it's weird that Spotify just entered the virtual concert business and thinks people will pay $15 for prerecorded shows you can only watch once at a dictated time. - Mic

Still Ticking: The Mousetrap, Running For 67 Years In London, Gets Set To Resume After Its COVID Pause

For 427 days, an old wooden board inside the foyer of St Martin’s Theatre in London was stuck on the number 28,199. It had ticked upwards every night for 67 years, logging the number of performances of the longest -running play in the world. But on March 16, 2020, The Mousetrap paused for breath. This seemingly immovable object met...

Cuban Artists Demand National Museum Take Down Their Work Until Fellow Artist Is Released

In an act of protest, the artists are now calling for any of their works on view in the museum to “be covered in such a way as to prevent their ‘communication’ to the public, and that those works that are not exhibited but belong to the collection be removed from the museum's web page” until Manuel Luis Alcántara...

Can Robots Help Ease Loneliness?

In 2018, New York State’s Office for the Aging launched a pilot project, distributing Joy for All robots to sixty state residents and then tracking them over time. Researchers used a six-point loneliness scale, which asks respondents to agree or disagree with statements like “I experience a general sense of emptiness.” They concluded that seventy per cent of...

Finalists To Fill Trafalgar’s Fourth Plinth

Mayor Sadiq Khan said it was the "most international line-up" of artists. The landmark has been home to a rolling commission of artworks since 1998. The plinth was built in 1841 but remained empty due to a lack of funds. - BBC

Forgotten Archive Of Brontë Family Manuscripts Headed To Auction

"The collection was put together by Arthur Bell Nicholls, the widower of Charlotte, who of the six Brontë children lived the longest, dying in 1855 at the age of 38. Nicholls sold the majority of the surviving Brontë manuscripts in 1895 to the notorious bibliophile and literary forger Thomas James Wise. The collectors and brothers Alfred and William Law...

We Need A New Model For Selling Music. How About This?

"I sometimes feel we’re losing sight of how valuable music is. I get messages on Patreon or Instagram from fans telling me how my music got them through a huge depression or losing a child. It was the same for me." - The Guardian

Performance Artist And Director Robbie McCauley Dead At 78

" résumé included reimagining classic American plays through diverse casting and a stint in the ensemble of Ntozake Shange's groundbreaking 1976 Broadway show, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide / When the Rainbow Is Enuf. But she was best known for shows she wrote and performed at venues like the Kitchen in Manhattan and Franklin Furnace in Brooklyn,...

In Rushdie’s Defense…

In his new book, “Languages of Truth: Essays 2003-2020,” Rushdie attempts to perform a defensive castling move. He suggests his work has been misunderstood and mistreated because the literary culture has turned from brio-filled imaginative writing toward the humbler delights of “autofiction,” as exemplified by the work of Elena Ferrante and Karl Ove Knausgaard. - The New York Times

The King Of Nouveau Hula

Patrick Makuakāne understands well the value of the traditional dances passed down through generations. ("I love those little gems. They're like family heirlooms … they're very precious and you understand they don't need to be changed and their inherent value is just the way they are.") But that doesn't mean that, in his longtime base of San Francisco, he...

NFT Of One Of YouTube’s Most-Viewed Videos Of All Times Is Sold For Beaucoup Bucks

Sunday's spending spree means the mysterious anonymous bidder will become the owner of the Charlie Bit My Finger clip. But it also gives them a chance to create some follow-up content. The auction page says the NFT winner will be given the opportunity to "recreate a hilarious modern-day rendition of the classic clip" that will feature "the original stars,...

This Island, A COVID Success Story, Had Kept Its Stages Running Right Through The Pandemic — Until Now

"A recent surge in cases — Taiwan's worst outbreak since the start of the pandemic — has brought a halt to cultural life on the island, forcing performing arts centers, concert halls and museums to shutter just as they are coming back to life in the rest of the world. Performers from Taiwan and abroad have been caught in...

Amazon Buys MGM For $8.45 Billion

For Amazon, snapping up MGM — which has more than 4,000 movies and 17,000 TV shows in its catalog — is a way to supercharge its Prime Video service with a slew of well-known entertainment titles. In addition, Amazon is anticipating being able to mine Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer properties like the Pink Panther, Rocky and, yes, the 007 franchises for new...

Largest Queer Theatre In L.A. Fires Director For Sexual Misconduct

Michael A. Shepperd, artistic director of Celebration Theatre, has been terminated following an internal investigation of allegations that he groped and propositioned an actor backstage during the company's 2019 production of The Producers. Shepperd, describing Celebration Theatre as "a queer safe space" where flirting and physical affection were common, maintains that any and all contact between him and his...

‘Let The People Pee Without Missing A Note!’ — Maybe Doing Two-Hour Operas With No Intermission Isn’t Such A Good Idea

For its first post-pandemic performances this fall, Lyric Opera of Chicago — based, it seems, on feedback from potential audience members and official guidelines last year — decided to keep all performances under two-and-a-half hours and eliminate intermission. When he reported this, writes Chris Jones, "my mailbox immediately filled up with one burning question from Chicago's opera fans: When...

Our Free Newsletter

Join our 30,000 subscribers

Latest

Don't Miss

function my_excerpt_length($length){ return 200; } add_filter('excerpt_length', 'my_excerpt_length');