Way back in 1985-86, Anne Hamburger started up En Garde Arts in place of writing a master’s thesis at the Yale School of Drama. (“At the time, no one knew what that was; audiences identified theatre companies with the buildings they occupied.”) In this essay, Hamburger explains how she put together some of her early successes, why she closed En Garde Arts in 1999 and reopened it a decade later, and why that intervening decade completely changed how her company works. – HowlRound
‘The Most Famous Exhibition Nobody Saw’
That’s how Tate Modern director Frances Morris describes the 1989 Paris show Magiciens de la Terre. As The Economist‘s anonymous-as-usual correspondent writes, “The exhibition was in some ways a flop. In others it was a harbinger, or catalyst, of the way the art world would change with globalisation in the next three decades.” Here’s why. – The Economist
At The World’s Only Ventriloquism Museum
The Vent Haven Museum, across the Ohio River from Cincinnati in northern Kentucky, houses nearly 1,000 dummies, some 150 years old. Most of them, especially those that are or used to be famous, are off-limits to present-day ventriloquists, amateur or professional. – Smithsonian Magazine
Ballyhooed Space Art By MacArthur Genius ‘Fails To Deploy’
Orbital Reflector, sculptor Trevor Paglen’s 100-foot-long, titanium oxide-coated, $1.5 million diamond-shaped Mylar balloon, was launched into orbit in December and was meant to be visible from the Earth’s surface. But the balloon never inflated and has lost contact with the satellite system that could command it to do so. Paglen blames the January government shutdown. – The Art Newspaper
This Opera Company Posted A Profit Of $5.6 Million (!) For 2018
Mind you, the operating surplus was only just over $342,000 (in local dollars), but even that isn’t bad for such a money-losing art form. But several million dollars in bequests came in last year, sending the consolidated profit figure soaring. Which company? Opera Australia. – Limelight (Australia)
Why Don’t Men Learn More Languages? It’s Not Masculine?
A study from Canada reveals undergraduates consider language learning to be a feminine pursuit, and that men with traditional beliefs about the proper roles of men and women report less interest in such study if their masculinity has been threatened. – Pacific Standard
The Artist Who Painted Michelle Obama’s Portrait Is So In-Demand Now That She Has Assistants, And A Manager
Amy Sherald: “With a successful career, you have to hire some assistants to help, otherwise I can imagine that you would have to snort a lot of cocaine and drink a lot of coffee to just, like, get through life.” – The Cut
Doreen Spooner, Who Blazed A Trail On Fleet Street, Has Died At 91
Spooner made her name with a photo of the woman at the center of the John Profumo scandal, but she did much more. “‘Who’d ever imagine a woman might be a photographer on a national newspaper?’ she wrote in a 2016 memoir. ‘A woman might be a tart or a monarch, but a press photographer?'” – The New York Times
The New JJA Awards Announced
Congrats to the Jazz Journalists Association award winners! – Doug Ramsey
Alex Ross: The Fascinating, Complicated, Difficult Legacy Of Furtwangler
“Could modern performers recapture Furtwängler’s elasticity of style? Most likely not. Scholars such as Robert Philip and Kenneth Hamilton have shownhow the advent of recording permanently changed the way music is played. Effects of rubato and portamento—bending the tempo, sliding from note to note—sounded messy when heard on disc, and they were already passing from fashion in the mid-twentieth century.” – The New Yorker
Canada’s Last Bricks And Mortar Classical Music Recordings Store Is Closing
“The store’s closing follows a similar move by Vancouver’s venerable Sikora’s, a dedicated classical music store in West Hastings that shuttered in February 28, 2019 after four decades in business. While Grigorian’s has not provided details behind the closure, it’s not hard to see the writing on the wall in this era of music streaming and a diminished profile for classical music on the culture scene.” – Ludwig Van Toronto
Science Lets Us Do Magic. But Believing We’re “Playing God” Is Holding Us Back
The more an individual thought the issue involved playing God, the more morally unacceptable they judged it to be. – Nautilus
A Philosopher Argues Why We Should Play God
“We’re playing god every day. As the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes said, the natural state for human beings is a life that’s nasty, brutish, and short. We play god when we vaccinate. We play god when we give women pain relief during labor. The challenge is to decide how to change the course of nature, not whether to change it. Our whole life is entirely unnatural.” – Nautilus
What Makes A Novel Transgressive, What Makes It Unpublishable, And How That Changes Over Time
