ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

At The Thunderbird American Indian Dancers’ Annual New York Powwow

"Dance Magazine joined Saturday night's sunset bonfire to capture some of the competitions, and asked Thunderbird director Louis Mofsie and company dancer Michael Taylor...

Man And Daughter Killed Over Four Stradivarius Violins

“Our principal hypothesis is that the motive for the double crime was to find the international certification of authenticity of the violins so they...

Ocean Vuong Bombarded By Complaints From Australian 12th Graders Who Got His Writing On...

Student: "ur text was good but so confusing". Vuong: "mission accomplished". Student: "So u da one that got us all fucked up". Vuong: "Don't...

Xi Jinping Is Rewriting China’s History – A New Cultural Revolution

Xi’s use of history projects the message that the struggles of the first century of Communist Party rule have been buried by the need...

The Original True-Crime Dramas Were In Elizabethan Theatres

"More than four centuries ago a series of plays closely based on real murder cases appeared on the London stage. Their literary quality is...

David Graeber Was A Startlingly Smart Anthropologist. He Died Just After Completing His Magnum...

"Since one cannot know a radically better world is not possible, are we not betraying everyone by insisting on continuing to justify and reproduce...

Oxford’s Bodleian Library Was A Wreck Before The Eponymous Bodley Fixed It Up

"In 1598, … Sir Thomas Bodley, a retired diplomat and Oxford alumnus, offered to restore the dilapidated university library, entirely at his own cost....

How We Became Post-Modernist (And Why It’s A Problem)

Perhaps the ultimate postmodern irony is to be both – to sell out to the system while sending it up. It becomes impossible to...

Forest Whitaker’s Production Company Has Never Lost Investors A Dime. It Still Has Trouble...

Significant Productions, founded by Whitaker and run by Nina Yang Bongiovi, has made admired films like Fruitvale Station and Sorry to Bother You (that...

How A Nice Jewish Boy From Oakland Became A Busy Bollywood Actor

Richard Klein seemed well set as a math and science teacher and amateur performer in the Bay Area. Then, at 45, he up and...

How Julia Child Changed Americans’ Minds, And, Later, Her Own

Those under 55 may not appreciate just how differently people in the US thought about home cooking before Child's TV shows caught on. For...

Hong Kong’s M+ Museum Opens In A Climate No One Expected When It Was...

When plans for Asia's biggest contemporary art museum were announced back in 2007, Xi Jinping wasn't yet president of China, few people anticipated political...

How Peter Gelb Is Handling The Most Difficult Job In Opera, Now Even More...

A longread on how the Metropolitan Opera's general manager is handling the company's reopening and its long-term problems, what people inside and outside of...

A Universal Basic Income For Arts Workers? One Country Is Trying It

Ireland will launch a basic income guarantee program for artists and arts workers in 2022. The three-year initial plan will have a budget of...

Art Critic Reviews Work Without Noticing That It Depicts Rupert Murdoch

Robert Nelson of Melbourne's The Age wrote several hundred words about Jeremy Deller's Father and Son — life-sized grey wax candles, lit and gradually...

As Broadway Reopens, Who Is Broadway For?

Representation absolutely matters. But ever since Broadway announced that so many Black plays would reopen its season, there has been a feeling of dread...

London’s Barbican Center Commits To “Radical Transformation” After Investigation

The external review, which interviewed 35 people, identified “a lack of diversity in the organisation, an absence of confidence in HR systems and in...

Cities Are Spreading Like Organisms

In a widely cited paper from 2007, on a number of common measures of innovation and wealth creation, cities deliver benefits that exceed what we would...

Ludovic Morlot Appointed To Lead Barcelona Orchestra

Morlot, born in Lyon in 1974, will replace Kazushi Ono. The contract with the OBC is for four years, with a minimum of eleven...

Niall Ferguson: Why I’m Starting A New University

Those of us who were fortunate to be undergraduates in the 1980s remember the exhilarating combination of intellectual freedom and ambition to which all...

Musicians: Suffocating In The Gig Economy

Many musicians have watched, cringing, as the term “gig economy” has become a defining term of the national economic Zeitgeist. Not just because the...

How Can Today’s Piano Students Learn To Improvise? The Same Way They Did In...

John Mortensen has made a thorough study of how music students in Baroque-era Naples were taught to improvise harmony and counterpoint, then a basic...

John Cleese Cancels Cambridge Union Appearance Over Speaker Blacklist

"I was looking forward to talking to students at the Cambridge Union this Friday, but I hear that someone there has been blacklisted for...

Chinese Composers Are Making Western Classical Music Their Own

In fact, there have been composers in China writing for European instruments for over a century. Since the end of the Cultural Revolution, though,...

Portland’s Iconic Super Bookstore Faces Uncertainty

The latest plot twist has foreshadowed a potentially unhappy ending. Like the rest of Portland’s urban core — and like downtowns across the United...
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