“Despite museums’ well-meaning (but not always successful) efforts to adjust their tones and practices to 21st-century standards, auction houses continue to present African artifacts through a Eurocentric lens, often glossing over an artifact’s original context while foregrounding its connections to Western artists and collectors.” – Artsy
The Problem With Eternity (And What To Do About It)
“The problem with eternity is not that it doesn’t exist but that it is undesirable and incoherent; it kills meaning and collapses value. This is a difficult truth to learn, because we are naturally fearful of loss, and therefore attached to the idea of eternal restoration.: – The New Yorker
Meet The Artists Radically Transforming Broadway Theatre
“In recent years, the dam between uptown and downtown has started to spring a leak or two—and this season, the floodgates have opened. A rush of new productions written and directed by artists with a distinctly downtown sensibility are reshaping the Broadway landscape.” – Vogue
Pennsylvania Is Helping Pay For The Philadelphia Orchestra’s China Tour. What Do State Taxpayers Get Out Of It?
Basically, as one executive put it, “there are two Philadelphia brands the Chinese respect — the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School and the Philadelphia Orchestra.” Classical music is often used as a conversational warm-up for business discussions in China, not unlike the way sports is used elsewhere, and, as another executive puts it, the orchestra’s tour “serve[s] as a big draw for potential Chinese investors and companies to explore investment opportunities in the Philadelphia area.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer
A Vietnamese-American Theatre Critic Finally Sees Her Stories Onstage — And Feels What She Had Barely Known Was Missing
“There is a line in The Scarlet Letter: ‘She had not known the weight, until she felt the freedom.’ I hadn’t known the weight of transposing myself into other people’s bodies until I no longer had to do it.” Diep Tran writes about Vietgone and Poor Yella Rednecks, the first two parts of a planned five-play cycle by Qui Nguyen about his family’s journey from Vietnam and settlement in the U.S. – American Theatre
90-Year-Old Composer Disrupts Opera Opening With 50-Year-Old Grudge Against Company
Just as the lights were going down at the State Theatre in Melbourne for the start of Opera Australia’s Rigoletto, George Dreyfus stood up and started yelling through a megaphone about the fact that the company had never produced the opera it had commissioned from him in 1969 and he turned in the following year. He went on for more than ten minutes at which point the police arrived. – Limelight (Australia)
Yet Another Problem With Peter Zumthor’s Design For New LACMA Building: You Can’t Hang Paintings On Bare Concrete Walls
As if there weren’t enough issues with the damn thing already. As Christopher Knight writes, you could hang paintings on wires coming down from a high rail. (Bad idea in an earthquake zone.) Or you could drill holes in the wall, which is loud, expensive, and weakens the concrete. And LACMA want to rotate the collection constantly, so there would be a lot of rehanging. What were these people thinking? – Los Angeles Times
Turns Out Susan Sontag’s Actual First Book Was The One Her Husband Put His Name On And Made His Career With
A new biography by Benjamin Moser argues, citing previously unreleased correspondence as well as textual analysis, that Philip Rieff’s Freud: The Mind of the Moralist, which launched his academic career, was actually written (or rewritten) by Sontag, who had married Rieff when she was 17 — and that she relinquished rights to the book as part of her divorce settlement in order to avoid a custody fight over her son. – The Guardian
Rochester Philharmonic Music Director To Step Down
“Ward Stare, who in 2014 at age 32 became the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra’s youngest-ever music director following one of its most turbulent periods, will leave the job at the end of the summer in 2021.” – Rochester Democrat and Chronicle
Responsible Theatremaking: Content Warnings and Beyond
“Content warnings” — a more effective term than “trigger warnings” — “aren’t about treating audiences like they are incapable of handling the material a play presents. Instead, warnings are about giving an audience the appropriate information needed to make a choice about what they want to be exposed to. Ultimately, this is about respecting audience agency. Part of being a responsible theatremaker is trusting the audience to make their own choices about their exposure to certain topics.” – HowlRound
BBC Wants To Pry Listeners From Their Bubbles (Possible?)
The broadcaster is developing a “public service algorithm” that’s “built to surprise you,” said the BBC’s director of radio and education James Purnell.His hope is that audiences will stumble onto something new, instead of content that simply reinforces their views. Algorithms “do not have to create echo chambers,” he added, “they can open them up”. – BBC
A Beam Of Light? Crystal? What Should A Rebuilt Notre Dame’s Spire Be?
