Peter Brant has sold his 100% ownership interest in Art in America magazine, founded in 1913, to the company that publishes rival Artnews, and he will in turn become the majority shareholder in that company.
Archives for July 2015
Stunning Reversal: Cincinnati Piano Competition Reinstates Its Fired Artistic Director
“Awadagin Pratt, who was dismissed by executive director and CEO Mark Ernster on July 8, will continue in the role of artistic director. The competition also announced on Wednesday that Ernster resigned from his position on July 20. Board chair Jack Rouse, who had resigned on July 8, returned as chairman on July 26.”
Tate Britain Names New Director
Alex Farquharson is the choice. “The 45-year-old founded the £20m Nottingham Contemporary in 2009 with an exhibition of David Hockney’s work from the 1960s. That same year he was on the selection committee for the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where the UK was represented by 12 Years a Slave director Steve McQueen. In its first five years, Nottingham Contemporary has attracted more than a million visitors.”
Dr. Seuss’s New Book As Important Cultural Criticism
“Even the most skeptical reader will surely admire What Pet Should I Get?, in its initial printing of one million copies, as a text on the front lines of the revolution – and as a satire of old forms, perhaps, and at the very least an attempt at parody.”
Is Silicon Valley’s Creativity In Danger Of Stunting Itself?
“The enormous, disruptive creativity of Silicon Valley is unlike anything since the genius of the great 19th-century inventors. Its triumph is to be celebrated. But the accumulation of so much wealth so fast comes with risks. The 1990s saw a financial bubble that ended in a spectacular bust. This time the danger is insularity. The geeks live in a bubble that seals off their empire from the world they are doing so much to change.”
Study: Link Between Ideas and Creativity
“How do you make the leap from a hazy notion to one that is spelled out in practical details? Newly published research points to one simple technique that may do the trick.”
How The Smithsonian Used Kickstarter To Save Neil Armstrong’s Spacesuit
“The platform allows government institutions,museums and other philanthropic projects to reach a global audience of donors who can give a small amount to support big, historic projects that otherwise might not get the money needed to go forward.”
Netflix Will Soon Be The Largest “Network” Producer Of Original Programming
“Netflix next year is poised to expand its lineup to more than two dozen series, blowing past both HBO and TV’s most prolific basic-cable programmer, FX/FXX. A service until recently known mostly for repurposing other people’s movies and TV shows will thus achieve a major milestone: It will boast the biggest collection of first-run scripted content of any other subscription-based network in America, cable or streaming.”
The Profound Effect Funding Cuts Will Have On Regional UK Theatre
“The subsidised sector is without doubt the research and development arm of the commercial sector, where new productions, new work and new talent are developed. Ultimately, cuts of this magnitude would see the demise of the West End and regional touring as we know it, with far-reaching social, reputational, tourism and economic consequences.”
Oakland’s Cultural Renaissance Has Been Epic. But Development Threatens To Crush It
“The cumulative impact of all these developments could strike a crushing blow to Oakland’s cultural arts community, confirming its worst fears about gentrification and displacement and creating a leadership void at the already short-staffed Cultural Arts Department.”
A New (Important) Role For Libraries?
“Public libraries are becoming a one-stop shop for manufacturing in the digital age. Because libraries are investing in machines like 3-D printers, someday soon everyone with access to a public library could become an inventor or create something.”
What Should Music “Look” Like? (Linking Music With Its Album Art)
“I had been working on this graphic idea of a wind-flow diagram. I started to change the volume of the lines — in a kind of random but controlled way — and I thought that this would be a suitable minimalist motif to use on the CD.”
Scientists Are Teaching A Computer How To Improvise Jazz
“Jazz musician and computer scientist Kelland Thomas is building an AI program that can learn to play jazz and jam with the best of them, under a DARPA-funded project that aims to improve how we communicate with computers.”
National Gallery In London Faces All-Out Strike
“[The museum] has already been disrupted by more than 50 days of walkouts by staff since plans to [privatise] visitor services and security were first revealed. The Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union said it had served notice of four more separate days of industrial action, with a continuous, all-out strike starting on Aug. 17.”
