Based on a study of Leonardo’s portraits (including Salvator Mundi), a research opthalmologist argues that the artist had a rare form on strabismus, “a binocular vision disorder characterized by the partial or complete inability to maintain eye alignment on a fixed object.”
Arts Orgs In Birmingham Face Third Round Of Funding Cuts In Four Years
“The mooted cut – which would amount to just under £1m (30%) across the entire arts portfolio – would be on top of a combined £1.7m reduction in 2017 (34%), and a 25% cut the year before. It comes less than a year after the [city] council announced its intention to hold arts funding at a standstill until 2020.”
The World’s Biggest Arts Center Just Opened In Taiwan
By turns galumphing and graceful, the roughly £260m hulk contains an opera house, concert hall, theatre and recital hall, seating up to 7,000 people within its curvaceous shell. As Taiwan faces ever more pressure for assimilation from mainland China, whose cultural building boom has led to a new museum or concert hall open practically every week in recent years, the National Kaohsiung Centre for the Arts, AKA Weiwuying, is a monumental statement that this plucky nation means business on the international cultural stage.
The Moment When Poetry And Punk Collided
The day that Patti Smith and Sam Shepard met, she didn’t even know his real name (nor did she for a very long time afterward), but their meeting changed theatre, poetry, and punk.
Why Did Sesame Street, Such A Happy Show, Want To Feature A Grump Like Oscar The Grouch?
It’s all thanks to a cab driver from the Bronx, who drove Muppeteer Carol Spinney to his first meeting with Jim Henson.
This Is What Germans, Watching Brexit, Are Thinking About Great Britain
Whew: “If you act like you are the center of the world, you should actually be the center, or something close to it. As things currently stand, though, the British soon won’t even be within shouting distance of the center of Europe. The United Kingdom is currently demonstrating how a country can make a fool of itself before the eyes of the entire world.”
Cynthia Erivo, Getting Closer To That EGOT
The British actor who won the Emmy, Grammy and Tony as Celie in the Broadway revival of A Color Purple is about to be on the big screen in two different movies. “I am not aiming for [the Oscar]. … I’m aiming to do the work well, and if by chance that comes in my direction, I will be welcoming it with open arms.”
The Point Where The Filmmakers Became A Part Of Their Documentary
The makers of Making a Murderer created a second series, but a fair amount of it is about what changed after their documentary series exploded onto Netflix in 2015.
What Robert Glasper’s Monthlong Residency At The Blue Note Means For Jazz
Some candor, some mistakes, some crossover. “As he’s helped to wash away artificial divides between jazz and other contemporary black music, Mr. Glasper has spoken with a casual candor not typical of jazz musicians. ‘If you ever heard Miles Davis talk, I’m no different than Miles,’ Mr. Glasper said, sipping a cocktail in his Blue Note dressing room earlier this month. ‘His freedom in talking about where he is in the music and what he’s trying to do.'”
Wait, Is *That* Song In ‘A Star Is Born’ Supposed To Be Good – Or Terrible?
The journalist, before interviewing the song’s writer: “If the song is so paper-thin, why can’t I stop singing it under my breath? And why has the internet been moved to slap ‘Why Did You Do That?’ on top of videos of dancing robots and gyrating Pokemon? Is the song, with its xylophone intro and unpretentious pop charm, actually a stealth treasure?”
The Saskatoon Symphony Is Moving Offices After The Executive Director Was Stabbed
Saskatoon is cold, and the office was near a bus stop, before a man entered the office and stabbed the executive director in the eye with the blunt end of a fork. “As an arts organization, we’re really open to the public and we want people to be able to interact with us in all ways. … We want people to come in and warm up if they’re standing out in the cold when it’s -40 C and -50, and with our windows, you can see the bus coming so it is kind of the perfect warm-up spot.” Not anymore.
Is Paris Overtaking London In The Art Fair Scene?
Brexit, and all of the uncertainty surrounding it, might be giving Paris an edge. “President Emmanuel Macron of France seems to scent an opening. The president was scheduled to give a cocktail reception at the Élysée Palace on Friday ‘in honor of artists and creation’ on the occasion of FIAC 2018 including fair exhibitors. No French president has hosted such an event since 1985.”
When You Get A Romanov To Critique Amazon’s ‘The Romanoffs’
The Grand Duchess Maria of Russia, great-great-granddaughter of Czar Nicholas II (she lives in Spain) isn’t impressed, or so said her people. “The chancellery would not have issued the release at all if The Romanoffs were simply dull, the release went on. ‘Dullness may be disagreeable, but it seldom causes offense or insult. … Alas, to the series creator’s great discredit, The Romanoffs manages to do both.'”
Evelyn Anthony, Writer Of Spy Stories, Has Died At 92
She entered a field dominated by men like John Le Carré and Ian Fleming, and found fertile ground in the rivalries among Britain’s intelligence services. Getting to know actual WWII spies changed her writing, her life, and the genre.
A Second-Generation Playwright Who Took Her Mother’s Advice
Or rather, she took her mother’s story and melded it into a new play. Playwright Jaclyn Backhaus on why her new play includes pirates: “It’s a pirate attitude that got my mom to where she is. … t’s a pirate attitude that lot of people with dreams face when they’re trying to attain them.”
What Life’s Like For A Multitasking Creator
Alicia Jo Rabins, on pulling together discussions among writer/musicians about serving two different disciplines: “It’s not that unusual to work in multiple disciplines, but sometimes I feel a bit lonely about it. For so many of us, there’s no single word to describe our practice, no easy answer to the question ‘what do you do?'”
The Instagram Account That Started As A Lark And Became An Art Exhibit
Guadalupe Rosales started with some 1990s photos of friends, photos called “star shots” from mall photography studios. From there, her work became an Instagram archive to catalogue the history of Mexican Americans in Los Angeles. “‘I’ve gotten so many emails, people thanking me, saying, ‘I’m so glad that there is something out there that is representing a part of our culture,’ Rosales says of her Instagram accounts. ‘It’s nice to hear that. It validates that there was something missing — part of history.'”
Why We Needed A New History Of The United States
Jill Lepore has surmised, is that too much historical writing—and perhaps too much nonfiction in general—proceeds without many of the qualities that readers recognize as essential to experience: “humor, and art, and passion, and love, and tenderness, and sex… and fear, and terror, and the sublime, and cruelty.” Things that she calls “organic to the period, and yet lost to us.” Lepore’s training as a historian, she’s said, tried to teach her that these things did not contain worthy explanations. In graduate school her interest in them “looked like a liability, and I took note.”
Propwatch: the curtain in ‘Wise Children’
Is a curtain – that fabric lodged in the fabric of the building – a prop? Usually, no; but Vicki Mortimer’s design for Wise Children – adapted from Angela Carter’s deliciously rorty final novel – includes mobile pictures of stage curtains of various sizes, from toy-theatre miniature to human-height-plus. Identical in all but scale, they present the very quintessence of curtain.