Arts news

• Tracey Emin might have made her bed, but did she ever sleep in it? One expert claims she did not

  28-12-2014 20:57
  
  She might have made her bed, but did Tracey Emin ever sleep in it? That is the question raised by new research which claims that the artist’s most famous and controversial work, My Bed, may have been a clever fabrication.
  
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• Janis Martin Sang In Italian Restaurants To Survive, And Then Became A Celebrated Soprano And International Star

  28-12-2014 20:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  “From the early 1970s on she became identified with Wagnerian soprano parts like Isolde, Brünnhilde and Kundry in ‘Parsifal,’ as well as the title role in Puccini’s ‘Tosca’ and Strauss roles like Elektra and the Dyer’s Wife in ‘Die Frau Ohne Schatten’ (‘The Woman Without a Shadow’).”
  
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• Cutting Lines – And Cutting Profanity – For An American Audience

  28-12-2014 20:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  “Terrible things happen, wonderful ones, too. There are big events, big emotions and the occasional influx of lobsters or Nazis. Her characters have juicier things to bite than their tongues.”
  
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• Some Authors Flee Amazon’s All-You-Can-Read Service For More Lucrative Shores

  28-12-2014 20:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  “For romance and mystery novelists who embraced digital technology, loved chatting up their fans and wrote really, really fast, the last few years have been a golden age. Fiction underwent a boom unseen since the postwar era, when seemingly every liberal arts major set his sights on the Great American Novel. Now, though, the world […]
  
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• Do Christmas Movies Have A Shot At The Oscars Anymore?

  28-12-2014 19:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  “For a four-year stretch at the turn of the 21st century, December was the most wonderful time of year to be a best picture Oscar contender. … Since then, though, only one December movie — ‘The King’s Speech’ — has won best picture.”
  
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• One Portland (Maine) Theatre Company Founder Killed, Another Gravely Injured In Holiday Crash

  28-12-2014 19:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  “The Reillys founded and are the creative force behind the American Irish Repertory Ensemble, the Portland-based theater company better known as AIRE. Both actors also worked with other theater companies. The news of the accident has devastated the Portland theater community.”
  
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• It’s Taken 50 Years To Get A Civil Rights Movie Focused On African Americans Instead Of Whites

  28-12-2014 19:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  “The 1988 film Mississippi Burning, which focuses on two white FBI agents, exemplifies the normal Hollywood approach to the civil rights movement. The film angered a lot of black movie-goers because it made the FBI into heroes when, according to civil rights activist Charles Cobb, the bureau often looked the other way as black Southerners […]
  
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• Fan Fiction Is Not A New Thing – But It *Is* A Great Way To Engage With Stories

  28-12-2014 19:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  “Shipping may have achieved prominence in the burgeoning world of Internet fan fiction, but the phenomenon, if not the expression, goes back at least a hundred years, when Sybil Brinton, a wealthy Englishwoman in her forties, wrote the first known work of Jane Austen fan fiction, ‘Old Friends and New Fancies,’ in 1913.”
  
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• Museums Trying To Make Up Budget Shortfalls By Selling Off Collections Will Be Sanctioned

  28-12-2014 18:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  In the UK, “the MA’s cuts survey found that 52 per cent of museums experienced falling income last year, the most since 2011, with local authority-run museums and national institutions badly hit. Some museum directors are talking about further cuts of up to 35 per cent next year.”
  
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• Writing About The Past When Evidence Is Slim

  28-12-2014 18:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  “I was very interested in the way that the past was just continually reinvented as new ideas of homosexuality came along. It left me interested in not just the gay past, but how we write about the gay past and how we claim it or deny it. That led straight into my novels.”
  
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• How Democracy Spreads (And Why That Spread Sometimes Fails)

  28-12-2014 18:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  “For Fukuyama, the great challenge of state-building is creating and sustaining an institution of collective rule that cuts against the grain of human nature: we are designed to favour friends and family, and a patrimonial tribal order is ‘hard-wired,’ he argues, into our neural circuitry.”
  
