My Q&A with President Daniel Weiss–Part II: Financial Impact of Met Breuer & Planned New Wing
While implicitly faulting the Metropolitan Museum’s administration for not having managed its operations “in a way that’s financially sustainable,” Daniel Weiss, who has been the Met’s president since July, diplomatically avoided … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2016-04-27
The Beyoncé challenge
We live in such a varied culture. Hard for anyone to keep track of more than a small part of it. But sometimes something comes along that you just can’t miss, and don’t want … read more
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2016-04-27
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Archives for April 2016
French Billionaire Francois Pinault To Build New Museum In Paris
In a deal struck with the city, Pinault will take over the historical Bourse du Commerce (commodity stock exchange) building, which is close to the Louvre. The opening is scheduled for the end of 2018.
Counterintuitive: The Rise Of Pirate Radio Stations In The Age Of The Internet
“Helped along by cheaper technology, the rogue stations can cover several blocks or several square miles. Most broadcast to immigrant communities that pirate radio defenders say are underserved by licensed stations.”
Why The Royal Ontario Museum Decided To Digitize Its Entire Collection (And That’s Just The Start)
Q: So five years, 1.5 million images, mobile apps, access points in the galleries. That’s a huge endeavour. The big question is, why? A: Well, it’s obvious. This collection doesn’t belong to the museum. It belongs to the public. And technology is the way we’re going to give it back.
Bones Found Under Orchestra Pit In Cincinnati (Musician Worked To Death?)
“The bones were discovered March 29 by Aztec Services Group employees. Archeological group Gray and Pape examined the bones and confirmed that they were human skeletal remains, they said in a press release.”
UK Report: Jobs In The Arts Increased By 4% In 2015
“The data from the Office of National Statistics shows that 976,000 people now work in the sector, with separate data from 2015 showing that 460,000 people were working in artistic, literary and media jobs, including 77,000 authors and writers and 19,000 choreographers.”
English National Ballet Gets A New Executive Director
Patrick Harrison is currently executive director of the Cambridge Arts Theatre. Prior to which he was director of commercial operations at the National Theatre.
The Way We Release Movies In Theatres Hurts Independent Films
“A policy that’s centered on the concept of week-long theatrical release leaves out movies of significant artistic merit (such as “Losing Ground”) that don’t get a week-long run at all.”
Romania’s Culture Minister Resigns Over Ballet Crisis (Yes, Crisis!)
“Vlad Alexandrescu announced that he would be stepping down in a posting on his Facebook page Wednesday, after he failed to solve a conflict at the Bucharest National Opera that has seen three shows canceled so far.”
Why Comcast Wants To Buy Dreamworks For $3 Billion
“Comcast could make use of DreamWorks’ IP-rich vault in its theme parks as well as to feed its global film and TV pipelines. It’s understood that the deal on the table envisions bringing DWA into the Universal Pictures fold.”
Did Rousseau Have ADHD? (Sure Looks Like It)
“In his autobiography, Confessions, the description is clear: ‘To understand the full extent of my delirium at this moment you would have to know how easily my heart is fired by the least thing and with what energy it plunges into imagining the object that attracts it, however worthless this object may sometimes be.'”
Subversive Opera That Hooks You Without You Realizing It
“We created a show and pretended it was going to be a rock concert. Booked a rock venue and advertised it as an indie rock show. Made up the name Liederwolfe. Everyone in the Montreal scene was curious and it was packed. And then people came on stage and sang opera. People freaked out – it was a real happening – it was great. People were yelling, people walked out – but some people stayed. They brought their friends the next time. And they stayed with us and became our core audience for eight years.”
Making Dance Out Of Martial Arts And Meditation (And Rice), And Becoming A National Symbol In The Process
Founder Lin Hwai-min talks about the birth, the growth, and the aesthetic of the Cloud Gate Dance Theatre of Taiwan
Canada Council’s New Strategic Plan: Be A Bridge Between Indigenous/Non-Indigenous Through Arts
“Reconciliation through the arts is one of four main priorities in the council’s new five-year plan, which was released on Tuesday. The other three are about helping Canadian artists thrive in a digital environment, raising their profile internationally and giving them more money.”
Tolstoy *Hated* Shakespeare – Partly For The Things We Love Shakespeare For Today
“What frustrated Tolstoy the most was how Shakespeare neglected to furnish his characters with clear reasons for their actions, how he left a play’s meanings and intentions ambiguous.”
