“His argument goes like this: In economic terms, the arts are playing a losing hand; in almost every other industry, the costs of production are reduced over time, allowing for more goods to be sold at a lower price point. Innovation and commodification contribute to this process, enabling goods to be produced ever-more cheaply and distributed on a vast scale, which in turn allows for the increasing segmentation of consumer markets and real-time adaptation to changing tastes and expectations. Alas, almost none of this is true for the arts.”
Rediscovering The Identities of Some Of West Africa’s Long-Anonymous Master Sculptors
“Some sculptors here, such as The Essankro Master and The Master of the Arched Back, are designated only by their region or style, but many others … now have names and stories (one, Kuakudili, has a face) and so they are slowly becoming known as individuals.”
How Bedbugs Get Under Our Skin And Into Our Psyches
They don’t transmit West Nile virus or Lyme disease or malaria, yet humans – especially city-dwellers – are terrified of them. Ashamed, too: If we get them, we’re reluctant to tell our friends, lest they avoid us. How and why do we give these critters such power over us?
When Tennessee Williams Took Up Painting
“On the patio of his cottage in Key West, with his most celebrated writing years behind him, playwright Tennessee Williams took refuge in painting … express[ing] his loneliness, sexuality, and loathing for Truman Capote in this personal pastime.”
Hilary Mantel – Once More – On Taking The Tudor Court From Page To Stage
“Inside my head, they are whirls and blurs of energy in a show that never sleeps, where even in the small hours the blood runs down the walls. I construct the scenery and source the props, arrange the sound effects: church bells, the cry of hounds. I am my own lighting expert.”
Dressing ‘Sleeping Beauty’ For The Ballet Theater At The Met
“Then there are the ornate headpieces and floppy, wide-brimmed hats. Everyone wears a wig. … There are 210 of them, three times as many as in any other Ballet Theater production, the head of the wig department, Rena Most, said. The Queen’s perruque towers above her like a sheaf of wheat, augmented further by a spray of giant feathers.”
Will The Protest Mattress – Remember, It Was A Senior Year Art Project – End Up In A Museum?
“Whatever its fate in art or social history, Mattress Performance could well live on in objecthood. But would a museum or gallery want it? On the phone from California, where she is visiting a friend in Laguna Beach post-graduation and luxuriating in the distance from the 50-pound mattress she hauled around daily since September, Sulkowicz says no one has approached her about the prospect yet.”
When The Only ‘American Girl’ Black Doll Is A Slave, We’ve Got A Problem
“If you were a white girl who wanted a historical doll who looked like you, you could imagine yourself in Samantha’s Victorian home or with Kirsten, weathering life on the prairie. If you were a black girl, you could only picture yourself as a runaway slave.”
What Happened When An Opera Company Opened Its Dress Rehearsal To Working-Class Students
“It was an extremely new experience to be sitting in the three-tiered performance hall, listening to the kind of song and live music that was so good it belonged on an album.”
Last Year The Baltimore Symphony Hired An Embedded Journalist To Cover The Orchestra (Here’s How It Turned Out)
I have a whole lot of editorial control as far as picking stories out. I would say probably 75 percent of what I do is unrelated to the orchestra; it’s just generally about classical music. Twenty-five percent relates the orchestra. But I don’t see it as a direct “try to sell this concert.”
Kennedy Center Announces New American Orchestra Festival
It’s an ambitious project, and a challenge for the box office. Undaunted by the idea that the original Spring for Music festival, at Carnegie Hall, had trouble attracting audiences to unfamiliar ensembles playing unfamiliar work, Shift’s presenters have opted for programs focusing almost exclusively on living American composers, with a healthy dose of multimedia for good measure.
In 1992 Richard Woodward Wrote A NYT Mag Cover Piece On Sally Mann That Caused A Firestorm. Now He Reflects On Mann’s New Book
“What’s clear from Mann’s not always coherent defense of her actions in the book is that she, too, is uncertain about the answers to her questions I asked—a confusion that, I believe, only increases her stature by adding a complicating layer to her motives. No one likes a smug, self-satisfied artist and Mann’s intelligence attractively joins a bold disregard for convention and self-doubt.”
