“It has seemed that for the entire 2010s thus far, Facebook has been a place for composers and co. (whether to chat, laugh, share work, share opportunities, discuss musical issues, discuss politics, fight like hell) to come together. The same is true for actors, string players, academics, doctors, and bankers, to some extent, I’m assuming. But for composers, or for the several hundred spread over six continents whom I’m FBfriends with, at any rate, it has functioned as one of the relevant gathering places for those of us who couldn’t make it to the show last night. Our lot, as a rule, doesn’t congregate.”
Archives for November 2017
The News Media Business Is In Complete Collapse. What To Do?
“There are at least three major trends contributing to this dismal media moment. They all point to the same solution, and it’s something everyone in journalism should know by now: News publishers have to get better at making money outside of advertising.”
British Academics Argue That Museums Don’t Control Copyright On Images Of Work In Public Museums
“The [European] Court of Justice has made it quite clear: for a photograph to be protected by copyright, it must be original in the sense that the photographer has exercised creative choices and thereby stamped the photograph with their personal imprint. A photographer who merely seeks to control light and angles to create an image of a work of art is highly unlikely to have created a copyright work.”
The Most-Anticipated New Opera Of The Year Faces Backlash
The piece has “taken many aback with some startlingly negative reviews as well as bending-over-backward attempts to find some value in a work by a team that has given us operatic masterpieces in the past. Without question, the most highly anticipated new opera of the year — a year in which John Adams turned 70 and Peter Sellars, 60 — “Girls” has also been presented as the first opera of Trump times. The populist spirit of the 49ers, the lack of regard for the environment in pursuit of wealth, along with the rampant racism against Latinos, Chinese and black people has created the expectation of the kind of political opera that the lyric stage has historically been very adept at.”
Canada Wonders: Can You Really “Decolonize” A Country?
“It was singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie who, early in 2017 at outset of the Canada 150 hoopla that offended many Indigenous people, counselled everyone to “Keep calm and decolonize.” But what exactly does that mean? After centuries of contact, can you really tease apart the threads of settler and Indigenous culture?”
The Digital World Isn’t Subverting Democracy, It’s Helping It (Really?)
“Digital technologies are changing politics as we know it, but not because of some inherent or immutable characteristic that stands apart from the world in which they were created. Instead, these technologies have helped an underlying condition, namely growing discontent at marketisation – the privatising of ever more goods, services and social interactions, and the ideologies that justify that process – to find meaningful expression in the formal political arena.”
Holland Cotter: Louvre Abu Dhabi’s Rewrite Of Art History
“The Louvre Abu Dhabi is banking on the theory that pointing out links among a wide variety of cultures will make all art feel more approachable to the global audience it hopes to attract. Once viewers gain the habit of spotting connections, they may come to accept that all cultures are equally valuable and personally relevant. That, at least, seems to be the thinking, and it makes sense.”
Do We Have Time For Utopias? How About Dystopias?
“It is a tough job to reclaim the idea of utopia for the twenty-first century and deploy it in the battle against the neoliberal agenda. But – if we were to want to do such a thing – these are books that could help us. If there is an alternative to a neoliberal future, the imaginative effort required by utopian thinking is a necessary step to achieving that alternative.”
How Restaurant Menus Manipulate Customers
“There is now an entire industry known as ‘menu engineering’, dedicated to designing menus that convey certain messages to customers, encouraging them to spend more and make them want to come back for a second helping.” Reporter Richard Gray ferrets out a few tricks of the trade.
What Allan Bloom Saw In Rejection Of Elites
“Underneath a nonjudgmental relativism, Bloom saw a creeping nihilism: believing that all judgments of value had equal weight, the students ended up not believing or aspiring to much of anything at all. As a result, they no longer aspired to learn the truth, but rather to be “open-minded.” Incapable of treating moral questions and culture as anything other than matters of personal preference, they couldn’t be bothered to take seriously the task of self-reinvention that their education demanded of them.”
The Art Of The Fake: Forgers Are The Art World’s Folk (Anti-)Heroes
Noah Charney: “There is an element of illusionism to a good forger’s craft, but also a mischievous Loki quality to them, a sense that they are ‘more prankster than gangster,’ and that it is okay to admire them, even cheer for them against the authorities. The tabloid media, in particular, likes to dress up art forgers as working class heroes who are ‘sticking it’ to the elites, showing the emperors that they wear no clothes.”
The Internet As We’ve Known It Is Dying
“A vibrant network doesn’t die all at once. It takes time and neglect; it grows weaker by the day, but imperceptibly, so that one day we are living in a digital world controlled by giants and we come to regard the whole thing as normal. It’s not normal. It wasn’t always this way. The internet doesn’t have to be a corporate playground. That’s just the path we’ve chosen.”
Why Are So Many Adaptations Of ‘Swan Lake’ So Dark?
Black Swan isn’t even the half of it. John Neumeier’s version features Mad King Ludwig; James Kudelka’s includes gang rape; Michael Keegan-Dolan’s centers on abuse by Irish priests. There’s even another film coming out about a ballerina in the lead role losing her sanity. David Jays talks to dancemakers about the darkness they find at the heart of the story.