Over Decades, The New Yorker Rejected Hundreds Of Eileen Myles’ Poems. Until One Day They Didn’t
“Did I stop there. Uh uh. I think because I grew up in an alcoholic household and I was suspending belief so often as a child just to survive that it now felt like a bicep flex.”
Zaha Hadid’s Firm Wins Its First Post-Zaha Commission
Zaha Hadid’s Firm Wins Its First Post-Zaha Commission
“Zaha Hadid Architects won an international design competition for the Sberbank Technopark building, which will be built at the Skolkovo Innovation Center near [Moscow]. The new science and technology park – designed to host emerging IT, biomedical, energy, nuclear and space innovation companies – is said to be Russia’s answer to Silicon Valley.
Here’s The First Zaha Hadid Building To Open Since Her Death
“Cruise ships regularly disgorge thousands of passengers to visit attractions beyond the docks, but in the case of Salerno, this ancient and gracious Italian city of 133,000 people south of Naples, the first must-see site may soon become the maritime terminal itself.”
How Identity Politics Conquered The Art World: An Oral History
Jerry Saltz and Rachel Corbett collect the testimony and assemble a timeline – with, at its center, the still-notorious 1993 Whitney Biennial.
White Actors ‘Blacking Up’ For Othello Isn’t Inherently Awful, Says Simon Callow
“Is it so offensive? I don’t know. People say it’s offensive because it reminds you of the Black & White Minstrel show. But, it’s a different thing altogether. … The great point of acting is that it is an act of empathy about someone you don’t know or understand. I continue to defend Laurence Olivier’s performance as Othello.”
A Brief History Of Harriet Tubman In American Pop Culture
She’s been depicted in portraits and statues, served as a hero of folk tales and an icon of civil rights and feminism, made into a parody Barbie doll, and even helped Abraham Lincoln slay vampires. Now she’s going to join Lincoln in the ultimate domain of dead white males – on American money.
Why Do So Many Smart And Capable People Not Feel Happy? A ‘Scarcity Mindset’
“Most of us are the products of people who survived in what was for a very, very long time, in our evolution as a species, a scarcity-oriented universe. … So we do have a very hard-wired tendency to be scarcity-oriented. … It is now being shown in quite a lot of studies that you actually perform better if you don’t put yourself under the scarcity mindset, if you don’t worry about the outcomes and enjoy the process of doing something, rather than the goal.”
Is Mindfulness Overrated? Research On The Subject Might Be
Results of a meta-analysis of 124 studies on the purported benefits of mindfulness practice “show that many of these studies contained sample sizes that are too small to provide meaningful results – and they suggest that studies on mindfulness that have turned out negative results may have not been published.”
Scorsese, De Niro, Foster Et Al. Talk About ‘Taxi Driver’, 40 Years On
“[Robert] De Niro reunited with director Martin Scorsese, co-stars Jodie Foster, Cybill Shepherd and Harvey Keitel, screenwriter Paul Schrader, and producer Michael Phillips for an onstage chat moderated by the director of the New York Film Festival, Kent Jones. They talked about everything from how they came up with Bickle’s mohawk to Foster’s fear of hot pants and Keitel’s improvisations with a pimp. Then Vulture typed it all up for you.”
Chaos At Bucharest’s National Opera House: Latest General Manager Lasted One Day, Performances Cancelled, Musicians And Dancers Split Into Factions
Last week, in an attempt to win back Johan Kobborg, the house ballet’s artistic director – along with his superstar fiancée, Alina Cojocaru, and all the company’s non-Romanian dancers – the culture minister brought back the former general manager whose replacement led to the crisis. But that general manager, George Călin, had been removed because of corruption charges; when he returned, the opera side of the house and the orchestra went on strike (shutting down ballet performances as well). Călin stepped down the next day, and the house has been leaderless since; the culture minister has tried to convince legendary Romanian-American stage director Andrei Serban to return to Bucharest and turn the company around, as he did with the National Theatre after the Ceaușescu regime fell. Now the pro- and anti-foreignerKobborg sides (which roughly but not entirely align with the ballet and opera sides) are bitterly hurling accusations at each other, with the deputy prime minister attempting to mediate. (in Romanian; Google Translate version here)