Tania Bruguera was once again detained by the authorities on Sunday afternoon after staging a performance at her Havana home, in which she and others read passages from Hannah Arendt’s “The Origins of Totalitarianism.”
Archives for May 2015
How Hollywood Is Helping To Make Virtual Reality Interesting
“Shooting a movie or TV show is incredibly tough under the best of circumstances. [With VR], the basic things you learned from your experience no longer apply from a technical perspective, and there’s not a body of work you can point to saying, ‘We want it to be like that or like that.’”
Museum Visitor, Falling, Grabs Ancient Greek Urn, Smashing It
“A ministry statement says the prehistoric, Minoan-era vase, which had been broken in antiquity and restored after excavation, is being repaired and should be back on display on Friday.”
America’s Oldest Performing Arts Group Turns 200
“The Handel and Haydn Society, which claims to be America’s oldest continuously performing arts organization, turns 200 this year. Once an amateur oratorio society dedicated to performing new music — the American premieres of Verdi’s Requiem (in 1878) and Bach’s “St. Matthew Passion” (1879), among much else — alongside the old, its orchestra and chorus have been among the country’s most prominent early-music ensembles since 1986, when it moved to playing with period instruments.”
When Mark Zuckerberg Met Frank Gehry, This Is The Building That Resulted
“It is in fact an appealing throwback to the unfussy, ad hoc, quickly made experiments of Gehry’s early career. At the same time, there’s something plainly absurd about the idea that architecture could turn Facebook, whose market capitalization is now in the neighborhood of $225 billion, into a low-key outfit without airs, or even allow it to carry out a plausible impersonation of one.”
The Hardy Boys And Nancy Drew Industry – Keep Costs Down, Use Freelancers And Formularize Creativity
“The secret behind the longevity of Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys is simple. They’re still here because their creators found a way to minimize cost, maximize output, and standardize creativity. The solution was an assembly line that made millions by turning writers into anonymous freelancers—a business model that is central to the Internet age.”
A Major New Arts Center For San Francisco’s Palace Of Fine Arts?
“The WAW proposal, which would give the palace the pseudonym, the Center for Global Arts and Cultures, calls for capital improvements totaling $150 million. By contrast, recent improvements to the Herbst Theater ran to $156 million.”
Netflix Believes It Can Create New Audiences For Documentaries
“Traditionally, documentaries have targeted niche audiences, defiantly unconcerned with commercial success. They don’t attract nearly as many viewers on the big or small screen as their commercial-minded Hollywood counterparts. Netflix thinks it can change that dynamic, drawing big audiences to nonfiction fare using the same algorithms and data it’s relied on to engineer hits like House of Cards.”
Academy Of Motion Pictures Faces Challenges, Contemplates Changes
“Behind closed doors — where leaders of the 6,000-member film Academy do most of their deliberating — paid staff, elected governors and committee members have been looking to shore up the annual awards show, which saw a drop in TV viewers of almost 15 percent to 36.6 million in the last year. As that happens, they are dealing with other challenges, expected and otherwise.”
More Audience Engagement? Audiences Need To Reassert Themselves
“Aside from the artist’s responsibility, Don Roth has come to believe that audiences need to do a better job of reasserting themselves. They need to spend more time preparing for a concert, discovering or rediscovering the music, as well as finding out about the musicians. Audience members also need to disconnect themselves, literally and figuratively, from daily life, and be open to a musical experience that’s simultaneously emotional, intellectual, and spiritual.”
Ranked: America’s Most “Inspirational” Cities For Artists?
“The educational website WorldWideLearn recently culled data from the American Community Survey and the Local Arts Index to rank the 15 most creatively inspiring cities in the United States for aspiring young artists and art students. “
Photographer Mary Ellen Mark, 75
“Her portraits of celebrities, street people, and prom-goers are familiar to many Americans who saw her work in Life, National Geographic, Vogue, the New Yorker, Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, or one of her 18 published photo collections.”
Zaha Hadid’s Library Design For Oxford Shocks Planners
“Hadid’s building is the most radically designed modern college building in Oxford since the love-it-or-hate-it cliff face of James Stirling’s Florey building at Queen’s College. This is undoubtedly Hadid’s most intriguing small building, one that she originally described as “a soft bridge”.”
