Arts news

• Why Is Sophie Hunter Taking Britten’s Phaedra To A Beckett Festival?

  26-07-2015 23:41 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “But why Phaedra in a Beckett festival? Yes the Racine/Lowell/Britten links were evident, but how to join Beckett and Racine? I had to trace my own constellation of connections from one great artist to another and, without wanting to deny the audience their own chance to join the dots, here are just a few of […]
  
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• The World Of Competitive Music Lessons For Kids

  26-07-2015 22:36 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Music, at least in terms of noodling around on the piano, strumming a guitar or trying out new things on the violin, actually hardly features in the struggle. Typically, this is all about grades, age and a formal classical instrument, a trio which is locked together in a pressurised algorithm calculated to result in a […]
  
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• Amazon Makes Plans For Brick And Mortar Stores

  26-07-2015 21:34 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “After placing an order, you’d get to select a pickup time window. Then, all you’d have to do is stop by on the way home and pick up your items. It’s said that there will also be a small store location on site, perhaps allowing customers to walk in and buy without placing an order […]
  
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• Vogueing: Still Dominant In New York

  26-07-2015 21:17 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “While the ball honors vogueing’s pioneers, it also reflects the ways that the dance has evolved stylistically and demographically: its global expansion; the increasing participation of women; and a shift to bolder, more acrobatic dancing.”
  
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• A Museum Gets A Major Donor’s Works Early – By Creating Replicas For His House

  26-07-2015 21:05 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “These great names are now in the collection of the Nelson-Atkins. And the replicas are carefully hung, in their original decorative frames, on the walls in Henry Bloch’s home. ‘They’re just wonderful. They are absolutely identical,’ Bloch says. ‘I often say, are you sure you gave me the copies?'”
  
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• 100 years later, why do we still kneel at the shrine of the Bloomsbury set? | Zoe Williams

  26-07-2015 21:00
  
  Their ideals of sex and bohemia are attractive to TV producers, but they never made it into the real worldI was listening to two friends, both academics, talk: “Isn’t it weird,” one said, “that we had very radical ideas when we were undergraduates, but we’ve ended up in these very traditional, monogamous relationships.” “Not really,” said the other, “because I’m not interested in sex and I only like women.”As the Bloomsbury set is small-screened for some
  
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• A century later, why do we still kneel at the shrine of the Bloomsbury set? | Zoe Williams

  26-07-2015 21:00
  
  Their ideals of sex and bohemia are attractive to TV producers, but they never made it into the real worldI was listening to two friends, both academics, talk: “Isn’t it weird,” one said, “that we had very radical ideas when we were undergraduates, but we’ve ended up in these very traditional, monogamous relationships.” “Not really,” said the other, “because I’m not interested in sex and I only like women.”As the Bloomsbury set is small-screened for some
  
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• Marlon Brando’s Private Audiotapes Reveal A Man Haunted By Fame And Memories

  26-07-2015 20:59 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Brando started recording his thoughts ‘as soon as he could get his hands on a tape recorder,’ Douglas said, adding that he loved new technology and gadgets. ‘He was the first person to buy a Mac. He was the first person to tell me about the Internet. I had no idea what he was talking […]
  
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• Claim: The Uberization – Or Robotization – Of Everything Will Save Lives

  26-07-2015 20:40 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “I do not think people should be driving cars for much longer, unless they want to. We will be killing and injuring many, many fewer people if we turn over driving. It’s one of the most important things we can do. If we value human life, let’s not end it as often.”
  
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• How Joseph Cornell Changed The Art World – From His Mother’s Basement

  26-07-2015 20:19 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “A pioneer of assemblage art, collector, autodidact, Christian Scientist, pastry-lover, experimental film-maker, balletomane and self-declared white magician, he roved freely through the fields of the mind while inhabiting a personal life of extraordinarily narrow limits. He never married or moved out of his mother’s house in Queens and rarely voyaged further than a subway ride […]
  
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• An American Soprano On The Proms

  26-07-2015 20:12 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “America doesn’t have anything like this. It’s the envy of the world.”
  
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• Cities of Salt, Linbury Studio, review: Lack of plot fails to make desert bloom

  26-07-2015 14:09
  
  The concert premiere of five scenes from Zaid Jabri’s new opera, Cities of Salt, was an event of great potential significance. As the first opera by a Syrian composer, with a Syrian soprano – Talar Dekrmanjian – in the leading role, and based on a story filled with echoes of recent Middle Eastern history, it covered bases nobody had thought of covering before.
  
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• Forced adoption exhibition prompts outpouring from women moved by loss

  26-07-2015 13:00
  
  The trauma of separation from their babies faced by 19th century unmarried mothers is still raw in responses to the Foundling Museum’s forthcoming show Donations to fund an exhibition on unmarried women who were forced to give away their babies – dubbed “fallen women” in the 19th century – have been accompanied by poignant comments that show how deep the trauma still lies in many families, say organisers at the Foundling Museum.The museum, which grew out of the first children’s chari
  
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• Alice Anderson: Memory Movement Memory Objects review – a simple enchantment

  26-07-2015 11:45
  
  Wellcome Collection, London
  By taking everyday objects – laptops, ladders, cycle helmets – and wrapping them in copper wire, Alice Anderson makes the mundane magicalThe tale is told of a certain Frenchwoman who believed that her husband and children were impostors. Madame M was convinced that her real family had been kidnapped and replaced by a group of cunning lookalikes who were trying to defraud her. Every day, her husband’s hair looked slightly different, his moustache had grown a frac
  
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• Michael Jacobs, Velázquez and me

  26-07-2015 10:47
  
  When the writer Michael Jacobs found he was dying, he asked his friend Ed Vulliamy to complete his last book, a personal meditation on Velázquez’s masterpiece Las Meninas. Ed Vulliamy kept his promise. Here he recalls his friend’s humour, passion and indomitable spirit as they worked on it together• Extract: read Michael Jacobs on Las Meninas hereIn the winter months of early 2014, Jackie Rae – widow of a man I had come to know for a painfully brief period of time – sent me the manusc
  
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• Velázquez’s Las Meninas: much more than meets the eye

  26-07-2015 08:30
  
  Michael Jacobs’s last book was an attempt to unlock the mysteries of a painting that had been a lifelong passion, Velázquez’s Las Meninas. In this extract he relates how it all started…• Read Ed Vulliamy on completing his dying friend’s last work hereThe envelope, postmarked Madrid, torn slightly on the lefthand corner, released, on opening, the pieces of a puzzle. “A jigsaw postcard,” explained a handwritten note inserted amidst the scrambled contents. “I found this in the gift
  
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• Photographer Giulio Magnifico captures the tranquillity and characters of Italy's osterias

  26-07-2015 01:00
  
  Italians have been kicking back and enjoying a glass of wine and a bite to eat in osterias since the 14th century.
  
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