“While no date has been set, [the Detroit Repertory Theatre’s] longtime artistic director and co-founder, Bruce Millan — who helped launch the company in 1957 — has announced he’s begun planning for his retirement. When that happens, Leah Smith, the Rep’s marketing and development director, will step into his considerable shoes. The Detroit News spoke with Millan and Smith at the theater last week.”
When Oxford’s Library Literally Branded Dirty Books With A Scarlet Letter
Well, okay, the letter wasn’t really scarlet; it was black, but nevertheless … Beginning in 1882, when the Bodleian Library overhauled its cataloguing system, the Greek letter phi (Φ) was branded onto the spines of books deemed to be “Obscene literature in general” or “Drawings and photographs of nudes and similar subjects.” These books — which ran from an illustrated edition of Ovid’s love poetry to Joyce’s Ulysses to Madonna’s Sex to a Monty Python volume — were kept under lock and key, available only with a specific referral from a professor. The Φ system was in use until, wait for it, 2010.
How An Archaeologist Identified A 6,000-Year-Old Musical Instrument
“Marilyn Martorano first laid eyes on the long, baguette-shaped rocks almost four decades ago, as a volunteer at what is now Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve in southern Colorado. The clearly hand-shaped stones, which had been discovered in the area, were housed in the on-site museum when Martorano first saw them. They were a strange set of artifacts for which no one had yet determined a use.” Thirty years later, a video someone sent her made her realize that the rocks made up a percussion instrument now called a lithophone.
Jean Tinguely’s Extravagantly Odd Music Machine Is Back In Action
“A year after it was silenced [from decades of wear and tear], Jean Tinguely’s beloved clanging, banging, creaking, groaning music machine Méta-Harmonie II is ready to go back into action at the Museum Tinguely in Basel following a laborious year-long restoration of many of its parts.”
Puns Are Not The Lowest Form Of Humor – Rather The Contrary, In Fact
“Despite its bad reputation, punning is, in fact, among the highest displays of wit. Indeed, puns point to the essence of all true wit — the ability to hold in the mind two different ideas about the same thing at the same time. And the pun’s primacy is demonstrated by its strategic use in the oldest sacred stories, texts, and myths.” Indeed, the fact that we think Adam and Eve ate an apple is due to a pun.
For A Producer, Knowing When And How To Close A Play Is As Important As Opening It
“One of the industry’s faults is that producers can find themselves in financial trouble and in a bid not to lose face may not want to tell anyone else about it. Invariably, this sees the situation escalate to crisis point, and by that time with the problems apparent, they’re often irrevocable.”
In A New, Oscar-Tipped Netflix Movie, The Writer And Director Got To Express The Absurdities Of Her Own Experience
And that director, Tamara Jenkins, “is getting increasingly frustrated by its billing. ‘It’s not just a women’s infertility comedy. It’s about survival. It’s about humanity. It’s about growing. It’s about mortality. It’s about gentrification.'”
A French Street Artist Anonymously Invades Los Angeles
How anonymous is the artist known as “Invader”? Interviewing him is “a bit like a toddler playing Peekaboo who covers his face thinking no one in the room can see him. Invader is clearly tall and slim, nearing 50, with thin lips and narrow cheeks that are peppered with graying stubble. He has clean, manicured nails. Tufts of dark and silvery hair creep out from under his cap. He smells of a freshly-finished cigarette.”
Why Is Harry Potter Still Going, And Will JK Rowling Ever Stop?
Seriously, is that ring on her finger just to remind us that she’s flipping us off and taking all of our money with every new book, movie, play, script, what have you? “At this point, the whole thing feels like a Cruciatus curse (often used on Muggles): it’s all very painful, and I wish it would stop.”
Study: It’s Distressingly Easy To Believe Your Own Lies
After they finished lying to her, researcher Danielle Polage asked the students to again rate their certainty that each of these events had or had not happened. Fascinatingly (and a little creepily), subjects showed a statistically significant change in their beliefs, indicating that they became less sure that untrue events hadn’t happened to them after saying that they had. Conversely, when subjects were later asked to deny events that had happened to them, they became less sure that those events did take place.
Star Russian Director’s Trial Seen As A Threat To Artistic Freedom
Kirill Serebrennikov has been charged with embezzlement and faces 10 years in prison. Supporters have compared his trial to the purge of directors during the Soviet Union and the censorship of leading writers under the Tsars. “People of culture have always held the most dangerous position in Russia,” Liya Akhedzhakova, a celebrated actor who starred in Soviet classics like Office Romance, told the Guardian in court on Tuesday. “They are the first to be targeted.”
The Answer To Chaos And Threat In The Modern World? The Values Of Our Great Institutions
“We allow our great cultural institutions to fall into disrepair and disrepute because, as we strip them of their reverential traditions and their arduous canon, we also strip them of our reasons to cherish them. We call them before the tribunal of public opinion to justify their very existence, as if we can no longer see through the smog to the heights of Parnassus, lonelier than ever because we have forgotten that it is even there. We attempt to chain the Muses to the machinery of our modern malaise, as if we do not remember that they exist to show us the way to transcend that malaise, to find our way home again, by way of that steep and difficult climb, to the bosom of art and learning.”