Peter Brook Returns To Mahabharata For New Theatre Piece
The director and his colleagues who wrote and staged the nine-hour production that toured the world in the 1980s have returned to the ancient Indian epic for a work titled Battlefield. The four-actor staging opens in September at Brook’s longtime venue, the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris, and will tour to London, three cities in Italy, Amiens in France, Singapore, Tokyo, and Hong Kong.
Actress Natasha Parry, 84, Wife And Collaborator Of Peter Brook
“Her career was inescapably defined by her marriage, at the age of 20, to the director Peter Brook, with whom she worked many times in productions of Shakespeare, Chekhov, Anouilh and Beckett. She was also a vital part of Brook’s experimental, theatrical work in Paris, Persia (as Iran then was) and the villages of Africa. But Parry also had an independent career in films that marked her out as a fine screen actor.”
The Tragedy Of iTunes And Classical Music
“When the developer Erik Kemp designed the first metadata system for MP3s in 1996, he provided only three options for attaching text to the music. Every audio file could be labeled with only an artist, song name, and album title. Kemp’s system has since been augmented and improved upon, but never replaced.” Robinson Meyer explains why Apple’s music software is such a disaster at handling classical (and other kinds of) music.
Here Are Five Classical Music Gems From The AP’s Massive New YouTube Archive
From the Philadelphia Orchestra arriving for its first tour of Britain to the inimitable Thomas Beecham introducing a concert to Maria Callas’s notorious walkout from the Rome Opera’s Norma. (video)
Now Watson Will Do More Than Humiliate You At ‘Jeopardy!’ – It Will Analyze Your Writing Style
IBM is now licensing a tool of its supercomputer “cognitive system” called Tone Analyzer, which “us[es] linguistic analysis to detect emotional tones, social propensities, and writing styles” and then provides “suggestions to help the writer improve their intended language tones.”
How Al Hirschfeld Captured That Certain Something About His Subjects
Hirschfeld archivist David Leopold: “He always felt that we all have this ability to recognize a friend from the back, a block away, wearing an overcoat. He didn’t know how we do that. But he was always going for that telling gesture, that arch of the eyebrow.”
‘Brokeback Mountain’ Ten Years On: An Oral History
Ang Lee, Jake Gyllenhaal, Anne Hathaway, Randy Quaid, Annie Proulx, Diana Ossana, and Larry McMurtry share their memories – and tributes to the late Heath Ledger.
Reviving The Play That Reclaimed The Pink Triangle For The LGBT Movement
Yes, all you millennials – back before you were born, the few people who remembered that the Nazis had used pink triangles to mark out homosexuals in the prison camps tended to view the symbol as a badge of shame. Then Martin Sherman’s Bent opened on Broadway …
Bayreuth’s New Wagner Museum Finally Faces Composer’s Anti-Semitism Openly
“Revamped and doubled in size at a cost of 20 million euros ($21.92 million), the museum for the first time displays Wagner’s anti-Semitic screeds, which he published in his youth anonymously, then under his own name before he died in 1883. It also depicts the close ties his widow Cosima, who died in 1930, and his descendants forged with Hitler.”
Russia’s Bookstores Cordially Invited To Join Vladimir Putin’s Book Club
“The government plans to begin offering rent and tax breaks to booksellers in exchange for an ‘opportunity’ to provide a selection of titles chosen by the government. Dmitry Livanov, Russia’s Minister of Science and Education said this this new program [will] ‘help promote sales of those books which have historical value’ and ‘can contribute to patriotic education of local population’.”
We All Understand Fear And Anxiety Wrong, Says Neuroscientist Who First Mapped The Brain’s ‘Fear Circuit’
“These days, most people think that the fear circuit gives rise directly to the emotions of fear and anxiety. [Joseph] LeDoux is convinced it doesn’t – and that this distinction matters a great deal.”