“What happened? How is it that, in only a generation or two, educated Americans went from at least pretending to know and care about the fine arts to paying no attention at all?”
Tenure Is Going Down In Flames. Does It Matter?
“What I wonder is whether justice and tenure can exist side-by-side in discussions of academic labor. At best, they rest next to one another uneasily. At worst, tenure is now reliant upon the stratified academic workplace to exist.”
The Genius Of ClickHole: How The Onion Spinoff Designed To Mock The Internet Became The Best Thing On It
Dan Kois: “How does the site, with its small staff of young writers and editors tucked around a few tables at the Onion‘s Chicago offices, generate so many stories that make me laugh really hard? And why do so many of these stories also make me feel bad? And what does it mean to make a website that does both of these things – that makes extremely viral media, while ruthlessly satirizing the world of viral media?”
Just How Do You Dance To Jazz? (Once It was Common)
“Yes, the musicians have to keep an underlying dance pulse going if they want listeners to get out of their chairs and shake their hips. But the venue also has to provide an open space where that can happen without blocking the view of others. And the audience has to be able to identify the beat within a jazz number that has a lot of different moving parts. In New Orleans, audiences are trained by family and friends to hear that dance pulse from an early age.”
Ratmansky Strips The Varnish Off “Sleeping Beauty”
In the twentieth century there was a strong anti-narrative trend in some quarters of the ballet world: storytelling was seen as corny. Consequently, a great deal of the mime, or hand-talk, in the nineteenth-century ballets was dropped. According to Alexei Ratmansky, this was definitely the case with “The Sleeping Beauty.” In the movement score he found much more mime than we see in today’s productions, and he says he restored every scrap of it.
Street Names – So Much More Than Labels For A Map
“Street names are the lyrics to accompany the symphonies that all cities perform, day-in day-out, and their integrity ought to be respected. Maybe they do have more of a function after all than to simply help people tell one street from another.”
In The Age Of Curators New Music Could Use Some Curation
“While, historically, the curator was the person at a museum in charge of caring for that museum’s collection of artwork, this has only been a partial description of part of the profession for some time. Now, art curators are often at the forefront of enabling creative innovation and audience interaction. In the world of new music, on the other hand, curating is mostly a word we’ve usurped for use in funding applications and marketing materials.”
Poland’s Government Made A Huge Investment In New Concert Halls, Museums (So What About Audiences?)
“The investments have generated a remarkable audience boom. Between 2004 and 2013, the number of museum visitors rose from 17.5m to 29.0m, visitors to art galleries from 3.0m to 4.5m and audiences for theatres and concerts from 9.3m to 11.5m.”
Here’s Who Bought The Most Expensive Sculpture Ever Auctioned
Shortly after Picasso’s Les Femmes d’Alger distracted us all by selling for $179 million, an anonymous bidder paid $141.3 million for Giacometti’s L’homme au doigts (Pointing Man). Who was he? One of the likeliest suspects, as it happens.
Why We Need Our Writers To Be Audacious
“It is therefore necessary that writers everywhere should see it as their ultimate duty to preserve artfulness of language by couching audacious prose. Our prose should be the Noah’s ark that preserves language in a world that is being apocalyptically flooded with trite and weightless words.”
Truth Based On Facts Is Losing In Our Modern Culture. It’s A Slippery Slope From Here
“It is sad that the modern attack on truth started in the academy — in the humanities, where the stakes may have initially seemed low in holding that there are multiple ways to read a text or that one cannot understand a book without taking account of the political beliefs of its author. That disrespect, however, has metastasized into outrageous claims about the natural sciences.”
Study: Turns Out There’s Big Correlation Between Education And Musical Taste
“Of all the highbrow tastes, all but jazz are disliked by lower class people, and of the lowbrow tastes, country, easy listening, and golden oldies are concurrently disliked by higher class people.”
This Year’s Tonys Suggest A New Maturity Has Taken Over Broadway
“In a year of record Broadway grosses ($1.36 billion), it’s heartening to see commercial imperatives take a back seat. But then perhaps Broadway is beginning to recognize how reliant it is on nonprofit theater in the U.S. and nationally subsidized theater in Britain.”
How Big Is The No-Tonys Effect? ‘The Visit’ Closes This Weekend
“The show, which began previews on March 26 and opened April 23, has been a box office disappointment but a passion project for its producers and investors, who worked for more than a decade to bring it to Broadway.”
Jerry Saltz Says This Artist Is ‘Like A Badger Of Painting’
“[Albert] Oehlen is like a badger of painting, a cross between a weasel and a small bear, fearlessly scouring painting’s possibilities, implications, and metaprograms, scavenging for sweet spots, weaknesses, ways to decode, remap, and break down the medium … I love his work, but I am not even sure that I actually like it.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 06.08.15
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Showtime Launches Standalone Streaming App
“With the OTT strategy, Showtime — which has nearly 24 million pay-TV subs — is looking to reach so-called cord-nevers and cord-cutters, who don’t have an interest in traditional cable or satellite plans.”
The First Civilian Artist In Space
“Najjar was inspired to reach space after climbing Mount Aconcagua, the world’s second-highest peak. ‘I was looking out over the whole sweeping range of the Andes, when suddenly a Swiss Air Boeing 747 from Santiago passed just over my head and moved on its way through the deep blue sky,’ Najjar writes in his photo book. ‘It was completely surreal. And at this moment I thought, you’ve gotta go one step further; you’ve gotta go into space.'”
Closing A Tax Loophole For Amazon Accidentally Hits Self-Published Authors Hardest
“All fair and square? Not really. For microbusinesses faced with the job of calculating myriad tax rates, the new regime is an administrative nightmare.”
FIFA’s Bad Week Continues As Its Puff Film Flops – Seriously – In The U.S.
“Frédéric Auburtin’s film, funded by the football governing body and starring Tim Roth as Sepp Blatter, scored $607 from its 10-cinema limited run, according to the Hollywood Reporter. One cinema, the FilmBar in Phoenix, Arizona, reported one ticket sold, a site take of $9.”
The Tragedy Of The Digital Commons – And What People Are Doing About It
“The designers of Turkopticon and its cousins draw attention to common problems, hoping to influence longer-term change on a complex issue. In time, the idea goes, requesters on Mechanical Turk might change their treatment of workers, Amazon might change its policies and software, or regulators might set new rules for digital labor. This is an approach with a long history in an area that might seem unlikely: the conservation movement.”
ISIS, Al-Qaeda, And Classical Arabic Poetry (They Write A Lot Of it)
“Unlike the videos of beheadings and burnings, which are made primarily for foreign consumption, poetry provides a window onto the movement talking to itself. It is in verse that militants most clearly articulate the fantasy life of jihad.”