Arts news

• Getting Playwrights Out Of ‘Developmental Hell’

  17-04-2016 23:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “What makes this initiative unusual is that these plays are already guaranteed full productions beyond their one-night-only staged readings.”
  
  Read more

• Object lessons: the best of London’s Islamic sales

  17-04-2016 23:00
  
  Fragment from Alice de Rothschild’s vase carpetsOriental Rugs and Carpets, Christie’s, London, 19 April
  Est £250,000-£350,000
  Three previously unpublished, 17th-century Safavid “vase” carpets, from the collection of Alice de Rothschild, are on the market for the first time in more than a century. Each of them is different in design, showing the extraordinary accomplishment of the south Iranian Kirman weavers. The designs, which often, but not always, feature
  
  Read more

• Much more than spray tans, vajazzles and white stilettoes: Southend-on-Sea show highlights Essex’s past peculiarities

  17-04-2016 23:00
  A chilly Saturday night in Southend-on-Sea might not seem to be a major art world draw. However a substantial crowd was attracted to Focal Point Gallery in the town’s shiny new library to celebrate the opening of The Peculiar People. This rich, archival exhibition is devoted to the history of alternative communities in Essex from the late 19th century to the present day. The show marks the start of Focal Point’s Radical Essex project, which will run throughout the rest of the year a
  
  Read more

• Mark Bradford to represent the US in the 57th Venice Biennale

  17-04-2016 23:00
  
  The Los Angeles-based artist Mark Bradford will represent the United States at the 2017 Venice Biennale, the Rose Art Museum of Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts, which will present Bradford’s work at the event, announced today, 18 April. The exhibition at the US Pavilion, due to run from 13 May to 26 November 2017, will feature a new site-specific installation by Bradford, who works in a variety of media.The Rose Art Museum’s director, Christopher Bedford, who is co-cur
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Former director of scandal-beset Knoedler Gallery breaks her silence

  17-04-2016 23:00
  
  In 2009, two years before news of the Knoedler Gallery’s $70m sale of fake Abstract Expressionist paintings began to emerge, Ann Freedman resigned as director. Two years later, the venerable gallery closed down and the lawsuits against Knoedler and Freedman began to flood in. Five settled. The first to reach trial, brought by the collectors Domenico and Eleanore De Sole, also settled its claims against Freedman on 7 February (and against Knoedler shortly afterwards), just before she was s
  
  Read more

• Evaluating Steve Reich As He Turns 80

  17-04-2016 23:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “If music was invented to restore our emotional and psychological equilibrium, Music for 18 Musicians is one of the great pieces of music ever composed.”
  
  Read more

• The Photo Whose Existence Is A Powder Keg For Arguments About Confederate Memorials

  17-04-2016 22:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The image has helped bolster the claims of the community of amateur historians, hucksters, and Confederate sympathizers committed to defending the Confederacy from the charge of racism, who insist that thousands of black men fought and died for the rebel cause.”
  
  Read more

• We’re All Feeding Facebook’s Giant, Sucking Content Hole

  17-04-2016 22:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “It’s tough to be creative every day when your life is fundamentally ordinary. It’s tiring. And, since most writers toil in relative isolation, it’s anything but social.”
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Is Theatre About The Working Class, But Made For The Middle Class, Always ‘Poverty Porn’?

  17-04-2016 20:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “It can be troubling to sit in an expensive theatre seat – that might cost close to what some people live on for an entire week – and watch actors portray the less fortunate.”
  
  Read more

• Will TV ‘Pay For Play’ Casting Workshops Actually Change?

  17-04-2016 20:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The idea of a committee to explore ways to stop the abuse is a good one – but means nothing if there’s no way to enforce anything that comes out of the committee.”
  
  Read more

• For The First Time, The British Get A Series That Streams Before It Broadcasts On Regular TV

  17-04-2016 19:25 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “We have to recognise that young people don’t watch TV the way we did. … It’s very much in the spirit of New Blood that the show will premiere on iPlayer.”
  
  Read more

• How Being Cool Has Ruined Berlin

  17-04-2016 17:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Somebody must have written about my street on their viral travel blog. Now I had the whole world at my doorstep; I just didn’t have Berlin anymore.”
  
  Read more

• The Other Mapplethorpe’s Oeuvre Is Slightly Different

  17-04-2016 16:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Edward could have chosen a profession that wouldn’t engender comparisons, but he believed, in a lapsed Catholic sort of way, that he was destined to get to know his brother through a shared vocation.”
  
  Read more

• How The Author Of Wolf Hall Actually Gets Her Writing Done

  17-04-2016 16:33 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “I used to be a late starter, but now I get up in the dark like a medieval monk, commit unmediated scribble to a notebook, and go back to bed about six, hoping to sleep for another two hours and to wake slowly and in silence. Random noise, voices in other rooms, get me off to a savage, disorderly start, but if I am left in peace to reach for a pen, I feel through my fingertips what sort of day it is.”
  
