“Starbucks has started selling art from a new coffee bar in Chelsea, amid some of the biggest galleries in New York. The Fortune 500 company opened a branch in the neighbourhood in late November with an exhibition of paintings and drawings by the young US artist Robert Otto Epstein, each of which was on sale for between $1,000 and $3,000.”
Egyptian Police Arrest, Then Release, Country’s Most Popular Young Cartoonist
Islam Gawish, a 26-year-old satirist with 1.6 million Facebook followers, was arrested last Sunday, ostensibly for running a website without a license. Following a swell of online protest, authorities released him the next day with the statement that he was found not to have any links with terrorists.
That Stolen Picasso Seized In Turkey Last Week? It’s A Fake
“The Picasso Administration, charged with managing the artist’s estate, … said the canvas is a copy of a 1940 work by the great Spanish artist, Woman Dressing Her Hair – and the original is in the hands of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).”
Ai Weiwei’s Latest Controversy: He Poses For Photo As Drowned Refugee Child
On the pro side: “powerful tribute”; “iconic image”.
On the con side: “egotistical victim porn”; “an opportunist move to hitchhike onto a current tragedy”.
How The Humanities Have Alienated The Rest Of The World
“Ideally, university administrators, business executives, foundation directors, policymakers and many others—both in the private sector and in state and federal government—can and should benefit from the knowledge and wisdom embedded in the humanities. Unfortunately, these people are increasingly alienated from studying them in our colleges and universities.”
Women Are Better At Running Theatres Than Men, Says Actress
Maxine Peake, who appears regularly at Manchester’s Royal Exchange (Sarah Frankcom, artistic director): “I just think actually women are probably better for running buildings, because they can multitask. And I think – without sounding terribly sexist, and I’m not saying across the board – they generally have a smaller ego.”
Suffering For Your Art: Ballet Stars Talk About Their Injuries
Eight principal dancers – including Daria Klimentová, Steven McRae, Cynthia Harvey, James Whiteside, and Vito Mazzeo – from some of the world’s top companies talk about coping with the damage their profession inflicts on their bodies.
The Alternate Reality Of This Year’s Sundance
“The festival threw down a gauntlet. It sent a message to an industry that, to the eyes of many, had failed to uphold with its work the values its members espoused with their politics (or, at least, their campaign donations).”
Aurèle Nicolet, One Of 20th Century’s Great Flute Players, Dead At 90
“A player of exceptional versatility with a distinctively rich sound, he was as renowned for exploring and championing new repertoire for his instrument as he was for his polished performances of the great works by the likes of Bach and Mozart.”
Hans Ulrich Obrist Talks About The Future Of Art
“The invention of the internet once promised to make knowledge open and accessible to anyone across the world, a perfect, radically open tool that encouraged the sharing of information and knowledge across societies and specialisms. Yet in opposition to the original nature of the web, the mechanisms behind the filter bubble are generating closed systems of knowledge. This is radically harmful to both individuals and societies.”
How It Feels To Go From Acclaimed To Self-Published
“I remember the moment I went from being an admired, multi-award-winning debut picture book author to a largely unknown, ignored, and even pitied self-published author. In the past two years I have published sixteen books for young readers, but my books are not eligible for review in the major outlets, public libraries refuse to acquire them for their collections, and major awards are no longer a possibility.”
Life Lessons From Goethe (Yes, Really)
“For the modernists, being spiritually sick was a condition of intellectual respectability, and T. S. Eliot wrote that ‘there is something artificial and even priggish about Goethe’s healthiness.’ … The key to Goethe is that the spiritual ‘healthiness’ so disliked by Eliot was not that of a man with a perfect constitution but that of a recovered invalid.”
The 100 Jokes That Shaped Modern American Comedy
From Charlie Chaplin to Burns and Allen to Mae West to Redd Foxx to What’s Opera, Doc? to Phylllis Diller to Lily Tomlin’s Ernestine to Carol Burnett’s Went With the Wind to Richard Pryor to Seinfeld to The Simpsons to the greatest film comedy ever made …
The Makers Of ‘Airplane!’ Tell Where They Found All Those Laugh Lines
A Q&A with Jim Abrahams and the Zucker brothers. who insist that they lifted many lines – including “Surely you can’t be serious” and “We need somebody who can not only fly this plane, but who didn’t have fish for dinner” – directly from old dramatic movies.
Art Fund Says It Will Stop Raising Money To Keep Works In Britain Unless UK Reforms Export Licensing
“This follows the debacle that ensued when the foreign buyer of a £35m work by Rembrandt, Portrait of Catrina Hooghsaet (1657), withdrew an export licence application when the Art Fund decided to mount a public campaign to buy the picture for Wales.”
It’s A Bosch! Newly-Authenticated Painting Had Lain In Storage In Kansas City
The Temptation of St. Anthony a 10-by-15-inch oil-on-wood panel that was probably part of a triptych, was acquired by the Nelson-Atkins Museum in 1935, where it was last on display in 2003.
Justin Peck Makes His Largest Dance Yet – And His First Story Ballet
The Most Incredible Thing, based on a Hans Christian Andersen tale, has a new score by Bryce Dessner and a cast of 56.
Top Posts From AJBlogs 02.01.16
Local, state, federal: public funding for the arts in the U.S.
At the Atlantic, Andy Horwitz asks ‘Who should pay for the arts in America?‘ He is specifically asking about nonprofit arts, whose funding comes from paying customers, donors and other sponsors, and the public sector. … read more
AJBlog: For What It’s Worth Published 2016-02-01
Miles To Go: The Met Breuer’s Unspoken Task
The Metropolitan Museum put on a show for the press last week at a briefing on the Met Breuer. It took place, oddly (for the Met) in a black gallery in the main museum building and … read more
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2016-02-01
Boulez
Pierre Boulez’s passing last month brought back memories of what a giant he was in his prime. He certainly gave the generations that followed a complex heritage. I really can’t imagine what it must have … read more
AJBlog: Infinite Curves Published 2016-02-01
Goodbye to All That (Almost)
The Trisha Brown Dance Company presents three of Brown’s proscenium works in New York for the last time. … read more
AJBlog: Dancebeat Published 2016-02-01
Journalism as ‘The Poetry of Fact’
At the Chicago Sun-Times I watched some great wordsmiths up close. Roger Ebert wrote with an ease that seemed miraculous. His profiles flowed like swift streams. David Elliott was another. His reviews had the density … read more
AJBlog: Straight|Up Published 2016-02-01
In two and a half months …
Here’s something I’ve mentioned before. But now it’s time to get serious. My reemergence as s composer is just two and a half months away, with an evening of my work on April 14, … read more
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2016-02-01
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A Greek Play Cancelled Due To Protests Gets One Final Performance
“On Thursday, the theater’s artistic director canceled the last four performances of the play, saying in a statement that it had caused ‘more pain than room for thought’ and had led to ‘threats,’ without disclosing further details.”
An Artist Sketches Other Artists Into The Canon
“‘What Rebecca’s doing in a very beautiful, subtle way is saying: Look, here’s all these artists who are working right now in Los Angeles,’ says Grant. ‘Do you know them? They want to meet you. They want their work to be known in the public realm and considered on equal footing with male peers.'”
Opera Has To Deal With Issues Around Race, Gender, And Orientation – But How?
“Opera is a complex, historic art form, with its own arcane formal language. Rather than think of it as entertainment, it makes more sense to conceive of it as a vast archive of emotional, historical, social and theatrical data. Opera allows us to enter into, understand and actually feel emotions that are culturally and historically extremely distant from our own time and sensibility.”