Triumphs and Laments, an 1,800-foot frieze along the Tiber River, will be created using the “reverse graffiti” technique.
Denver-Area Arts Orgs Battle Over How To Divide $87M In Public Funding
“No one in the cultural community wanted to see a noisy fight erupt over the money. The theaters and history museums, dance companies, classical quartets and galleries all feared an ugly battle would leave a bad taste in the mouths of voters who they are counting on to reauthorize their funding for a third, 10-year period in 2016.”
Wadsworth Atheneum In Hartford Puts Final Touches On A Comeback
“On Sept. 19, after a five-year, relatively humble $33 million renovation, the Wadsworth is finally reopening the Morgan Memorial Building … and its European galleries, which have been mostly closed since 2009. … For the first time in 50 years all the Wadsworth’s galleries will be open at once.”
Rock Legends Are Lining Up To Write The Spongebob Squarepants Musical
David Bowie, Cyndi Lauper, Aerosmith, Jonathan Coulton, The Flaming Lips, Panic! At the Disco, and They Might Be Giants are just a few of the folks headed to that pineapple under the sea …
There Is No Third Harper Lee Novel In That Safe-Deposit Box
“That’s the finding of James S. Jaffe, a rare-books expert brought in to review the contents of the safe-deposit box at a bank in Ms. Lee’s hometown of Monroeville, Ala.”
With Misty Copeland On Board, Broadway’s ‘On The Town’ More Than Doubles Its Box Office Take
“The first African-American woman to be named a principal in the 75-year history of American Ballet Theater provided a jolt to On the Town during her first week in the musical. The show, which is closing on Sunday, immediately went from a laggard to a leader: It grossed $914,434 in the week that ended Sunday, up from $395,379 the week before.”
New Broad Museum’s Online Reservation System Crashes On First Day
“The public’s enthusiasm was apparent – maybe a little too apparent – on Monday when the Broad Museum began booking online reservations for its Sept. 20 opening and beyond. By midafternoon, the Web page for reservations to the new contemporary art museum in downtown Los Angeles carried an announcement in red type: ‘Due to overwhelming demand, our ticketing system is currently down.'”
The Lessons Of Times Square: A Great Public Space Requires Paying Attention
“The lesson is that painting the pavement blue and closing it to cars is a start, but reclaiming space alone is not sufficient to create the sort of vibrant public plaza we’d all like. That requires real stewardship. Civic culture needs cultivating and curating. Unless we do so, public space can become a public nuisance.”
Boston’s Institute Of Contemporary Art At The Crossroads
“Approaching the 10-year mark in its handsome waterfront building, will the ICA (which was founded in 1936 as the Boston Museum of Modern Art) step up to the next level? Will it galvanize both artists and the public, embarrassing older, slower museums with its fleetness of foot, its largeness of vision, its willingness to provoke, surprise, and seduce? Or will it continue to strike large slabs of its potential audience as fiddly and pinched, a place of pretension, predictability, and underwhelming exhibits?”
How Tiny GreyWolf Press Became A Big Deal Publisher
“Over the past few years, as publishing conglomerates merged, restructured, and grappled with Amazon, a midwestern press snuck in and found a genuinely new way forward for nonfiction.”
Study: How Music Can Manipulate You – And In The Wrong Hands…
The researchers report in the online journal PLoS One that, compared to silence, the sound of their favorite songs increased risk-taking, while disliked music decreased it. Specifically, they write, “the frequency for accepting a gamble is 54.1 percent for favorite music, vs. 47.4 percent for disliked music. When no music was playing, the acceptance rate is 51.4 percent.”
The Knowledge Economy – Who Decides Where The Value Is?
“Who decides what you are allowed to learn?” Who decides what metaphors we use to speak of knowledge? And can we still learn how knowledge is organized by people in a particular location, together with the communities in which we teach?”
It’s An Amazing Time For New Opera -So What New Work Is Succeeding? And Why?
