Erica Eisen tells the story of the Dunhuang Diamond Sūtra, a Chinese block-printed scroll dated 868 CE that was bricked up in a cave for eight centuries and ended up at the British Library (which the Chinese government is not happy about).
With String Quartets In A Brewery, NC Classical Radio Station Courts New Listeners
“Organized by WDAV in Davidson, and held at a brewery in Charlotte, the quarterly Small Batch Concert Series has attracted standing-room-only crowds of more than 200 people for its four concerts to date” — a turnout “much bigger” than previous station events, says the general manager, who adds that at every concert he encounters people who didn’t know that metro Charlotte even had a full-time classical radio station.
The Saucer Has Landed! Taiwan Opens Its New National Arts Center
Part landscape, part architecture, the 1.51-million-square-foot National Kaohsiung Center for the Arts blurs the boundaries between indoors and out, solid and void. Floating at one end of a 116-acre park that had been a military base before the project began 12 years ago, the $280-million complex brings together four performance spaces under one enormous roof and a fifth one on top of it.
Sotheby’s Banksy Stunt Illustrates The Art Of Stunt (Or Stunt Of Art)
“Art, which once reflected values aloof from simple (or complicated) greed, has been insidiously absorbed into the economy of commercial products,” Gary Indiana wrote in 1986, “its cash worth determined by dicey variables unlike the ones fixed for ordinary commodities.” The difference now is that the variables that determine art’s monetary value are no longer seen as dicey. Instead, they’re understood as art itself.
Reviving Latin As A Spoken Language Is A Politically Fraught Project
“Latin’s revival, among young teachers on the one hand and nostalgic nationalists on the other, appears to flourish on two opposing ends. But while they may seem to be separate, the two are inexorably and uneasily linked through the history of white men’s appropriation of Latin as a marker of superiority.”
In The Age Of The Museum Of Ice Cream And The Creation Museum, What Does ‘Museum’ Even Mean?
Philip Kennicott: “It isn’t easy coming up with a definition capacious enough to include the richness and diversity of the museum world without being so wide open that it might as well encompass theme parks and drinking holes that just happen to include the word ‘Museum’ in their name.”
We Need to Talk About Non-Consensual Audience Participation
“Artists who cleverly use participatory moments can make bold statements about the boundaries between performer and spectator, onstage and off. … But all the experiences I’ve loved have had something in common: They’ve given audiences a choice. A few weeks back, I had a starkly different experience.” Lauren Wingenroth describes what went wrong with that experience (Boris Charmatz’s 10000 Gestures, if you want to know), and suggests one simple step performers could take to avoid crossing the line from challenging to obnoxious or worse.
‘It’s Something Of A Counter-Museum’ — American Poetry Museum Operates Without Exhibition Space
Board chair Jon West-Bey, who developed the institution based on his graduate thesis: “We wanted to put programs before space. We didn’t want to be the type of place where we said, ‘If we build it, they’ll come.’ It was more, ‘We’ll come to you.'”
Greece Is Finally Crawling Out Of Its Economic Disaster — What’s Next For Its Art World?
“Since Greece officially ended its decade-long economic bailout this summer, its government has been tentatively moving forward with plans to ease austerity measures on its citizens. … We asked figures from Greece’s art world to reflect on the economic crisis and its effect on the arts, and to look towards the future.”
Could New EU Rules On Sharing Content Save The Arts’ Middle Classes?
“The reality is a lot of the profits go to a few super tech houses in Silicon Valley and the result is you lose entire segments of the cultural creation population,” says John Degen, executive director of The Writers’ Union of Canada and chair of the International Authors Forum. “You end up either with superstar authors, or a vast underclass wanting to be superstars and no middle class. It’s been completely hollowed out.”
Irish Arts Funding Up 10 Percent, To Highest In Ten Years
The figure falls short of an historic high of €83 million (£72.7 million) in 2007 but is being seen as a significant step towards Irish taoiseach Leo Varadkar’s 2017 commitment to doubling government support for the arts within seven years.
Small UK Music Venues Are Shutting Down. Is It Because Of Robots?
