Arts news

• Edward Snowden bust artists want 'gift to the city' returned to Brooklyn park

  14-04-2015 23:47
  
  Bust in police custody after being put on monument without permissionManhattan gallery hopes to display 4ft, 100lb sculpture next month The mysterious artists who planted a bust of Edward Snowden on an American revolutionary war monument now want to free their sculpture from police custody and display it again, saying it was intended as a thought-provoking “gift to the city”.The artists are applying for permission to show park-goers their likeness of the former National Security Agency whist
  
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• A New Generation Of Orchestras Is Rising. Great, But…

  14-04-2015 21:28 via feedproxy.google.com
  “I attended both expecting to trumpet the virtues of a more collaborative and flexible model. But I was disappointed. Different though they were, the two performances had a few things in common: Both offered a lot of energy and emoting, but both fell short on the details, with too many moments of sloppiness and too […]
  
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• Resignation Exposes Debate About Quality Of UK Dance Training

  14-04-2015 21:23 via feedproxy.google.com
  “A quick glance at Dance UK’s website would suggest an art form that was in very good shape. It reports a dramatic increase in the number of professional dance companies over the past two decades, as well as pointing out that audiences have risen significantly, and students studying the subject at school have grown by […]
  
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• Data Says: Blue Is Increasing In Art

  14-04-2015 20:53 via feedproxy.google.com
  “How blue is the visual art of our era? Interpreting the data of 94,526 paintings created between 1800 CE and 2000 CE, Martin Bellander, a PhD student at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, discovered that blue has increased in art while orange has become less common.”
  
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• Hot Right Now: Twitter Accounts Of Medieval Images (But There’s A Problem)

  14-04-2015 20:42 via feedproxy.google.com
  “Unfortunately, their wild popularity means these accounts have no reason to change. Yet that very popularity also shows that people are curious about historic images.”
  
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• 2014’s Biggest-Selling Album? A Movie Soundtrack

  14-04-2015 20:08 via feedproxy.google.com
  “The album – complete with two different versions of the hit song Let It Go – sold four million more than its nearest rival, Taylor Swift’s 1989, which sold six million according to music industry body the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).”
  
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• Berlin Cracks Down On Vacation Rentals As City Is Overrun With Tourists

  14-04-2015 20:05 via feedproxy.google.com
  “The ban was imposed to prevent the city from becoming victim to property owners who would rather rent their apartments for €700 per week to tourists rather than offer them to normal residents for much less. The law is also meant to show that city officials in Berlin are taking the fight against gentrification seriously.”
  
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• Hollywood Studios Scramble To Protect Themselves After Sony Cyber-attack

  14-04-2015 19:56 via feedproxy.google.com
  A challenge is that companies can implement “the highest level of sophistication as far as firewalls and technology and compliance … but no matter how good it is there is always a people component. It is the people part of this whole situation that is very difficult. Everyone in the company has to participate in […]
  
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• Dance Theatre Of Harlem’s Reinvention Is On A Rocky Road

  14-04-2015 19:49 via feedproxy.google.com
  “The pre-2004 company associated with these particular works, which call on a variety of leading, solo and ensemble dance forces, eventually numbered as many as 44 dancers. The one now under Ms. Johnson’s guidance has 18. She has stressed that in the years since it was reformed in 2012, Dance Theater of Harlem has evolved […]
  
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• Wheeldon’s New “American In Paris” Choreography Is A Masterpiece

  14-04-2015 19:44 via feedproxy.google.com
  “This is what musical-comedy dance can look like when it’s made by a choreographer who knows how to do more than just stage a song. Once you’ve seen it, you’ll know what you’ve been missing, and find it hard ever again to settle for less.”
  
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• The Highly Problematic Explosion In MFA Writing Programs

  14-04-2015 19:14 via feedproxy.google.com
  “Explosive” is the word routinely used to describe the growth of M.F.A. programs in creative writing. Iowa was the first, established in 1936. By 1994, there were 64. By last year, that number had more than tripled, to 229 (and another 152 M.A. programs in creative writing), according to the Association of Writers and Writing […]
  
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• Get Real: Philosophy Looks To The Real World

  14-04-2015 19:05 via feedproxy.google.com
  “Where for decades or even centuries, philosophy has focused on our representations and descriptions of the world, on human consciousness and cultural systems, many are now turning to the external features of the world that constitute the content of our experiences and the context of our social practices.”
  
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• How embracing graffiti stopped one Spanish village going to the wall

  14-04-2015 18:41
  
  Scheme to invite street artists to Fanzara, home to 323 people, has turned it from a potential addition to Spain’s dying villages list into a cultural triumphThe village of Fanzara, home to 323 people, counts two bars, one butcher and a shop.
  But over the past year, this small village 50 miles north of Valencia has quietly transformed itself into the street art capital of Spain, with more than 40 murals by some of the country’s top street artists tucked among its beige and grey walls. Contin
  
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• My big break: Ken Loach, Caitlin Moran, Lennie James, Grayson Perry and more explain how they made it

  14-04-2015 18:27
  
  Are the arts today really closed off to anyone who doesn’t have the right background or financial support? We asked musicians, film-makers, actors, artists, architects and others at the top of their field how they got thereMy first job: Minicab leafleting all round Finchley in London. It was scary, wandering the streets at night, door to door. I was so terrified my mum used to come with me and wait at the end of each street. I had no idea how to work hard, no self-discipline. I’d shove leafl
  
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• Cincinnati Symphony’s Lumenocity Was A Hit (But Now You Have To Pay To See It)

  14-04-2015 18:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  “Slated to cost $1.4 million, orchestra officials fell short in fundraising by $400,000, and were faced with the dilemma of either not presenting Lumenocity this year or charging attendees a fee.”
  
