“The background music industry – also known as music design, music consultancy or something offered as part of a broader package of ‘experiential design’ or ‘sensory marketing’ – is constantly deciding what we hear as we go about our everyday business. The biggest player in the industry, Mood Media, was founded in 2004 and now supplies music to 560,000 locations across the world, from Sainsbury’s to KFC.”
Egypt’s New National Museum Wants Rosetta Stone Back
“Dr Tarek Tawfik, director general of the Grand Egyptian Museum, risked sparking a new row over the prized artefact … The stone fragment, which dates to 196BC, is one of the British Museum’s most popular exhibits. Before it was found by accident by Napoleon’s army in 1799 nobody knew how to read hieroglyphs. Scholars were able to use the Greek inscription on it as the key to decipher them.”
What’s Unacceptable Audience Behavior? People Have Been Fighting About That For Centuries
“[The larger issue is] what happens when a large number of people are concentrated together in a public space and have different ideas of how we should all behave. … We see these moral panics in other crowded spaces, too.” And sometimes the policing of behavior scares away the very communities that arts organizarions are trying to reach out to. Lyn Gardner meets Kirsty Sedgman, author of The Reasonable Audience: Theatre Etiquette, Behaviour Policing and the Live Performance Experience.
AT&T To Yank Service Of Customers For Digital Piracy For The First Time
It’s the first time AT&T has discontinued customer service over piracy allegations since having shaped its own piracy policies last year, which is significant given it just became one of America’s major media companies.
Here’s Some Good News About Peak TV: Episodes Are Getting Shorter
“[The Amazon drama] Homecoming is just one of a raft of exceptionally good new half-hour dramas. Netflix has Maniac, Amazon also has Forever, and even Facebook has Sorry For Your Loss. Each of these shows have the traditional trappings of an hourlong, and yet they’re shorter and punchier and all the better for it. They’re necessary, too. In an age where we’re being slowly suffocated with a tower of content that nobody can fully keep on top of, a half-hour drama simplifies things.”
Russian Billionaire Who Keeps Making Art-World Headlines Detained For Questioning In Monaco
Dmitry Rybolovlev — who purchased Donald Trump’s Palm Beach mansion for way over market value, was the seller when Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi became the most expensive artwork in history, and has been suing art dealer Yves Bouvier in various countries for years — is being investigated for trying to illegally influence Monegasque judges and police with respect to his suit against Bouvier in the principality.
Using The Arts To Help Rebuild Mosul, Ravaged By Three Years Under ISIS
The Iraqi city was the largest one that the violent extremist group conquered, and while it was liberated last year, there is still wreckage (physical and psychic) everywhere. Late last month, a group from the Iraqi National Symphony organized an orchestral concert in Mosul, and the city is hosting more cultural events as well — not least to get attention from international donors who could fund reconstruction.
Using Music To Help Rebuild Mosul, Ravaged By Three Years Under ISIS
The Iraqi city was the largest one that the violent extremist group conquered, and while it was liberated last year, there is still wreckage (physical and psychic) everywhere. Late last month, a group from the Iraqi National Symphony organized an orchestral concert in Mosul, and the city is hosting more cultural events as well — not least to get attention from international donors who could fund reconstruction.
How Political Should The Art World Be?
“There’s a tendency to see the art world as separate from broader cultural, social, or political worlds, which I think is not helpful or accurate. Particularly with protests against institutions we’ve seen that issues of class, race, gender, and access are vital. Protesters come to us because they see us as part of the world, and hold us to task accordingly. We have greater legitimacy and more importance than we sometimes think we do. We have a responsibility towards the public.”
Poetry Society Of America Executive Director Steps Down
Since joining the organization in 2001, Alice Quinn has steered numerous programs that celebrate poetry through partnerships with prominent cultural organizations, including the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, the Los Angeles Public Library and the New York Botanical Garden.
What Drone Photography Brings To The Artistic Table
Drone photography could be described as a collaboration or a co-production between man and nature. It allows nature to speak on its own terms but in a novel new way. If photomicrography undresses nature, drone photography with its plumb-line overhead view shows us nature at an angle we’ve never seen before, exposing its pixel treasures, many of which throw a shade over any abstract art produced by an artist.
An Orchestra Should Be A ‘Community-Building Mechanism’, Says Oakland Symphony Music Director
For Michael Morgan, “art and politics are, to varying degrees, indivisible: There’s no either/or. In the end, he’s interested in community, in blending cultures, the power of diversity, and the intersection of music and well-being, imagination, and hope. His obligation is to find that intersection over and over again — that’s his revolution.”
