Sheikh Saud bin Mohammed Al-Thani, “at one time the biggest art collector in the world … [and] a distant cousin of the current Emir, served as Qatar’s minister of culture from 1997 until 2005 and oversaw an ambitious museum building programme for the oil and gas-rich Gulf state.”
So Who Paid $101 Million For A Giacometti Last Week?
There was only one bidder for the sculptor’s 1950 piece Chariot at Sotheby’s last week. That bidder was anonymous at the time, but someone has blown his cover …
Quentin Tarantino Says He’ll Retire After Ten Films
“I don’t believe you should stay onstage until people are begging you to get off. I like the idea of leaving them wanting a bit more. I do think directing is a young man’s game, and … I want to go out while I’m still hard.”
“The Realism Canard” And What Movies Do To Our Brains
“The realism canard” is what critic Isaac Butler calls the tendency to find fault with works of fiction, especially films, because events and conditions in them aren’t like real life. (For instance, in outer space, you can’t hear explosions.) Problem is, our brains are fooled by filmed images a lot more than we’d like to think.
Alt-Rock Becomes Chinese
Liang Long, lead singer of the band Second Hand Roses, “strutted across the stage … wearing a red floral-print jacket and snug red shorts. The jacket, adorned with dozens of gold tassels, was as majestically fussy as Michael Jackson’s, but with a more playful touch. … [The guitarist’s] red tutu bounced in time with the beat, and the crowd jumped along with him.”
Watching Ballerinas Prepare Their Pointe Shoes
Some dancers rip them apart and glue them back together, some shellac them, some cut out the material around the toes, some yank out the sole lining. Everyone does it differently, and many spend hours at it. (includes videos)
Russia Launches Sputnik, A New International Radio/Internet News Network
“Russia launched a new state-funded foreign news service Monday to challenge the ‘aggressive propaganda’ of the West and provide an ‘alternative interpretation’ of global events. The new media brand, Sputnik, is the reworked foreign language service of the state-owned RIA Novosti news agency and Voice of Russia radio.”
Jerry Tallmer, 93, Theater Critic Who Founded The Obie Awards
“The Village Voice was a young paper and Mr. Tallmer its young theatre critic when, in 1955, he decided the burgeoning Off-Broadway scene south of 14th Street merited a practical response outside of weekly reviews. He hatched the idea of the Obie Awards, a downtown answer to the uptown Tonys.” He went on to spend 30 years at The New York Post.
Sendak Estate Sued By Philly Museum And Library Over Rare Books
“The executors of Maurice Sendak’s will have not complied with his wishes to bequeath his multimillion-dollar rare-book collection to the Rosenbach Museum and Library and for the revered author and illustrator’s work to continue to be displayed at the Rosenbach. So claims a lawsuit filed last week in northern Fairfield County, Conn., [by] the Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia.”
The Women Tagging And Painting The Streets Of Bogotá
“[In Colombia’s capital], where graffiti is classified as a violation rather than a crime, street artists do not have to hide.” Here, three of the most active talk about the challenges of working as a street artist while female.
Surprise Winner Of Canada’s $100K Giller Prize
Montreal music blogger Sean Michaels took the award for his debut novel, Us Conductors, a thoroughly fictionalized account of the life of Leon Theremin, inventor of you-know-what.
The Songwriters Of “Frozen” Have A New Musical On The Way
Up Here, by Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, “will tell the story of a socially awkward computer repairman named Dan who becomes attracted to Lindsay, a t-shirt designer. But his overactive imagination keeps getting in the way of a potential relationship.”
How The Bond Between Two Gay Men Produced Some Of World War I’s Finest Poetry
When Siegfried Sassoon met Wilfred Owen at a war hospital in Scotland.
Have Recordings Hurt The Art Of Piano-Playing?
Stuart Isacoff: “A performance should be unpredictable – an adventure. Today we often demand instead that an interpretation be unblemished, ‘correct’ – something to be memorialized and imitated. (Those of us who teach can attest to the number of students who see their job as learning to duplicate exactly a particular recording of a work by a recognized artist.)”
Net Neutrality For Dummies
Matthew Inman explains it all simply and clearly for those who don’t yet get it. (includes gratuitous references to crab tacos)
Some People Are Biologically Incapable of Dancing
“Most bad dancers have nothing but their own awkwardness and self-consciousness to blame, but for a few, a complete lack of rhythm could have a biological explanation, suggests some new research published this week … It’s called beat-deafness, and it’s a sensory deficit analogous to being tone-deaf, or color-blind.”
Top Posts From AJBlogs 11.10.14
Opening Soon In Tacoma: New Wing, New Collection
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2014-11-10
Is Opera Really “Dead”?
AJBlog: CultureCrash Published 2014-11-10
“Meaningfully Profitable”: Sotheby’s Bill Ruprecht on the Performance of Auction Guarantees
AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2014-11-10
Zurbarán In The News!
AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2014-11-09
Laugh, and you laugh alone
(Terry Teachout on pianist Harriet Cohen)
AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2014-11-10
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Tuning Prisoners Into A Human Piano
“In music class, these men were able to temporarily change their identity from prisoner to student, from being numbered to being human. Music became a life force, providing vital human connection in an environment where social interaction is suppressed.”
President Obama Weighs In On Net Neutrality, Calling The Internet ‘A Utility’
“The White House proposal calls for no paid prioritization, no blocking of any content that is not illegal, and no throttling of Internet services, where some customers have their Internet speeds artificially slowed down.”
How Language Becomes Slang
“What counts as slang? Where does it come from? And why does it exert such a powerful hold on the middle–class imagination?”
Jez Butterworth Downsizes After “Jerusalem”
“The River is a different beast: eighty minutes to Jerusalem‘s three hours and contemplative where the earlier play was raucous, turning on the intimacies of a couple rather than the carnival-like energy of a cast of fourteen.” What’s more, as the playwright says, the star of the show is arguably a dead sea trout.
Read It And Reap: Starting A Glossy Quarterly For Farm-To-Table Foodies
Modern Farmer‘s founding editor describes it as “the farming magazine for media professionals”. Sound silly? It won a National Magazine Award after only three issues.