“Whatever happens with the merged magazines, it looks bad. You can read it as another chapter in the sad decline of print. But scrutinizing the tea leaves, you can also see it as another augury that the discourse of art is more and more subordinate to fashion-obsessed celebrity and short-term finance.”
Archives for July 2015
Why Are So Many Companies Giving Away Their Intellectual Property? (Hint: It’s Not Charity)
“It’s not happening for altruistic reasons. In his keynote at the O’Reilly Open Source Conference in Portland, Oregon last week, Cloud Foundry Foundation CEO Sam Ramji argued that the shift is being driven by economics.”
Atlanta’s High Museum Gets A New Director
At the Philbrook, Randall Suffolk boosted attendance by 63 percent and almost tripled participation in educational programs. “We’ve tried to reinvent our relationship with our community,” he said. Suffolk spearheaded the planning for Philbrook Downtown, a 30,000-square-foot satellite facility that opened in 2013.
Our Culture Is Dead. (No, Really)
Thanks to the “massification” or “democratization” of culture, we can all claim to be cultured even if we have never read a book, listened to a symphony, or attended an art gallery. Eliot said that “higher culture” is the domain of an elite. Vargas Llosa is in favor of putting an end to “morally repugnant” elites which are at variance with our egalitarian ideals. In doing so, however, we achieve “a pyrrhic victory” whereby we dumb down and become too all-inclusive: “everything is culture and nothing is.”
What’s The Job Of Philosophy? To Make You Happy? Or…
“It is an oft-repeated idea that philosophy in its modern, professional form has become detached from what was, in ancient times, a founding ideal: to teach people how to live well. In today’s university, the emphasis is on the search for the truth about whichever subject lies at hand, regardless of how, if at all, such truths change what you do when you leave the classroom. So while students often report finding philosophy “therapeutic,” they do so in passing, somewhat guiltily.”
Violette Verdy On What Makes A Great Dancer
A musical dancer helps you to see and feel the music in your own body; a dancer with a superior musicality goes even further, playing against the music, entering into a conversation with it, bending it to her own wishes. This is the kind of dancer Verdy was. Such musicality is innate.
Music So Intense You Get “Skin Orgasms”?
“We normally only respond like this to experiences that might ensure or endanger our survival – food, reproduction, or the terrifying plummet of a rollercoaster. How can music – hardly a life-or-death pursuit – move the mind and the body as powerfully as sex?”
Disabled Characters And The Theatre – Some Considerations
“Why is one considered a beacon of acting talent for playing a disabled character convincingly? Why is it a common expectation that these actors will transform into characters whose experiences they can never truly understand? And, perhaps the most important question: if able-bodied actors continue to be cast in these roles, what opportunities are left for disabled actors?”
Why Charging Admission Might Be A Good Idea For UK Museums
“Sometimes you have to think the unthinkable. If we want museums to prosper and thrive in a harsh economic climate with central government talking about 40% cuts, an entrance fee may be the best way forward. And it may have a good side.”
Billionaire Starts International Art Fair In Seattle, Gets Top Galleries To Come
“I’ve been going to the Venice Biennale for at least a decade and always enjoy the stimulation of seeing the work of new and up-and-coming artists,” Allen, who co-founded Microsoft Corp. with Bill Gates, said in a telephone interview. “In 2013 I started thinking, ‘what’s keeping us from doing this in Seattle?’”
Why Do People Dress Like Slobs To Go To The Theatre?
“When people were invited onstage at a recent performance of “Penn & Teller on Broadway,” many women looked as if they had stepped out of a jazzercise class, while men ambled around in hideous cargo shorts.”
Stage Fright – What Exactly Is It, And What’s Behind It?
“Stage fright has been aptly described as ‘self-poisoning by adrenaline'” – the fight-or-flight response. “But what Cro-Magnon man needed upon finding a bear in his cave is not what a modern person needs in order to play King Lear. Without the release of abrupt action, the hyperactivation becomes, basically, a panic attack.”
How A Stolen Rodin Was Tracked Down And Recovered After 24 Years
The bronze cast of Young Girl with Serpent was taken from a Beverly Hills home in 1991. The story of its discovery and restitution features an ace investigator, a sharp-eyed Rodin scholar, a recalcitrant dealer, and a filing mistake.
