This talk by the founders of of MeowWolf explains how giving participants the ability to create their own experiences in a virtual world is a powerful way to make art more accessible, meaningful, and inclusive. (includes a good history of how immersive storytelling has evolved) – American Museums (YouTube)
How Fascists Connected Themselves To Ancient Culture
Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy both proudly and explicitly connected themselves with the ancient Romans and borrowed many of their symbols — the very name “Fascist” refers to an important Roman status marker, and the Nazi Imperial Eagle is derived from the Roman standard. Himmler’s reading of antiquity, on that train in 1924, was extreme, but it was also the natural extension of the discipline’s origins; earlier classicists had simply been more genteel, or perhaps less proactive, in their application of white supremacy to antiquity.
The Art Market’s Money-Laundering Problem (And Congress’s Inadequate Response To It)
“As the proposed extension of the Bank Secrecy Act (BSA) to the arts and antiquities market awaits consideration on the United States House of Representatives floor, proponents of the art market are building consensus against the bill among both moderates and conservatives.”
St. Louis Re-Prioritizes Arts Funding To Civic Engagement
The report, titled “Arts &: A Creative Vision for St. Louis,” is all about the ampersand—the “and” generated by every arts experience, which people don’t always stop to consider. The plan is to prioritize grants for arts organizations and projects that help strengthen the overall fabric of civic life.
Chicago’s Glittering Redevelopment Plan That Became A Bellyflop
The deal was simple: The city would let developers build tall at Cityfront Center, Chicago’s largest real estate development of the 1980s. In exchange, there would be beautiful buildings, streets, parks, plazas and a riverwalk. Yet the architecture, with rare exceptions, is mediocre. The public spaces were supposed to be vibrant and interconnected. Instead, they are unfinished, underachieving, largely disjointed and even, in one case, off-limits to the public.
Drug Dealers Busted For Smuggling Meth Disguised As Faux-Aztec Statuary
“The various chunks of meth were part of a 90-pound package of miscellaneous Mexican souvenirs. Each piece had been intricately carved or molded and then painted to resemble items like masks, wall hangings, statues, and ancient calendars. However, a simple breakage in the decorative replicas revealed the deception.”
Philadelphia Remembers Gerry Lenfest As One Of America’s Great Philanthropists
In a span just shy of two decades, they gave away more than $1.3 billion to charity — money spent on expansions at the Curtis Institute of Music and Philadelphia Museum of Art, to substantially fund the creation of the Museum of the American Revolution, for college scholarships to students in rural Pennsylvania, to fund hospitals, literacy programs, and nature preserves, and on and on. Wednesday’s three-hour-plus tribute offered seemingly no end of testimony to their generosity, a montage of institutions transformed and individual lives changed.
LA’s Literary Community Furious About LA Public Library Actions In Popular Program
The Los Angeles Library Foundation on Wednesday announced the hiring of a new programming director, weeks after the organization became enmeshed in a controversy over the firings of two previous longtime directors at the library, Louise Steinman and Maureen Moore.
Starring Steven Yeun
Yeun, who played Glenn on The Walking Dead and is starring in a new Korean film called Burning (based on a short story by Haruki Murakami), says that he hopes and believes there truly will be a sea change for Asian American actors. “We live in this era that, while Joy Luck Club came out that one time, we got so many things coming up now. We got talent now. We got people everywhere. Is it still going to take some time? Yeah.”
The Myth Of Artist Agnes Martin, Recluse, Dissolves Into The Reality Of Agnes Martin, Connected And Committed To Her Community
She lived in community wherever she was, but truly found a home in Taos. “As a poor, queer female artist who suffered from schizophrenia, Martin existed on the margins of society for most of her life. After spending the 1950s living in poverty, she achieved critical success in the 1960s and commercial success thereafter. In the 1990s she had made millions off her art and was eager to repay the kindness her community had showed her during her own years of struggle.”
The True Power Of Katniss Everdeen Goes Way Beyond The ‘Hunger Games’ Rebellion Sign
The author of Belles echoes the author of An Ember in the Ashes in her appreciation for the protagonist of Suzanne Collins’ Hunger Games series (and they say we need a little more Katniss right now): “I needed to read girls like her; girls who weren’t so nice; girls so angry that their rage could topple anything in their path; girls that could face the dark; girls who could never be contained.”
The Cover Song Makes A Comeback
The status of the cover song has shape-shifted throughout pop-music history. Well into the 1950s, it barely even needed a name: It was just the routine way of doing business. During the rock era, covers became suspect as inauthentic, the stuff of the hack bar band, unless an artist “made the song their own.” With the rise of hip-hop, covers were displaced by sampling and remixes, but then samples themselves became more concealed and layered, for reasons of both art and copyright. In the 2000s and earlier this decade, the practice migrated to YouTube, where concert clips or home videos of one-off covers, rearrangements, and parodies might show off the skills and wit of amateurs and pros alike but still seldom troubled the charts—unless they also made it to soundtracks or TV ads, where acoustic remakes of once-upon-a-time hits (either twee or glum or both) have become a staple.