Bret Easton Ellis grants that almost no house would publish American Psycho today (he wouldn’t even want to write it today), and it’s hard to imagine any American publisher releasing Lolita in 2019 if it weren’t already famous. “[Yet] if Lolita is a scandalous novel about child abuse, why are A Little Life and My Absolute Darling, which are much more graphic, so much less so? Times have changed since 1955, of course, but the idea of the novel’s purpose has changed too.” – The Guardian
The TV Subscription Bundle Is Under Attack – And It’s The Industry’s Primary Business Model
Every day that the TV networks keep their bundles intact is another day for the internet to undermine the bundles. Some of that comes through direct competition: Netflix remains quite disinterested in producing live TV and sports programming, but short of that they have a little bit of everything — just like your old cable TV subscription. – Vox
Instagram Removes #FineArtModel Hashtag From The Platform
Content posted using the hashtag, “often used by live figure drawing models to attract work via the social media platform, was hidden because “some content,” according to a message, did not “meet Instagram’s community guidelines.” – artnet
If You’re Applying For A Grant, Don’t Do These Things
“To improve their chances of winning a grant, foundation officers and professional grant writers say charities should avoid making the following mistakes in grant proposals and applications.” – Inside Philanthropy
Controversial Sponsor Withdraws From Turner Prize After One Day Of Criticism
Stagecoach South East, a bus company that offers service to the host city of this year’s prize exhibition (the seaside town of Margate), has for a chairman Sir Brian Souter, who spent heavily in campaigns to maintain bans on same-sex marriage and discussion on homosexuality in classrooms. The backlash against Stagecoach’s sponsorship was swift and effective. – The Guardian
Portrait Of Leonardo Da Vinci, Only The Second Known, Identified In Queen Elizabeth’s Collection
“A sketch of a bearded man lost in thought, preserved for 500 years among the papers of Leonardo da Vinci, has now been identified as a rare portrait of the Renaissance master himself.” – The Art Newspaper
How Good Are The Acoustics In Philadelphia’s Newest Concert Hall? Complicated Question
“No definitive answer is possible,” writes Peter Dobrin about the 270-seat venue at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, “because it is in a way not a single hall, but many.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer
One Of The Great Private Art Collections Of The 20th Century Opens To The Public This Weekend
The Cerruti Collection, worth more than €500 million and housed in a villa near Turin specially built for it by collector Francesco Federico Cerruti, “includes Medieval and Baroque masterpieces, Modern paintings by Giorgio de Chirico, Francis Bacon and Andy Warhol, as well as rare books and fine objects.” – The Art Newspaper
How Do You Get People To Line Up All Day For Your Theatre? Sell Tickets For 65 Cents
Well, since this is the UK, it’s 50p. Citizens Theatre in Glasgow offers 100 tickets at that price for every production, writes artistic director Dominic Hill — and there are also £2 tickets for neighborhood residents and the unemployed and £10 for people under 25. (Their top ticket price is only £26.50.) – Arts Professional
Peru’s Version Of El Sistema Shows Results
Among participants in the program, called Sinfonía por el Perú and founded by tenor Juan Diego Flórez in 2011, “[there has been] a 75% decrease in unwanted pregnancies, another 51% decrease in domestic violence as well as a significant increase in grades and even college admissions.” – Americas Quarterly
Plogging Anyone? Scrabble Adds 2,800 New Words
A whole host of new Scrabble words relate to current lifestyle trends including plogging (picking up litter while jogging), sharenting (sharing news and images of one’s children on social media), babymoon (early period of new parenthood), dancecore (type of electronic dance music), zen (state of calm attentiveness), fleek (used in the phrase ‘on fleek’, stylish) and bizjet (small aeroplane used by business people). – Irish Times
A Few Minutes Alone With “The Last Supper” – Surprisingly Affecting
Phil Kennicott: “I’m lucky to have been given a little extra time at “The Last Supper” and even, for a few minutes, time without other tourists, and the experience is deeply moving. I’m surprised by this because “The Last Supper” is famous for being but a shadow of what Leonardo put on the walls about the same time Columbus sailed for America… Yet there it is, glowing on the wall, far more precise in its communication than anything I expected during a two-week trip looking at art in Italy.” – Washington Post