How Might The Republicans’ Tax Plan Impact The Arts?
“Under the current rules, taxpayers can subtract the year’s charitable gifts from their income, reducing the amount of earnings that are subject to tax. President Trump’s proposal for a higher ‘standard deduction’, adopted by both the House and Senate bills, could mean that many taxpayers who currently deduct charitable gifts will no longer be able to do so, which could reduce the tax incentive for donating art and money to museums. While museum donors probably will not stop giving as a result, they may give less.”
Enough Already With The Wildly Overrated George Orwell
Ben Judah: “There is a simplicity and a clarity to Orwell’s prose. It flows nicely. But there is also nothing special about it other than the fact it has been canonised as the ultimate in English authorial excellence. This is still very much a surprise to me, because there is just so much wrong with it.”
Listen To This Year’s Grawemeyer Award Winner, Bent Sørensen’s ‘L’Isola Della Città’
“Written for the Danish ensemble Trio con Brio and the Danish National Symphony Orchestra, which gave its premiere last year, L’Isola della Città (‘The Island in the City’) unfolds over nearly half an hour in five continuous movements. Stealthy and subtle, its central threesome of soloists – piano, violin and cello, as in Beethoven’s Triple Concerto – finds oases of calm amid flares of intensity from the orchestra.”
Daniel Day-Lewis Finally Explains (Sort Of) Why He’s Quitting Acting
“I haven’t figured it out. But it’s settled on me, and it’s just there. … All my life, I’ve mouthed off about how I should stop acting, and I don’t know why it was different this time, but the impulse to quit took root in me, and that became a compulsion. It was something I had to do.”
Front Porches – New Houses Are Getting Them, And People Are Using Them Again
“In the 20th century, porches couldn’t compete with TV and air conditioning. Now this classic feature of American homes is staging a comeback as something more stylish and image-conscious than ever before.”
TV Comedies Were Taking On Sexual Harassment Months Before ‘The Weinstein Effect’
“Just as Louis C.K. used his stand-up specials and FX show, Louie, to recast his own sexual misconduct as transgressive comedy, his peers – multi-hyphenate TV stars like [Aziz] Ansari, Tig Notaro and Lena Dunham – have used their own platforms to mine the experience of working with guys like him, and dig into issues like how to act on intractable rumors, the social discomfort of taking a stand, and the problem with well-meaning male allies.”
Big Foundations Stepping Up To Protect Arts Orgs From San Francisco Real Estate Market
“Think the Bay Area’s arts ecosystem is in trouble now? Imagine what it would be like without the Rainin and Hewlett foundations.”
#GrammysNotSoWhite: Pool Of Major Nominees May Be Most Diverse Ever
“This year’s increased number of artists of color and women may be a response to the current political climate in which many in those groups feel both threatened and moved to speak out. It most certainly reflects the academy’s attempt to address criticism that it is out of touch with notable artists and trends shaping pop music.” (For a complete list of nominees, click here.)
Classical Grammy Nominees Are *Not* The Usual Suspects
Two of the five opera nominees are by Alban Berg, and the closest thing to a warhorse is The Pearl Fishers. (Unless Wozzeck counts.) All of the nominated orchestras are American, but none are from the old “Big Five.” Three nominations went to the South Dakota Chorale. There’s one likely shoo-in, though: the late Dmitri Hvorostovsky, for Sviridov’s Russia Cast Adrift. (For a complete list of nominees, click here and scroll way down for classical.)
No Classic Rock (Not Even The Beatles): It’s Glenn Gould Vs. Unknown Somalis In Best Historical Album Grammy Race
The 50th anniversary edition of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band didn’t make the cut, though the endlessly re-released Gould Goldberg Variations did. (This version includes every single take the pianist did.) The Goldbergs are up against a 25-disc set of Leonard Bernstein conducting Leonard Bernstein, excerpts from an archive of old Somali music that was buried in the desert during the long civil war, 1970’s Afro-pop and jazz from what’s now Burkina Faso, and songs by a zither-playing gospel-blues preacher. (For a complete list of nominees, click here.)
The Guggenheim Bilbao, 20 Years On
“Despite a slight dip in attendance after the 2008 financial crisis, the museum has welcomed more than 20 million visitors – two-thirds of them from abroad – since it opened on 19 October 1997. In a city of around 350,000 people, the original feasibility study calculated that 400,000 visitors a year were needed to justify the initial expense (estimated at $228m by the economist Beatriz Plaza) and ongoing subsidy (currently around €9m a year).”
Philly’s Oldest Alternative Art Space Is Selling Its Building
“‘We are going to switch from being building-based to being project-based,’ [Painted Bride] executive director Laurel Raczka said Monday. … The organization is not having any particularly stressful financial problems at this time, Raczka said. Rather, the decision to free itself from the building is driven by a desire to serve the city’s younger artists and audiences in a way that makes sense.”