Some 332 violins, 76 violas and, 73 cellos and 19 double basses are available to view, along with hundreds of other stringed instruments from around the world, and thousands of wind, keyboard, percussion and electronic examples, spanning 5,000 years of human history.
What Mazes Tell Us About Ourselves
Culturally, mazes are now massively resurgent. Practically every country park has its hedge maze, mirror maze or maize maze – and so do a growing number of churches and cathedrals. In virtual reality, notably, the maze forms the basic substructure of innumerable videogames. So why do mazes draw us in? And what do they do to us while we are there?
Denver Art Museum Suffers ‘Data Security Incident’ With Personal, Financial Info
“The Denver Art Museum warned 800 people this month of a data breach that included sensitive personal and financial information about its donors, customers, and current and former employees, according to a letter obtained by The Denver Post.”
Is This The City Of The Future Way Out In The Sonoran Desert?
“A portmanteau of ‘architecture’ and ‘ecology,’ arcology was first theorized by the Italian architect Paolo Soleri in the late 1960s. Billed by its creator as the blueprint for a “city in the image of man,” arcologies challenged the notion of the urban environment as something separate from and antagonistic to nature. In Soleri’s cities, cars would be useless and the very notion of roads would be abolished as divisive constructs. Work and living spaces would be nearly indistinguishable. There’d be no need to ever use a light bulb during the day or air conditioning during the summer, even in the desert.”
Watch How A Historic 16th-Century Church Crumbled In The Mexican Earthquake
The Ex-Convent of San Guillermo Abad in Totolapan, founded in 1534, suffered severe damage in the 7.1 magnitude quake on Sept. 19 – and security cameras recorded that damage from multiple angles. (includes video and audio)
How To Fix Toronto’s Public Art
Because of its relationship to development — and the rigid nature of that policy — public art mainly grows in the shadows of new building projects. That means large swathes of the city’s inner suburbs have been neglected. The report recommends pooling art funds contributed by developers and by the city’s own capital projects to target underserved areas.
Using 3-D Holograms To Share Holocaust Survival Stories Onstage
“[Fritzie] Fritzshall is one of 13 Holocaust survivors who tell their stories through holographic images that invite the audience to ask questions, creating what feels like a live conversation.”
Telling The Stories Hollywood Won’t – Producer Christine Vachon
“Vachon, now 55, has either launched or been instrumental in developing the careers of such idiosyncratic talents as Todd Solondz (Happiness), Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don’t Cry), Mary Harron (I Shot Andy Warhol), and John Cameron Mitchell (Hedwig and the Angry Inch)” – not to mention Todd Haynes, from Poison to Velvet Goldmine to Far From Heaven to Carol. “She has an instinct for which voices are best suited to tell which stories, and which audiences will turn out to see them. She likes working with first-time directors ‘because they are often telling a story they’ve waited their whole lives to tell.'” A Q&A with Dana Stevens.
What It’s Like To Be The Only Black Art Commissioner In A City (Exhausting)
“As an arts commissioner swept up in a zeitgeist where all public displays of art honoring problematic white men are on red alert, [Kilolo] Luckett is in a position where she must not only help [Pittsburgh] navigate this space, but she also gets to help discern what message the city sends to the people. As a professional art historian, this is an uneasy dance of preserving artistic freedoms and expressions and also making sure decisions are not merely capitulations to political correction.”
Former Tate Britain Director Is Revolutionizing Lisbon’s Gulbenkian Museum
“When [Penelope] Curtis arrived in 2015, the museum’s design had barely changed since it opened in 1969. … [One of her main projects is] to open up Gulbenkian’s ‘rather rigidly divided’ collection and shine a spotlight on its Islamic holdings.”
How Fear Can Be a Positive Thing
Given that real fear can be scarring and unpleasant, there’s a temptation to believe that the best way to deal with it is to avoid it at all costs. But science and philosophy often suggest otherwise. Fear can be one of the great sources of personal improvement. In particular, fear can help people cultivate several classic virtues that religious figures, sages, and secular moral traditions have all seen as essential for living a well-ordered life.
The Popular Myths Of Martin Luther Aren’t True. Nonetheless…
“Not only were there no eyewitnesses; Luther himself, ordinarily an enthusiastic self-dramatizer, was vague on what had happened. He remembered drawing up a list of ninety-five theses around the date in question, but, as for what he did with it, all he was sure of was that he sent it to the local archbishop. Furthermore, the theses were not, as is often imagined, a set of non-negotiable demands about how the Church should reform itself in accordance with Brother Martin’s standards. Rather, like all “theses” in those days, they were points to be thrashed out in public disputations, in the manner of the ecclesiastical scholars of the twelfth century or, for that matter, the debate clubs of tradition-minded universities in our own time.”
Why We Want To Assign Blame For Natural Events
“When weird things happen, we still crave the sense of control we get from believing that there’s a reason, that they lay bare the good and evil in society. The human toll of natural disasters tells a story of collective apathy that allows a famine to unfold; corporate greed and unchecked development causes a flood. When nature throws something unexpected our way – as it did to us here in Houston, when I was writing this article from the island that used to be my neighbourhood – we are all apt to look, despite ourselves, for meaning in the madness.”
