“At the risk of being dismissed as naïve, I’ll repeat: it takes eyes, ears, brains, and passion — not an art market degree — to run a culturally meaningful gallery. The problem with the ever-growing barrage of marketing schemes lies in the sentence they all open with: “Art is like any other business.” It isn’t. No two artists require the same approach; I have as many hats as I have artists. If only I was in the business of selling hats.”
Are Apple Stores The 21st Century’s Temples? Maybe So, Says A Cultural Historian
“In more ancient times, when communal experiences were mediated by religion, crowds used to gather outside temples on feast days. … Nowadays, we have Apple Release Day – the Feast of St. Jobs – when faithful customers gather outside Apple stores and await the renewal of a next generation iPhone.” Says NYU professor Erica Robles-Anderson, “It’s so obviously a cult.”
How Billy Crystal’s One Five-Minute Scene Nearly Derailed ‘The Princess Bride’
Mandy Patinkin came away with a bruise, and for some takes Cary Elwes had to be replaced with a mannequin.
French Thinking Used To Animate The World. So What Happened?
“French public debate has been framed around enduring oppositions such as good and evil, opening and closure, unity and diversity, civilisation and barbarity, progress and decadence, and secularism and religion. Underlying this passion for ideas is a belief in the singularity of France’s mission.”
Eighty Years of Penguin Books – By The Numbers
“Before Allen Lane began his publishing house in 1935, good books were the purview of the privileged, costing more than many Londoners spent on a week’s rent. But that all changed when Lane, then managing director of the now-defunct Bodley Head, bought the rights to 10 already popular hardcovers … redesigning each with a uniform set of specs so simple that even small, inexperienced print shops could mass-produce them on the cheap.” (infographic)
How Can A Movie About A Laundry Worker In 1914 Feel So Sadly Relevant Today?
“It all felt a little too retro. The thing is, while these men may well have the best of intentions, the history of the left, and of revolution, is littered with broken promises made to women.”
How Does A Canadian Artist Sketching Cartoons About The Brontë Sisters Become So Popular?
“A cartoonist and quasi-historian who launched her comic strip Hark! A Vagrant in 2007 while still working at the museum, Beaton has harnessed the power of Tumblr and Facebook and Twitter to become a ubiquitous presence online, where her sketchy, clever, perfectly imperfect strips are often copied, spoofed, remixed and memed by others.”
A Broadway Actor Stands Up For A Kid Who Disrupted A Performance
“He said in the Facebook post that he believed shows that have special performances for autistic audiences should be commended for their efforts and that he hoped the woman would see his post.”
Walter Benjamin, Children’s Radio Broadcaster
“Something quintessentially Benjaminian happens in that uncanny encounter of radio and child: the hint of an unsettling remainder in the everyday, in the dislocation of sent message and received meaning, in the figure of the child who knows something his parents do not.”
L.A.’s Intense Reactions To The New Petersen Automotive Museum
“The new design, reported KPF’s website, ‘transforms the Petersen building into one of the most significant and unforgettable structures in Los Angeles.’ They got that right. Anyone who has been by the intersection of Fairfax and Wilshire in recent months will tell you that it’s the sort of thing you just can’t unsee.”
The Deep Moral Failings Of Those Who Would Ban Toni Morrison’s Books
“When schools and institutions attempt to ban The Bluest Eye there is a distinct and ugly irony to this exile. I often think of Morrison’s own words, ‘If you’re going to hold someone down you’re going to have to hold on by the other end of the chain.'”
A Protest Mural Gets Defaced
“Wylie Goodman recalls sitting in her Brooklyn home in August when she thought she heard gunfire outside. Actually, it was someone shooting paintballs at a 27-foot-tall mural she had allowed to be created on the side of the building she owns in Red Hook.”
The Paris Opera Opens With Glamour, Glitz, And New Artistic Directions
“Until now, the French haven’t really done galas in the focused way of American organizations. In a largely state-subsidized cultural system, fund-raising has not been an imperative and the cultivation of a circle of patrons has been discreet and elite.”
Why Jane Austen Never Goes Out Of Style
“Of all her contemporaries, Austen is the only one to have made it through with her best-seller status intact, and that’s not just because her girls meet her boys without any help from Tinder.”
Saving Ancient Books Rediscovered In Italy After The Library Was Closed For A Century
“‘One of the bottom shelves was full of black slime,’ she recalled. ‘You couldn’t recognise that they were books and many were lost.'”
Shakespeare Fest Commissions New ‘Translations’ Of The Bard – Into Contemporary English
“We can piece these meanings together, of course, by reading the play and consulting stacks of footnotes. But Shakespeare didn’t intend for us to do that. He wrote plays for performance. We’re supposed to be able to hear and understand what’s spoken on the stage, in real time.”
State Lawmaker Leans On Thomas Hart Benton Mural To Take Notes
There are many things one might do while inside a room whose walls are lined with a historic Thomas Hart Benton mural: admire the artwork, contemplate it, take selfies with it. One should not use it as a surface to lean on while writing. Especially if you’re a state lawmaker.
Vancouver Symphony Picks Kelly Tweeddale As Its Executive Director
Kelly Tweeddale, who has been the executive director of Seattle Opera for the past 13 years, takes over her new role on Nov. 16, the orchestra announced Thursday.
Ernest Hemingway Was A Total Pack Rat
“He saved even his old passports and used bullfight tickets, leaving behind one of the longest paper trails of any author. So how is it possible that ‘Ernest Hemingway: Between Two Wars,’ which opens on Friday at the Morgan Library & Museum, is the first major museum exhibition devoted to Hemingway and his work? It could be simply that no one thought of it before.”
The ‘Queer Tango’ Movement Comes Into Its Own
Marina Harss: “For many people, including me, the word tango conjures the image of a pantherlike milonguero, hair slicked back, in a breathless embrace with a lithe, rapt partner, skirt slit to her thigh, trembling at his every touch. … But, no surprise, this image has very little to do with the reality of the tango as it is experienced by those who dance it. … Men are dancing with men, women with women; women are leading and men are learning to follow. Often, these roles shift mid-dance.”