ArtsJournal: Arts, Culture, Ideas

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How A Pulitzer Prize-Winning Playwright Teaches Theatre To Her Students

Lynn Nottage: "American Spectacle has always begun with a field trip to the Coney Island Circus Sideshow. ... We also go to vogue balls, courtroom trials, and megachurches. The event that the students especially love, which I never would have anticipated, is wrestling." - Paris Review

Do Poor And Lower-Middle Class Kids Deserve Access To The Humanities?

West Virginia says no. "For most students, their state’s main public university remains their best hope of breaching the walls of class difference. As the ax falls, that idealistic mission fades, and inequalities widen." - The Atlantic

Who Says We Can’t Write New Music In A Thoroughly Baroque Style?

"Nuova Pratica, a group of up-and-coming performer-composers who aim to re-open the book on Baroque composition, … reject the idea that what they do is mere pastiche. …(Their) music issues an unspoken challenge to the idea that everything in the musical language of the Baroque has already been said." - Early Music America

Chicago’s Arts Institutions Are Still Struggling Post-COVID

"A decline in subscription rates, shockingly higher costs, and donations that haven't kept pace with inflation have thrown some arts organizations off-balance and spiraled others into crisis. Museums, music and dance venues have bounced back faster. Theaters struggled, perhaps due to the expense and complexity of staging." - Crain's Chicago Business

A Man Who Investigated The Crimes Of Ferdinand And Imelda Marcos Goes To The Broadway Musical About Them

"Having seen and enjoyed the show in New York, I now realize that I missed the obvious during my years in Manila. The Marcoses, the now-94-year-old Imelda in particular, had for years captured the affection and votes of ordinary Filipinos by entertaining them." - NPR

Why Is This Artist Teaching A Robot Dog How To Paint?

Artist Agnieska Pilat isn't worried that Basia the robot dog might take her job. She "is a self-described techno-optimist who loves the robots: she even lives with Basia, and takes her for walks around her neighbourhood in New York City." - The Guardian (UK)

Irish Author Paul Lynch Wins The Booker For A ‘Soul-Shattering’ Novel

The book, Prophet Song, pictures a Dublin descended into fascist tyranny. - The Guardian (UK)

Remember When The UK Was Going To Return The Parthenon Marbles?

Greece remembers. But does Britain? And where exactly do the negotiations stand? - The Guardian (UK)

You’ll Never Guess Who Won The Streaming Wars

A Merry Scottish Christmas, anyone? - Wired

Spotify Quits Uruguay After Lawmakers Mandate Equitable Pay For Artists

Article 285 will put into copyright law the “right to a fair and equitable remuneration” for all “agreements entered into by authors, composers, performers, directors and screenwriters with respect to their faculty of public communication and making available to the public of phonograms and audiovisual recordings”. - The Guardian

How Mass Culture Gave Rebellion To The Individual

How did we get here, where men who benefit most from our social structures, position themselves as the little guy? This comes from a longer history of political shifts in America and of the rise of mass cultural consumption as a means of political expression. - 3 Quarks Daily

Redefining And Redeploying Expertise

The phenomenon is sped by automation, which usurps routine tasks, leaving employees to handle the nonroutine and unanticipated—and the continued advance of which throws the skills employers value into flux. It would be supremely ironic if the advance of the knowledge economy had the effect of devaluing knowledge. - The Atlantic

Athletes Are Reshaping Parts Of The Art Market

"Many sports figures are being courted by galleries, auction houses, art shows and museums." - The New York Times

Nora Roberts Has Been Laughing All The Way To The Bank

"Before Roberts, the romance genre was dominated by tepid and virginal women who were overpowered by brooding men. Roberts changed all that by thrusting romance into the modern era." - The New York Times

An Epic Pandemic Theatre Trek

Part I, in which "a Lakota playwright, 7 Indigenous actors, and an L.A.-based ensemble survive a pandemic, cross thousands of prairie miles, and confront centuries of history to make a play." - American Theatre

Why Activism Leads To So Much Bad Art

"During the past decade, politics has intruded on daily American life more than at any time since the 1960s; in the same period, technology has given a microphone or printing press to anyone with an internet connection. The result is the feeling that everyone should say something whenever anything happens." - The Atlantic

An Inside Look At How Fox News Started Peddling The “Trump Didn’t Lose” Big Lie, Even Though The Murdochs Were Against It

In an excerpt from his new book, Network of Lies, Brian Stelter lays out how, despite Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch being clearly in favor of conceding and moving on, the network first broadcast the conspiracy theories that ended up costing it $787.5 million. (The key figure: host Maria Bartiromo.) - Politico

What The Vegas Sphere Says About Our Relationship With Art

The Sphere is a distillation of an evolving relationship among art, artist, and technology—somewhere between a warm embrace of and a final surrender to screens. It is an acknowledgment and maybe even a tribute to the ways in which our screens have become extensions of ourselves... - The Atlantic

But Tattooing A Scannable Barcode Of Your Favorite Song On Spotify Seemed Like Such A Good Idea!

A growing cadre of music fans have joined the Spotify tattoo craze as a conversation starter or a way to commemorate sentimental favorites like wedding first-dance songs. But while many on social media tout the tats and how well they scan, some are starting to discover that nothing in life is permanent, even tattoos. - The Wall Street Journal

Cleveland Ballet Suspends CEO And Artistic Director Amid Investigation Into Alleged Firing Over Body Size

Artistic director Gladisa Guadalupe and president/CEO Michael Krasnyansky, who are married, are alleged to have fired a teacher at the company school's outreach program after seeing a photo of her in class, and then to have fired the outreach program's manager after he complained to HR. - WKYC (Cleveland)
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