LA Phil’s New Principal Guest Conductor Makes An Entrance
It is rare enough with American orchestras to appoint a principal guest. The reason for the post more often than not is to fill in something lacking in a music director. The last time the L.A. Phil had principal guests was three decades ago, when it brought in the especially versatile and tuned-in young conductors Michael Tilson Thomas and Simon Rattle to complement an old master, Carlo Maria Giulini. In the case of Mälkki, the natural first reaction may be that she’s a woman. While American orchestras have begun hiring female music directors, this is the biggest crack, thus far, in the increasingly fragile glass ceiling about to crash down on top-tier orchestras.
Philip Glass, The Ultimate Collaborator
For all a director’s authority, film is the most collaborative art form, and Glass is surely the most collaborative artist in history. His dozens of movies are only a small part of his prolific output, which includes music for well over 50 operas, dance works and music theater pieces; 11 symphonies; hoards of concertos and other orchestra and chamber pieces. All that and the reams of music for the Philip Glass Ensemble, which he founded 49 years ago and is still going strong, as it demonstrated at the Ace on Sunday.
An Opera Built On Sounds Too Low For Us To Hear
“For most of the work’s duration, twenty-four subwoofers, placed with their cones pointed upward, emit electronic tones that vibrate at a frequency of 10.67 hertz, or around ten oscillations per second. … Human ears can’t detect sounds much below twenty hertz, but you register their presence all the same. … The body is listening even when the ears tune out.” Alex Ross checks out Ashley Fure’s “opera for objects,” The Force of Things.
After 91 Years, New York City’s Notorious Cabaret Law Is Repealed
“A nearly century-old law that turned New York bars into no-dancing zones, prevented singers like Billie Holiday and Ray Charles from performing and drew protest from Frank Sinatra, is finally set to be struck down.”
‘Today’s Gossip Is Tomorrow’s News’ – Amid The Sexual Harassment Firestorm, A We-Told-You-So By The Founder Of Gawker
Nick Denton: “The headlines are shocking – unless you read Gawker before it was shut down … Those first accounts of sexual harassment – even if anonymous or thinly sourced – give confidence to victims that they are not alone. Gossip, though it draws those motivated by envy and resentment, is also a tool of the powerless.”
The Remarkable Magnetic North Theatre Festival Gets A Second Chance
“For one thing, it goes to small places other than Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver in the country, where people are underserved in terms of having access to the work of Canadian artists. It is also a gathering place where everyone from students to audiences to artists can come together to meet and talk; and it is also a showcase for Canadian artists who don’t have a lot of platforms for their work. There are more now – but an opportunity for presenters to see a lot of Canadian work in one place in a short period of time is very important.”
What Data Scientists Are Learning From Crunching Literature
The oddest finding may be the sharp increase in an innocuous little word: “and.” In 1946, “and” accounted for around 2.6 percent of the words in the reports, a frequency similar to that of average academic prose. But by 2015, as this chart shows, its share had almost doubled, reflecting what the researchers describe as the growing tendency toward long lists of nouns that create the illusion of activity, sometimes despite a “total absence of logic.”
Data: A Revolution In Understanding Literature? (Controversial, To Say The Least)
Literary criticism typically tends to emphasize the singularity of exceptional works that have stood the test of time. But the canon, Franco Moretti argues, is a distorted sample. Instead, he says, scholars need to consider the tens of thousands of books that have been forgotten, a task that computer algorithms and enormous digitized databases have now made possible. “We know how to read texts,” he wrote in a much-quoted essay included in his book “Distant Reading,” which won the 2014 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. “Now let’s learn how to not read them.”
Teachers At NY Arts School Of “Fame” Renown Protest Arts Cutbacks
Founded as an arts school in 1936, LaGuardia was immortalized in the 1980 film “Fame.” Alumni include a galaxy of stars such as Liza Minnelli, Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Vanessa Williams and Jennifer Aniston, along with top artists, composers and musicians.
Should Conditions In Prison Really Be Worse Than On The Outside?
“Why are the carceral practices in the US so harsh? Part of the reason is the vestige of a Christian-inspired desire to reform the offender’s soul. Around the time of the Revolution, the penitentiary’s ‘unsocial manner of life’ based on order, obedience and silence could seem plausible only to those who thought that they could achieve a ‘new victory of mind over matter’. Today, prolonged solitary confinement is coming to be seen for what it is: torture.”
Galleries Hit By A Wave Of Cyber-Scams
The fraud is relatively simple. Criminals hack into an art dealer’s email account and monitor incoming and outgoing correspondence. When the gallery sends a PDF invoice to a client via email following a sale, the conversation is hijacked. Posing as the gallery, hackers send a duplicate, fraudulent invoice from the same gallery email address, with an accompanying message instructing the client to disregard the first invoice and instead wire payment to the account listed in the fraudulent document.
British Museum’s Deal With Abu Dhabi Is Probably Dead
“Delays in the construction of the Norman Foster-designed Zayed National Museum in Abu Dhabi means that an agreement with British Museum – which was to help curate exhibitions and lend the new institution around 500 valuable artifacts – is unlikely to be realized.”