“That’s the reserve price that has been slapped on Cabaret Voltaire in a bid to secure Dada’s future during its centenary year. Now it is just a question of finding a deep-pocketed art lover who can envisage the unassuming building, nestled among cobbled side streets in Zurich’s old town, as a sculpture or oil painting.”
Is Diversity Really A Funding Issue?
“The emerging artists, audiences, and arts leaders of tomorrow do not reflect the majority of individuals who fund and lead the arts today – who, to be quite frank, are primarily wealthier white individuals (although arts leaders are not necessarily wealthy).”
The Wondrous Robot Clocks Of 12th-Century Turkey
“Al-Jazari … worked as the chief engineer at Artuklu Palace, headquarters of the Artuqid dynasty that ruled over parts of Turkey, Syria and Iraq in the 11th and 12th centuries. During his time there, he invented a large number of devices that revolutionized mechanical engineering … Perhaps Al-Jazari’s most wondrous inventions were his clocks, because they were about so much more than just telling the time.”
In Bombed-Out, Besieged Syrian City, Volunteers Assemble 15,000-Volume Library
“It is a place of learning and ideas, with books salvaged from the wreckage outside … A photocopy of an old history book, a shelf full of children’s stories, and self-help books by Tony Robbins, sit alongside a J.M. Coetzee novel, a volume of Islamic scholarship, and slim editions of Arabic poetry by Mahmoud Darweesh or Nizar Qabbani. They are read by candlelight during lengthy power outages or at the war front by rebel fighters.”
Woman Buys $200 Sofa On Craigslist, Winds Up With $60K Warhol
“The Warhol screen print of a man’s genitalia was bought by accident after a clueless seller sold a couch through the site and threw in a box of junk that happened to contain the artwork. A New Jersey woman was the lucky buyer who decided to pick up the box while collecting the couch, all for $200, on the Lower East Side.”
The Value Of Real Architecture In A Strip-Malled State
“Cities traded rich architectural histories — marked by encounters and conflicts between Native Americans, the Spanish, the French, and later arrivals from Europe and the Caribbean — for easy money in the form of modern coastal development. This makes sense; there is money in waterfront property. But this is no charming Nantucket or Cape Cod; my city doesn’t even pull a San Francisco and have a touristy wharf.”
Steering The National Theatre In A New Direction
“That requires what Power describes as ‘two types of gardening at the same time: planting really deep and at the same time growing stuff quickly. Not quicker than it needs, but being instantly responsive and finding a place in the repertoire as quickly as possible, so that artists and audiences understand what we stand for and what we want to be.'”
The Joy Of A Terrible But Experimental Book From A Successful Author
“Even as my unease and disappointment increased with each passage like this, I began to feel a strangely pleasurable tingling. There was no escaping the fact that I was reading a bad book by a very fine writer, but it occurred to me that this was actually a good thing.”
This Article Will Make You Question Everything About The Oscars, And The Sanity Of Those Who Want To Win One
“This year, with so many races up for grabs, the party circuit is wildly competitive – especially when you factor in that a huge chunk of a studio’s promotion budget used to be spent on buying ads in daily print trade papers. Now that Variety and The Hollywood Reporter are weeklies and online, that excess coinage is repurposed into flying talent to events.”
Could Limited Series Change The Way TV Is Made?
Quality-wise, there’s something quite logical about this evolution, especially for those who have watched a promising pilot but thought, “What on Earth are they going to do for season two?”
In London The New Theatres Are Thriving, And Here May Be Why
Both The Yard and the Park Theatre originate in the ambitions of impressively determined founders. Though in some ways the two venues are very different, Miller and Bond express the purpose of what they’re doing in much the same way. “How do you engage with your community and how do you diversify your audience? But I think it’s especially true in London which is growing so quickly and the population is changing all the time.”
Why Paula Poundstone Started Making Jokes About Pop-Tarts
“I was a young comic at the time, so I didn’t really have all that much actual material, and so at a point, I would read from the box or the package of whatever food I had. I have no idea why. And you know, the toasting instructions on the Pop-Tarts are so damn funny.”
Director Peter Brook At 90
“To modern audiences, Brook’s advocacy of the barest theatrical essentials may seem far from revolutionary, so we need to be taken back in time to a period when bourgeois sensibilities exerted an asphyxiating stranglehold.”
Is There Anything Wrong With A Museum Of Fakes?