Pro Sports Has Discovered: Broadcasting Their Games Free and Live On TV Increases Their Business
“Research actually shows that TV broadcasts can increase game attendance. And while blackout policies are meant to increase revenues, as Forbes pointed out, the policy has done little to boost ticket prices for the Indy 500.”
A New Animal-inspired Algorithm Is Letting Machines Learn (Much) Faster
“An injured animal doesn’t diagnose its sprained ankle; it finds a limp that allows it to keep moving. Similarly, the team’s robots didn’t pinpoint the damage; they just noticed a drop in speed or a change in course, and selected a new movement to resume their actions.”
How Our Comedians Became Our Social Critics
“The stuff of late-night LOLs used to be quippy monologues, vapid celebrity interviews, Stupid Human Tricks both official and less so. It still is, to some extent. More often, though, TV comedy that self-consciously defines itself as “comedy”—the stuff that originally airs on Comedy Central and FXX and HBO, the stuff that is firmly rooted in traditions of sketch and standup—is taking on subjects like racism and sexism and inequality and issues including police brutality and trigger warnings and intersectional feminism and helicopter parenting and the end of men.”
91 Percent Of Wikipedia’s Editors Are Male. Is That A Problem?
“When it comes to how it is made, Wikipedia is a colossal failure. Only a tiny proportion of users now edit articles and the overwhelming majority of those editors are male. The most recent survey by the Wikimedia Foundation, the charity that supports but does not control Wikipedia, found that 91 per cent of the editors are men.”
Bone-Breaking – The Dance Craze That’s Exploding On Instagram
“Bone-breakers are known for dislocating their shoulders to create fluid movements that are spectacular to watch — but also might make you a bit squeamish. Instagram users are loving it, though. Dancers have uploaded more than 7,000 posts under the hashtag #bonebreaking, with 4,000 more under #bonebreak.”
American Publishers Look To China But Authors Fret About Censorship
“Organizers of the event say China deserves a seat at the table because it is such a big and potentially lucrative market. But some authors and free speech advocates have seen this as an opportunity to shine light on censorship in China.”
Joe Dowling Leaves A Reinvented Guthrie Theatre After 20 Years
“Not since Tyrone Guthrie founded the company that would bear his name has someone become more associated with the Guthrie Theater, one of the nation’s acclaimed regional theaters. The journey Dowling took to become its 20-year leader, reinventing the theater in the process, was unlikely and unexpected.”
Want To Know How The Brain Processes Creativity? We’ll Have To Devise More Creative Tests
“Interdisciplinary collaborations are often a good thing, especially between science and the arts. It makes sense that a design scholar would want to know how creativity works—in this case, a person who teaches a creativity course at Stanford’s d-school actually suggested the study. But creativity is, in the end, a human construct. That lack of definition makes it tough to study, even though the researchers tried to focus on a specific kind.”
Is The Top Of The High-End Art Auction Market Softening?
The percentage of guaranteed contemporary works at Christie’s evening auctions increased to 52 percent in May from 44 percent in November, according to ArtTactic. Meanwhile, average prices decreased 15.8 percent.
Repressive Middle East Governments Hiding Behind Shiny International Art Buildings
“In this context of repression, it’s clear that whatever the Louvre, the Guggenheim and New York University might say, the reality is that they provide a sheen of high-end respectability to an autocratic state.”
Want To Make Art About Superheroes? It’s Not Easy (As These Leaked Sony Emails Show)
“Gagosian Gallery worked for months to license images of Batman, Superman, Iron Man and Spider-Man for a series by the German photographer Andreas Gursky. More than six prominent Hollywood executives were involved in the negotiations, including Robert Iger, the chairman of the Walt Disney Company, Kevin Tsujihara, the chairman of Warner Brothers, the producer Charles Roven and the chief executives of DC and Marvel Comics.”
Study: Possible To Reduce Prejudice While You Sleep
A research team led by psychologists Ken Paller of Northwestern University and Xiaoqing Hu of the University of Texas-Austin reports it was able to able to reduce prejudice through a combination of conscious brain training and subliminal reinforcement as the study participants napped.
The Product Placements That Are Controlling Your Favorite Music
“The trick is that as with a lot of what’s taking place in the music industry these days – witness the backroom deals between the major labels and the streaming services, most of which leave the musicians out of the equation – the financial relationships are mostly opaque.”