Arts news

• LA Or San Francisco? Where Will George Lucas' Billion-Dollar Museum Be?

  03-01-2017 23:54 via feedproxy.google.com
  "The "Star Wars" creator is financing the project himself. He plans to spend more than $1 billion to build the museum, endow it and provide a trove of initial artworks valued at over $400 million. Together with Chinese architect Ma Yansong, Lucas has proposed a sleek, futuristic design looks like a cross between the Guggenheim and a galactic starfighter. The museum's bold design and concept make clear that the 72-year-old filmmaker sees it as part of his legacy, and he is increasingly impatient
  
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• 'I Disowned My Native Language': A Writer's Confession

  03-01-2017 23:33 via feedproxy.google.com
  Yiyun Li, who writes only in English: "Yes, there is something unnatural, which I have refused to accept. Not the fact of writing in a second language - there are always Nabokov and Conrad as references, and many of my contemporaries as well ... It's the absoluteness of my abandonment of Chinese, undertaken with such determination that it is a kind of suicide."
  
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• Edinburgh Invests Another £300,000 In Its Festivals

  03-01-2017 23:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  "The extra money will go the Expo fund, which is available to the 12 key Edinburgh festivals to help Scottish artists create and showcase their work on an international stage. It takes the total sum given by the government to support the festivals in 2017/18 to £2.3 million. The cabinet secretary for culture, tourism and external affairs, Fiona Hyslop, noted that the combined festivals attract 4.5 million attendees and contribute £313 million to the Scottish economy."
  
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• Beijing's Palace Museum Will Build Big New Outpost In Hong Kong

  03-01-2017 23:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  "The 30,500 sq. m museum will be funded with a $450m donation from the Hong Kong Jockey Club, the city's biggest private charity. The Hong Kong outpost will likely have a contemporary style as it will be designed by Rocco Yim, the Hong Kong architect who designed the new Hong Kong government complex."
  
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• Luhring Augustine Now Represents Jeremy Moon Estate

  03-01-2017 22:32 via artnews.com
  Luhring Augustine announced today that it has added the estate of Jeremy Moon to its roster. Later this month, the New York gallery will host the first solo exhibition of the British artist’s work in the U.S.Moon, whose career began in the … Read More
  
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• How To Get More People Into Movie Theatres? Start Screening TV Shows!

  03-01-2017 22:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Television companies are looking for ways to build hype for their new shows and make them stand out amid a glut of high-quality original programs. This year there could be as many as 500 scripted shows on TV and streaming services, compared with about 300 in 2015, according to estimates from the cable network FX. Theater owners, meanwhile, are eager to fill seats during slow periods including the autumn months, and hoping to diversify their businesses as the box office becom
  
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• The Visual Art World Is Shedding Expertise At A Dangerous Rate

  03-01-2017 22:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  "It is not just that it appears impossible to reach a consensus on important artists such as Modigliani. Nor is it the way the auction houses are discarding specialists at an alarming rate. Nor even the fact that key artistic Foundations (Warhol, Pollock and Lichtenstein) no longer provide an authenticating service. It is all this and more."
  
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• Standup Surrealist: Stewart Lee pens foreword to Ithell Colquhoun travelogue

  03-01-2017 22:00
  
  Its an odd pairing: Stewart Lee, the acerbic award-winning stand-up comedian and co-writer of Jerry Springer: the Opera, and Ithell Colquhoun, the Surrealist painter, writer and occultist, who died in obscurity in rural Cornwall in 1988. But despite describing himself as a fully signed up rationalist, Lee is also a major Colquhoun fan and has just written the foreword to a new edition of her Irish and Cornish travelogues, which were first published in the 1950s.
  Colquhouns writing first attract
  
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• If The Great Geniuses Hadn't Made Their Great Discoveries Would Others Have Made Them?

  03-01-2017 21:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  "For one thing, the most obvious candidate to replace one genius seems to be another genius. No surprise, maybe, but it makes you wonder whether the much-derided “great man” view of history, which ascribes historical trajectories to the actions and decisions of individuals, might not have some validity in science. You might wonder whether there’s some selection effect here: We overlook lesser-known candidates precisely because they weren’t discoverers, even though th
  
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• ‘Figurative Geometry’ at Collezione Maramotti, Reggio Emilia, Italy

  03-01-2017 21:08 via artnews.com
  Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday Read More
  
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• Dividing Movie Types Between "Coastal Elites" And "Ordinary Americans" Is Tempting But Dangerous

  03-01-2017 20:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  Thoughts of “the bubble,” and of its rhetorical cousin “real America” kept coming up as I tried to organize my feelings about the year’s movies. The phrases are both booby traps—labels that, when applied to culture, seek to impose a divide between art that is oblivious and art that is aware, or between movies that are about and for honest plain-spoken Americans (current example: Patriots Day) and movies that are for “coastal elites” who think rural
  
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• 'What Do You Get When 70 Dancers And Coders Meet For A Hackathon?'