“If traditional American opera audiences balk at a complex, modern work, how do we account for the warm reception Written on Skin received, and the cooler one for Cold Mountain?”
38-Year-Old Concert Pianist Beaten To Death; Husband Arrested
“The husband of Russian pianist Natalia Strelchenko has been arrested after the musician was found murdered at their home in Newton Heath, Manchester. John Martin, 48, is understood to be the man police arrested on 30 August on suspicion of murdering the prodigious pianist and remains in police custody for questioning. He is a double bass player who also acted as the victim’s manager.”
Bloomberg Arts Editor Manuela Hoelterhoff Retires
“Manuela Hoelterhoff has decided to retire after 11 years during which she has written, edited and presided over more than 20,000 stories, weekend TV shows and radio segment on the arts, architecture, books and music, science, the Nazis and Hamlette … Manuela is one of the most versatile writers we’ve ever had and we will miss her wit and sharp pen.”
Too Much History: Why Istanbul Can Hardly Dig A Subway Tunnel Anywhere
Not even an area that was underwater during antiquity is free of archaeological concerns. After all, there were shipwrecks …
International Ballet Festival Of Miami Turns 20
“Festival founder and director Pedro Pablo Peña emphasizes the daunting nature of his enterprise. ‘Fulfilling my dream of bringing ballet from all over the world to Miami has been a task worthy of Don Quixote,’ he says in Spanish. ‘It’s taken quite a bit of inspired madness.'”
A Field Guide To Dwelling On Your Failures
“When something doesn’t go right, the usual, understandable instinct is often to forget it, as quickly as possible. Move on, we advise each other. Don’t look back. … And yet, as tempting as it is to think of stoically soldiering on as the smart approach to dealing with failure, there’s also a solid case for wallowing in your mistakes, at least for a time.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 08.31.15
Monday Recommendation: Logan Strosahl
AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2015-08-31
Links Gone Wild: September Gurl Clicks
AJBlog: blog riley Published 2015-08-31
What I Learned This Summer: Philadelphia
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2015-08-30
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Unpacking The Call For Diverse Books
“Sometimes it seems that what publishing is looking for, when they look to the Market to sell books by marginalized writers, is a single story. It is: this writer is *the* Dominican writer, or *the* Japanese writer, or *the* Sudanese writer that you should read right now. After all, we live in a culture that sells books with the tagline, if you read only one book this year.”
‘Hamilton’ Is Not Only A Great Musical But Also A Theatrical Game-Changer
“Within the Broadway spectrum, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s hip-hop historical musical has less in common with recent smashes than with shows that radically expanded audiences’ perceptions of the kind of stories musicals could tell, and the language and form they could use to tell them.”
A New Ballet Explores The Real, Complex, Dark Relationships Behind Picasso’s ‘Three Dancers’
“Working for the ballet had been a good career move for Picasso, augmenting his income and introducing him to an audience of rich, cultured patrons. It had also pleased Olga who, while retiring from the stage, remained deeply attached to her old profession.”
How Art Helps New Orleans Students Deal With Their Post-Katrina PTSD
“Trauma is all about details. Trauma renders itself in certain songs, in the quality of the air against the sky, in colors of socks, in flavors of alcohol. When the human brain encounters a trauma, it makes quick decisions about what to remember, and it often remembers otherwise mundane details: the timbre of birdsong, or the specific shake of a tree’s shoulders. Sometimes the brain gets kind of obsessive about trauma.”
Is The Symphony Over?
“A genre once aimed at vast crowds—Mahler imagined his symphonies being played in stadiums, for tens of thousands of people—now leads a more subdued, solitary existence. Much of its legacy is ignored in concert halls and can be encountered only on recordings.”
Wes Craven, The Mainstream Horror Maestro With A Debt To Ingmar Bergman
“Wes Craven’s career is a startling link between the European arthouse and Hollywood exploitation horror.”