The 100 Best Movies Of All Time, As Chosen By Actors
The number-one film may come as something of a surprise …
Now That Americans Are Eligible For The Booker Prize, There Are Five Of Them On This Year’s Longlist
That’s five out of 13 in total. (The Brits only got three.) One of those five is a literary agent, and another – possibly the least famous of the group – is the bookmakers’ early favorite to win.
Dramatizing Egypt’s Political And Social Issues With A Bedroom Farce
Threesome, by Yussef El Guindi, “begins as a bawdy bedroom comedy whose main characters, a heterosexual Egyptian-American couple, invite a white American man into their bed. Over two acts it transforms into something darker, as all three grapple with the fallout of sexual assault, infidelity, war and the pain of lost hope, both political and personal.”
Can Arabic Literature Ever Be Fully Understood In English?
“In some ways, reading all this Arabic literature in English has been like listening in on a foreign-language recording when one understands the words’ meanings, but not the allusions, nor the jokes, nor the underlying rhythms. Some of this woodenness can be blamed on inadequate translations. But some of it falls to our historical blind spots.”
‘I Would Have Jumped Off A Roof For Mao’: Li Cunxin, ‘Mao’s Last Dancer’, From The Cultural Revolution To The 21st-Century West
“Forced into ballet as a child in Mao’s China, Li Cunxin defected to the US and had to work as a stockbroker to support his family back home. But he never quit dancing. As he brings the Queensland Ballet to Britain, he talks about his traumas and triumphs – and shock at seeing people take their privileged lives for granted.”
Harper Lee’s Attorney Takes Over Another Piece Of The ‘Mockingbird’ Brand: The Annual Play In Monroeville
Tonja Carter, who rediscovered the manuscript of Go Set a Watchman and sued the local museum over its gift shop’s Mockingbird-themed merchandise, has formed a company to produce the stage adaptation of the novel in the town’s historic courthouse – taking the rights away from the museum, which had presented the play for years.
Shigeko Kubota, Pioneering Video Artist And Fluxus Member, Dead At 77
“Today, Kubota … [is] better remembered for her 1965 performance Vagina Painting, in which Kubota attached a paintbrush to her skirt, squatted, and moved around over a canvas.” More notable was her work, by herself and with husband Nam June Paik, developing the genre of video art in general and combining video and sculpture in particular.
Philadelphia’s Other Opera Company Reinvents Itself (Again)
After a two-year hiatus, the erstwhile Center City Opera has re-emerged with a new name (that doesn’t include the word opera) and mission, a four-shows-in-18-days summer festival format, a new home (the Prince Music Theater, itself recently brought back from the dead), a world premiere, two local premieres, and the musical version of Heathers.
Vic Firth, 85, The ‘Stradivari Of Drumsticks’
Besides spending four decades as the Boston Symphony’s principal tympanist (Seiji Ozawa called him “the single greatest percussionist anywhere in the world”), he decided in the 1960s to design and build his own sticks, feeling that what was on the market was inadequate for the subtleties of serious symphonic and ensemble music. Little did he know then that he was setting the gold standard for percussionists in all genres all over the world.
‘The Book Of Mormon’ Is Finally Playing Utah – Where They Seem To Love It
“The biting satirical musical that mocks Mormons has finally come to the heart of Mormonlandia, starting a sold-out, two-week run Tuesday at a Salt Lake City theater two blocks from the church’s flagship temple and headquarters.”
More Football Players Are Trying Ballet – And Liking It
Today’s exhibit: the Fighting Gamecocks of the University of South Carolina. (includes video)
Top Posts From AJBlogs 07.29.15
AftA Thoughts 2015: Self-Perpetuating Boards
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2015-07-29
Now This, For A Big Museum, Would Be Experimental
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2015-07-29
Philbrook Museum Director Randall Suffolk Gets High (Museum, that is)
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2015-07-29
An Oxymoronically Postminimalist Improviser
AJBlog: PostClassic Published 2015-07-29
An indefatigable operagoer
AJBlog: OperaSleuth Published 2015-07-29<
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