“DSO officials announced a $15 million gift from the William Davidson Foundation. Of that, $5 million comes in the form of a challenge grant, which, if matched, will add to the DSO’s small-but-growing endowment. The balance will support a variety of DSO programs. Three other foundations already jumped in to make that happen.”
Archives for October 2017
Bass Museum In Miami Has Reopened At Last
“After two years and a transformative $12 million overhaul – capped by a nerve-wracking visit from Hurricane Irma – Miami’s Bass Museum re-opened to the public this weekend with a roomier layout, new galleries, and immersive installations by contemporary art stars Ugo Rondinone and Pascale Marthine Tayou.”
Albany Symphony Gets Largest-Ever Donation: $7 Million
The late Heinrich Medicus, a philanthropist and a professor at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in nearby Troy, NY, bequeathed the money specifically for the orchestra’s endowment. “The symphony will also be the beneficiary of half of the undesignated residuals from Medicus’ estate, including property and his art collection, part of which is up for sale this weekend at the Stair Galleries auction house in Hudson.”
Film About Last Tsar’s Mistress Faced Violent Protests Before Premiere, Giggles Afterward
News of Matilda, a glossy period piece about a Polish ballerina who had an affair with Nicholas II before he was crowned (or married), was met by Russian orthodox extremists with protests, calls for a ban and even arson attacks. (Nicholas was canonized in 2000 as a martyr for the faith.) “However, most Russians – and certainly those at the screening in Moscow on Tuesday – take little or no offense.”
Wear Whatever You Want, Just Come See Us, Says Scottish Opera’s New Campaign
“Tongue-in-cheek posters display messages such as ‘you don’t have to dress up for the opera’. The posters, shared on social media to target a younger audience, also dispel perceptions that you need to speak the language to enjoy an opera, or that you’ll need binoculars to see the stage.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 10.30.17
Matisse and Bonnard: A Perfect Pair?
It has been almost a month now since I stopped in at the Staedel Museum during a layover in Frankfurt to see “Matisse–Bonnard: Long Live Painting!” but when I have mentioned it in conversation to curators, dealers and other people in the art world, many have not known about the connection between the two. So it seems worth it to discuss the show here. … read more
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2017-10-29
The Unslaked Fires of Love
The White Light Festival presents Layla and Majnun, directed and choreographed by Mark Morris. … read more
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2017-10-30
2017 PEN USA Literary Awards
This year’s gathering, Friday night at the Beverly Wilshire, was not only free from obvious partisan rifts, but took on a fierce sense of purpose I don’t recall before., … read more
AJBlog: CultureCrash Published 2017-10-29
Grantmakers In The Arts Is Moving From Seattle To NY. What Will It Mean?
“This is a rare opportunity for a national organization to re-think policy and protocol and move in new directions while solidifying its deepest commitments. It isn’t very often, that a new important organization leader gets the chance for a kind of clean break with the past operation, and the opportunity to mold a new future. Not jettisoning the past, but aligning it with a new future. A new location and a new staff are a big deal.”
How To Get Good At Literary Parties
“In general, I learned, you should stay away from parties for rich people, because their purpose is donations and having a good time is secondary. Never go to a networking event. Poetry readings are either the best or the worst things. You can skip any book party because they only happen once, they end too soon, and there’s no narrative to them, especially if you’re not there.”
How To Make Hollywood More Accessible To Deaf People?
“Closed captioning is widely but not unfailingly available in theaters; that should improve by next summer, when all theaters showing digital movies must comply with a new federal rule under the Americans With Disabilities Act. As for performers, ask people to name deaf movie actors — or films about deaf people starring deaf people — and you’ll probably get exactly one name and title: Marlee Matlin, who won an Oscar for her turn in “Children of a Lesser God” 30 years ago. Then, crickets.”
Google X: Where “Radical” Creativity Is Encouraged
“X is perhaps the only enterprise on the planet where regular investigation into the absurd is not just permitted but encouraged, and even required. X has quietly looked into space elevators and cold fusion. It has tried, and abandoned, projects to design hoverboards with magnetic levitation and to make affordable fuel from seawater. It has tried—and succeeded, in varying measures—to build self-driving cars, make drones that deliver aerodynamic packages, and design contact lenses that measure glucose levels in a diabetic person’s tears.”
The Movie That Savages The International Art World
The art world is a soft target for satire, not least because the art world’s appetite for satire of itself is limitless. Artists are constantly sending up tradition and the scene through their art, only to see the cycle repeat itself as their own work becomes staid and canonical. It’s unreasonable to expect any satire of the art world to be fresh, since knowingness is the first requirement to get in the door. The Square won the Palme d’Or at Cannes this spring not because it lashes the art world in a new way, but because Ruben Östlund delivers his lashings so exquisitely.
Change La Boheme? Are You Frickin’ Kidding?
“These new takes on this classic of classics raise the question of whether “La Bohème” should be messed with at all. We seem to have an almost instinctive desire for this piece to remain the same, to be the opera we encountered as children. Is that something we should resist or accept?”
