Jelani Cobb: “Last month, HBO inspired an avalanche of criticism when it announced that it would produce a series called Confederate, which would explore a hypothetical world in which the South had won the Civil War. The events in Charlottesville illustrated a problem with that idea: only by the most specific, immediate definition can we consider the Confederacy to have lost the Civil War, and its legacy has defined a great deal of our history since then.”
Archives for August 2017
‘The Lost Cause Of The Confederacy Meets Cirque Du Soleil’: Dolly Parton’s Civil War-Themed Dinner Theater Extravaganza
Aisha Harris travels to Pigeon Forge, Tennessee to watch Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede – twice. (Audience members choose whether to sit with the North or the South; she wanted to see the show from, as it were, both sides.)
Berkshire Museum Turns Down $1 Million To Delay Selling Off Art
“The anonymous group … pledged to contribute up to $1 million to the Pittsfield museum if its board agrees to pause an auction of 40 works of art at Sotheby’s and to allow outside experts to provide a second opinion on the advisability of the controversial sale. Elizabeth McGraw, president of the museum’s board of trustees, said the offer falls short.”
Houston’s Theatre District Swamped By Harvey’s Floodwaters
The downtown area that’s home to the city’s flagship performing arts organizations is adjacent to Buffalo Bayou and has seen severe flooding. Here are preliminary damage reports from the Alley Theatre and the venues that house the Houston Ballet, Houston Symphony, and Houston Grand Opera.
Houston’s Major Museums Are Holding Up Against Hurricane Harvey
The Menil Collection, Museum of Fine Art Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, and Houston Center for Photography report no damage to their collections and relatively little to their buildings – so far. The Rockport Center for the Arts in Corpus Christi, alas, hasn’t been so lucky.
Enzo Dara, Great Buffo Bass, Dead At 78
“Over the … four decades of his career, Dara became one of the most famous Italian basses on the opera stage by portraying a small cluster of touchstone roles that highlighted his natural gifts for comedy, rapid-fire patter and innate bel canto technique.”
Moscow’s Pushkin Museum Tries To Crowdsource Purchase Of A Titian
“Previously thought to be a copy of Titian’s Venus and Adonis, experts at the Pushkin say it is the earliest surviving version of the work and now the Moscow museum wants to buy it through crowdfunding. It does not come cheap though – the painting is reportedly estimated to be worth between $10m-$20m.”
We Barely Pause To Look At Art In Museums. So Why Do We Spend So Much Time On Selfies?
“Mobile technology encourages us to forego the Enlightenment Era experience and its accompanying promise of profound self-knowledge. With the invisible audience of social media always lurking in our mobile phones, we are tempted to permanently affix a scrim of personal narrative over the artwork we see and experience. Do art selfies correlate with lower levels of engagement with the artwork?”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 08.28.17
Hurricane Harvey & Museums: Houston MFA, Menil Collection in Relatively Good Shape
This just in from Gary Tinterow, director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, in response to my query about how his institution has been weathering the Hurricane Harvey maelstrom: … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2017-08-28
Brahms and Blood
A few months ago, I wrote about the music that concludes the film A Quiet Passion, and that brought to mind one of the most frustrating endings, musically speaking, that I’ve experienced in a film … read more
AJBlog: Infinite Curves Published 2017-08-28
Jazz/Improv Chicago: Wide-ranging talents, free fests, PoKempner pix
Chicago’s jazz/improvised music scene contains multitudes, last week ranging from the wild yet earnest Liberation Music Collective to veteran piano sophisticate Michael Weiss in trio, as two of Marc PoKempner‘s photos document … read more
AJBlog: Jazz Beyond Jazz Published 2017-08-28
Taylor Swift’s New Single Crushes YouTube, Spotify Records
YouTube said Saturday the song’s lyric video broke a record for that site, with more than 19 million same day views. Swift crushed the previous record set by “Something Just Like This” from The Chainsmokers featuring Coldplay, which received 9 million views in 24 hours.
The Smithsonian Plans To Shut Its IMAX Theatre. It’s A Puzzling Decision
The Washington-based Smithsonian has decided to trim its fat by replacing its impressive facility with a restaurant. To little surprise, the decision to give priority to hot dogs over hot docs has not been popular in the educational-film world.
How Books Are Read Is As Important As What’s In Them
“It has long been thought, for instance, that the print revolution of the 18th century resulted in a shift from oral to silent reading, from shared reading to indulging in a book of one’s own, as books became more available to a wider range of people while leisure time also increased. But, says Abigail Williams, such a clear-cut transition is difficult to trace.”
Study: People Pay More Attention To High-Volume Of Reviews Rather Than To Quality Reviews
“Across various combinations of average rating and number of reviews, participants routinely chose the option with more reviews. This bias was so strong that they often favored the more-reviewed phone case even when both of the options had low ratings, effectively choosing the product that was, in statistical terms, more likely to be low quality.”
