Arts news

• New York Gallery Murray Guy Will Close

  05-01-2017 23:51 via artnews.com
  The New York gallery firmament continues to fracture with an announcement by Murray Guy today that it will close after 18 years in business. Calls to the gallery were not immediately returned. Murray Guy, which has been located on the edge … Read More
  
  Read more

• Director of Patron Loyalty, California Symphony (San Francisco Bay Area)

  05-01-2017 23:41 via feedproxy.google.com
  A newly created role, the Director of Patron Loyalty is a senior level position reporting to the Executive Director. Over the last three seasons, the California Symphony has doubled down on patron loyalty, focusing on retention among single ticket buyers, subscribers, and donors with a highly targeted audience development plan that has led to dramatic increases in sales and fundraising. This new position is to continue this growth, overseeing all marketing efforts and low-level annual fund donor
  
  Read more

• Vinyl Record Sales Reach 25-Year High

  05-01-2017 23:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  Great - but vinyl sales only accounted for about two percent of the market. Still, it shows that "people want tangible objects – it’s human nature, and there is still nothing as satisfying as cracking open a new record, placing it with care on the turntable, and letting the sound take you away, as you look at the album sleeve. Formatting a Spotify playlist will never compete with that, no matter how many millions of songs are at your disposal."
  
  Read more

• Fight Back: One Lit Magazine Editor Explains A Boycott Of Simon And Schuster

  05-01-2017 23:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  For Simon & Schuster, publishing controversial nationalists can be immensely profitable. "During Milo Yiannopoulos’s tenure at Breitbart – where he’s told gay people to 'get back in the closet' and women to 'log off' the internet – he has amassed more than 1 million followers on Facebook. Threshold Editions, the Simon & Schuster imprint dedicated to 'innovative ideas of contemporary conservatism', has a hit on its hands."
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Each Generation Gets - Indeed, It Creates - The Drugs It Deserves

  05-01-2017 23:05 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Over the past century, popularity has shifted between certain drugs - from cocaine and heroin in the 1920s and '30s, to LSD and barbiturates in the 1950s and '60s, to ecstasy and (more) cocaine in the 1980s, to today's cognitive- and productivity-enhancing drugs, such as Adderall, Modafinil and their more serious kin." (Someone's forgetting about heroin and crystal meth.) "If Huxley's progression is to be followed, the drugs we take at a given time can largely be ascribed to an era's culture."
  
  Read more

• 40 Years After Peggy Guggenheim's Death Legal Battles Still Rage Over Her Amazing Collection

  05-01-2017 22:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  The legal briefs have become increasingly acrimonious. The foundation says that it has faithfully carried out Peggy’s wishes, that she never said the collection should remain as she left it, and it describes the descendants’ claims as “distortions,” “pointless,” “ridiculous and outrageous,” and “devoid of good faith.” It also says that a 2013 letter to the foundation from the descendants’ attorney “leaves little room for dou
  
  Read more

• Casey Affleck Isn't Getting The Heat For His Sexual Harassment Cases That Nate Parker Did - Is There A Racial Double-Standard?

  05-01-2017 22:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  Affleck is getting awards and nominations galore for his performance in Manchester by the Sea. Last summer, Nate Parker was considered an even more likely contender for The Birth of a Nation - until word of his rape trial during college spread, whereupon his prospects plummeted. (Parker was acquitted.) Is the difference because Affleck is white and Parker is black? There are certainly reasons to think not, but the question keeps coming up.
  
  Read more

• The top worldwide biennials and events this year

  05-01-2017 22:00
  
  Whitney Biennial
  17 March-11 June
  Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
  The Whitney Museum opens its hugely influential biennial exhibition for the first time in its new downtown building after a three-year hiatus. The curatorsChristopher Lew, who is based at the Whitney, and the independent curator Mia Lockshave selected 63 participants after visiting dealers and curators in 40 cities. The line-up includes established names such as the US artists Jo Baer and Larry Bell, international collec
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• A Connoisseur of Strangeness: Thomas Struth on His ‘Nature and Politics’ Exhibition at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta

  05-01-2017 21:45 via artnews.com
  A few years ago, the photographer Thomas Struth was scheduled to participate in a talk at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta with Glenn Lowry, the director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. “It would be a trip … Read More
  
  Read more

• A Revolution Is Coming. Say Goodbye To The Jobs (Uh Oh)

  05-01-2017 21:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Fifty percent of the jobs will be gone in ~20 years. Not from the great sucking sound of jobs to Mexico that can be stopped with a wall. Not from moving offshore to China. From automation that is moving quickly from blue collar manufacturing to white collar information work. Second only to climate change, this is the greatest disruption of our time, and I don’t mean that word in a good way."
  