  03-01-2017 20:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Chaos, yes, but also 18 compelling two-minute performances using both familiar and emerging new media tools, like full-body motion tracking, livestreamed 360-degree video, projection mapping, ..." Kelsey Lannin reports from DanceHackDay in San Francisco.
  
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• The Internet Hasn't Democratized Music As Promised

  03-01-2017 19:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  "As music discovery becomes more concentrated and consolidated (goodbye, Vine) thanks to Spotify recs and Tidal-only exclusives (my New Year’s resolution: cancel Tidal) and Beats 1 premieres that one feels obligated to indulge for the sake of relevancy, the free-for-all that once was a deep-dive internet search for a weird track has dissipated a bit, in lieu of streaming services handing you what you want on a platter. 'Discovery' features feel like an exercise in marketed groupthink, even
  
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• How to use John Berger’s ‘language of images’ on Trump, polar bears and Kim Kardashian

  03-01-2017 19:02
  
  In the 70s, the late critic revolutionised our appreciation of the visual arts. How do his ideas translate to contemporary culture?John Berger, who died on Monday, wrote and said a lot of smart things, but he will be remembered longest for his 1972 BBC television series and book Ways of Seeing. The TV series belongs to the pixellated past, but the brilliantly designed book published alongside it by Penguin, with boldly montaged illustrations and stark, pithy text, is a bestselling modern classic
  
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• Visiting Disney World Is The Modern Version Of Making A Medieval Pilgrimage, Say Academics

  03-01-2017 19:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  And they may just have a point, at least with respect to some visitors. "In the modern world, a trip to Disney has become a rite of passage that transforms those who make the trek ... Disney World resembles a medieval pilgrimage center, designed to connect pilgrims with the supernatural."
  
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• How A Building Shaped The Magazine The Economist Became

  03-01-2017 18:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Just as the design of prisons can make rehabilitation easier or harder, and as school buildings influence how children learn, so offices mould the people who work in them. They make some kinds of interaction easy and others hard, which shapes the way of working. Over the years the building has shaped The Economist in several ways, some good, some less so."
  
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• Sharing Everything Online Isn't Really As Liberating As Some Of Us Think

  03-01-2017 18:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  "When faced with an abundance of digital toys that offer magical levels of connectivity and convenience, many of us succumb to a 'giddy sense that privacy is kind of stupid', as Gary Shteyngart [once] wrote."
  
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• The Upstart Companies Making Opera Hip In LA

  03-01-2017 17:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  New opera companies are everywhere, and springing up in unexpected places and in unusual formats. And there's a lot more coming in 2017.
  
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• Brian Eno Creates Music That Grows Like A Garden As You Listen To It

  03-01-2017 17:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  His latest release has a regular CD version that's a single long track of Enonian ambient music. But the iTunes version is a mini-app in itself, using algorithms to create music that's always changing - "growing" - and never ends.
  
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• A Timeline of Attempts to Fix the Art World

  03-01-2017 16:20 via artnews.com
  From the founding of the Louvre in 1793 to the emergence of the Underground Museum in Los Angeles in 2012 to the start in 2013 of GCC, a collective focusing on contemporary Gulf culture, this timeline tracks guided and misguided … Read More
  
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• Morning Links: ‘Ways of Seeing’ Edition

  03-01-2017 14:04 via artnews.com
  Must-read stories from around the world Read More
  
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• John Berger, the author of Ways of Seeing, has died aged 90

  03-01-2017 10:57
  
  John Berger, whose most famous book Ways of Seeing sold more than a million copies, has died aged 90. An art critic who hated the label, Berger wrote Ways of Seeing in 1972, basing it on a BBC television series of the same title. As well as high art, Berger analysed the visual language of the mass media. Partly conceived as a riposte to Kenneth Clark's Civilisation, a far more lavish television series turned book, Ways of Seeing is still in print and on student reading lists.A number of books w
  
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• Florence acts to ensure Michelangelo's David remains sure-footed after recent earthquakes

  03-01-2017 09:00
  
  Experts are assessing the seismic resistance of Florences historic treasures in the wake of the catastrophic series of earthquakes that shook central Italy last year, killing nearly 300 people and destroying the 14th-century Basilica of St Benedict in Norcia.
  The disasters have revived the debate around the weak ankles of Michelangelos David (1501-04) at the Galleria dellAccademia. In 2014, geoscientists from Italys National Research Council raised the alarm that the five-tonne statue shows mic
  
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• A Practical Real-World Debate About Public Money And The Role Of Artists