Brain-Damaged Former Violin Star Makes Music Again Through Brain Waves Linked To Computer
“In a groundbreaking project led by Plymouth University and the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability in London, her brain was linked to a computer using Brain Computer Music Interfacing software, allowing her to compose and play music again. This month, for the first time she was able to perform with her best friend Alison Balfour, with whom she last played when they were both violinists in the Welsh National Opera Orchestra in the 1980s.”
After A Century Of Puzzling, Researchers Have Cracked The Brilliant Code Of A 1000-Year-Old Tablet
“The team from the University of New South Wales in Sydney believe that the four columns and 15 rows of cuneiform – wedge shaped indentations made in the wet clay – represent the world’s oldest and most accurate working trigonometric table, a working tool which could have been used in surveying, and in calculating how to construct temples, palaces and pyramids.”
$50 Million Class Action Suit Filed Filed Against Royal Winnipeg Ballet Over Nude Photos
A former student of the Royal Winnipeg Ballet is filing a class-action lawsuit against the school and former instructor Bruce Monk, alleging Monk took nude photos and sold them online.
Broadway’s Social Media Problem
“Actors’ Equity has contracts with the Broadway League and various producers that constrict what can be recorded; these also make it clear who owns the footage, and it’s not the actors. They can retweet or share something posted by the show or a news outlet, but they typically can’t just go on their own for self-promotion purposes. In recent years, because of the growing importance of social media, actors have been grumbling that they need footage rights.”
What A Writer Sees That The Reader Doesn’t
“You come up with an image, phrase or sentence. Your head snaps back, and you say to yourself, Where did that come from?! I’m not talking about automatic writing, though that may be part of it. I mean the entire range of invisible forces that produce and affect the work. There are things the writer sees that the reader does not; things the reader sees that the writer does not; and things neither of us ever sees. These, the most entrancing of the lot, have a power of their own. Like the ghost of Jacob Marley, they lead to unimagined, sometimes frightful yet fruitful destinations.”
How Big A Factor Is Surprise In Enjoyment Of A Pop Song? A Neuroscience Answer
“Based on the music cognition literature, we propose two hypotheses for why some musical pieces are preferred over others. The first, the Absolute-Surprise Hypothesis, states that unexpected events in music directly lead to pleasure. The second, the Contrastive-Surprise Hypothesis, proposes that the juxtaposition of unexpected events and subsequent expected events leads to an overall rewarding response.”
Trisha Brown Remembered: A Reckless Disregard For Boundaries
“Trisha Brown’s dance made a singular impression, but it’s hard to remember specifically what she did. Most photos of her show her aiming in several directions at once, but they’re deceptive. They make her dancing look static when she never was still. I’ve never seen such a fluent body. Yet she didn’t look as if she was just flinging herself around.”
Why America Needs Its New National Center For Choreography
“I’m interested in how we can amplify space and proximity for artists who want to explore an idea bigger than just their next project. For example, there’s the Dancing Laboratory, which will initially center around BODYTRAFFIC, an LA-based company that commissions two or three pieces a year. The commissioning model generally suffers, because the artist must write the grant without knowing what the work will be yet, they raise the funds, and then put all the energy and resources into a few weeks, and expect the commissioned choreographer to make an amazing work. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t; there’s no room for failure or trying new ideas. We decided we want to disrupt that system, as well as offer additional opportunities that would cultivate female choreographic talent.”
Man Sold £30,000 In Fake Artworks. Not Very Good Fakes As It Turns Out…
“Richard Pearson, 56, from Sunderland, was jailed in January for selling 14 faked drawings and pictures to a gallery in Northumberland. He admitted fraud and forgery charges and was sentenced to three years and seven months. Suspicions were aroused when a restorer noticed that one of the canvases Pearson used was too new. A price on a receipt he claimed was from the 1960s was also spotted to be in decimal pounds and pence, rather than pounds and shillings, and a telephone number he used was too long.”
Is Theatre An Ideal Space To Get An ‘Empathy Workout’?
Yes. Theatre is, to put it bluntly, special (and science backs that up). “There is something about theatre in particular that transforms the way we consider humanity. After surviving millennia, it remains one of the most popular and desirable modes of storytelling. Beyond entertainment, there is something we gain at the neural level by engaging with theatre.”
Here’s How Museums Use Their Architecture To Court Bigger Crowds
New ideas say it’s time for museums to embrace their exteriors, even out into the sidewalks or streets near them, and certainly their plazas. In one case, in London, “the idea behind the project was to see the museum not just as a cultural project, but as an urban one. It needs to be of the street.”
Hollywood Has Its Worst Weekend Since The One After September 11, 2001
Actually, after adjusting for inflation, last weekend was even worse than that one. How is that possible? Blame a hurricane – and boxing.