  Read more

• Conceptual Pop-Music Duo The KLF Announce a Comeback After 20-Plus Years

  05-01-2017 21:21 via artnews.com
  In 1995, K Foundation—the conceptual art wing of The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu, known more famously as the British pop-music duo The KLF—made a statement announcing a 23-year moratorium on all projects, which by then notoriously included the release … Read More
  
  Read more

• Lit's Top Ten Unreliable Narrators

  05-01-2017 21:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  "There are, of course, different types of unreliable narrators; those who are fooling themselves, those who are fooling others, and a range in between. Here are a few of the ones that stand out."
  
  Read more

• Johnathan Reiner at Hang-Up Gallery, London

  05-01-2017 20:52 via artnews.com
  Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday Read More
  
  Read more

• So How Did A White Nationalist Land A Major Book Contract? Here's A Window On The Publishing Business

  05-01-2017 20:34 via feedproxy.google.com
  "The fact that someone with extreme views considered offensive by many people got such a significant book advance shows how the publishing world reflects, and plays to, many of the divides in our culture. Few left-leaning readers realize that within mainstream publishing, conservative books are a booming business."
  
  Read more

• An Idiosyncratic Timeline Of "Attempts To Fix The Art World"

  05-01-2017 20:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  The term "the artworld" itself seems to date only to 1964, but this timeline goes all the way back to 1793, when the revolutionary regime in France turned a certain royal palace in Paris into a public museum. The history here is selective, to be sure, but half the fun of these things is working up righteous high dudgeon over what's been in- and excluded.
  
  Read more

• How John Cage-The-Person Informed The Art

  05-01-2017 19:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Throughout his life, Cage remained a cultural omnivore. Interwoven into Selected Letters are comments that reveal how his life and art were informed by his study of the I Ching and Zen Buddhism, his burgeoning interest in mushrooms (making him an amateur mycologist), and his embrace of a macrobiotic diet. He aspired to have “all distinctions between art and life removed.” His blending of Eastern and Western artistic traditions placed him at the center of the American avant-garde of
  
  Read more

• How Dancers Navigate The Madhouse That Is January In New York

  05-01-2017 19:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  Remember when early January was basically a post-Christmas lull in the performing arts season? Those days are over: now it's not uusual for a dancer to perform in three completely different works for different companies within 24 hours. "The reason - or the culprit, some might say - is the phenomenon known as APAP."
  
  Read more

• Watermelon Wound: A Show by Benny Andrews Deals with Political Angst and Anxiety

  05-01-2017 18:31 via artnews.com
  Through January 21, at Michael Rosenfeld, New York Read More
  
  Read more

• An Interactive Visualization Of Every Line In "Hamilton"

  05-01-2017 18:26 via feedproxy.google.com
  Want to better see and understand the relationships and interactions of the characters and plot lines of the musical "Hamilton?" This engaging interactive scrollable exploration of the show will drop you down a rabbit hole if you're not careful...
  
  Read more

• Louvre attendance falls as tourists stay away from Paris

  05-01-2017 18:15
  
  The Louvre has announced that its total attendance in 2016 fell to 7.3 million. This compares to its record attendance of around 9.3 million only two years ago, when the museum projected visitor numbers could rise to 12 million by 2025. The Louvre attributed the decline to the fall in foreign tourists visiting Paris in the aftermath of terrorist attacks in 2015 and 2016. It is likely to remain the world's most visited art museum in The Art Newspaper's annual survey: the British Museum in London
  
  Read more

• Why 'La La Land' Has An Edge In The Oscar Race

  05-01-2017 18:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  The Academy just looooves movies about Hollywood. (Exhibit A: The Artist) (What, you don't remember The Artist?)
  
