Arts news

• Iowa State Legislators Want To Raid State's Culture Fund To Cover State Budget Shortfall

  25-01-2017 23:27 via feedproxy.google.com
  "The Iowa Cultural Trust fund is on the chopping block as state lawmakers strive to cover a shortfall in the state budget for the fiscal year that ends in June. A tentative budget agreement would take the entire $6 million in the fund, and use it to offset cuts to a range of state agencies. The fund was established in 2002.   Lawmakers over time have appropriated money for the fund, with interest used for matching grants to artists and arts organizations."
  
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• Karen Finley: Art Is At The Heart Of America. So How Are Going To Support It?

  25-01-2017 23:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Whether it's transcribing Great Negro Spirituals, protecting indigenous Native languages, attending outdoor jazz concerts, preserving quilting by the Amish or the Gee’s Bend women, singing the Delta Blues, weaving narratives of neglected LGBTQ history, creating plays of the immigrant experience or collaborating across state lines, we are a country of expression. Art is the bridge when walls of fear keep us insulated and reactive. A society loses meaning, purpose and direction without it."
  
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• Executive Director, Green Music Center at Sonoma State University

  25-01-2017 22:40 via feedproxy.google.com
  Sonoma State University invites applications and nominations for the position of Executive Director of the Green Music Center, available in 2017.The Organizationhttp://gmc.sonoma.edu/The Green Music Center (GMC), a premier performing arts venue in the California’s Bay area, is a state of the art educational and performance facility on the Sonoma State University campus and home to the SSU Music Department. Located in the heart of the Sonoma wine region, the GMC includes the magnificent 1,4
  
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• Long-serving Mayor Of Harrisburg PA Worked On Museum No One Wanted, Then Stole Artifacts

  25-01-2017 22:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  "The fact that no one seemed to share in his dream of making a less disturbing Westworld on the banks of the Susquehanna did not deter Stephen R. Reed. Nope. He employed that coal-mining country grit in every step of his totally un-mandated, batshit quest to built another Gene Autry Museum in Pennsylvania. And then he got really carried away, and purloined more than 500 items that were slated for the non-existent institution and paid for with public funds, storing them (accidentally! he cla
  
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• Heba Y. Amin at Zilberman Gallery, Istanbul

  25-01-2017 22:29 via artnews.com
  Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday. Read More
  
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• This Year's Oscar Best Picture Nominees - Not Exactly Box Office Winners

  25-01-2017 22:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  "For only the second time in the last 10 years, none of the best picture nominees — at the time of nomination — has grossed more than $100 million domestically. And that first time was in 2015, and that’s only because American Sniper had just opened in wide release; it would go on to gross $346.7 million in North America."
  
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• St Issac's Cathedral dispute triggers political row

  25-01-2017 22:00
  
  A government decision handing control of St Petersburgs famous St Isaacs Cathedral from museum officials to the Russian Orthodox Church has unleashed a storm of protest. The row came to a head on 24 January when a leading parliamentarian, who happens to be Leo Tolstoys great-great grandson, defended the decision in an anti-Semitic tirade in which he blamed Jews for destroying churches.
   
  Observing the protests over the handover of St Isaacs, I cannot but note an amazing paradox, Pyotr Tols
  
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• St Isaac's Cathedral dispute triggers political row

  25-01-2017 22:00
  
  A government decision handing control of St Petersburgs famous St Isaacs Cathedral from museum officials to the Russian Orthodox Church has unleashed a storm of protest. The row came to a head on 24 January when a leading parliamentarian, who happens to be Leo Tolstoys great-great grandson, defended the decision in an anti-Semitic tirade in which he blamed Jews for destroying churches.
   
