Filial piety may be the paramount Confucian value, and flouting it is still rare in Chinese real life, let alone on state-controlled television. This is likely why All Is Well, broadcast only on a provincial channel, has been streamed online more than 390 million times, more than triple the number for the next most-popular show. – The Economist
Don’t Run The Forklift Through The Picasso: The Insane Logistics Of Moving Priceless Art From Museum To Museum
“Yet the mechanisms required … – loan agreements, insurance, packing, couriering, shipping, handling, installation – are delicate, expensive and complex. Behind every exhibition is an intricate logistical web that reaches across the globe.” – The Guardian
Tchaikovsky – Experimentalist Avant Gardist?
The idea that Tchaikovsky anticipated the experimentalism of the Symbolists and Surrealists runs counter to his conservatism as a person and as an artist, his reverence for the music of eighteenth-century composers, reliance on the number format in his operas, general adherence to the diatonic system, and predilection for German augmented sixth chords. But he embraced these things in order to counter them, or to highlight and enhance them with his own unmistakable signature. – Times Literary Supplement
Why Everyone Is Hating On Hudson Yards’ “Vessel” (Or Whatever We’re Calling It)
The Vessel has invited nearly universal vitriol, even amongst the politest architecture critics. It is an object lesson teaching us that, in our neoliberal age of surveillance capitalism—an era where the human spirit is subjected to a regime of means testing and digital disruption, and a cynical view of the city as an engine of real estate prevails—architecture, quite frankly, sucks. – The Baffler
A Deaf Actor In The RSC’s Mainstage Shakespeare
Charlotte Arrowsmith, who’s played Cassandra in Troilus and Cressida, Curtis in The Taming of the Shrew, and Audrey in As You Like It, writes about integrating sign language into her performances, communicating with her colleagues, and what mainstream theatres need to do to accomodate deaf actors. – Arts Professional
What Happens To Sets From Movies? One Non-Profit Figured Out How To Get It To People Who Need It
Movie productions require lots of household items to fill their sets. But then the movie is over and where does all that stuff go? It’s a headache for the production team to get rid of it. A Massachusetts organization offers a service to quickly break down the sets and make them available to families in need, working with 400+ social workers. – WGBH
How Video Game Addiction Works
Many gamers seemed to struggle to find their place in society. “In our modern meritocratic society, you don’t have an obvious place in the way people used to have. You have to create it for yourself. That’s complicated. Fleeing into the more regulated world of the game—a Manichaean populist worldview—is an easy way out.” – The Atlantic
Wait, Who Exactly Is The Real-World Analogue To The Baddies In The Most Recent Marvel Movie?
Spoiler alert, perhaps obviously. But really, whom are the Kree meant to represent? It’s unclear, or variable, perhaps, but for sure: “The Kree become a scapegoat, an oppressive empire that oppresses the oppressed.” – Los Angeles Review of Books
Gaillard With Parker, Gillespie, Marmarosa, et al
Here’s a gathering of 1940s Los Angeles all-stars. – Doug Ramsey
We Need To Talk About The Author Of ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’
Charlotte Perkins Gilman has become a go-to feminist author with her clear, understandable, and terrifying short story, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” forgotten after her death but rediscovered in the 1970s. But she wrote a lot of nonfiction as well. In that writing, “she accused non-white immigrants of ‘diluting’ the racial purity of America and advocated for a government-run, slavery-adjacent system of forced labor, which she called ‘enlistment,’ for black Americans.” – LitHub
It Wasn’t Easy Being An Actor In The 19th Century
Just ask Sarah Bernhardt, or her greatest rival. “Technological advantages like the steam locomotive and gas lighting made it possible for acting companies and star performers to reach larger and more varied audiences than they ever had before. At the same time, actors and the playwrights who wrote for them began to move from productions that prized flamboyant gestures and histrionic speeches toward those that championed a more naturalistic and intimate performance style.” – American Theatre
Thomas Heatherwick Projects Are Everywhere These Days. We Deserve Better
“This high-profile intercontinental spread has made Heatherwick all but ubiquitous. It has also earned him a heavy dose of suspicion mixed with contempt, both from critics and the public. His name is often used as something of a synonym for everything that’s wrong with contemporary urban design.” – CityLab
Might Our Morality Change With Artificial Intelligence? (Is That Even The Right Question?)
