“Thicker ink, fewer smudges, and more strained hands: an Object Lesson.”
Little Girl Breaks 2,000-Year-Old Vase, And Museum Is Thrilled
No, she didn’t pull an Ai Weiwei. “A little girl accidentally broke a 2,000-year-old glass vessel during a visit to the Israel Museum on Sunday. The museum said the object has now been repaired and is in better shape than it was before.”
You Should Know The Work Of These 12 Choreographers
“From the early days of the Great White Way to the greatest hits of the past ten years, here are 12 legendary choreographers who have (literally) given shape to Broadway as we know it.”
Time To Abolish The Idea That Social Interaction Is A “Science”?
“Social science was — it is best to speak in the past tense — a mistake. The dream of a comprehensive science of society, which would elucidate “laws of history” or “social laws” comparable to the physical determinants or “laws” of nature, was one of the great delusions of the 19th century.”
Sometimes You End Up Having To Paint Your Castle Yellow: The Perils Of Historical Restoration
“The story of how the restoration of the Great Hall of Stirling Castle led to it being painted bright yellow illustrates the unexpected complexity … It comes down to this question: When you choose to restore something, at which moment in time are you restoring it to?” (podcast with transcription)
Dangerous Satire? Americans Know Nothing Of Dangerous Satire
“America simply never had a Werner Finck, and we certainly don’t have a Bassem Youssef, even though we’d like to think we do. It is far safer and easier to canonize Chaplin’s ballet performance [in The Great Dictator] while forgetting the unsafe, uneasy provocations of Finck [and Youssef]. Americans tolerate bullshit even when we know – we know – it’s bullshit. At the best of times, there is something luxurious about this.”
Stop Calling It ‘The Bechdel Test,’ Says Alison Bechdel
After all, as she’s been saying for years, she wasn’t the one who came up with the idea. She simply put it in a comic strip, where it was eventually noticed.
Ten London Museums Do A Virtual Collection Swap Via Instagram
“Using the hashtag #museuminstaswap, each participating institution will share photos of its partner museum throughout the week, highlighting works that resonate with their own collections.”
Cultural Appropriation – A Weapon Of Mass Destruction?
“I worry that if we reach a place where a charge of cultural appropriation becomes a trump card, instantly condemning a work of art, a fashion line or a fitness craze, we won’t delve deeper on the important questions raised by cultural exchange.”
Radical Sandcastles – Now HERE’s Some Pathbreaking Architecture For You
“His creations look nothing like classical interpretations. Instead of mounds and turrets and moats, [Matt] Kaliner’s structures are drippy archways that twist, jut, climb, and at times appear suspended in midair. They are otherwordly, like something you’d find on a beach in Neverland, or what it might look like if Antoni Gaudi had designed the fictional island of Laputa in a dream.”
Sylvie Guillem On Nureyev And Being ‘Mademoiselle Non’
“I trusted my instincts. It is a very short career [and] I didn’t have time to cope with the management of the company.”
Twyla Tharp Rehearses Her 50th Anniversary Tour: Day Eight
“But today the ones in this room are tired. This is no surprise as last week was a hard one finishing the entire show, which is nearly 90 minutes of dancing. I always push the first week of a rehearsal period so that we can all see what we actually have.”
How The Biggest Explosion In Recorded History Changed Culture All Over The World
The eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815 did more than just cause the “Year Without Summer” and lead to months on end of storms, crop failures and epidemics. The aftermath of that catastrophe changed the course of painting and literature (though the participants didn’t know it at the time), and arguably led to the birth of an entire branch of popular culture.
How To Structure A Radio Narrative, Explained In Comic-Book Form (Starring Ira Glass)
A portion of the “Keep or Kill” chapter from Jessica Abel’s graphic non-fiction book Out on the Wire.
Detroit Institute Of Arts Narrows Its Search For A New Director
Board Chairman Gene Gargaro, who is leading the 14-member search committee, said Tuesday that the museum has completed two rounds of interviews and identified “a short list” of four possible replacements for former Director Graham Beal, whose 16-year tenure ended June 30.
Is Your Foundation Perpetuating Inequality By The Way You Give Away Money?
“A basic tenet of equity in our line of work is that the communities that are most affected by societal problems are leading the efforts to address these challenges. And yet, many foundations’ application process is deeply inequitable, leaving behind the people and communities who are most affected by the injustices we as a sector are trying to address.”
Reflecting On The Harry Potter Generation (Long After Harry Was Done)
“For an entire generation, Harry Potter is a core text; for many, it’s the core text, formative not only because of its content, but because of the collective experience of reading it. The long waits between books, the midnight release parties, the broad cross-cultural anticipation that was near-unprecedented in the book world at the time: for the massive number of people who read them as they were first published, these things are tied up in our memories of reading the books, and our lasting interpretations of their words.”
What Do You Need To Do To Innovate In The Concert Hall? (Some Suggestions)
“Why don’t you create performing arts organizations like sports teams? For example, why not have fan clubs for various artists? Why don’t you have them sign autographs? At one point I got them to make baseball cards for all the musicians. There’s a lot to learn in the way sports are marketed, how they’re delivered, and how broadly they’re accepted. Sports is the most successful of the performing arts; and in any industry don’t you try to learn from the most successful?”
Two Aspen Music Festival Fellows Killed In Crash
Trumpeter Alex Greene, 23 and a student at the Curtis Institute, and tuba player Ben Darneille, 21 and studying at DePaul University, died in a in a car accident near Rock Springs, Wyoming on Monday night .
Post Cate Blanchett-Andrew Upton Era At Sydney Theatre Company Has Its Leader
The new artistic director at Australia’s leading theater will be Jonathan Church, outgoing director of England’s Chichester Festival Theatre, which he transformed from a fading regional company to a powerhouse that regularly sends produxtions to the West End and Broadway.
When Freud Meets fMRIs – Neuropsychoanalysis Is Now A Thing
“With their starkly different goals, methods, and cultures, psychoanalysis and neuroscience can appear to be two different species, mutually alienated, as if preoccupied with two altogether different pursuits. But to some, like Solms, they are merely two views of the same object.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 08.25.15
Public Charity
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2015-08-25
Islam’s Pashtun Warrior for Peace: Badshah Khan
AJBlog: Straight|Up Published 2015-08-25
Monday Recommendation: The Jaki Byard Project
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2015-08-24
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The Revolution In Photography Right Now Will Change How We Think About Pictures
“Failure to recognize the huge changes underway is to risk isolating ourselves in an historical backwater of communication, using an interesting but quaint visual language removed from the cultural mainstream.”
12-Year-Old Trips, Punches Hole In $1.5 Million 17th-Century Painting
“Footage released by the organisers of ‘The Face of Leonardo: Images of a Genius’ exhibition in Taipei shows the boy in shorts, trainers, a blue Puma T-shirt and holding a drink walk pass the still life, catching his foot and stumbling over. He looks up at the Paolo Porpora oil on canvas painting of flowers, shown later to have a fist-sized gash at the bottom, and freezes, looking around at other people in the room.” (includes video)
Merl Reagle, Beloved Crossword Author, Dies Suddenly At 65
“‘In the 1980s, a new group of puzzlemakers saw that crosswords were starting to remind them of their worst teachers from grade school,’ Mr. Reagle wrote in a 1997 article for The Philadelphia Inquirer‘s Sunday magazine. ‘Wouldn’t it be more fun and attract more solvers if puzzles were a little more playful? Just a smidge trickier and a lot wittier?'”