How Music Competitions Are Reinventing Themselves
Competitions, like the rest of the business, are redefining themselves. Rather than trying to produce the superstars of tomorrow, they’re increasingly focusing on the present: an end in themselves. Indeed, the line between the competition and other classical music organizations is increasingly blurred.
Even As Its Economy Was Melting Down, Greece Still Invested In The Arts. Why?
The principal belief is that supporting the arts and culture is not a luxury but an investment in human progress. It is the necessary scaffolding for building and sustaining civil society. It is the cornerstone for human growth and development.
We’re All About Feelings Now – How Literature Evolved Beyond Narratives
Western literature’s gradual progression from narratives that relate actions and events to stories that portray minds in all their meandering, many-layered, self-contradictory complexities. I’d often wondered, when reading older texts: Weren’t people back then interested in what characters thought and felt?
New York Museums Rescind Use Of Saudi Money For Programs
The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum said on Thursday that they would not use Saudi money for programs on Middle Eastern art that had originally been supported by groups tied to the Saudi government.
On The Differences Between Being An Actor In The US And Europe
“Certainly American culture is different from European culture. So I had expected the life of a theatre artist in Paris or London to be more refined, somehow easier, and at the same time more gratifying on a creative level than mine here in the States. But it turns out that their struggles, passions, fiscal concerns, their training, their identity issues, and the sexism they face—in other words, much of their life experience, seems very similar to my own.”
5,000-Year-Old Musical Instrument Found Near Rome
“The ceramic shell at first appeared to be one of a kind. One hypothesis was that it might have been a cheese strainer. Then, similarities were found with two other objects, found near Naples, that had been convincingly identified as sound boxes for musical instruments.” One doctoral student determined that it was either a bowed lute or a lyre, and she made speculative reconstructions of each, using a copy of the ceramic shell and materials that were available circa 3,000 B.C. (includes sound clips)
Brahms: Rhythms That Fight (That’s The Secret)
Polyrhythms run through Brahms’s music like an obsessive-compulsive streak. You don’t have to be musically literate to know the bumpy feel of a cross-rhythm. Two-against-three can be a parent strolling hand in hand with a skipping child. Triplets on top of eighth notes are like a slow canter next to a trot: The two horses might move at the same speed, but you wouldn’t want them pulling a carriage together.
Anthea Bell, Who Translated Kafka And Astérix, Dead At 82
She was a widely admired translator of German literature in particular, introducing works by Sebald, Zweig, and Freud as well as Kafka to anglophone readers. But she’s best known for her translations of children’s books from German and French, especially the Asterix series of comics, whose puns she cleverly rendered in English.
Cicely Berry, Legendary Voice Coach For Actors, Dead At 92
“[She] was the best-known voice coach of her generation, though the term vastly underrates what she did and her attitude towards it.” In three books and 45 years at the Royal Shakespeare Company (along with extensive work elsewhere), she transformed the way that voice work for actors was taught, and even conceived.
The New American Songbook: The 30 Hits Of The Past 25 Years That We’ll Be Hearing For The Next 100
“Separating the most durable tunes from the millions of other would-be classics is no easy task. So we asked critics, musicians, and industry professionals to predict which [ones will last].Some of these songs our children will belt in sports arenas. Others our grandchildren will dance to at their weddings.”
Walton Family Foundation Funds New Teaching Program To Increase Diversity In Museum Staff
The charitable foundation of the family that founded Walmart has given $5.4 million to Spelman College, a historically black institution in Atlanta, and the Atlanta University Center to create an art history and curatorial studies undergraduate program.
Ballet Culture Is Finally Changing, Because It Has To: Two New York Times Critics Reflect On #MeToo And The City Ballet Lawsuit
A pair of essays, by Gia Kourlas on how New York City Ballet’s dancers are standing up for decency and respect rather than defending the behavior of their now-departed colleagues, and by Siobhan Burke, wondering why the union that’s supposed to represent all the dancers is fighting for the two who were fired rather than the colleagues they demeaned in their texts.
Banksy Really Meant To Shred The Entire Painting, But The Shredder Jammed
“In [a] video posted on Tuesday entitled Shred the Love (the director’s cut), Banksy shows himself constructing the shredding mechanism inside a frame. It then cuts to the auction room and the moment of partial destruction. At the end, the video notes: ‘In rehearsals it worked every time …’ as it shows the piece going the whole way through the shredding machine.”