Because AI might ‘think’ differently to how humans think, and because of the general tendency to get swept up in its allure, its use could well change how we approach tasks and make decisions. The seductive allure that tends to surround AI in fact represents one of its dangers. Those working in the field despair that almost every article about AI hypes its powers, and even those about banal uses of AI are illustrated with killer robots. – Aeon
Michael Tilson Thomas On His Relationship With Music
“We are living in a time when production has mostly superseded content in every area you can think of. It’s very archaic to be holding on to what is the actual content and how to keep it meaningful.” – Washington Post
The Essential Brilliance Of Studio Musicians
In the 1950s and ’60s, especially, session musicians could make or break a hit. And session musicians were in high demand, as producers like Phil Spector became obsessed with production techniques such as the Wall of Sound, forcing as many musicians as possible into a studio and having each of them contribute a small part to a larger, bombastic sound. As a result, session musicians became highly valued: Each had to play their role well, but they also had to find a way to click with every other session musician in the room. – Pacific Standard
Theatre Without Actors? It Can, And Does, Happen
Peter Brook posited that any empty space in which one actor walks as someone else watched could be a theatre. The next year, Samuel Beckett wrote a play with no actors. And onward the idea has gone, from Punchdrunk shows, to Enda Walsh’s Rooms and the Royal Court’s Dismantle This Room, in which 15 audience members do precisely that. – The Guardian
Apple’s TV Plans: Not So Much Netflix Competitor As Seller Of Shows
Apple’s main focus — at least for now — will be helping other people sell streaming video subscriptions and taking a cut of the transaction. Apple may also sell its own shows, at least as part of a bundle of other services. But for now, Apple’s original shows and movies should be considered very expensive giveaways, not the core product. – Recode
‘The Joe Rogan Experience ‘, The Bizarro ‘Fresh Air’ Of The Intellectual Dark Web
Justin Peters: “Listening to the show is sort of like crashing an intense, intimate dinner party in which the only courses are whiskey and weed. … The Joe Rogan Experience has become one of the internet’s foremost vectors for anti-wokeness. With its mellow, welcoming vibe, its pretense of common sense, and its general reluctance to push back on any of its guests’ ideas save for only the battiest, the podcast has become the factory where red pills get sugarcoated. So how did Rogan — the Fear Factor guy! — become the Larry King of the Intellectual Dark Web? Don’t ask him.” – Slate
Google Doodle For Bach’s Birthday Uses AI To (Try To) Compose Bach-Like Chorales
The little Bach-bot “promises to take any two-bar melody you type in and turn it into a Bach, or Bachlike, chorale in four parts, played by charming little music-box figures of bewigged 18th-century musicians.” Yet, writes Anne Midgette, “it may only add to the doodle’s charm that what it actually proves is the opposite of what it sets out to do.” – The Washington Post
The Hague To Get Another International Court, This One For Art Disputes
“The first tribunal devoted exclusively to art disputes, the Court of Arbitration for Art (CAfA), will open for business 1 April in the Hague. … Instead of judges unfamiliar with evaluating scientific evidence of authenticity or selling an artwork on a handshake and an invoice, CAfA’s arbitrators will be experienced art lawyers who understand expert evidence and market practice. … CAfA will hear disputes ranging from authenticity and fraud to contract and copyright, and proceedings can occur anywhere.” – The Art Newspaper
Actor Playing Lead In ‘The Color Purple’ Fired For Old Anti-Gay Facebook Post
Oluwaseyi Omooba, who had been cast as Celie, a queer character, in the revival by the Curve Theatre in Leicester and the Birmingham Hippodrome in England, wrote on the social media site five years ago, “I do not believe you can be born gay and I do not believe homosexuality is right, though the law of this land has made it legal doesn’t mean it’s right.” – The Guardian
Conductor Thomas Wilkins Works To Get Composers Of Color Into Boston Symphony’s Repertoire (And Into The Canon)
Wilkins, the BSO’s conductor for young people’s and family concerts, makes his subscription-season debut this weekend with a program of music by Florence Price, Adolphus Hailstork, Roberto Sierra, and Duke Ellington. Wilkins is aware of the charge of tokenism: “The easy observation would be to say that this is just a night of box-checking so that we can move on. In reality, it is not. It is, in fact, a launch. … And you know what? You gotta start somewhere.” – The Boston Globe
Tate Galleries Will Accept No More Donations From Sacklers
Just a couple of days after the National Portrait Gallery in London announced that it was turning down £1 million from the family whose company makes OxyContin, the Tate announced that, while it would not remove the Sackler name from any existing gifts, “in the present circumstances we do not think it right to seek or accept further donations from the Sacklers.” – The Art Newspaper
Why Universities Shouldn’t Act Like Commercial Art Galleries
Art schools that commit to The MFA Fair by representing recent alumni in their first outing as professional artists are clearly endorsing the idea that “the market” is the dominant way for artists to make a living. This is misleading at best and completely irresponsible at worst. – Hyperallergic
Get Out The Pitchforks! What’s The Difference Between Criticism And Intimidating Work Out Of The Market?
“When it comes to Young Adult literature, what, precisely, is the difference between the marketplace of ideas and a Twitter mob? A group of unpaid readers—one with an undeniable personal investment in the Y.A. community—seems to be doing much of the work of critique that is usually first the task of agents and editors, and then that of booksellers and critics. But, when these particular readers do that work, they are derided as pitchfork-wielding hysterics.” – The New Yorker