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• Francis Bacon and the Masters review – a cruel exposure of a con artist

  14-04-2015 17:55
  
  Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, University of East Anglia
  Placed beside Picasso, Velázquez, Matisse, Rodin and others, Soho’s perverse putdown master emerges from a conversation with genius with no real heart – and absolutely nothing to sayFrancis Bacon was the divine devil of modern British art, a demon of dark ecstasy. His pummelling of human flesh has a monstrous sensuality, a massive power. Usually, seeing a Bacon, I drink in its perverse colours like blood or wine. At least, I used t
  
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• Chicagoland Chamber Orchestra Shuts Down After 20 Years

  14-04-2015 09:52 via feedproxy.google.com
  “Gayle Heatherington, Ars Viva executive director, said Monday morning that the ensemble was in ‘excellent financial health’ with record subscription and single ticket sales and that the decision to draw the curtain was purely ‘a personal one.'”
  
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• How Do You Function As Director Of Someone Else’s Museum? (Especially Eli Broad’s)

  14-04-2015 09:48 via feedproxy.google.com
  “Being the director of Eli Broad’s new museum might strike some people as a contradiction in terms. … How could someone running Mr. Broad’s private museum really have any power?” Joanne Heyler, however, is just the person to pull it off.
  
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• Philadelphia Orchestra’s Summer Season At City’s Mann Center Down To Two Weeks

  14-04-2015 09:43 via feedproxy.google.com
  “The Philadelphia Orchestra, which once played an 18-concert series in Fairmount Park, and more recently nine, will perform six this summer – and only three can be considered purely classical.” The venue’s CEO says she’d like more from the orchestra, whose administrators respond that they can’t schedule it.
  
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• Indians, Iranians, And Gay Penguins: The 2014 List Of Library Books Tried Hardest To Ban Is Here

  14-04-2015 09:41 via feedproxy.google.com
  Leading the pack in attracting misguided outrage was Sherman Alexie’s young-adult title The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, followed by Marjane Satrapi’s girl-comes-of-age-in-Iran graphic memoir Persepolis and Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell’s And Tango Makes Three, about the same-sex pair of penguins who raised a chick at the Central Park Zoo.
  
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• The Monster Wave That Changed Art History (It Came From Japan)

  14-04-2015 09:40 via feedproxy.google.com
  Hokusai “is, after all, not only one of the great figures of Japanese art, but a father figure of much of Western modernism. Without Hokusai, there might have been no Impressionism – and the global art world we today take for granted might look very different indeed.”
  
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• Theatre In The West End Is In A Golden Age, Says Top Producer

  14-04-2015 09:38 via feedproxy.google.com
  Sonia Friedman: “I can stand here alongside a lot of colleagues doing the same job, saying the West End is as good as it can ever be, and it’s probably the best it’s ever been right now.”
  
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• Bringing Genuine Vaudeville To The Metropolitan Opera

  14-04-2015 09:35 via feedproxy.google.com
  “What’s a vaudeville consultant doing in an opera house? It turns out that not just anyone can choreograph a decent slosh routine, a messy staple of slapstick in which whipped cream, custard or shaving cream is wielded as a projectile, hopefully to comic effect.” So David McVicar decided to make the itinerant clowns of Pagliacci […]
  
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• ‘Literary Geography’ – Literally: Mapping The Emotions Of 19th-Century London

  14-04-2015 09:34 via feedproxy.google.com
  “What lurks behind the literary landmarks of Victorian London? Fear? Joy? Ambiguity? In a new data mining project, a Stanford University research collective has sought to map the British capital’s ‘emotional geography’ by categorizing what feelings or sensations common settings convey in the novels of Dickens, Thackeray, Austen and 738 [of their colleagues].”
  
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• Christopher Wheeldon In Wonderland: “An American in Paris” Is Ballet Choreographer’s Dream Come True

  14-04-2015 09:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  His staging (direction as well as dance) of the Gershwin show, just opened on Broadway after knockout success in Paris, “perfectly encapsulates the artistic character of the boyish-looking, 42-year-old Wheeldon: a sophisticated balletmaker who is a hopeless fan of razzle-dazzle.” Sarah Kaufman tells how he came to the project.
  
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• The Ballerina Who Earned Her Starring Broadway Role In The Shower

  14-04-2015 09:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  The star-to-be was the Royal Ballet’s Leanne Cope, the show was An American in Paris, the director was her old colleague Christopher Wheeldon. And – sorry! – neither nudity nor running water was involved.
  
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• Top Posts From AJBlogs 04.13.15

  14-04-2015 05:46 via feedproxy.google.com
  International Pop, World Pop, And Don’t Forget German Pop AJBlog: Real Clear Arts Published 2015-04-12 A Variety Show from Myanmar AJBlog: DancebeatPublished 2015-04-13 Monday Recommendation: Jack Teagarden AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2015-04-13 Just because: Willis Conover appears on To Tell the Truth AJBlog: About Last Night Published 2015-04-13 When McRae Met Clarke-Boland AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2015-04-12 […]
  
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• Eduardo Galeano, Who Inspired Latin American Leftists Through His Writing, Has Died At 74

  14-04-2015 00:57 via feedproxy.google.com
  “His best known book, ‘The Open Veins of Latin America,; published in 1971, described the historical legacy of the Spanish colonial era and capitalist plunder that followed it. He spurned conventional narrative in favor of anecdotes highlighting, among others, enslaved indigenous Bolivian miners, devastated Brazilian rain forests and polluted Venezuelan oil fields.”
  
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