The destruction wrought on Myrna Herzog’s 1661 Edward Lewis bass viola da gamba by the Italian airline during Herzog’s trip from Rio de Janeiro to Tel Aviv last January made headlines internationally. Fortunately, Alitalia readily agreed to pay for restoration, and after a year’s worth of work by luthier Shlomo Moyal, the instrument is repaired and ready for performance. — Classic FM (UK)
Does Documentary Theatre Add To Understanding?
A theatre researcher thinks not: “On the surface, theatres of the real offer authenticity and certainty in their attachment to reality. But watching one of these plays does not produce a secure experience of truth. The closest we can get to an objective reality is the feeling of real, replacing fact with feeling.” – The Conversation
Are These The 21 Most-Beautiful Theatres In America?
Curbed, the guilty-pleasure real estate porn site, makes a list of standout concert halls in America. Acoustics aren’t the criteria here – or functionality or success. Instead, this is a list of visual pleasures. – Curbed
A Man Walked Into A Bookstore
But he was in his 40s, and so it wasn’t as filled with possibility and joy as it might have been when he was in his 20s. “The bookstore is a liminal space. Even if like me you don’t have the cash to buy a box of new titles and reinvent yourself week to week, you have the moment of the choosing and everything it tugs upon.” – LitHub
The Architecture Of Cuarón’s 1970s Mexico City
For instance, there was the 1943 Cine Metropolitan, a movie theatre where a couple of key Roma scenes take place. “‘Cinemas were like this,’ he says reverently. ‘When I was a kid I would love to arrive 10 to 15 minutes before the beginning of the movie to see the curtain opening slowly and the expectation of what you are going to see next.'” – Los Angeles Times
Let’s Not (Ever) Forget The Glories Of Reading Iris Murdoch
“I had, I think, finally been introduced to the private world of reading that many people inhabit; a dream state I now regard as a portal to the act of breathing life into fictional worlds of one’s own. That first Murdoch novel seemed like a belief system transformed into story, given to me to make of it what I wanted, on my own.” – The New York Times
The Millions, One Of The Last Indie Book Magazines, Has Been Bought By Publishers Weekly
After a nearly 16-year run, The Millions, which was truly one of the last outposts of the early 2000s book blogging culture, has made a decision: “While the magazine’s coverage of books, arts, and culture [will] continue, it will now be as a property of PWxyz, the parent company of Publishers Weekly.” – Vulture
Has Silicon Valley (The Idea) Lost Its Creative Soul?
The ideal of super-smart people using those super smarts to create disruption for the betterment of all, or as Steve Jobs once put it, engineers working, quote, “to solve most of humankind’s problems.” He said that more than 20 years ago. There’s been a lot of history since then. There’s been a lot of money made, too, but also there’s been the emergence of certain kinds of problems that are only possible because of technology. – Wired
The Next Great City For Artists? How About Des Moines?
The City has been growing a lot, especially the downtown. It’s ripe for a great arts scene. The trick? How to keep it lively and desirable but affordable at the same time. Artists love Austin, for example, but many are thinking of leaving because it’s gotten too expensive.
What Does It Mean To Be A “Teaching Artist”?
Eric Booth: “Teachings artistry lives in the hybrid zone, where two essential human realms meet—art and learning—to enrich one another and create the most fecund human space. Indeed, there is a tidal element to a teaching artist’s career as it ebbs and flows between the two kinds of projects.”