The AI Bot That’s Great At Writing Horror Fiction
“It turns out, machines can be pretty damn good at spinning up a tale of murder, dread, despair, and supernatural terror. At least one is—Shelley A.I., a horror-writing bot created by researchers at the MIT Media Lab, debuting just in time for Halloween this year. Named after Frankenstein author Mary Shelley, the little horror-author-that-could is a deep learning algorithm that reads stories published in terror-inducing /r/nosleep subreddit and trains itself to write its own horror fiction.”
Some Thomas Hart Benton Murals Have Been Removed From View At Indiana University. Does This Make Any Sense?
“In the controversial panel, Benton painted a reporter, a photographer and a printer into the foreground – an homage to the press of Indiana for breaking the power of the Klan. In the center, a white nurse tends both black and white children in City Hospital (now Wishard Hospital). The sinister figures of the Klan are visible in the background, behind the hospital beds – a reminder, perhaps, that racial progress can always slide backwards.”
Seattle’s Intiman Theatre Has A New Artistic Director
Jennifer Zeyl: “Theatre at its best—I’m beginning to see a pattern as an independent producer, a devised theatre-maker and a director—I think that autobiographical narrative is incredibly powerful. Talking about intersectionality and all the nuanced combination of identifiers that make one person. And how complex that is, and how unique it is, and how beautiful it is. And at a time, a political climate like we’re experiencing right now, to be able to stand in that and celebrate it and be heard and seen, I think is an act of revolution. That’s what we need right now. We really need to show up. People need to stand in their identities. That’s what actually makes America great.”
Why Would Anyone Choose To Be A Fundraiser?
“Essentially, the report reveals good news and bad for arts-related fundraising, but even the good news feels weighed down by more work and cost. Some of the report’s big takeaways are indicative of the challenges fundraisers in all fields face working at both small and large organizations.”
Scholar Says He’s Found Proof Where Shakespeare Is Buried
“The title page and dedication page have encrypted in them the exact church, the exact part of that church and the exact spot … where Shakespeare is buried. It’s like an old-fashioned treasure island map. You overlay the title page on to a ground plan of Poets’ Corner and it just points to exactly where he’s buried. It’s just phenomenal.”
The Father Of “Mindfulness” Warns Of People “Losing Their Minds”
The once “very macho” anti-war activist who raged against MIT’s role in nuclear weapons research is the catalyst behind the west’s mushrooming interest in mindfulness meditation, having reimagined Buddhist contemplation practices for a secular age almost 40 years ago.
The Last Mainstream Arts Critic In Texas… (Time To Turn Out The Lights?)
“This latest round means not a reduced staff of reviewers but no critics at all at major city papers. That’s a watershed. The arts here in North Texas, for instance, have been blossoming the past decade, while arts coverage has gone the other way. Fort Worth is the home of the internationally-known Cliburn competition and Kimbell Art Museum — that’s pretty unusual for a city its size. Yet the local paper now has no arts critics on its staff.”
Michigan Has Lost Its Mainstream Critics. Artists Are Feeling It
“We’ve heard about theater critics being laid off, we’ve heard about newspapers cutting back on the space they’re willing to devote to arts coverage. It seems like that’s something we hear from theaters across the board in Michigan.”
What’s Up With Predatory Men Like Terry Richardson Hiding Behind ‘Art’?
What in the WORLD, every magazine that ever bought into this: “Richardson’s aesthetic has been described as ‘sleaze fashion.’ His photos feature nudity, sexual innuendo and not-so-inventive uses of popsicles. The photographer, a wiry 52-year-old who’s often seen in thickly rimmed hipster glasses and flannel shirts, leans into his ‘pervy’ reputation, projecting a certain male fantasy of a nerd-turned-horndog.”
Canadian Lit Has A Lot Of Prizes – Perhaps Too Many Prizes
“It seems it is only a matter of time before there is an award for the best award – as if no Canadian author or publishing house should be left out in the cold.”
When Pierre Boulez Went Electric
Boulez’s goal for the French Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique “was not to replace instrumental with electronic music, but to work so that the two would mingle and, in Boulez’s words, ‘live together like cotton and rayon.'”
Actor Anthony Rapp Claims ‘Sexual Advance’ By Kevin Spacey When Rapp Was 14
“As Spacey’s star began to rise through the 1990s and 2000s — including a Tony Award, two Oscars, a decadelong run as the creative director of the Old Vic theater in London, and six seasons and counting on the hit Netflix series House of Cards — Rapp’s frustration, anger, and incredulity with the sexual boundary he said Spacey crossed with him grew as well. Seeing Spacey now, ‘My stomach churns,’ Rapp said. ‘I still to this day can’t wrap my head around so many aspects of it. It’s just deeply confusing to me.'”
Jane Juska, The Woman Whose New York Review Of Books Personal Ad Birthed A Book About Sex For Older Women, Has Died At 84
The book, A Round-Heeled Woman: My Late-Life Adventures in Sex and Romance, came from a rather literary place: It “grew out of a personal ad Juska placed in the New York Review of Books in 1999. Inspired by an Eric Rohmer film, Autumn Tale, it read: ‘Before I turn 67 – next March – I would like to have a lot of sex with a man I like. If you want to talk first, Trollope works for me.'”