With Jerry Saltz just having ruminated on “The Avant-Garde That Lost By Winning,” what about the ones that simply lost? Alex Greenberger and Andrew Russeth offer “an unabashedly opinionated deep dive into the terms, artists, and movements that may once have seemed destined for the canon but that now chart as footnotes, as well as many that have returned to the forefront.”
Archives for April 2017
We Should Be Very Careful About What We Call “Art” (And Who We Call “Artists”)
Whereas “artists” originally were, by definition, people who create art, “art” is now defined as anything made by a purported artist. The “institutional theory” codifying that premise is fully operative in the global art establishment.
How Playwrights Have Been Putting A Spotlight On Gun Violence In America
“Cite the numbers, and the problem instantly becomes too vast to grasp: More than 33,000 people killed and upward of 78,000 wounded by firearms each year in the United States … This is where the stealthy power of theater has an advantage, at least theoretically. … News reports arrive after the fact, but theater can meddle with time and dimension, showing us the before, the during, the yet to come.” Laura Collins-Hughes surveys the plays that have been exploring the issue.
‘A Modestly Shattering Discovery’ – Alex Ross On The Lost Stravinsky Score That Surfaced Last Year
“Like thousands of other Stravinsky fans, I listened to a live stream of the première, my anticipation heightened by descriptions that the composer had supplied later in life. (He called it ‘the best of my works before The Firebird, and the most advanced in chromatic harmony.’) Like many others, I felt mild disappointment. Funeral Song contains no thrilling premonitions of the Stravinsky to come. … Yet, after spending more time with the piece … I felt a growing fascination. The music has a veiled power, and hints at otherwise hidden sources of inspiration. A spectre haunts the scene: the spectre of Wagner.” (includes sound clip)
An Open Letter To The Dancer Who Hates Herself
Alessa Rogers of Atlanta Ballet: “I see you. I know who you are. If you think you are hiding your self-loathing, you are deceiving only yourself. It is time to stop. … Don’t be seduced by the feeling that berating yourself makes you a better artist. I know you are trying to protect yourself by saying self-judgmental things so that it won’t sting if others do. But putting yourself down will not endear you to the people in the front of the studio.”
The Star Ballerina Who’s Making A Real Career As An Actress
Irina Dvorovenko retired from ABT in 2013, and since then she’s had roles in two major dramatic television series. She tells Gia Kourlas how it happened.
What Other States Can Learn From Rhode Island’s Arts Incentives
“While Rhode Island may be the smallest state in the country, [it] has become a powerhouse when it comes to attracting artists and art lovers to its shores. And the method by which state leaders have leveraged Rhode Island’s tax code to benefit the creative community could serve as a model for other states looking to cultivate a stronger arts economy.”
Agent Who Conned Friends Into Investing In Non-Existent Play Pleads Guilty To Larceny
Roland Scahill claimed to have purchased the rights to soprano Kathleen Battle’s life story and that he was producing a one-woman show starring Lupita Nyong’o about Battle’s firing from the Metropolitan Opera.
For First Time Ever, Met Museum Chooses Choreographer As Artist-In-Residence
“The Metropolitan Museum of Art has been seriously getting into dance lately. But now it’s taking its love affair one step further: Gallim Dance director/choreographer Andrea Miller was just named the museum’s artist in residence for the 2017-18 season – the first dance artist ever chosen for that distinction! We caught up with Miller to find out exactly what this means.”
What The Two French Presidential Candidates Propose For The Arts
“[Emmanuel] Macron … has declared his intention to maintain the cultural budget in exchange for greater efficiency. He wants all schoolchildren to have access to cultural and artistic education, and has proposed a €500 annual ‘culture pass’ for young people. … [Marine] Le Pen, meanwhile, … has made no overall budget commitment. However, as part of her focus on French patrimony, she wants to increase funds for heritage and conservation by 25%. She also wants to stop the sale of national buildings and palaces to foreigners and the private sector.”
Ban On Indian Movie For Being ‘Lady-Oriented’ Overturned
“Lipstick Under My Burkha, a drama that explores the sexual awakenings and personal struggles of four small-town Indian women, was initially denied classification [by the Central Board of Film Certification] … On Wednesday an appeals board overturned that decision, saying … ‘There cannot be any embargo on a film being women oriented or containing sexual fantasies and expression of the inner desires of women.'”
Brand-New Music Director Quits Oslo’s Opera House Because He (And Everyone Else) Can’t Get Along With Artistic Director
“Karl-Heinz Steffens announced that he’s already decided to leave his post next year. Steffens was popular and had been viewed as a unifying force in an organization riddled with conflict, but he claims he simply hasn’t found a good tone with the Opera’s incoming and embattled Artistic Director, Annilese Miskimmon.”
Performing ‘Hamlet’ In A Sandstorm At A Syrian Refugee Camp
Dominic Dromgoole, the former director of Shakespeare’s Globe and godfather of the company’s every-country-on-earth tour of Hamlet, writes about the tour’s visit to Amman, Jordan, and to the Zaatari settlement for refugees near the Jordanian-Syrian border.
