Well, at least among those written in English – and as chosen by a roster of critics polled by BBC Culture. Have a look, nod or shake your head, and argue away.
Trial Begins Over Theft Of Priceless Santiago De Compostela Manuscript
A laid-off electrician at the Spanish city’s cathedral is accused of having stolen the 12th-century Codex Calixtinus, considered the world’s first tourist guide (for pilgrims to Compostela) and one of the most important surviving sources for medieval music. The manuscript was stolen in 2011 and was found (along with other manuscripts and €1.2 million in cash) in the electrician’s garage the following year.
Inside Philadelphia’s Mummers Parade: Can It Evolve The Way The City Has?
A longtime resident who’d never seen the century-old New Year’s Day spectacle goes behind the scenes with one of the old-line South Philly clubs, meets the new brigades that draw from the city’s growing population of art-minded Millennials, and remarks on some of the parade’s worryingly retrograde elements. (Then she hits the after-party on Two Street.)
Engage With The Arts? So What’s The Problem?
“After two decades of declining audience numbers, is that decline an aberration or a new reality? Is the demand for the core arts now permanently smaller than it once was, or is it that the demand for the core arts in the way we deliver them is what has permanently changed?”
The Woman Who Made Playboy A Literary Outlet, Alice K. Turner, Dead At 75
“While not known most widely for its literary fiction, Playboy was for many years one of the few mainstream monthlies that published ambitious short stories. Ms. Turner became fiction editor in 1980 and guarded that tradition, shepherding works by John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Bob Shacochis and other acclaimed writers into pages better known for Playmates and other pinups.”
Yoko Nagae Ceschina, 82, Japanese-Italian Countess And Classical Music’s Fairy Godmother
A young Japanese harpist who went to Venice to study and met and married a wealthy nobleman, she spent her adult life discreetly but lavishly funding major performers and institutions – and sometimes taking personal care of them.
Spain Arrests Alleged Forgers Of Picasso, Matisse, Miró
“Three suspected members of an art forgery ring were arrested in the Spanish cities of Zaragoza and Tarragona … Accused of peddling drawings falsely attributed to Miró, Picasso, and Matisse, they’ve been charged with crimes against intellectual property and fraud.”
Houston Grand Opera Zooms Past Its $165M Fundraising Goal
The Inspiring Performance campaign, launched quietly in 2007 and publicly in 2012, raised $172.9 million to “fund world premieres, new productions of established operas and the company’s first staging of Richard Wagner’s The Ring of the Nibelung.”
Russia’s New Film Rules Could Outlaw Its Oscar Nominee
“Russia has introduced new rules regarding the issuing of exhibition licenses for films, decreeing that films ‘defiling the national culture, posing a threat to national unity and undermining the foundations of the constitutional order’ will not be allowed to be screened in cinemas.” As it happens, more than a few people in Russia (including the culture minister) think that description could apply to Leviathan, which has already won a Golden Globe
Were These Two Gay Erotic Novels Written By Oscar Wilde?
“Teleny, anonymously published in 1893, describes the erotic relationship between two men – Camille Des Grieux, who has ‘always struggled against the inclinations of my nature’, and Rene Teleny. Its prequel Des Grieux was published in 1899. The authorship of Teleny was first attributed to Wilde decades later by the French bookseller Charles Hirsch, who had opened a London shop in 1889, and who counted Wilde among his customers.”
We Thought We’d Never Hear Górecki’s Fourth Symphony. Now We Can – And It’s A Knockout
Everyone had thought that the Polish composer – whose Third Symphony actually hit the pop charts in 1992, 15 years after it was written – hadn’t completed the Fourth when he died in 2010. Turns out he did – and Mark Swed says it’s “a major symphony and possibly a great one.”
How To Care For Your Feet When You Torture Them By Dancing En Pointe
Advice from a ballet master at Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo.
Wallace Shawn Says He’s A “D-List Actor Who Does Animal Voices For A Living”
“Being an actor is a strange thing that came up in my life, and I’ve had great good luck with it … I take myself much more seriously as a writer, but I understand why people might not like my writing. I mean I really understand why it’s not as popular as the writing of some other people. … I actually don’t understand why I haven’t been taken more seriously as an actor, in the sense of being given better parts.”
Trying To Give Everyone A Good View Has Made Theaters More Exclusive, Not Less
Prewar theaters “had a greater capacity at the lower price levels than at the higher, a contrast to today, where there are very few cheap seats and they are all at the very back or the very front. … Seat prices have been levelled up rather than down on the grounds that all enjoy an uninterrupted view of the actor.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 01.20.15
The Prototype Festival’s “Scarlet Ibis”
(and the day I almost ate glue)
AJBlog: Condemned to Music Published 2015-01-19
Monumental Art Undertaking in Saudi Arabia: Needs Partners
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2015-01-19
How Beautiful Can Age Be?
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2015-01-19
The Story Behind LACMA’s Saudi Partnership
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2015-01-18
Monday Recommendation: Art Tatum
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2015-01-19
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Theatre Companies In Southern California To Release A Plan To Bring Diversity To The Stage
“Tim Dang, producing artistic director of East West Players, has written an initiative that calls for at least 51% of those employed by Southern California theater companies by 2019 to be people of color, women or those younger than 35.”
Amazon Is Making TV, Of Course – And Now It’s Going To Make Movies, Too
“‘Whereas it typically takes 39 to 52 weeks for theatrical movies to premiere on subscription video services, Amazon Original Movies will premiere on Prime Instant Video in the U.S. just 4 to 8 weeks after their theatrical debut,’ the company said in a press release.”
Computers Are Learning To Read Humans’ Emotions
“Our faces are organs of emotional communication; by some estimates, we transmit more data with our expressions than with what we say … But since the nineteen-nineties a small number of researchers have been working to give computers the capacity to read our feelings and react, in ways that have come to seem startlingly human.” One of the most successful is an Egyptian woman running a startup near Boston.
This Was The Cultural Revolution That Changed The World Of The Late 1800s (And We’re Still Benefiting)
“Eating canned peaches in the winter, buying a chocolate bar at the corner newsstand, hearing an opera in your living room, and immortalizing baby’s first steps in a snapshot all marked a radical shift in human experience. Replacing scarcity with abundance and capturing the previously ephemeral—these mundane pleasures defied nature as surely as did horseless carriages.”