"If you’re a prodigy with a great gift for something, you can simply do it – yet might not be aware of why and how. And you don’t ask questions. Indeed, the geniuses I met seemed too preoccupied with committing acts of genius to consider the cause of their creative output. Maybe an outsider looking in has a clearer...
The performances — by such well-known artists as Mitsuko Uchida, Steven Isserlis, and the choir Stile Antico — cost about £3,000 each for personnel and copyright payments, and that doesn't include artists' fees. This while the venue has had no ticket income for months on end. On the other hand, viewers have donated £750,000 so far, and Wigmore's membership...
"With digital, there is no such thing as authenticity. You are trusting that it is what it is. I feel eventually no matter how convincing it may seem, what we are experiencing through media could be something engineered against our best interests in some way. Even if one doesn’t care about the big picture, when it is proven that...
"The complex will include a dozen buildings, including two separate museums — one for Ukrainians and Eastern European Jews killed in the Holocaust, and one specifically memorializing those who died at Babyn Yar. There will also be a church, a mosque, a synagogue, a multimedia center, a research center, and a conference building." The artistic director of the project...
"The Historical Dictionary of Science Fiction includes some 1,800 separate entries, from actifan and aerocar to zero-gravity and zine. … A historical dictionary devoted to the history of something as future-oriented (and imaginary) as science fiction may seem like a contradiction in terms. But then science fiction has always had a curious relationship to the real world, said Jesse...
Here are reports from Taiwan ("Shows go on – with precautions in place"), Italy ("A sharply divided theatre world"), the U.S. ("Struggling on despite lack of leadership"), Sweden and Denmark ("Back to lockdown"), and Greenland ("Cut off from the outside world"). - The Stage
Except in the countries where they aren't: the Uffizi in Florence welcomed all of 800 visitors when it reopened last week, and Belgium declared museums essential and let them keep operating. But the lockdown stretches on in Britain and Germany, and museum workers get more and more worried; in France, museums had to close again after opening in the...
" began her astonishingly prolific eight-decade career performing radio plays as a child in Iowa. She appeared in Shakespearean comedy and Eugene O'Neill melodrama on Broadway in the 1950s, was a television mainstay from the dawn of the medium" — not to mention her now-legendary big-screen performances in The Last Picture Show and Young Frankenstein — "and, at 82,...
With ongoing uncertainty about the future course of the pandemic, Cannes organizers decided they had no choice but to change this year's dates from May 11-22 to July 6-17. "The move, while expected, will have a domino effect across the festival circuit." - The Hollywood Reporter
Perhaps it's better to say the culture wars have been brought to the tiny ex-Yugoslav republic in the Alps, courtesy of prime minister Janez Janša, now in a third term as prime minister. (His previous term ended in a 2013 corruption scandal.) Janša has been replacing museum directors, canceling government leases and contracts with arts organizations, and pushing a...
There is ample absurdity to wring from the fine-art ecosystem, where hierarchies and quid pro quos rule. Players ruthlessly engage in an unspoken competition for limited opportunities and resources—be they grants, residencies, publications, exhibitions, panel spots, teaching gigs, public commissions, or sales. And all of the above is adjudicated by gatekeepers who, like the gods of Olympus, deal fate...
Trump failed to purge all the old élites, largely because he was forced to depend on them, and the Proud Boys never came close to matching the ferocity and reach of the Red Guards. Nevertheless, Trump’s most devoted followers, whether assaulting his opponents or bombarding the headquarters in Washington, D.C., took their society to the brink of civil war...
Until the arrival of the coronavirus, the prevalent model was not particularly friendly to rapid response. Symphony orchestras did a good deal of planning two or three years in advance, although that was mostly big-picture stuff — there was still plenty of room for changes at the detail level. - San Francisco Chronicle
The announcement means the departure of one of Washington’s longest-serving theater chiefs and an opening in a company with a prestigious literary pedigree: It is an arm of one of the world’s great classical collections, the Folger Shakespeare Library. - Washington Post
If the owner is explicitly saying the business itself won’t survive, keeping the building around as a cultural monument raises additional questions about what culture, exactly, is being preserved. - Curbed