“One can imagine a near-future museum with every important artwork in the world – the entire contents of E H Gombrich’s 1950 classic The Story of Art – made manifest in a single super-didactic replica collection. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as no one feels fooled. A copy is just a copy, entirely legal and often useful (not least for scholarship and education), and becomes a forgery only if the work is used to defraud.”
‘The People v. O.J. Simpson’ Creators On Their Relationship With Veracity And Why All Film Is Manipulation
“All the shows we get compared to are documentaries. We are a work of drama, and that sometimes allows us to go dig deeper. [But] even documentaries aren’t as truthful as you think they are. [If] someone says something in a documentary and you cut to someone else’s face, that filmmaker has made a decision.”
Scientists: Practicing Scales Might Not Be The Best Way To Learn The Piano
“The research goes somewhat against the old assumption that simply repeating a motor skill over and over again – for example, practising scales on the piano or playing the same level on your game over and over again – was the best way to master it. Instead, it turns out there might be a quicker (and more enjoyable) way to level up.”
#JeSuisCirconflexe ! French Twitterstorm Over Spelling Reform
The Académie Française introduced these changes – the elimination of some (not all) circumflexes and simplified spelling of some words – back in 1990, but they’re only now entering the school curriculum. And the French are protesting in (very Gallic) solidarity with their beloved diacritical mark.
Here’s The Woman Replacing Millepied At The Head Of The Paris Opera Ballet
Aurélie Dupont has spent her entire education and career at the company and its school; she retired from the stage last summer at the top rank of étoile.
Pussy Riot Is Back – With New Video About Russia’s Chief Prosecutor
“Wearing police uniforms and fishnet stockings, they whip hooded prisoners and waterboard them in their prison cells. The well-made-up women gleefully throw wads of cash into the air and flirt viciously with their viewers. The Russian punk protest group … sashayed back into the public eye on Wednesday with the release of a music video savaging the country’s prosecutor general, Yuri Y. Chaika, who locked up three members of the group in 2012.”
‘Cold Mountain’, Jennifer Higdon’s New Opera, Comes Indoors
The work opens at Opera Philadelphia this weekend, following its world premiere last summer at “the open-air Santa Fe Opera, … one of the most beloved venues in the country. But one hears of comments about not having to compete with Mother Nature, and how singing after stage combat is easier when not at a 7,199-foot elevation.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 02.04.16
Guggenheim Abu Dhabi Still Stalled, as Monitoring Report is Issued on Saadiyat Island Labor Conditions
PricewaterhouseCoopers’ 4th annual monitoring report on labor conditions on Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island, recently released by the Tourism Development and Investment Company (TDIC) of the United Arab Emirates’ capital, gives a mixed picture of progress and continued concerns. … read more
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2016-02-04
Frank Collett Observed
Rifftides reader Mike Harris responded to last week’s post about the passing of pianist Frank Collett and the outpouring of comments about him. Testifying to what all those folks have been saying, … read more
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2016-02-04
So you want to see a show?
Here’s my list of recommended Broadway, off-Broadway, and out-of-town shows, updated weekly. In all cases, I gave these shows favorable reviews (if sometimes qualifiedly so) inThe Wall Street Journal when they opened. … read more
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2016-02-04
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When You’ve Got It, You’ve Got It – Birmingham Orchestra’s Shrewd Judge Of Conducting Talent
“Over the past four decades, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra has established a reputation for selecting the right conductors to become its music directors at exactly the right moment in their careers, a record that any orchestra in the world would envy.”
Judge’s Ruling Endangers $400 Million Lucas Museum For Chicago
Judge John Darrah’s ruling Thursday means construction will at least be delayed and the legal proceedings could end up killing the project in Chicago.
Artificial Intelligence Is Revolutionizing How Google Searches. Tomorrow The World!
“The truth is that even the experts don’t completely understand how neural nets work. But they do work. If you feed enough photos of a platypus into a neural net, it can learn to identify a platypus. If you show it enough computer malware code, it can learn to recognize a virus. If you give it enough raw language—words or phrases that people might type into a search engine—it can learn to understand search queries and help respond to them. In some cases, it can handle queries better than algorithmic rules hand-coded by human engineers. Artificial intelligence is the future of Google Search, and if it’s the future of Google Search, it’s the future of so much more.”
How To Measure A TV “Hit”? Right Now, It’s Anybody’s Guess
“Ah, passion – the elusive element of TV that networks are still trying to turn into a profit. Research departments try: They can look at tweets, or Facebook posts, or measure exactly how many minutes someone watches a program.” But still…