  Read more

• The God of Glazes: A Centennial Retrospective of Ceramicist Miyagawa Kozan

  05-01-2017 17:37 via artnews.com
  Museum of Oriental Ceramics, Osaka, April 29 – July 31 Read More
  
  Read more

• New Classical Music Is A Bigger Tent Than It's Ever Been In History, Says Allan Kozinn

  05-01-2017 17:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  "There was a time, within relatively recent memory, when buyers of new-music albums had a good idea what kind of music they would hear – and not incidentally, what kind they would not hear." Kozinn surveys the current scene.
  
  Read more

• Motion Capture, The High-Tech Cinema Process, Comes To Live Theatre - To Shakespeare, No Less

  05-01-2017 16:34 via feedproxy.google.com
  For a new staging of The Tempest starring Simon Russell Beale at Stratford-upon-Avon, the Royal Shakespeare Company is using the same techniques and equipment, including a costume filled with digital sensors, for the character of Ariel that Hollywood has used for Gollum and King Kong.
  
  Read more

• One Of The Last Of The Shakers Has Died - Only Two Remain

  05-01-2017 16:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  Sister Frances Carr, a resident of the sole remaining Shaker community, at Sabbathday Lake in Maine, passed on Monday at age 89. "Carr apparently didn't like when people called her, 60-year-old [Brother Arnold] Hadd and 78-year-old Sister June Carpenter the 'last' Shakers - she was convinced others would eventually convert to the religious sect, something Hadd still hopes for."
  
  Read more

• Crucifixion is horribly violent – we must confront its reality head on

  05-01-2017 15:36
  
  Glasgow theology students have been warned about brutal crucifixion images. But such paintings remind us of the grisly truth about deathGlasgow University is giving theology students what the Daily Mail calls “trigger warnings” about potentially upsetting images of the crucifixion. The theology department concedes that its course about Christ in cinema “contains graphic scenes of the crucifixion, and this is flagged up to students beforehand”. Given it includes Mel Gibson
  
  Read more

• A Virtual-Reality Paintbrush That Lets You Make Art On Empty Space (Google Bought It Up, Of Course)

  05-01-2017 15:33 via feedproxy.google.com
  "[Drew Skillman and Patrick Hackett] were trying to build a 3-D chess application one night a couple of years ago when they discovered it had an unexpected side effect: As you moved the chess pieces around in virtual space, they left trails of light behind."
  
  Read more

• Barnes Foundation Does Its First-Ever Sound Installation

  05-01-2017 15:17 via feedproxy.google.com
  "In Unbounded Histories, which can be streamed on any web-enabled phone as you enter the collection, [Andrea] Hornick creates soundscapes and recites poems keyed to individual artworks, all to encourage viewers and listeners to reconsider each work through her series of provocations."
  
  Read more

• Morning Links: Hot Wheels Edition

  05-01-2017 15:08 via artnews.com
  Must-read stories from around the world Read More
  
  Read more

• Could Companies Just Stop Dumping Gifted Dancers Because Of Some Arbitrary Ideal Of Height Or Body Type?

  05-01-2017 15:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  Jenice Armstrong, on Sara Michelle Murawski's dismissal from Pennsylvania Ballet because, at 5'11", she's too tall: "Murawski's dancing abilities don't appear to be in question. So if ballet officials had an issue with a tall dancer, why woo her here? Now that she's finally here and performing beautifully, she gets a hard toe shoe up her backside, because they apparently don't like the idea of a tall female looming over shorter male dancers."
  
  Read more

• What Happened To Berkeley Symphony's Music Director?

  05-01-2017 14:47 via feedproxy.google.com
  Joana Carneiro has just withdrawn from her third straight program there in four months - and for the previous two, no reason was given. Now we know why - and, fortunately, it's good news.
  
  Read more

• Conductor Georges Prêtre Dead At 92

  05-01-2017 14:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  "[He] led many of the world's leading orchestras during a remarkable 70-year career that lasted through October when, visibly frail, he gave an emotional farewell concert with the Vienna Symphony, of which he was honorary conductor. At the end of the concert, he blew kisses to the musicians."
  
  Read more

• Writers Guild Screenplay Nominations (All Three Of Them) Are Out

  05-01-2017 14:16 via feedproxy.google.com
  "The Writers Guild of America hands out only three movie awards - a paltry number compared to the guild's 26 TV categories - but this year's list of nominees is complete with an interesting split from the Academy."
  