“Music has become very open source. The channels in which you discover new artists have changed drastically. We can’t have our culture curated by robots; it has to be people who know what they’re talking about. We need cultural wayfinders who are willing to take risks.”
Sometimes, Theatre Can Feel A Bit Too Topical (Even When It’s About 1977, Or 1897)
What it’s like to go to the theatre and see a play about the Constitution right now: “The play’s concerns could hardly have felt more viscerally urgent. In the row behind me, a woman wept deep, grieving tears — a kind of crying so suffused with pain that we’re not used to hearing it in public, even in a darkened theater. But this is not an ordinary time.”
Carol Hall, Who Wrote The Music And Lyrics For ‘The Best Little Whorehouse In Texas,’ Has Died At 82
This is how it all began: “Ms. Hall was enjoying moderate success as a singer and songwriter when, developing an idea first hatched during a dinner party conversation, she, Peter Masterson and Larry L. King created Best Little Whorehouse, a comedy based on an article Mr. King had written in 1974 for Playboy. It concerned the moralistic efforts to close down a real-life Texas brothel known as the Chicken Ranch (because some customers paid in chickens) that had operated for years.”
The Complicated Modernist Architecture Of The Former Yugoslavia
Yugoslavia was a modernist construct as a country, and the architecture bred unity as well. “Modernism was as much a part of the taste and tang of the place as tiny cups of Turkish coffee and milk sold in heat-sealed plastic bags.”
The Long-Delayed (And Sadly Still Necessary) Vengeance Of Artemnesia Gentileschi
The artist fought hard for her place in the art world. And when men punished her for it, “she turned the horror of her own life into scenes of women’s vengeance on the men at whose hands they had suffered. She used biblical stories to portray, in exquisite paintings, her fury at the sexual violence she herself had endured.”
Museums Taking Money From Saudi Arabia Reassess Their Priorities After A Journalist’s Murder
Hm. “For years, nonprofits from museums to major universities have been strengthening ties with the oil kingdoms of the Middle East as a way to broaden their offerings, foster cross-cultural dialogue and obtain access to those countries’ considerable riches.” Great goals! But … museums have a lot to evaluate right now.
The Joys Of A Midnight Book Launch Don’t Fade In Adulthood
Well, at least not when the book is a new one from Haruki Murakami. There are contests, and there are ghost cats and there’s pasta. “When during a quiz at the Three Lives launch party a woman won a large tote bag containing a bag of pasta and a jar of tomato sauce, she got the biggest cheers of the night.”
Renovating Marfa
Six of Donald Judd’s buildings in the Texas town are getting a facelift and, in some cases, much more than that: “It will add 26,500 square feet of new program space and make open to the public for the first time another 16,000 square feet.”
What The Heck: All Of The Songs From ‘A Star Is Born,’ Ranked
Alert: All of the songs are – if you like pop music, of course – pretty good. “The album has been the gift that keeps on giving.”
Sweden’s Nationalmuseum Joins The 21st Century
The museum was closed for five years – until this weekend, when it became the most recent expression of a long-distant dream: “Though it took decades to realize, the idea to design a building to house the collections of King Gustav III was first hatched in 1792.”
Why Does Cinema Like To Torture Children?
Well, teenagers and other young people still make up most of the audiences for movies – “so it makes sense that cinema reflects problems that affect them – police racism and far-right violence, yes, but economic and environmental hostilities, too. In the tumult of 1968, there was talk of a ‘war against the young.’ Fifty years later, that just sounds like how it is – and a war creates war movies.”
Maryse Conde Wins The ‘Alt-Nobel’ Prize For Literature
The Guadaloupean writer, author of I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem and other books, won The New Academy Prize in Literature, “a new prize established by a group of over 100 Swedish cultural figures as a substitute for this year’s Nobel in Literature, which was not awarded for the first time since 1949 because of a sexual misconduct scandal.”
What the doctor ordered
Doctors will be able to prescribe visits to the Montreal Museum of Fine Art for their patients, reports the Gazette: Doctors will each be able to assign up to 50 museum prescriptions over the course
Homage to Félicien Rops
“The evil which the curiosity about the past uncovers marches in accelerating pursuit of the horrors lurking in the present . . . “That is a comment by Cyril Connolly about a very different work