Why We Need A Better Way To Study The Arts
There have been many studies that take advantage of this process, and they bulk out much of the academic literature on the impact and value of the arts. The build-up to this new centre has revealed a critical mass of scholars and artists who have an appetite (and now the opportunity) to do things a bit smarter, with nuance and sensitivity to the richness of cultural experience, that doesn’t simply reduce cultural experiences to mathematical equations.
There’s Just No End — Narrative Closure Is Becoming A Thing Of The Past
Amanda Hess: “The age of the sequel is over. Now it’s the age of the sequel to the sequel. Also the prequel, the reboot, the reunion, the revival, the remake, the spinoff and the stand-alone franchise-adjacent film. Canceled television shows are reinstated. Killed-off characters are resuscitated. Movies do not begin and end so much as they loiter onscreen. And social media is built for infinite scrolling. Nothing ends anymore, and it’s driving me insane.”
The State Of Illinois Needs A New Arts Policy. Really.
The economic-development arguments for the arts are as well-worn as they are indisputably accurate, but it is high time arts advocates in Chicago admit that they have not made an effective statewide case. It also is high time for arts advocates in Chicago to admit that so much state arts funding should not be swallowed up by relatively rich institutions in downtown Chicago. It should be for everyone.
Ai Weiwei Says He’s Done With Museum Shows — And China May Be Done With Him
“Q: But are you allowed to go back?
A: You never really know … they told me I’m free, I’m allowed to go back.
Q: But you’re not sure that they’re telling you the truth?
A: I don’t know if they even know the truth.”
Steve McQueen And Viola Davis On Hollywood, Race And Power
“MCQUEEN: What’s happening with #MeToo and Time’s Up is amazing — these are huge, giant steps. But I just feel sometimes, as a black filmmaker, that it’s still going around in circles.
DAVIS: It can’t just be ‘This is a time for female rage, so this is a time for female-centric movies and maybe some black artists.’ It should’ve been time years ago. This is what it always should be.”
H. Peter Stern, Co-Founder Of Storm King Art Center, Dead At 90
“He and his father-in-law, Ralph Ogden, owners of a business that manufactured metal fasteners for construction and home use …, co-founded [the center] in Mountainville, N.Y., and developed it into a prestigious outdoor sculpture museum with modern and contemporary works arrayed over a vast pastoral landscape.”
Roy Clark, 85, Country Guitar Wizard And Co-Host Of ‘Hee Haw’
“While Mr. Clark’s musicianship and technical abilities were sometimes overlooked by critics who saw only the hayseed star of Hee Haw, he said he had few regrets about his career path. … “I’ve seen too many great guitar players sitting unnoticed on a stool in an orchestra. I said, do I want to be there, playing great and nobody knows it, or do I want to be out front with the lights on me, giggling and laughing, playing guitar and rolling my eyes and they say ‘Golly, this guy’s great?'”
David Hockney Smashes Record For Most Expensive Work By Living Artist
With a total price of $90.3 million at Christie’s last night, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) (1972) became the most expensive piece by a living artist ever sold at auction. Even more unusually, “the Hockney painting went to the block without any type of guarantee — almost unheard of in this day and age, when consignors know how to play the big auction houses off against one another.”
London’s Old Vic Theatre Tries Crowdfunding More Women’s Lavatories
The £100,000 public fundraising campaign to double the number of ladies’ loos in the building is fronted by a video featuring actresses Joanna Lumley, Bertie Carvel, and a ferocious-looking Glenda Jackson reading tweets from audience members on the subject.
The Contemporary Novel Might Not Look Familiar, But It’s Thriving
The familiar world becomes alien within a single lifespan. In such a world of relentless evolution, art is perpetually in danger of being outstripped, every “realism” of describing a vanished reality. Just as capitalism erases difference to make way for a homogenous global anti-culture, artistic traditions are swept aside, denounced as irrelevant almost as soon as they have established themselves. Today, Ezra Pound’s modernist command to Make It New! sounds like nothing so much as a corporate slogan for Apple or Huawei. Capitalism and the avant garde check each other out from across the room, seeing much to admire.
Recent Listening: Eden Bareket
Eden Bareket, Night (Fresh Sound New Talent)
Man Disrupts “Fiddler On The Roof” Performance With Nazi Shouts
The man, who had been seated in the balcony, began shouting “Heil Hitler, Heil Trump.” Immediately after that, “People started running,” audience member Rich Scherr said. “I’ll be honest, I was waiting to hear a gunshot. I thought, ‘Here we go.’ ”The man was escorted out a few minutes later and the show continued.
St. Louis Ballet Dancer Found Dead In Rural Missouri Lake
“Raffaella Maria Stroik, 23, was reported missing Tuesday after a state park ranger found her unattended vehicle at Mark Twain State Park, about 100 miles northwest of St. Louis.” Her body was discovered floating in Mark Twain Lake Wednesday morning. She had joined St. Louis Ballet only last year.