  Read more

• Portrait Of The 100-Year-Old, Still Working Artist

  17-04-2016 16:12 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Her age and lack of mobility — she no longer gets out of the house regularly and has live-in round-the-clock care — have forced a series of adjustments to her work habits. Far from undermining her project, however, these concessions have served to highlight the conceptual nature of her work.”
  
  Read more

• Hirst paints—and counts—one million minuscule spots

  17-04-2016 16:03
  
  Damien Hirst talks about his latest spot painting and sculptures, and why being offered a knighthood makes him feel queasy, in an interview in today’s Observer Food Monthly (17 April). In a revealing two-hander lunch with the chef Mark Hix, who runs Hirst’s Pharmacy2 restaurant in Vauxhall, south London, the former YBA is on fine form, saying that yoga is making him feel like a new man. “I do yoga. Iyengar. Three times a week…. I used to slouch a lot, now I slouch a bit
  
  Read more

• How Peoria (Yes, Peoria) Got A Ballet Company

  17-04-2016 15:49 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Creating a ballet company in Peoria in 1965 was difficult. Ballet was not particularly popular then, and even less popular in stodgy Peoria.”
  
  Read more

• The Classicist Who Thinks We Can Actually Beat Internet Trolls

  17-04-2016 15:24 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “She responded, battling back her antagonists and becoming something of a folk hero in the process. Now her engagements often combine her two pursuits, as her talk at Women in the World did: tracing the history of misogyny from the ancient world to today.”
  
  Read more

• How To Become The Best Bookstore In The World

  17-04-2016 15:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Our biggest year was when Borders closed. … We got a huge onflow from that!”
  
  Read more

• The Next Big Playwright Just Might Be A Quiet British 29-Year-Old

  17-04-2016 14:55 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Even at this stage of her career, Ms. Mitchell said, Ms. Birch is an important writer, in the tradition of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield — ‘those tough women who can also do exquisite lyricism.'”
  
  Read more

• James Levine’s Best Moments From Decades At The Met

  17-04-2016 14:23 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Levine built the Met Orchestra into one of the world’s great ensembles. And, more than any other mainstream figure, Levine has used his position to gradually expand American appreciation of the form.”
  
  Read more

• The Man Who Chronicled A Youth Revolution

  17-04-2016 14:08 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “For me, photography is all about youth. … It’s about a happy world full of joy, not some kid crying on a street corner or a sick person.”
  
  Read more

• What A Play Is, Or Could Be, And Certainly Is Not

  17-04-2016 13:44 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “If your friend wrote the play, do not tell her upon curtain that ‘the actors were really talented.’ Actors are popsicle sticks painted with eyes and animated by her mind and your praise can immolate itself on a bonfire stoked with those sticks, thanks.”
  
  Read more

• Artist threatened with lawsuits if she sells nude Donald Trump painting

  17-04-2016 13:00
  
  Illma Gore’s painting, on display at Maddox Gallery in London now with a £1m pricetag, depicts the Republican presidential candidate with a small penisAn infamous nude of Donald Trump has attracted bids of over £100,000 after it went on display at the Maddox Gallery in Mayfair, London, last week, but the artist is being anonymously threatened with legal action if she sells it, due to its resemblance to the Republican presidential hopeful.The piece by Illma Gore, titled Make Ame
  
  Read more

• Mona Hatoum: ‘It’s all luck. I feel things happen accidentally’

  17-04-2016 09:30
  
  On the eve of a major Tate Modern show, the Beirut-born installation artist talks about identity, homeland and being a London student in the cheerless 70sIn 1982, the artist Mona Hatoum staged a performance piece at the Aspex Gallery in Portsmouth. Its title was Under Siege, and it lasted for seven hours. Hatoum was naked, covered in clay, and trapped inside a huge transparent container, a strange primeval mermaid without any water in which to swim. Again and again, she would try to stand up; ag
  
  Read more

• Conceptual Art in Britain 1964-1979 review – an antiseptic archive of archives

  17-04-2016 09:00
  
  Tate Britain, London
  The rebellious exuberance of 1960s conceptual art is largely absent from this poker-faced showCan time past ever be regained? The curators at Tate Britain evidently hope so. In the opening gallery of Conceptual Art in Britain 1964-1979 – note that dismal title and be warned – they have recreated a famous work from the heady London of 1967.Nearly 6,000 oranges are piled in a glowing pyramid on the floor. You are meant to pluck one and eat it, a literal parody of a
  
  Read more

Follow @ArtsUKnews on Twitter!