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• Prince Charles Thinks His Ideas About Architecture Are ‘For The People’ – And He Couldn’t Be More Wrong

  28-12-2014 17:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  “Charles and his friends like to portray themselves as the underdogs, as victims of a leftie conspiracy of inhumane modernism, but they couldn’t be more well connected, and their polemics in favour of twee cottage architecture resonate strongly with a public taste for the picturesque and sentimental, and the spurious notion of What People Really […]
  
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• When, And How, Did Western Movies Embrace Hinduism?

  28-12-2014 17:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  “‘Look at the first Matrix movie,’ says producer Peter Rader. ‘It’s a yogic movie. It says that this world is an illusion. It’s about maya – that if we can cut through the illusions and connect with something larger we can do all sorts of things.'”
  
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• In Dance, Collaboration Can Be Challenging (But Usually Worth It)

  28-12-2014 16:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  “There are pitfalls. Sweat causes the hands to slide upward from the waist to the chest, where they are least helpful. Leotards can be slippery.”
  
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• A Composer Accidentally Hits The Big Time

  28-12-2014 16:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  “It all felt a bit far-fetched. I went in to talk to them at the studio and we started working immediately. There wasn’t even time to think about it.”
  
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• The Departing Smithsonian Chief Has Spent Thousands Of Hours Looking For Hometown Artifacts

  28-12-2014 15:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  “The secretary said that his quest would have been easier had the Smithsonian finished digitizing its vast collection, but added, ‘I wish I started it earlier because it’s made me appreciate these collections in a way I didn’t when I took on the job’ six years ago.”
  
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• Blood-swept lands: the story behind the Tower of London poppies tribute

  28-12-2014 15:21
  
  Artists Paul Cummins and Tom Piper describe the trials and triumphs behind their famous, if controversial, first world war commemorationThere were many happy twists of fate that led to the most visited and talked about public art installation for a generation, not least the fluke of finding a remarkable sentence in an unknown soldier’s will and a fortunate case of mistaken identity. But ultimately the poppies at the Tower of London happened because of one artist’s powers of persuasion. “I
  
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• City Opera Doesn’t Have Much, But It Does Have Its Name

  28-12-2014 15:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  “Inheritance battles propel plenty of operas … but the one playing out in court over the few remaining possessions of the bankrupt New York City Opera — mainly its name and its Manhattan thrift shop — is proving rich in operatic drama and characters.”
  
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• How Do Iraqi Arts Students Get U.S. Dance, Music, Or Art Instructors?

  28-12-2014 14:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  Skype, of course. “For the pianist Hersh Anwer, 24, of Erbil, the visits meant access to trained professionals. ‘After they’re gone, there is no piano teacher,’ he said.”
  
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• What’s The Classical Music Equivalent Of ‘The Nutcracker’?

  28-12-2014 14:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  “Those working in the trenches of classical music must view ‘The Nutcracker’ with envious despair. For choruses everywhere, the holiday season is the time for Handel’s ‘Messiah,’ and there is a sizable audience happy to hear it annually. Music doesn’t get any better than this.”
  
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• In Less Than A Year, Los Angeles Will Have Its New Broad Museum

  28-12-2014 13:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  “I’m working with what you would call a curator’s dollhouse of my own. We had a big decision to make about how to arrange the walls, especially of the third-floor galleries, because we have complete flexibility up there, 35,000 square feet and no columns, and there’s nothing dictating where the walls will go.”
  