  Observing the protests over the handover of St Isaacs, I cannot but note an amazing paradox, Pyotr Tols
  
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• Highland Flings as Whitechapel Gallery honours Peter Doig on Burns Night

  25-01-2017 22:00
  
  The fact that Peter Doig this years designated Whitechapel Art Iconwas born in Edinburgh and that last nights (25 January) gala dinner held to celebrate him at the Whitechapel Gallery coincided with Burns Night, made it inevitable that the evening should have a heavily Scottish theme. And it certainly did.
  A lone piper and drams of malt whisky ushered in the illustrious stream of Whitechapel and Doig supporters, who included the artists Enrico David, Phoebe Unwin, Langlands & Bell and Idris
  
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• Female painter of the Flemish Baroque back in vogue—four centuries on

  25-01-2017 22:00
  
  The first ever exhibition for a long-forgotten 17th-century female artist is to be held at the Rubens House in Antwerp in 2018. Michaelina Wautier is probably the first woman who successfully painted works in nearly all the genresportraits, history pictures, still-lifes and scenes of everyday life. At that time most successful Flemish female artists specialised in flower compositions.
   
  Wautier (or Woutiers) was born in Mons in about 1617 and worked in Brussels, where she died in 1689. She
  
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• Dalí’s controversial portrait of sister comes to market for first time

  25-01-2017 22:00
  
  A controversial portrait by Salvador Dal of his sister Ana Mara, given to her before the pairs relationship deteriorated over details published in his autobiography, is on the market for the first time with a price tag of 800,000 to 1.2m.
  Figura de perfil (La Hermana Ana Maria) (1925) depicts Ana Mara sat looking through a window at the Cadaqus coastline in north-eastern Spain. As with many of Dals paintings of his sister, Ana Maras bottom is accentuateda feature he stressed even more in a late
  
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• Struggling Newseum In DC Lays Off 26 Employees

  25-01-2017 21:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  "The latest round of layoffs suggest the finances of the journalism museum remain shaky, as they have ever since it moved from a small space in Arlington to a gigantic building on Pennsylvania Avenue in the District."
  
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• Mary Tyler Moore, 80

  25-01-2017 20:58 via feedproxy.google.com
  "[Her] production company, MTM Enterprises, created groundbreaking TV shows during the 1970s and 1980s, including Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere. But she was primarily considered one of television's finest comic actresses because of her roles on two of the most popular sitcoms of all time."
  
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• Christo Walks Away From His Big Colorado Project

  25-01-2017 20:39 via feedproxy.google.com
  "For more than 20 years, the artist Christo has worked tirelessly and spent $15 million of his own money to create a vast public artwork in Colorado that would draw thousands of tourists and rival the ambition of “The Gates,” the saffron transformation of Central Park that made him and Jeanne-Claude, his collaborator and wife, two of the most talked-about artists of their generation. But Christo said this week that he had decided to walk away from the Colorado project — a silve
  
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• Foundation for Contemporary Arts Names 2017 Grantees for Performance, Poetry, and Visual Art

  25-01-2017 20:07 via artnews.com
  Since 1963, from its roots in an emergency fundraising drive for the fledgling dancer Merce Cunningham (led by Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and John Cage), the Foundation for Contemporary Arts has endured as an artist-led enterprise to support other artists, with the … Read More
  
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• Russell T Davies: Theatre Is A Better Venue For Free Speech Than TV

  25-01-2017 20:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  "That's generally why I am getting more and more interested myself in trying to find a voice for theatre. I'm definitely heading that way. I think you've got to – when you say that television can't express certain things then you have to move beyond it. And I speak as someone who has got away with an awful lot on television.”
  
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• Leslie-Lohman Museum Names Gonzalo Casals Director, Announces New Opening Date

  25-01-2017 20:00 via artnews.com
  The Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art in New York announced today that Gonzalo Casals will be the next director of the institution. He will begin in his post on March 6. The museum, which has been closed for … Read More
  
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• What (C)Should The NEA Be Doing?

  25-01-2017 19:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  "The money doesn’t seem to make big, promising things happen, things that wouldn’t happen otherwise. Much of the giving feels like disguised budget offset. The NEA’s goal looks like survival. It has been so beleaguered over the years, so pummeled, that its mission each year is to dodge the fatal bullet. Yet the NEA – or federal funding for the arts – has served many great goals and can do it once more."
  