French Antiquity Dealers Protest President Macron’s Art Restitution Plans
Many tribal art dealers feel that their work in restoring and preserving pieces, documenting information about them and helping to establish collections, has been misrepresented and point to the lack of a legal framework around restitution. – The Art Newspaper
Howell Begle, Lawyer Who Fought To Get Early R&B Stars Properly Paid, Dead At 74
“During a years-long pro bono legal fight, Mr. Begle represented [Ruth] Brown and other R&B artists, helping them claim royalties from past sales, industry-standard royalty agreements going forward, and other benefits in what became known as the royalty reform movement.” — The Washington Post
Here’s Another Cambodian Dance Form Brought Back From Brink Of Extinction
We’ve read about how Khmer royal court dance has been revived (and even queered). Less familiar is the masked dance-drama lakhon khol, which was nearly wiped out, along with the country’s other traditional art forms, by the Khmer Rouge. Sun Rithy, a 46-year-old whose father and grandfather performed in the genre and trained him in it, now has a company of young performers dedicated to preserving lakhon khol. — Reuters
For Opera About Tibetan Saint, Composer Searched For Sounds She’d Never Heard Before
Andrea Clearfield added Nepali and Tibetan bells, conch shells, and singing bowls to the Western orchestra for Mila, Great Sorcerer, but even those were sounds she already knew. So she got an instrument maker to create seven entirely new instruments, from, as David Patrick Stearns puts it, “an ethereal tricked-out music box to a drone that suggests something primeval welling up from the center of the Earth.” — The Philadelphia Inquirer
Will Shortz In Hot Water For Ethnic Slur That Made It Into New York Times Crossword
“The clue for 2 down in the New York Times‘ first crossword puzzle of the new year was nothing unusual: ‘Pitch to the head, informally.’ But the answer stopped many puzzlers in their tracks. … It was a minor dust-up, all things considered, but it says something about the state of crossword puzzles in 2019.” — Slate
Nat Geo Shelves Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Show After Sexual Misconduct Accusations
“National Geographic Channel has pulled its long-running Neil deGrasse Tyson chat show StarTalk off the air, at least for now, following allegations of sexual misconduct against the famed astrophysicist. StarTalk will remain on hiatus as a Fox Networks Group investigation into the multiple claims continues.” — Variety
Anne Midgette Reviews The IRS’s On-Hold Music
“Background music has to walk a tricky line. We want something inoffensive yet meaningful, and you’d better believe that we — the consumer masses — will barrage customer service with complaints if the balance tips too far in one or the other direction.” — The Washington Post
Court Throws Out Sexual Harassment Lawsuit Against Artforum And Its Ex-Publisher
“New York’s Supreme Court has dismissed a case against [the magazine and its] former publisher, Knight Landesman, whom curator and art fair director Amanda Schmitt claimed had sexually harassed her via ‘unwelcome physical contact and repulsive written and oral demands for intimacy’ while she was an employee at the magazine.” (Landesman resigned the day the suit was made public.) — ARTnews
Movie Theatre In Germany Offers Nationalists Free Tickets To ‘Schindler’s List’, Nationalists Act All Insulted
The Cinexx theater in the town of Hachenburg made the offer to members of the right-wing party Alternative für Deutschland for a screening on Jan. 27, Holocaust Remembrance Day. Cinexx says it wasn’t trolling and wants to “initiate discussion,” but AfD folks called the scheme a “tasteless instrumentalization” and a “senseless provocation.” — The New York Times
Louvre Had Record-Breaking 10.2M Visitors In 2018, Thanks To Delacroix And Beyoncé
The figures show a bounce-back for the museum after several years of dips in attendance attributed to falling tourism in Paris following the 2015-16 terrorist attacks. Juicing the numbers were the wildly successful Delacroix retrospective and (of course) the hit Beyoncé/Jay-Z video “Apeshit.” — The Guardian
Beset By Orbán’s Right-Wing Government, Budapest’s Theatres Hang On
Howard Shalwitz, longtime artistic director of the DC company Woolly Mammoth, writes about his recent visit to the Hungarian capital, reporting that, despite constant political pressure on funding and programming, “there’s still plenty of social and political kick on Budapest’s stages.” — HowlRound
#MeToo Sweeps Argentina After Young Actress Accuses Star Actor Of Rape
Last month, Thelma Fardin posted a video to Instagram in which she tearfully recounted how Juan Darthés allegedly raped her while they were touring Nicaragua for a telenovela. She was 16; he was 45. Fardin’s million followers sent the video viral, with the hashtag #Miracomonosponemos (roughly, “#LookWhatYouveDoneToUs”), and the effect has been as big as that of the Harvey Weinstein accusations in the US. — Public Radio International
In Brazil, Female Readers Band Together To Support Female Writers (And They’re All Going To Need Each Other Now)
Book clubs with names such as “Read Women” have been growing in Brazilian cities, pushing for including more work by women authors in publishers’ lists, bookstores’ inventory, and even school curricula. Now those writers and their supporters worry about whether the new president, Jair Bolsonaro, and his far-right followers will undo the progress of recent years. — Public Radio International
The Year in CultureGrrl: Impolitic About Art & Politics
Once again, art-lings, let me offer you my Best Wishes for an Art-Full New Year, along with CultureGrrl’s Top 20 Stories for 2018. And I’ll end this post with a postlude about an issue that I’ve largely ducked this year — the vexing question of whether museums should be “political” and if so, in what ways. — Lee Rosenbaum
Recent Listening: O Canada
Let’s mention just a few recent recordings by Canadians whose work has caught the ears of the Rifftides staff. — Doug Ramsay