“As one-off fees, you might say, ‘that’s not so bad’. But consider that your average art history PhD will have dozens, if not perhaps hundreds, of images, then soon even an unpublished PhD can become prohibitively expensive. You want to discuss mid-18th Century portraiture, and show perhaps 50 images? That’ll be £750. You want to turn that PhD into a book? £3050 please, before you’ve even thought of printing costs. Want to put on a Hogarth exhibition, with a decent catalogue? £8600. Ouch. And Tate are on the cheaper end of the scale.”
Arts Are $4.1 Billion Engine For Philadelphia’s Economy
A Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance report “shows a nearly 25 percent percent increase in economic impact over 2011, measured in direct spending by audiences and art organizations and estimated indirect spending. It also shows a 32 percent increase in city tax revenue, attributable to the arts sector.”
What Carey Perloff Achieved In Her 25 Years Leading American Conservatory Theater (A Miracle, Basically)
“Her ability to make a go of ACT in the wake of dual disasters – the artistically uncompromising [founder Bill] Ball’s financial mismanagement and 1989’s Loma Prieta earthquake, which partially collapsed and temporarily shuttered the palatial Geary Theater – looks downright miraculous even to her. … The story of those early years, particularly a riotous first season that included a picket by the Catholic Church and exercised critics and season subscribers alike, is now theatre lore.” Perloff talks to Richard Avila about how she did it and what she learned over the years, especially about being a woman running a major institution.
Meet New York City Ballet’s Youngest Choreographer in History
“School of American Ballet graduate and Ballet Semperoper Dresden apprentice Gianna Reisen” – age 18 – “makes her first-ever work for New York City Ballet this season. Reisen began studying at SAB in 2010 and first participated in SAB’s Student Choreography Workshop as a choreographer in 2015. She also choreographed for the New York Choreographic Institute, an affiliate of NYCB, during the fall 2016 working session.”
Keeping Count: What Plays (And By Whom) Are Being Produced
“These last stats can be spun positively: In the new-play world, male playwrights are down to just nearly half of all production credits, with women slowly but surely catching up. The glass-half-empty take, though, is that at this rate we won’t see gender parity (or women cracking the 50-percent ceiling, at least) in the new-play sector until roughly 2021.”
Legendary Samurai ‘Macbeth’ Production Returns After More Than Three Decades
“When it visited the Edinburgh Festival in 1985, this Macbeth” – staged by the revered Japanese director Yukio Ninagawa with his company, Saitama Arts Theater – “was declared an ‘overnight legend’, with critics praising its bold gestures and painterly beauty.” Saitama has now prepared a touring revival, which is coming to Britain next month, and, writes Andrew Dickson, it “still makes much homegrown Shakespeare look pallid.”
At The International Championship Of A Cappella
Jon Caramanca checks out the finals at Carnegie Hall: “There were groups striving to make a cappella their lives, groups that formed as passion projects and groups that seemed intent on dismantling the a cappella establishment from within by taking advantage of the competition’s open format to import styles of singing you won’t see at most college pre-frosh weekends. At times, and especially during the awards portion of the evening, that made for a confusing mandate, with global folk songs pitted against choral lite-gospel, and smarmy pop-rock alongside the familiar complex multipart vocal harmonizing (with vocal percussion!) that is a cappella’s public face.”
A Visit To Yayoi Kusama’s New Museum In Tokyo
“Even the restrooms are covered in polka dots.” Motoko Rich meets the artist and tours the five-story museum, which opens October 1. (Timed tickets are already sold out through November.)
Composer Arvo Pärt Wins Theology Prize From Vatican
The 81-year-old Estonian, who is the world’s most-performed living classical composer (and who is not himself Roman Catholic), is one of three recipients of this year’s Ratzinger Prize, named for Pope Benedict XVI (né Joseph Ratzinger) and given to “people who answered to the challenge of fostering a deep dialogue among science, theology and philosophy.”
Improving Schools Is Not The Key To Upward Mobility For Poor Children, Finds New Research
UC Berkeley economist Jesse Rothstein “found that differences in local labor markets – for example, how similar industries can vary across different communities – and marriage patterns, such as higher concentrations of single-parent households, seemed to make much more of a difference than school quality. For Rothstein, there’s no reason to assume that improving schools will be necessary or sufficient for improving someone’s economic prospects. ‘We can’t educate people out of this problem,’ he says.”
Why Book Cover Designs Are So Different In The UK From What They Are In The US
“Traditionally, US design tended towards literal interpretation, driven… by the complexity of the US market: the image that motivates readers in southern California to pick up a copy of a book is likely to be different to what appeals to readers in South Carolina. As a result, US jackets have tended to appeal to the lowest common denominator, and that does not make for good design.”
Film Society Cancels Screening After Filmmaker Announces “Justice Pricing” Plan To Charge White Males More
Shiraz Higgins used the false name Sid Mohammed when he announced a so-called justice-pricing model to charge white men as much as $20, while others would pay $10 based on the purchasing power of individual groups and “price discrimination.”
Have We Lost Control Of Our Computers?
“The problem is that we are attempting to build systems that are beyond our ability to intellectually manage… The problem is that programmers are having a hard time keeping up with their own creations. Since the 1980s, the way programmers work and the tools they use have changed remarkably little. There is a small but growing chorus that worries the status quo is unsustainable.”
