Arts news

• Margaret Atwood On Her New Book, And A Lot More

  04-10-2015 23:48 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “You can’t face this alternative, so let’s pretend it’s not there. You can’t face global warming, so let’s pretend it’s not there. We know that Santa Claus is really our parents, but we don’t want to look at that too closely. People do that all the time. We know Stephen Harper is a dictator in the making, but he’s convinced some people that they’re going to be financially better off under him, which is untrue.”
  
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• Goya’s Bleakest, And Most Modern, Paintings Came From War

  04-10-2015 23:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Goya’s close experience of the war brought only disillusionment. Courage is much less visible than cruelty in The Disasters of War: Zaragoza, after all, could only hold out for so long. He remorselessly shows the atrocities committed by both sides. Because this was the first guerrilla war, it released a new kind of violence.”
  
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• James Levine Steps Down From Conducting New Opera ‘Lulu’ At The Met

  04-10-2015 22:26 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The announcement did not directly address Mr. Levine’s history of health problems, but said that ‘faced with the demands of rehearsing and performing two large-scale operas simultaneously this fall,’ he would concentrate his energies on Wagner’s ‘Tannhäuser,’ which opens on Oct. 8. The overlapping runs of two of Mr. Levine’s favorite operas were to have been a highlight of the Met’s 2015-16 season.”
  
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• A Swashbuckling, Cross-Dressing, Sword-Fighting 17th Century Opera Singer Gets Her Own Young Adult Book

  04-10-2015 22:12 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Whenever society starts to think about, what does gender mean, what does sexuality mean, she’s just one of the names that comes up, and people start thinking about her, and talking about her, and portraying her all over again.”
  
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• GarageBand: Good Or Bad For Music?

  04-10-2015 21:50 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “While audiophiles and classic rock enthusiasts might sneer at the software’s humorously simple design, digital natives simply see it as making something impenetrable now liberatingly accessible.”
  
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• The New Arts Center In Buenos Aires Hosts 10,000 Visitors A Day

  04-10-2015 21:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Remarkably, everything in it is free, from video installations to comedy acts to symphony concerts.”
  
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• Goya in hell: the bloodbath that explains his most harrowing work

  04-10-2015 21:00
  
  His horrifyingly bleak Black Paintings are said to be a result of Goya going deaf. But is there another reason? As the National Gallery show opens, Jonathan Jones finds the shocking answer in the artist’s hometown of ZaragozaA dog is drowning in quicksand. Its grey head pokes defiantly out of the brown sludge, even as a dead yellow sky above insists there is no hope. No saviour. In the next painting, supernatural shapers of the world reveal themselves, but they are grinning hags floating e
  
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• Ai Weiwei: Artist finds listening devices hidden in his studio

  04-10-2015 20:59
  
  'There will always be surprises'
  
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• Speaking Of Translation … Women Theatre Critics Get It Way More Than Men

  04-10-2015 20:51 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “We need to get to a stage in our theatre when a woman can be allowed to tell her own story, without translation – in all its complexity, and grotesqueness, and ugliness, and non-conformity, and sometimes conformity, and sometimes subversion. Not as a feminist statement. But just ‘coz. Because we are women theatre makers and this is how we see the world, and our view is just as valid as the culturally predominant male lens we’ve spent so much time translating.”
  
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• The Oregon Shakespeare Festival Explains (Further) The ‘Translating Shakespeare’ Initiative

  04-10-2015 20:05 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “There will be a dramatist’s perspective in the center of these plays for the first time in 400 years. Typically, we rely on information about the plays from actors, directors, dramaturgs, designers, and scholars. I’m asking the writers to go into the plays (I keep joking about giving them coal miners’ hats) and see what they discover about how the plays work from within their structure. Compressing the length of the project to three years also was strategic. I just wante
  
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• Selling A Norman Rockwell To Fund Journalism

  04-10-2015 19:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “”We are able to expand our mission and do even more for the profession of journalism and press freedom,’ he said. ‘That’s a great legacy for Norman Rockwell.'”
  
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• Workers At London’s National Gallery Come To An Agreement, End Strike

  04-10-2015 19:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Union members had been on strike for more than 100 days in protest against plans to switch visitor services to a private company. PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka said he still opposed privatisation, but had been unable to prevent it.”
  