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• 'A Rainbow-Colored Dream': Check Out China's International Ice And Snow Sculpture Festival

  25-01-2017 19:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Preparations for the event [in Harbin] begin months in advance, with workers digging huge ice blocks from the frozen Songhua River. ... Sculptors compete to create more and more elaborate buildings of ice, all illuminated in multi-colored lights."
  
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• Art world romance is in the air... on Grope Mountain

  25-01-2017 18:40
  
  The most romantic day of the year is almost here (yes, we're already thinking about 14 February) and, as ever, the art world has the big night covered. Adventure-seekers in London and Liverpool can reach new heights of pleasure at Grope Mountaina climbable wall made with custom holds shaped like human orifices and appendages. The wall, created by the experimental design studio Bompas & Parr, first opened at New York's Museum of Sex in 2015 where many of the multi-coloured, larger-
  
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• Shakespeare's Special Place In America

  25-01-2017 18:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  "The great modern nations boast great writers who depict and define the national life and character: Victor Hugo for the French, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe for the Germans, Leo Tolstoy the Russians, Herman Melville and Mark Twain the Americans, and Shakespeare the English. Of course their greatness is hardly confined to their parochial impact: They are masters for all time and every place. And even among these titans an order of rank is observed, as a true aristocracy requires, and it is Shakesp
  
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• 930-Pound Brown Bear Is Finland's Hottest New Artist

  25-01-2017 18:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Juuso got some paint in his paws and started to make marks with them. We noticed that he liked it," says one of his keepers. "We just leave paint for him, some plywood and paper ... He does all the work in his own time, when he's alone, sitting and moving his legs on the paper." (includes video)
  
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• How The Great German And Austrian Orchestras Became Tools Of Propaganda

  25-01-2017 17:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  "The alchemy of the transformation began with a gradual relinquishment of autonomy, especially stark in Berlin. The Berlin Philharmonic, nationalized into a state-owned company in January 1934 under Joseph Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda, began to perform in the old Philharmonie on Bernburger Straße under an immense swastika. It was now expected to render service to “the German cause.” (Even Goebbels did not speak of “Nazi music” but of “German music.&r
  
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• 'It's going to make art great again': the street artists taking on Trump

  25-01-2017 17:09
  
  The new president has inadvertently inspired a range of angry and satirical pieces, including altered street signs and a drone writing derogatory graffitiAt an anti-Trump rally this weekend, the film-maker Michael Moore took the stage to say the president could be taken down with political satire. “Let’s form an army of comedy and we will bring him down,” he said. “He is affected by ridicule.” That army of comedic artists has been pounding the pavement this weekend
  
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• ‘About the Hare and the Tortoise But Mostly About the Hare’: William N. Copley on Francis Picabia, in About 1978

  25-01-2017 17:06 via artnews.com
  For anyone interested in the pathways and redoubts of 20th-century art history that are messy, ribald, obscure, and proudly defiant of taste and convention, now is a great time to visit New York City. Through March 19, the Museum of … Read More
  
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• Jill Soloway Says Male Directors Should Just Stop Making Movies About Rape (Then She Womansplains Why They Do It)

  25-01-2017 17:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  On a panel at Sundance, the writer/producer (Transparent, United States of Tara, Six Feet Under) said, "We get it, guys. You want us to stay inside because you want us to be afraid we're going to get raped. We get it! Stop making movies and TV shows about rape. Let women make those movies if they want to." Then she started talking about why she thinks Paul Verhoeven made Elle ...
  
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• To understand Trump, we should look to the tyrants of ancient Rome

  25-01-2017 16:44
  
  His disdain for the norms of democracy makes it hard to understand the US president – but he has precedents in emperors such as Commodus, Nero and TiberiusHe looks like a strong man – the strongest. Holding a huge club to beat his enemies with, the Roman emperor Commodus wears a lion skin over his bearded, empty-looking face in a marble portrait bust made in the second century AD, which is one of the treasures of Rome’s Capitoline Museum. He is posing as the mythic hero Hercule
  
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• After Trump's CIA Visit, Lookups Of The Word 'Claque' Spiked

  25-01-2017 16:35 via feedproxy.google.com
  As Merriam-Webster observes, "Claque means 'a group hired to applaud at a performance' or 'a group of sycophants.'"
  