Novel About Medieval Sufi Mystic Wins International Prize For Arabic Fiction
Mohammed Hasan Alwan’s A Small Death retells the life of Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi (1165-1240), considered by some the greatest of Sufis and by others (conservative Muslims) an apostate, and his journeys across the breadth of the Islamic world. The award includes $50,000 for the author and another $50,000 toward the costs of translation into English.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 04.26.17
A failure of SHIFT — there wasn’t much buzz
Why I’m writing these posts about SHIFT, a festival featuring orchestras from around the U.S., coproduced in Washington by the Kennedy Center and Washington Performing Arts, with all tickets affordably priced at $25): … read more
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2017-04-26
Out-of-Towner Downer: Metropolitan Museum Considers a Xenophobic Admission Policy
Saul Steinberg‘s famous New Yorker cover portraying how Manhattanites view the rest of the world came to mind when I read Robin Pogrebin‘s NY Times article about the Metropolitan Museum’s tentative (to my mind, wrongheaded) proposal to discriminate against out-of-towners in charging admission fees. … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2017-04-26
Sotheby’s Pumps A Nascent Market
It may have been just a matter of time: today Sotheby’s announced an inaugural sale of contemporary African art, saying that this market in recent years has undergone “a long-overdue correction.” … read more
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2017-04-26
How Charles Lloyd stays marvelous
During the 50 years since his breakthrough album Forest Flower (released in February 1967, recorded live at the Monterey Jazz Festival the summer before) … saxophonist-flutist Charles Lloyd has been unusually popular for an adventurous jazzman. … read more
AJBlog: Jazz Beyond Jazz Published 2017-04-26
A Museum Built For Failure (You’ll Learn Something)
“The purpose of the museum is to show that innovation requires failure,” Dr. West said as he introduced some of the exhibits in a video posted this month on the YouTube channel of Fredrik Skavlan, a Scandinavian talk show host. “If you are afraid of failure, then we can’t innovate.” He said he started the museum “to encourage organizations to be better at learning from failures — not just ignoring them and pretending they never happened.”
Stars Of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’ Decline To Describe The Story As Feminist, And The Audience Is Not Happy
Typical of the responses at a panel following the Tribeca Film Festival screening of the opening episode was this from Elisabeth Moss: “For me, it’s not a feminist story. It’s a human story because women’s rights are human rights. … So for me, you know, I never approach anything with any sort of, like, political agenda. I approach it from a very human place, I hope.” As reporter Laura Bradley puts it, “[these] answers were much less in tune with the audience than the episode itself had been.”
Why Does Our Musical Taste Get Frozen In Our Youth?
“It’s simply not realistic to expect someone to respond to music with such life-defining fervour more than once. And it’s not realistic, either, to expect someone comfortable with his personality to be flailing about for new sensibilities to adopt. I’ve always been somewhat suspicious of those who truly do, as the overused phrase has it, listen to everything. Such schizophrenic tastes seem not so much a symptom of well-roundedness as of an unstable sense of self. Liking everything means loving nothing. If you’re so quick to adopt new sentiments and their expression, then how serious were you about the ones you pushed aside to accommodate them?”
Claire Chase Wins This Year’s $100K Avery Fisher Prize
Chase, 38, became the first flutist to receive the Fisher Prize, which is awarded every few years to recognize musical excellence, vision and leadership (and whose payoff was increased this year from $75,000). The prize comes half a year after Ms. Chase stepped down from leading the International Contemporary Ensemble, the vital new-music collective commonly known as ICE, to focus more on her performing career.
Can Berlin Really Afford A Dazzling New Museum Of Modern Art?
“The museum, set to be built in the center of the Kulturforum—a collection of museums that includes Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery, the Kunstbibliothek art library, and neighboring the Hans Scharoun-designed Philharmonic—has been controversial from the outset. Herzog & de Meuron won a second competition, after the initial one hailed no winner.”
Why The CIA Secretly Funded Arab Art For Years
Suspicions about the almost sudden spread and funding of American art movements such as Abstract Expressionism led critic Max Kozloff to describe it in a 1973 essay as“a form of benevolent propaganda.” But while much is known about CIA funding for American art during the Cold War, their support for Arab art during the same period has rarely been discussed.
Director Jonathan Demme, 73
Mob wives, CB radio buffs and AIDS victims; Hannibal Lecter, Howard Hughes and Jimmy Carter: Mr. Demme (pronounced DEM-ee) plucked his subjects and stories largely from the stew of contemporary American subcultures and iconography. He created a body of work — including fiction films and documentaries, dramas and comedies, original scripts, adaptations and remakes — that resists easy characterization.
This Year’s NFL Football Draft Is At The Philadelphia Museum Of Art (Huh?)
“Standing on those steps and seeing that this is such a heroic moment, this is a culmination for these [draft picks], we set out on, ‘Could we create a theater? Could we build a theater here?’ ” said Peter O’Reilly, the NFL’s senior vice president of events. “We know it’s going to be complicated. We know it’s going to be audacious. But this is what we have to do, and the Parkway itself was natural. It’s a home to so many iconic events over the years.”
John Waters Is Hosting A Summer Camp For Grown-Ups
Sure, there will be campfires and s’mores, but there will also be burlesque lessons, Hairspray karaoke, scotch and cigars, and Bloody Mary Bingo – not to mention a movie marathon, a costume contest, and the national treasure‘s own one-man show. Also arts-and-crafts and archery, which seem pretty kinky in this context.
Do We Really Need To Dress Up When We Go To The Opera?
“Americans might say that their freedom of self-expression is being denied if they are told how to dress. I think we can learn that self-expression and respect for certain traditions are not mutually exclusive. I have seen many of my fellow citizens dressed in attire more suited to a workout at the gym or for mowing the lawn in restaurants, offices and theaters. This detracts from the specialness of certain occasions.”