  03-01-2017 07:51 via feedproxy.google.com
  Ohio's Cuyahoga County voters approved a cigarette tax to fund artists. So the question was how to allocate those funds. The country's arts commission decided that the program would
  emphasize community engagement over studio practice. Originally, the proposal was to have a Washington DC-based nonprofit organization replace the Cleveland-based group that had administered the individual artist grant program since its inception in 2008.
  But artists got upset that criteria emphasized change over art
  
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• Today's AJBlog Highlights 01.02.17

  03-01-2017 05:35 via feedproxy.google.com
  Monday Recommendation: Andrew Cyrille Andrew Cyrille Quartet, The Declaration Of Musical Independence (ECM) Andrew Cyrille, a bold drummer, long since established his audacity and the independence underscored in the album title. This collection is notable for subtlety and daring ... read more
  AJBlog: RiffTides Published 2017-01-02
  12 Plays of Xmas: 7 Egor Bulychev by Gorky I’ve seen a lot of Chekhov. I mean, a lot. Last year, I marvelled at Vanya at the Almeida and spent a d
  
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• Bill Marshall, 77, Founder Of The Toronto Film Festival

  03-01-2017 03:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  “He was a pioneer in the Canadian film industry,” said TIFF director and CEO Piers Handling, in a press release announcing Marshall’s death. “His vision of creating a public festival that would bring the world to Toronto through the transformative power of cinema stands today as one of his most significant legacies.”
  
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• What Neurologists Are Learning From 125 Years Of Movie-Watching

  03-01-2017 02:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Over 125 years, the global filmmaking community has been engaged in an informal science of vision, conducting a large number of trial-and-error experiments on human perception. The results are not to be found in any neuroscience or psychology textbook, though you can find some in books on cinematography and film editing, and in academic papers analysing individual films. Other insights are there in the films themselves, waiting to be described. In recent years, professional scientists have star
  
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• John Berger, Radical and Wide-Ranging Art Critic, Novelist, and Essayist, Dies at 90

  03-01-2017 02:14 via artnews.com
  John Berger, the perspicacious and politically engaged art critic, novelist, and essayist whose 1972 BBC television series and book Ways of Seeing remains a cornerstone of venturesome contemporary art criticism, died today at his home in Antony, a suburb of Paris. The … Read More
  
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• How "Reality" TV Is Struggling To Portray Real People

  03-01-2017 02:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Television has long had a fraught relationship with the 'regular' person. Many of its shows, from Leave It to Beaver on down, have relied on the power of aspiration—the ideal family, the ideal group of friends, impossibly beautiful people inhabiting impossibly beautiful places—to amplify the appeal of the 'normal' worlds they’ve served up to their viewers... Those shows and their many, many counterparts claimed to embrace averageness; they also, however, scene after scene, tre
  
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• Way Out There, Where Art Meets Science And They Converge

  03-01-2017 01:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  We evolved here, on this spinning planet, we grew from abiotic material to life, became complex, and eventually, after billions of years, became us. You. Me. Our sense of beauty and wonder and curiosity turned our gaze to the sky and allowed us to discover the pieces of Universe that were our origins, looking back across countless light years to how we came to be. This in turn inspires art, prose and music, a unique outlook and perspective on nature that we can share and appreciate. The science
  
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• 11-Year-Old's Opera Debuts In Vienna

  03-01-2017 01:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Conductor Simon Rattle declared he was 'absolutely bowled over' when he first saw her perform, but it was Stephen Fry who first speculated that Deutscher could be this generation’s Mozart, after watching a video of her performing on YouTube. However, it is not a comparison that the 11-year-old is particularly keen on."
  
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• Adrian Searle on John Berger: 'Art for him was never apart from being alive'

  03-01-2017 00:31
  
  The Guardian art critic remembers his friend as a storyteller and natural performer whose ideas on art were always usefulI cannot overestimate John Berger’s importance to me. It wasn’t so much his critical opinions or insights I valued, so much as the man himself, whose vitality and receptiveness to the things about him had a force I have rarely encountered. Related: John Berger obituaryRelated: A life in quotes: John BergerRelated: John Berger: ‘If I’m a storyteller it&r
  
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• A Choreographer Who Thinks In Series

  03-01-2017 00:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  In the performing arts world, it is the custom that artists continually create and promote something new, something original. Choreographer Trajell Harris has conceived of a series of pieces that explore and expand on an idea. Could this lead to a new way of thinking about presenting dance?
  
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• Why Poetry? It's Such A Tedious Question At This Point. And Yet...

  03-01-2017 00:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Why support poetry? Those of us who engage in the publication and sustenance of the written word do so to insure that language for our future generations remains intact, powerful and ultimately renewed, capable of its role during times of crisis and celebration."
  
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