Er, is this a question underpaid arts professionals want to ask themselves in the morning? Well, maybe so.
Archives for January 2014
Can YouTube Tutorials Make You a Better Person?
Graham Beck decided to try it. After consulting with loved ones, he determined to use online video to learn to draw, overcome road rage, listen better, and butcher a chicken.
When Social Scientists Study String Quartets
“Scientists have come up with a way to reveal the pecking order within a string quartet. A team from the Royal Academy of Music and the University of Birmingham found that analysing how individual musicians vary their timing to follow the rest of the group can indicate a hierarchy.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 01.29.14
Not Against Interpretation
Source: We The Audience | Published on 2014-01-29
Pricing at the Met
Source: For What it’s Worth | Published on 2014-01-29
Rothschild Prayerbook Squeezes Out A New Record, Sort Of
Source: Real Clear Arts | Published on 2014-01-29
“Dirt Always Wins” — A Story, Part Two
Source: Out There | Published on 2014-01-29
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Alain de Botton’s Idea To Fix The News
De Botton thinks news should be more like novels, but what does he think news is? “The determined pursuit of the anomalous,” he writes at one point, before deciding that he wants to leave the definition “deliberately vague”.
Spotify King – This Songwriter Records 20 Songs A Day
Over the past six years he has composed and digitally released over 14,000 songs. In a single day, he says, he records between five and 100 tracks, though he averages 20.
Ticket Pricing Error Hurt Met Opera, Led To Drop In Sales
“Last February, Met officials announced a reversal of the price increase, acknowledging that their foray into dynamic pricing had had unintended consequences. The financial disclosure, filed as part of the requirements of a $100 million bond offering in 2013, shows average attendance fell to 79% of the opera house’s capacity—even lower than officials projected last February.”
Who Knew? Poets Are Hot (So Say Advertisers)
Poets are being used to sell things. Poets are celebrity endorsers whose endorsements seem to mean something.
What Shakespeare Knew About Science
Scholars are examining Shakespeare’s interest in the scientific discoveries of his time – what he knew, when he knew it, and how that knowledge might be reflected in his work.
Do We Really Need Commas?
You “could take [the commas out of] a great deal of modern American texts and you would probably suffer so little loss of clarity that there could even be a case made for not using commas at all.”
Hong Kong Publisher Detained and Jailed, Allegedly for Book Denouncing Chinese President
Yiu Mantin (Yao Wentian in Mandarin) was arrested three months ago on charges of smuggling chemicals into mainland China, but his family maintains he is being held because he was about to issue a book very critical of President Xi Jinping.
Smithsonian Says It Won’t Reopen National Mall Building To The Public After Renovation
It’s the Arts and Industries Building, one of the oldest buildings on the Mall. “The cost of rehabilitating the building for public use and operating it exceeded the available funding sources at this time. . . . The building will remain closed for the foreseeable future.”
Consumer Group Pushes Ticket Agencies To Justify Their Fees
“It’s something that people have told us they’re really fed up about,” he said. “That’s what we’re saying to the companies, you need to explain what these fees are for.
2013 Costa Book Award to Nathan Filer’s ‘The Shock of the Fall’
Filer, a mental health nurse, takes the £30,000 prize for his the first novel, narrated by an English boy who recounts his descent into schizophrenia following his younger brother’s death.
Minnesota Dance Theatre Board Resigns En Masse
A statement signed by the board said “the organization remains solvent and critically successful. We hope that the company and school will continue to succeed in the hands of a new board and the artistic director.”
‘Sensory Fiction’ – Researchers Develop Wearable Book
“It’s straight out of the pages of science fiction: a ‘wearable’ book, which uses temperature controls and lighting to mimic the experiences of a story’s protagonist, has been dreamed up by academics at MIT.” (includes video)
London Theatres Report Their Tenth Year In A Row Of Record Box Office
This means London box office receipts have more than doubled since the turn of the century. In 2000, total box office across SOLT members was £286.6 million.
Strad Stolen in Milwaukee Mugging
“A 300-year-old Stradivarius violin on loan to Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra concertmaster Frank Almond was stolen during an armed robbery after a performance by Almond at Wisconsin Lutheran College.”
How Pete Seeger Transformed Pop Music
“[He] introduced American pop to a different America: the one outside Tin Pan Alley and Hollywood, where a volunteer gospel choir could sing with more gumption than a studio chorus, and where a decades-old song about hard times could speak directly to the present. The folk revival reminded the pop world that songs could be about something more than romance.”
When Pete Seeger Faced Down the House Un-American Activities Committee
“I love my country very dearly, and I greatly resent this implication that some of the places that I have sung and some of the people that I have known, and some of my opinions … make me any less of an American. I will tell you about my songs, but I am not interested in telling you who wrote them, and I will tell you about my songs, and I am not interested in who listened to them.” (includes complete transcript)
Dealer/Hoarder Considers Restitution for Nazi-Looted Art
An attorney for Cornelius Gurlitt, the reclusive Munich collector whose trove of art, roughly valued at $1.3 billion, may be works looted by Nazi forces and sold through Gurlitt’s art dealer father, says that he will consider
Complete Works of Ben Jonson Now Available Online
“The new Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online, produced by a team of 30 scholars and available partly on an open-access basis, presents the texts of all his plays, masques, poems, letters and criticism in an interactive digital format, along with hundreds of supporting documents and musical scores and a bibliography.”
Box Office Down, Deficit Up at Metropolitan Opera
Donations are up, as is income from the HD broadcasts, but attendance reached only 79% in 2012-13.
The Real Problem With Literary Translation: It’s Not Untranslatable Words
“In a way, there’s no such thing. It may take three words, or an entire sentence, or even an interpolated paragraph, but any word can be translated. Short of swelling a book into an encyclopedia, however, there is no way of dealing with the larger problem: untranslatable worlds.”
Social Activist Dance Company Gets $3M From Agnes Varis Trust
The estate of the late pharmaceuticals mogul and philanthropist “will give $3 million to Gibney Dance, the formerly all-women dance troupe that is known for its social activism and is about to expand its operations to 280 Broadway in Lower Manhattan.”