President Emmanuel Macron said last month he was not opposed to a “a contemporary architectural gesture” that could make Notre-Dame “even more beautiful”. But many in France have called for Viollet-le-Duc’s spire to be restored as it had been built. – Irish Times
Rebuilding A Literary Canon With The Voices That Weren’t Heard In The Mainstream
“Instead of holding up a few isolated women as exceptions to the rule of male genius, we owe it to that audience to raise up a crowd: sharing, teaching, citing, and celebrating them despite their flaws and complications. Only then can we demonstrate that literary history has always contained a cacophony of female voices, diverse in their politics and outlooks, but forthright in their determination to speak in public and be heard.” – LitHub
Train The Brain: How Neurofeedback Can Make Us Believe
“By linking brain activity to an image or sound in real time, we can use simple game-like techniques to get people to train themselves to forge new neural connections and voluntarily adopt (or avoid) certain mental states.” – Aeon
At The Beginning Of The 20th Century Pianist/Composer Cecile Chaminade Was A Star. Then She Was Forgotten
More than a century later, Chaminade and her music have been largely expunged from history, and the societies named for her have disappeared — all except one: the Chaminade Music Club of Yonkers. – New York Magazine
‘When Literature Is Broken, We Rebuild It — Because We Need Shelter’: Arundhati Roy’s PEN America Lecture
“So, as we lurch into the future … what is literature’s place? What counts as literature? Who decides? Obviously, there is no single, edifying answer to these questions. So, if you will forgive me, I’m going to talk about my own experience of being a writer during these times — of grappling with the question of how to be a writer during these times, in particular in a country like India, a country that lives in several centuries simultaneously.” – The Guardian
Canadians In Rural Areas And Small Towns Could Lose Free TV
The Local Television Satellite Solution that provided free service to Canadians who lost signals when TV transitioned from analog to digital in 2011 could end this year. – CBC
Broken System: How Music Gets Promoted (And Who Gets Played)
“There are a lot of ways our music can come into contact with others, but there isn’t a lot of consistency in our field at large for how we evaluate works and provide opportunities for composers. (Sometimes it seems like every ensemble has their own method!) And, no matter what processes we use—from an open call-for-scores, to a competition format with specified prizes and a panel of judges, to a curatorial model that asks individual artists to build programs—we often face a series of similar challenges if we care about promoting works fairly.” – NewMusicBox
Plea For A Great Detente: Science And Philosophy
Once upon a time, it was not just that philosophy was a part of science; rather, science was a branch of philosophy. We need to remember that modern science began as natural philosophy – a development of philosophy, an admixture of philosophy and science. – Aeon
New Frontiers in Arts Research: My panel remarks at the IU Center for Cultural Affairs Symposium
I’ll let my comments speak for themselves but will leave you with this reflection — “A good society contains many different artists doing many different things. A bad society coerces artists because it knows that they can reveal all kinds of truths.” — from Iris Murdoch which was on my mind when I wrote my remarks. – Diane Ragsdale
Something American orchestras don’t want known
Continuing from my last post, with what should be in a book on the past few decades’ history of American orchestras … One main focus of the book would of course have to be orchestra finances. Along with the long-term decline in ticket sales, which of course affects the bottom line. – Greg Sandow
Saturday night special
The humble McDonald’s cheeseburger — the plain one, not the Big Mac — as madeleine. – Terry Teachout
Doris Day, Film Star And Animal Rights Activist, Has Died At 97
Day was a star who reinvented herself several times. She “achieved indelible fame in big-screen bedroom farces and put a sunny face on the working woman in postwar America,” and walked away from the industry when she could. “In 1981, she moved to Carmel, the Monterey Bay community she fell for while making the 1956 film Julie, and devoted much of her life to animal welfare.” – Los Angeles Times
Cannes Has Some Rules, Like ‘Wear Heels,’ That Strike The 2019 Sensibility As A Tad Retrograde
It’s the festival’s “sensibility” that must be maintained, after all. (Cue eyerolls.) “If your shoes are deemed unworthy of the Cannes red carpet, you can console yourself with the thought that not only the celebrities must dress up for occasion, but also the press photographers who crowd the adjacent gantries. Yes, they, too, have to wear black tie.” – The New York Times