“When the project ended, the media attention dissipated, the students returned to their regularly scheduled high school programming, and after a couple additional days during which he painted two more murals at Rush University Medical Center, Haring went home to New York. The Grant Park mural stood for about a week before it was dismantled—and that was the last time it was ever displayed in its entirety.”
And Now We Have… Graffiti Painted By Drones (For Those Hard-To-Get-To Places)
“KATSU, a well-known graffiti artist and vandal, used a hacked Phantom drone to paint a giant red scribble across Kendall Jenner’s face on one of New York City’s largest and most viewed billboards. By all accounts, it is the first time that a drone has been deployed for a major act of public vandalism.”
Finally, A Step In The Right Direction! This Ballet Company Is Returning To Live Music For All Performances
“It’s the news that dance and music fans have awaited for decades: For the first time in more than 20 years, every major Orlando Ballet performance next season will be accompanied by a live orchestra.”
Jorge Luis Borges’s ‘Library of Babel’ Is Now a Real Website
“The Library, subject of a 1941 Borges story by the same name, contains all possible combinations of letters, and is tended to by melancholy Librarians trying in vain to locate meaning within the nonsense. … If that sounds like a less-than-appealing place to spend your time – not to mention a logically impossible one – keep your rational, unfevered brain away from libraryofbabel.info, where Brooklyn-based writer and coder Jonathan Basile has set out to bring Borges’ dream/nightmare to life.”
25 Years After They Were Executed, The Ceausescus Have Become One Of Romania’s Biggest Tourist Draws
See their lavish living quarters! See the People’s Palace, their enormous, garish pile of a public building that can be seen from space! See the spot where they were shot to death!
The Main Problems With This Plan About Giving Ebooks To Poor Kids
“Publishers aren’t giving kids a quarter of a billion dollars’ worth of free books. They’re free e-books. Which require two things: A good Internet connection — at least at school if not at home — and some sort of device to read them. And that’s a challenge.”
Why Are We In Such A Rush To Declare The Anthropocene A Reality?
“he Anthropocene is a neologism that attempts to pin down a lot of free-floating anxiety about climate change and the myriad ways that Homo sapiens are making over the planet in our own image. It styles humans as a geological force, as powerful as any ‘natural’ one.”
Lyric Opera Of Kansas City Fires Artistic Director, Eliminates His Position
The board chairman said in a statement, “Lyric Opera of Kansas City is reorganizing along the lines of standard industry structure for the purpose of improved effectiveness and efficiency in our operation and has eliminated the position of artistic director. Lyric Opera of Kansas City today announces the departure of Artistic Director Ward Holmquist. We thank him for his years of service.”
What Michelle Obama Said At The Opening Of The New Whitney Museum
“I guarantee you right now there are kids living less than a mile from here who would never in a million years dream that they would be welcome in this museum. And growing up on the South Side of Chicago, I was one of those kids myself. I know the feeling of not belonging in a place like this.”
Salman Rushdie Vs. Francine Prose – Chapter 459 Of The Charlie Hebdo Wars
Rushdie: “Our fellow artists were murdered for their ideas and you won’t stand up for them … I hope that our long alliance can survive this. But I fear some old friendships will break on this wheel.”
What We Need In The Arts Is More Whistleblowers
“Sometimes, our instinct to protect each other does more harm than good. … Why don’t we call each other out more? Identify the bad apples for the greater good? Imagine: if every money-wasting incompetence or petty dishonesty was called to account, what would the savings amount to?”
This Summer’s Movies Are Playing Sex For Laughs
“Sex has always served as ample inspiration for comedy – every awkward encounter in bed is a potential gold mine for an observant writer or actor. But this summer, more than any other in recent memory, filmmakers are focused on what’s going on in hotel rooms, taxi back seats and anywhere else two people (or more) are getting it on. … Here, the stars and filmmakers from those films talk about what embarrassed them, what might embarrass audiences and what’s so funny about sex. These are excerpts from the conversations.”
Dressing Up The Brain: Wearing A Suit Changes The Way You Think
“[A team of researchers] found that wearing clothing that’s more formal than usual makes people think more broadly and holistically, rather than narrowly and about fine-grained details. In psychological parlance, wearing a suit encourages people to use abstract processing more readily than concrete processing.”
Le Corbusier – The Man, The Modernist, The Painter, The Nudist
“He redefined architecture for the 20th century, pioneered modernity, made radical urban utopias for the masses – and spent his last years nearly nude in a cabin inspired by human physiology.” (slide show)
Top Posts From AJBlogs 04.30.15
Bravo: Even the Whimsy At A Few Museums Is About Art
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2015-04-30
Too Mellifluous
AJBlog: Sandow Published 2015-04-30
So you want to see a show?
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2015-04-30
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Does The Tate Museum Have A Structural Problem?
“The relationship between Tate Britain and Modern, then, is really about what importance we give to old art and the concept of a national culture; and as it turns out, most people are more interested these days in the concept of internationalism and the culture of the contemporary, than what appears to be the stuffy, out-of-date world of narrow-minded nationalism; which is why almost 5.8 million visitors flocked to Tate Modern in 2014, and barely a quarter of that number made it to Tate Britain.”
How Did Storytelling Become So Devalued In “Good” Writing?
“Valuing the importance of the story is still considered unambitious, as though anyone could do it. I suspect the opposite: it is because writing a good story is so hard that it is such a tempting target, to be dismissed as a lower, populist skill. In the absence of a capacity, posit a principle.”
All Or Nothing: The Economic Reality Of Today’s Music Business
“The point is that while music is as lucrative as ever for those at the top, what’s diminished, as in so many jobs, is the comfortable middle, where once upon a time musicians who never quite hit the big time could nonetheless make their living: not super-rich, but doing fine and enjoying a certain stability. What we are left with now is a kind of all or nothing, in which you either scale the dizzy heights or languish forlornly at the bottom.”
LA’s Music Center Struggles As Dissention Mounts
“The … relationship the Music Center has with its resident companies is arm’s-length, remote, not collaborative. Each resident company is in its own little private world; collaboration is not encouraged.”
Hahaha, Heehee, Heh – How We Spell Laughter In Texts And Emails
Sarah Larson: “The terms of e-laughter – ‘ha ha,’ ‘ho ho,’ ‘hee hee,’ ‘heh’ – are implicitly understood by just about everybody. But, in recent years, there’s been an increasingly popular newcomer: ‘hehe.’ Not surprisingly, it’s being foisted upon us by youth. What does it mean?”
Betsy Von Furstenberg, 83, Baroness And Actress
“A glamorous German-born baroness who made her debut in the movies and on the Broadway stage in the early 1950s as a teenager and later reinvented herself as a television actress, writer and philanthropist.”
Seeing ‘Hamilton’ At Public Theater Becomes New York Celebs’ Number-One Status Symbol
“Over the last four months, the boldface names have come, one after another, to this cozy downtown theater to see the show’s creator and star, Lin-Manuel Miranda, rap and sing and love and cheat and rise and fall and fight and die.”