“To make a building or a landscape is a hugely complex and collaborative business. Many famous architects obscure that fact, and present themselves like fashion designers, delivering a tight brand and a singular sensibility. Snohetta carry themselves like a collective of filmmakers: Their work has no set style and no manifesto. It is visually bold, but shaped by observation and empathy.”
How A Word Coined In A Comic Strip Turned Into A Dance Craze (And Launched Louis Armstrong To Stardom)
“The phrase heebie-jeebies was, as far as we can tell, coined in 1923 by cartoonist Billy DeBeck in his popular comic strip Barney Google. Before long, the phrase was popping up all over … [it] implied eccentric movement and vague associations with mental disturbance, which made it the perfect name for a dance that aimed to satisfy the mid-1920s fascination with cutting loose and stepping out of convention for a couple of happy minutes.”
Long-Form Television Like ‘Breaking Bad’ And ‘The Wire’ Is Boring And Ruining Everything
“Soon, everything else in your life – theatre-going, museum visits, eating, breathing – has vanished in your commitment to seven more hours of following the ins and outs of petty crime in Baltimore or the adulterous lives of slow-emoting ad men in 60s New York.”
Too Fragile To Open, The World’s Oldest Multicolor Printed Book Is Digitized
“The revealed pages include eight categories of subjects illustrated by 50 different artists and calligraphers, with birds, plums, orchids, bamboo, fruit, stones, ink drawings, and other miscellaneous imagery, each followed by a text or poem.”
Sotheby’s Didn’t Make As Much Money Last Quarter, But It Has A Plan
“‘Our contemporary group has identified some areas where we can be doing a lot better,’ [new CEO Ted Smith] said, suggesting he might increase Sotheby’s efforts and resources in the United States and overseas, and change the way it related to consignors.”
Why Is The Hirshhorn Director Holding A Gala In NY Instead Of DC?
“The Nov. 9 gala will include 400 invited guests and honor 40 living artists whom the museum considers essential to its identity. But despite Chiu’s statement in the Times story announcing the event — that she intends no snub to the Washington arts crowd — it is a snub, and a distressing indication that she doesn’t understand the purpose, the history or the identity of the museum she now leads.”
Filling Forgotten Niches In The Book World, And Making Money Doing It
“New York Review Books, the publishing offshoot of the literary magazine The New York Review of Books, has made a specialty of rescuing and reviving all kinds of ignored or forgotten works in English or in translation, fiction and nonfiction, by writers renowned and obscure.”
Frank Gehry Is The Wrong Architect For The Revitalized Los Angeles River
“Not that he’s going to clad the entire 52 miles of river in hyper-reflective steel panels OH GOD PLEASE SAY NO. It’s just that Gehry’s work so rarely provides true public space and doesn’t show many gestures to the natural environment—both of which are the most important things the river will need to do.”
Why Don’t Kid Movies Have Kids In Them Anymore?
“The absence of live-action children’s movies featuring child actors in central roles is even more confusing when two other factors are considered: live-action movies tend to be cheaper (Toy Story 3 cost $200m to produce, whereas Home Alone only cost $18m), and child actors are not only everywhere, especially on TV, but are also arguably better than ever.”
When Our Artistic Heroes Fall To Earth (It’s Difficult To Forget Them)
Today, we are in a new moment of iconoclasm, as symbols such as the Confederate flag are reconsidered; as celebrities such as Bill Cosby fall spectacularly from grace; as books, plays, films and operas are reconsidered, edited or banished to the margins of the canon for offending contemporary audiences.
Media Meltdown As Media Use Changes
“Some investors have concluded that owning media stocks is too risky amid dramatic changes in how viewers consume entertainment, analysts said. Viewership changes are beginning to prompt studio chiefs to reassess how they manage their businesses and even which shows and movies get the green light.”
Does Anyone Care About Blackface Makeup For Otello?
“What I think is most damaging is when there’s no discussion about it, and then you get a situation where the cover of an artistic brochure shows somebody in blackface and then the rest of us are thinking, ‘what’s going on?'” (The Met’s decision came after an outcry from some subscribers who took issue with a photo in its season brochure.)
Explosive Growth: Thousands Flock To Watch Video Game Competitions
“As many as 12,000 people descended on KeyArena this week to watch teams of professional gamers square off in the International Dota 2 tournament. At stake in Saturday’s final round is a $6.5 million prize, part of an $18 million purse, the largest in e-sports history. E-sports, as competitive video gaming is known, is big business and is now attracting the likes of Amazon and Microsoft. Increasingly, the Seattle area is a focus of the industry.”
SOOO Many Problems With Streaming Music. Ultimately They Don’t Matter
“The thing to remember when it comes to the progress of art (and to technology): Never follow the money, follow the artists. That’s where the creativity and caring lies. Streaming is no exception.”
The First Woman Member Of The New York Philharmonic Is Still Playing
“Back in 1966, when Leonard Bernstein hired Orin O’Brien to join the double bass section of the New York Philharmonic, she became the orchestra’s first woman, making history in a heretofore all-male club. (The first ever was Edna Phillips, who broke the gender barrier in 1930, when Leopold Stokowski hired her as principal harp of the Philadelphia Orchestra).”
Tate Britain Attempts To Turn Visual Art Into Multi-Sense Experience
“The exhibition features cutting edge technology, including binaural and directional audio to produce 3D sound, a perfume release system to engage the sense of smell, and state-of-the-art haptic technology to recreate the sense of touch.”
Challenge: Diagram A Donald Trump Sentence (And The Surprise Inside)
“First, I’m surprised that so much of a speech that sounds like pure blather actually does form a few coherent sentences, albeit fractured and interrupted by other thoughts. Second, If you can locate the main clauses I’m talking about, you can see, graphically, how much weight they have to bear.”
Thin Skins: Today’s College Students Can’t Take A Joke (Or Don’t Want To)
“Keeping hold of that kid for all four years has become a central obsession of the higher-ed-industrial complex. How do you do it? In part, by importing enough jesters and bards to keep him from wandering away to someplace more entertaining, taking his Pell grant and his 529 plan and his student loans with him.”