More On The “Radical” New Barenboim Piano Design
“Designed by the Belgian instrument maker Chris Maene, the Barenboim has straight parallel strings instead of the diagonal-crossed ones of a contemporary piano. The wooden soundboard veins go in different directions. The bridges, ribs and bracings are specially-designed and the hammers and strings (yellow brass rather than red brass) have been repositioned.”
Choice Of New Director For The Proms Is A Surprise
David Pickard is “bound to face challenges. The BBC licence fee is due for a rethink next year; any changes to the funding model can scarcely not affect the Proms. At Glyndebourne, he presided over an institution that receives public funding only for educationwork and touring – the opera festival relies entirely on private money. He will now need to apply the diplomatic skills honed dealing with sponsors, donors and patrons to fighting the Proms’ corner in the boardrooms of the BBC.”
USC Dean Refuses To Accept MFA Class’s Withdrawal From Program
“Most notably, the Dean refused to acknowledge that the students were even dropping out, saying “we have not recorded your withdrawal. Instead, we have granted each of you a two-year leave of absence.” Given the clear sense of betrayal felt by the USC7, it seems unlikely that they would choose to return to the program.”
London’s National Gallery Suggests Priceless Paintings Might Belong To Ireland
“The 39 paintings, including some of the most celebrated works of the French artists Renoir, Monet and Manet, were left to the gallery by the art collector Sir Hugh Lane, who was killed on the Lusitania when it was hit by a German torpedo 100 years ago this month. In a codicil to his will, Lane made it clear that he wanted the paintings to go to Dublin, but because the amendment was unwitnessed the collection stayed in London.”
Can The ACLU Prove Hollywood Discriminates In Hiring Women? (Doubtful)
“Attacks on industry-wide practices are harder than on a single, outlier company, since an outlier exists against a backdrop that shows its possible to do better. In industry-wide cases, it becomes more challenging to prove that there is an adequate supply of qualified and interested candidates to begin with.”
Why There Are So Few Women Rock Critics
“The problem for women is that our role in popular music was codified long ago. And it was codified, in part, by the early music press. In the effort to prove the burgeoning rock scene of the sixties a worthy subject of critical inquiry, rock needed to be established as both serious and authentic. One result of these arguments—the Rolling Stones vs. Muddy Waters, Motown vs. Stax, Bob Dylan vs. the world—was that women came out on the losing side, as frivolous and phony.”
Playwright Sam Shepard Arrested In New Mexico
“Shepard was arrested on a charge of aggravated driving while intoxicated outside La Choza restaurant in downtown. The restaurant’s security called police about 7:45 p.m. Monday concerned about an intoxicated driver, Dobyns said. The man was trying to leave in the pickup, but the vehicle’s emergency brake was engaged.”
Numbers Are In: Broadway Had A Great Year At The Box Office
“The Broadway League said Tuesday that box offices reported a record total gross of $1.36 billion — up from $1.27 billion from the previous season. The trade association for theater owners, operators and producers said attendance was up 7.3 percent to 13.1 million.”
Sexism In The Art World: Here Are The Numbers
“The more closely one examines art-world statistics, the more glaringly obvious it becomes that, despite decades of postcolonial, feminist, anti-racist, and queer activism and theorizing, the majority continues to be defined as white, Euro-American, heterosexual, privileged, and, above all, male. Sexism is still so insidiously woven into the institutional fabric, language, and logic of the mainstream art world that it often goes undetected.”
Feminism In Art – We Were Making Progress And Then…
“We are now once again hard put to find at the big institutions feminist shows or exhibitions of works addressing gender, sexual, and other interrelated social inequities.”
Listing And Ranking Women Artists Doesn’t Help The Cause Of Women Artists
“Where notions of gender and success are concerned, the list, by virtue of its very format, embodies the crux of the problem: a litany of names and capsule bios, peppered with personal anecdotes and external endorsements, in lieu of analysis of enduring inequities and systemic biases.”
Memorial Day Weekend Movie Box Office Worst Since 2001
“This year, the industry’s estimated take between Friday and Monday in the U.S. and Canada was $190 million, according to Rentrak. That is the lowest since 2001—particularly bad when considering that average ticket prices have risen 44% over that time, according to the National Association of Theatre Owners.”