Is Daniel Barenboim’s West-Eastern Divan Orchestra A Hopelessly Quixotic Enterprise?
“The group’s deceptively simple premise — that getting musicians from groups [Israel and the Arab world] that have been opposed for decades to play together would foster understanding — seems even more ambitious in this polarized age.” (Indeed, the orchestra’s current tour of the U.S. nearly collapsed when the Trump administration withheld visas for some of its members.) As the conductor told reporter Michael Cooper, “When I’m with [the musicians], it doesn’t feel quixotic at all. When I talk to you, I know it is quixotic.”
‘Insufficient Information’: Finding Of Montreal Symphony Investigation Into Charles Dutoit Allegations
An independent investigation, ordered by the orchestra’s board last year, “did not yield sufficient information in relation to allegations of sexual harassment” by Dutoit, the ensemble’s music director from 1977 to 2002. The two complainants, for undisclosed reasons, did not speak with the investigators.
Selfie-Takers Accidentally Damage Goya And Dalí Works In Russia
In a slightly different twist on the usual heedless-selfiers-wreck-priceless-art tale, a group of four girls at an exhibition in Yekaterinburg gathered for a snap on one side of a temporary wall — and on the other side were hanging Goya’s Bravissimo! etching from Los Caprichos and Dalí’s riff on said etching. The girls knocked the wall over; it landed on top of the artworks and barely missed another museumgoer. (includes video)
Actor Geoffrey Rush’s Defamation Lawsuit Is Banner Issue In Australia’s #MeToo Movement
In two front-page articles last year, the Sydney tabloid The Daily Telegraph published leaked complaints by an actress that Rush made inappropriately suggestive banter to her and (as King Lear) stroked her breast onstage as he lamented over her (Cordelia’s) body. The Oscar-Emmy-Tony-winning Rush, who claims he has suffered physical illness from stress over the reports, insists that the allegations aren’t true and sued the Telegraph for defamation.
Nine Artists Working With Artificial Intelligence
While we wait for the next AI-generated work to hit the block, there’s a lot more to learn. To find out about the interesting work being created with machine learning—and the complex boundaries it’s pushing—we’ve assembled a list of nine pioneering artists to watch.
Finally, Ballet Slippers In All Skin Tones Are Being Made Available
The move is part of a collaboration between professional company Ballet Black and dance shoe design and manufacturing company Freed of London and has been “over a year in development” according to the Ballet Black website.
Report: Poor Are Losing Out In Music Education In The UK
Children in low income households were half as likely to take music lessons. The report suggests only 19% of children from families earning less than £28,000 learned a musical instrument, compared with 40% of those in high-earning households. This is despite similar levels of interest from both groups of children. The report also suggests higher-earning parents were twice as likely to want their children to learn an instrument.
Stunts under precarious circumstances – Glass’s ‘Satyagraha’, imported from Sweden
Philip Glass used to say he never composed opera per se, but ended up rubbing shoulders with Verdi and Wagner because opera houses had the needed theatrical apparatus. After 37 years of making the opera-house rounds, Satyagraha, is no easier to define.
Leonardo Canards: Conservator Dianne Modestini Debunks Doubts Over the Elusive ‘Salvator Mundi’
Dianne Dwyer Modestini, who painstakingly restored Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi, is exasperated by the questions that have been raised about the condition and attribution of the rediscovered painting that was to have been unveiled on Sept. 18 at the Louvre Abu Dhabi but has not resurfaced since it was sold at Christie’s on Nov. 15.
Native American Group Denounces Met Museum’s Exhibition Of Indigenous Objects
“Shannon O’Loughlin, the executive director of the Association on American Indian Affairs, argues that curators ‘did not consult with affiliated tribal representatives to perform their due diligence, but their first mistake was to call these objects art’. She adds, ‘Most of these items are not art: they are ceremonial or funerary objects that belong with their original communities and could only have ended up in a private collection through trafficking and looting’. The Met counters that it has regularly conferred with Native American representatives.
New York Theatermakers Experiment With Ways To Help Colleagues With Young Children
“The question of how well — or poorly — the theater world accommodates child care has been talked about for years, and is closely bound up with the discussion of why women are so underrepresented as writers, directors, and designers at the industry’s highest, and highest-paying, levels. … The theater world is experimenting with a variety of small-scale solutions to make the juggling easier.”