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• On my radar: Lily King’s cultural highlights

  28-12-2014 11:00
  
  The award-winning novelist on her favourite island, writer Tessa Hadley, music from the Head and the Heart and Richard Linklater’s film BoyhoodThe American novelist Lily King grew up in Massachusetts and studied creative writing at Syracuse University, and has taught literature and creative writing in high schools and universities. Her novels The Pleasing Hour, The English Teacher and Father of the Rain all won awards; her fourth, Euphoria, based loosely on the life of the anthropologist Marga
  
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• Rising stars of 2015: artist Sara Barker

  28-12-2014 10:00
  
  The Glasgow-based sculptor of delicate metal and glass structures hopes to build on a successful year with shows in Edinburgh and BirminghamSee the Observer’s rising stars of 2015 in fullRising stars of 2015: author Katharine NorburySara Barker loves the physicality of art. Fitting, therefore, that aspects of her somehow merge with her sculptures: vibrancy in the luminous blue eyes; elegance in the long body lines; a gentleness that chimes with the fragility of her delicate metal work. “I li
  
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• National Gallery review – Frederick Wiseman focuses on the minutiae

  28-12-2014 09:00
  
  Veteran US film-maker Frederick Wiseman goes behind the scenes of the National Gallery – but what does he think?There is never a quiet moment in Frederick Wiseman’s epic three-hour documentary about our National Gallery, even though the film has no voiceover, no score and no added sound effects. The nearest thing to music is the drone of the polishing machines at dawn. What fills the ears is exactly what blinds the eyes, in fact, and this is the never-ending talk that goes on in front of the
  
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• Jane Bown: the eye had it

  28-12-2014 09:00
  
  The legacy of a shy, self-effacing and funny woman who worked for the Observer for more than 60 years is an astounding gallery of black and white portraitsJane Bown: a life in photography – in picturesJane Bown remembered: ‘We had fun, didn’t we?’
  Jane Bown: the final pictureThere was never any mistaking her, the late great Jane Bown, who died on 21 December at the age of 89, but whose presence lives on in her extraordinary pictures, and in the pages and the spirit of the Observer, her s
  
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• Jane Bown: The lady behind the lens

  28-12-2014 09:00
  
  When Jane Bown donated her life’s work to the Scott Trust, Luke Dodd was assigned to help her archive the vast collection of negatives and prints. He recalls the friendship that grew over several years of them working together, allowing him to see the formidable talent that hid behind her unassuming personaJane Bown: the eye had it
  Jane Bown remembered: ‘We had fun, didn’t we?’Jane Bown: a life in photography – in picturesJane Bown: the final pictureThinking back about our unlikely fri
  
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• Hirst’s gallery: the length of a street—and free

  28-12-2014 08:43
  
  Taxidermy, anatomical models and other historical objects to go on show alongside Modern and contemprary works
  
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• Curves magazine's Stefan Bogner pairs images of mountain passes with a road-movie story

  28-12-2014 01:00
  
  A skier from the age of three, Stefan Bogner grew up and lives only an hour's drive from the Alps in Munich, and describes the mountains as his second home.
  
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• British museums warned not to sell the family silver

  28-12-2014 01:00
  
  Publicly funded museums that seek to sell off "the family silver" will face tougher sanctions from the body that overseas the UK's museums. The Museums Association (MA) is to tighten up its ethics code to avoid controversial sell-offs of valuable antiquities from cash-strapped museum collections
  
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• Jason Brooks's London Sketchbook – in pictures

  28-12-2014 00:00
  
  Artist Jason Brooks is perhaps best known for his fashion illustrations, which he regularly contributes to Vogue and Elle, but he has always been fascinated by cities. London Sketchbook is the second instalment in his series of illustrated travel books published by Laurence King. Here is a selection of highlights from a chapter of his book that focuses on London’s cultural gemsJason Brooks’s London Sketchbook: a capital talent for capturing the cityBuy London Sketchbook here Continue reading
  
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• Jason Brooks’s London Sketchbook: a capital talent for capturing the city

  28-12-2014 00:00
  
  He’s best known for his fashion illustrations, but Jason Brooks’s new book seeks the essence of London in pictures of the city’s most remarkable buildingsJason Brooks’s London Sketchbook – in picturesArtist Jason Brooks is perhaps best known for his fashion illustrations, which he regularly contributes to Vogue and Elle, but he has always been fascinated by cities. London Sketchbook is the second instalment in his series of illustrated travel books: Paris was the first and a New&n
  
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