  Read more

• The Stage 100 For 2017: Sonia Friedman Leads The List Of The Most Influential People In British Theatre

  05-01-2017 14:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  The producer of the West End's Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Dreamgirls, Funny Girl and Nice Fish (starring Mark Rylance) is only the third woman ever to top the roster. (See the full list here.)
  
  Read more

• The Theatre That Made English-Language Musicals The Toast Of Paris Gets Its First Female Artistic Director

  05-01-2017 13:46 via feedproxy.google.com
  Ruth Mackenzie, a Briton who headed the 2012 London Cultural Olympics and currently runs the Holland Festival, will take over the Théâtre du Châtelet from Jean-Luc Choplin, who transformed the venue from a somewhat offbeat opera and dance producer into a Broadway-by-the-Seine (Broadway's recent An American in Paris originated there).
  
  Read more

• Inside The Sistine Chapel Choir: A Singer Tells All (Well, Most)

  05-01-2017 13:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  The Vatican's flagship chorus got a bad reputation during the late 20th century (you may have heard its wobbly yelling on TV when a pope died), but Pope Benedict hired a new director to raise standards, and there's been real progress. The choir's only English member tells what it's like to have a job today in what's probably the world's oldest vocal ensemble.
  
  Read more

• Kader Attia focuses on the politics and poetry of water during two-day event in Dakar

  05-01-2017 12:18
  
  The Paris-born artist and activist Kader Attia will present the first off-site project of the 13th Sharjah Biennial later this week in Dakar, Senegal, focusing on cultural, political and ecological issues relating to water as a diminishing 21st-century resource.
  The event, called Vive lIndpendance de lEau (8-9 January; Universit Cheikh Anta Diop), includes symposia, performances and workshops organised by Attia, touching on topics such as colonialism, global warming and public health.Attia tell
  
  Read more

• Shirin Neshat’s best photograph: an Iranian woman with a gun in her hair

  05-01-2017 10:33
  
  ‘We often think of women with an Islamic background as being passive and submissive to men, but here they are empowered by bearing arms’This is my friend and muse, an artist called Arita Shahrzad. When it comes to capturing nuance and sadness, she has the perfect lips and eyes. I don’t actually take the pictures I produce. I’ve used photography for a long time, but I’m not technically trained. My role is more conceptual. I do the composition, the framing, the post-p
  
  Read more

• Top Posts From AJBlogs 01.04.17

  05-01-2017 10:26 via feedproxy.google.com
  12 Plays of Xmas:  8. Ecstasy by Mike Leigh
  A friend points out that this hasn’t been the cheeriest of series. Few hugs and no sign at all of puppies. This may say something about me, or my bookshelves. ... read more
  AJBlog: Performance Monkey Published 2017-01-04
   
  
  Read more

• Rhythm in blues: Sandra Blow's abstract paintings – in pictures

  05-01-2017 08:00
  
  British painter Sandra Blow used everything from tea to cement in her geometric work, resulting in energetic and mysterious canvases Continue reading...
  
  Read more

• Sure Criticism Tells You Whether to Pay Attention. But Once It Was So Much More...

  05-01-2017 06:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  The death of critic John Berger, who is best known for his four-part BBC series called "Ways of Seeing," has prompted a number of reflections on what it means to be a critic, what makes a great critic, and whether or not the current age values such criticism. Berger wrote often about being skeptical about perceptions of art and hardened wisdom about what it meant. He suggested a way of looking at art that was fresh and personal and questioned the generic.
  Today, criticism is often seen as old-fa
  
  Read more

• Judge Rules Against Fan Version Of "Star Trek"

  05-01-2017 01:25 via feedproxy.google.com
  The movie project billed itself as a professional quality fan "Star Trek" project. "To the purpose and character of the use, the judge writes that Axanar attempts to "stay faithful" to the Star Trek canon with nary any criticism, seemingly shrugging off defendants' arguments of staging a 'mockumentary.' To the nature of the copyrighted work, the judge writes that after 13 Star Trek motion pictures and six television series, these types of works "are given broad copyright protections."
  
  Read more

• Study: Recalling Your Dreams Promotes Creativity

  05-01-2017 00:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  The results suggest “increased awareness to dreams increases creativity through a ‘loosening’ of stereotyped thinking patterns,” the researchers conclude.
  
  Read more

Follow @ArtsUKnews on Twitter!