Much Of Public Radio’s Audience Listens In Cars. What That Audience Still Listen In Driverless Cars?
It’s still not clear what the entertainment systems in driverless cars will look like. The women have seen mockup designs that are very preliminary. “We don’t know if we’re essentially going to be presented with a platform from car companies where they’ll say, like, ‘Here’s your screen. Put what you want to put on it’ and now we’re competing with Netflix and Hulu,” said Muller. “Or is there a way to be part of the conversation, help shape what the entertainment experience is like for people?”
How To Be Successful In Theatre? Maybe Take Risks?
Chad Bauman argues: “Change is hard. I’ll admit it sometimes scares me. There are no guarantees. But how is that different from anything else in the theatre? It does surprise me when theatres elect to stick with a failing business model that is most certainly destined to lead to disastrous results over the long term rather than risking throwing it out the window for a shot at success.”
With A ‘Superstar’ At Its Helm, Harlem’s Studio Museum Prepares To Build New Home By America’s Leading Black Architect
“As the Studio Museum prepares to break ground [on 125th Street] next year, coinciding with its 50th anniversary, [Thelma] Golden, 52, is overseeing the institution at a turning point in its history. … Ms. Golden’s name, meanwhile, keeps coming up for top posts, like those at the Brooklyn Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At the same time, Ms. Golden must defend the Studio Museum’s importance in an age when the work of African-American artists is increasingly making its way into mainstream institutions.”
With Largest Gift In Its History, San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum Begins $38M Expansion
“Museum leaders gathered Tuesday morning to release details of the $38 million expansion that will – when finished in summer 2019 – nearly double its total exhibition space. The biggest addition is a new 8,500 square-foot, column-less exhibition pavilion” designed by Kulapat Yantrasast of the firm wHY. The pavilion will be named for museum board chair Akiko Yamazaki and her husband, Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang, who have contributed $25 million for the project.
Twitter Will Try Doubling Its Character Limit – Just How Big A Deal Is This?
“To start, the feature will only be available to a random set of users on the service. But if adopted by the platform as a whole, the change will constitute one of the most fundamental changes to Twitter’s core product in years.” Robinson Meyer answers seven questions about the change, such as, “Why would Twitter do such a thing?” (money), “What do 280 characters have to do with money?”, and What does it mean for Twitter’s most (in-)famous user?”
Most Expensive Manuscript Ever Sold Goes For $35 Million
The document is the original printer’s manuscript of the Book of Mormon, sold to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the church most people know as “Mormon”) by the Community of Christ, the Independence, Missouri-based denomination formerly known as the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints.
Guggenheim Museum Gets Pushback After Withdrawing Three Works Protested By Animal-Rights Activists
Claiming that it had received threats of violence well beyond what it had encountered in the past, the Guggenheim pulled three pieces from its exhibition “Art and China After 1989: Theater of the World” – only to come under a new round of criticism from artists, curators, and PEN America for capitulating to “heightened political sensitivities that have been amplified by social media.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 09.26.17
Zero Sum Funding?
The pursuit of grants, sponsorships, and donations is a central focus of all nonprofits – the arts no less than any other type of tax exempt entity. It keeps us up at night, permeates our dreams … read more
AJBlog: Engaging Matters Published 2017-09-26
Tom Petty at the Hollywood Bowl
Last night, Tom Petty concluded a lengthy tour with the third of three shows at the Hollywood Bowl. The tour was designed to look back at 40 years with his band, The Heartbreakers, and … read more
AJBlog: CultureCrash Published 2017-09-26
Writer on a Rampage
In a tribute to the late German author Carl Weissner, who wrote experimental fiction in both English and German in addition to translating more than 100 books by dissident American and British authors, … read more
AJBlog: Straight|Up Published 2017-09-26
Guggenheim Removes Controversial Art From Exhibition
The works, all by conceptual Chinese artists, came under fire last week when activists characterized them as “instances of unmistakable cruelty against animals in the name of art.” The criticism erupted after a measured preview of the show ran in The New York Times, titled “Where the Wild Things Are: China’s Art Dreamers at the Guggenheim.” The comments on the article, however, reflected the distress many experienced even before the show’s opening.
Research: How We See Color, What We Name It…
“Why should humans all choose roughly the same places to identify transitions, when color is just photons, irreducible quanta of light on a continuous spectrum of wavelengths? Linguists might say it’s because language creates cultural norms. Anthropologists might say it’s because some colors have more cultural relevance than others. Neuroscientists and physiologists might say it’s because of the specific light-sensitive cells in the primate eye tuned to pick up red, green, and blue wavelengths and send signals to the visual cortex—trichromatic vision.”
The Psychopath’s Playlist? Study Links Music Preference To Psychopathic Personality
In a study of 200 people who listened to 260 songs, those with the highest psychopath scores were among the greatest fans of the Blackstreet number one hit No Diggity, with Eminem’s Lose Yourself rated highly too.
Moscow’s Plan For A Massive New Museum Complex
“Inspired by the 19th-century world’s fairs and exhibitions in London and Paris, VDNH began life in 1939 as an agricultural showcase for the Soviet Union, with dozens of elaborate pavilions representing the different republics and industries. In the 1990s, the site lost state funding and became a flea market. Now, like much of Moscow, it is in the throes of a massive reconstruction programme backed by the city government.”