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• A Dance ‘Telenovela’ Unfolds Across Many Different Neighborhoods In L.A.

  04-10-2015 18:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “With today’s audiences having Twitter-like attention spans and where dances choreographed for TV shows like ‘So You Think You Can Dance,’ generally encompassing about two minutes, Duckler said her goal — and main test — ‘was to make a dance work that lasts for five hours.'”
  
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• It’s OK – Even Vital – To Be A Film Snob

  04-10-2015 17:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “I look up in admiration at models of artistic perfection, sound judgment and noble achievement, and I look down on what I take to be the stupid, cheap and cynical aspects of public discourse. … If the words nerd and geek can be rehabilitated — if legions of misunderstood enthusiasts can march from the margins of respectability to the heart of the mainstream — then why not snob as well?”
  
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• Margaret Evans obituary

  04-10-2015 17:00
  
  My friend Margaret Evans, who has died aged 82, was an intuitive, vibrant painter who, during her time at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, made a particular impression on its principal, William Coldstream.I met Maggie when she arrived at the Slade in 1954. She was already an experienced painter who knew what she wanted to do. She spent a great deal of time in the life rooms at the Slade, but did her best work in her room at the student hostel. This was her world, crowded with the things s
  
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• The Future Of Landscape Design

  04-10-2015 16:20 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Over the past decade, Hayes, 56, has become known for her blown-glass terrariums: biomorphic bubbles that house miniature ecosystems of ferns, bonsai, crystals and flowering plants. In creating them, Hayes reinvented a Victorian concept—the portable greenhouse—by giving it a curvy shape and a pristinely futuristic aesthetic.”
  
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• Let's glow: skaters descend on Liverpool's glow-in-the-dark skatepark

  04-10-2015 16:00
  
  Like a weird volcano glimmering in the centre of a once rundown park, Koo Jeong A’s new art installation is set to become a cultural destinationThe first indicator that an interview with Koo Jeong A would stray from the norm came a week before we met. “Koo doesn’t want to be recorded for the interview,” came the tentative email from the PR. “But she has suggested using a stenotype and stenograph instead … What do you think?” A stenograph, I should add,
  
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• Amazon Won’t Sell Chromecast Or Apple TV Anymore – And That’s Important

  04-10-2015 15:48 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “On its face, it’s insane that the biggest e-retailer in the world, looking at the stunningly lucrative consumer electronics market, would stop selling some of its biggest sellers. As of this writing, Google Chromecast was the sixth-best seller in Amazon’s US electronics store, and Apple TV was 14th — two of just a handful of non-Amazon products at the top of the list. What is the endgame here?”
  
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• Document Scotland: The photography collective exploring Scotland's past and present

  04-10-2015 12:59
  
  Created by four-person collective, Document Scotland comprises projects that each focus in detail upon an aspect of Scots life or culture
  
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• Abraham Cruzvillegas set to dig deep into the national consciousness with his earthy installation in the Tate’s Turbine Hall

  04-10-2015 12:39
  
  Soil searching
  
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• Emily Jacir: Europa review – this is art as a cause

  04-10-2015 09:00
  
  Whitechapel Gallery, London
  The work of the Palestinian-born Jacir is intriguing but closer to activism than to artEmily Jacir is a Palestinian-born artist who spent her childhood in Saudi Arabia and now lives in Rome – a history that plays a central role in her work, which is preoccupied with exile, belonging, personal mythology and nostalgia, misplaced or otherwise. Take, for instance, the 1998 photograph she calls Untitled (self-portrait). Jacir often puts herself in her films and insta
  
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• Turner prize 2015 review – pitifully limited expectations

  04-10-2015 08:59
  
  A music project, two mediocre installations and some wonderful work – by architects. There are brilliant artists under 50 out there, but the Turner judges have failed to notice themThe bar is low. The hopes are small. The expectations are pitifully limited. That is the first thing to say about the judges of the 2015 Turner prize. They require so little from contemporary art, or so it seems to me, that they are prepared to help over the admittedly modest stile to victory one artist who prod
  
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