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• 'Alternative Facts' Is The Perfect Euphemism For The Age Of Trump

  25-01-2017 16:06 via feedproxy.google.com
  Katy Waldman: "For one thing, the phrase calls to mind the snake-oil salesmanship that has animated Trump's rise to power." (Waldman cites the '70s term alternative medicine.) " The modifier's connotation of gutsy, even glamorous independence also lends credibility to the rogue alt-right ... Most of all, alternative facts evokes a total alienation from - and disinterest in - objective truth."
  
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• Justin Peck's New Ballet Is Not What It Was Before The Election

  25-01-2017 15:34 via feedproxy.google.com
  "[He] stops short of calling it a protest dance, but his newest ballet, The Times Are Racing, is certainly of the moment. The dancers wear sneakers, and T-shirts and hoodies emblazoned with words like Unite, React, Act, Protest and Fight."
  
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• Artist delves into Iran's tragic cinema blaze

  25-01-2017 15:19
  
  A new show at the narrative projects gallery in Fitzrovia, London, lifts the lid on a pivotal moment in Irans history, drawing attention to a tragic fire at the Cinema Rex in Abadan, southern Iran on 19 August 1978 (The Unity of Time and Place; 27 January-11 March). The Iranian artist Mahmoud Bakhshi focuses on the blaze which claimed the lives of more than 400 people. Bakhshi is promising an immersive installation using historical events and archival footage to construct a story, with no c
  
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• Houston's 'Nixon In China' Accused Of Yellowface

  25-01-2017 15:16 via feedproxy.google.com
  The complaints about Houston Grand Opera's current run of the John Adams opera include the casting of white singers as Chinese characters as well as caricatured stereotypes in Nixon's version of The Red Detachment of Women (an actual Communist propaganda ballet that uses caricatured stereotypes).
  
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• 'Minstrel Show': Houston Chronicle Rips 'Nixon In China' For 'Demeaning Treatment Of Chinese Culture'

  25-01-2017 15:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Instead of presenting Asians as human beings, we are offered a world of lazy stereotypes", writes staff theater and opera critic Wei-Huan Chen about the opera's version of the old Cultural Revolution ballet The Red Detachment of Women, "a representation of Asian people so nostalgic, so inaccurate and so out of touch with the way we talk about and view race in modern times that it at first evokes more confusion than disgust." (That's arguably a fair description of the original Red Detachment.)
  
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• I Wrote All The State Arts Agencies To Ask What Would Change For Them If The NEA Is Eliminated - Here's What Happened

  25-01-2017 15:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  As Leonard Jacobs notes, "40% of the NEA's budget, by statute, goes directly to state and regional arts agencies. ... If the NEA didn't exist, therefore, large chunks of state arts agency budgets would evaporate overnight." So what were the agencies' responses? The first, from a national unmbrella organization, was basically Don't talk about this out loud!!
  
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• Morning Links: Bruce Lee Edition

  25-01-2017 15:00 via artnews.com
  Here’s what we’re reading this morning. Read More
  
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• The Last Time We Fought For The NEA's Very Existence: A Look Back At The '90s Culture Wars

  25-01-2017 14:46 via feedproxy.google.com
  "[Here] are excerpts from the ARTnews archives that detail the [1989-91] struggle over NEA funding, including the controversy surrounding a Corcoran Gallery of Art Mapplethorpe show, Democratic representative Mary Rose Oakar's response, and Republican senator Jesse Helms's vow to avenge what he saw as a loss.
  
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• BroadwayCon Makes Peace With Actors' Equity

  25-01-2017 14:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  "After a short dispute, Actors' Equity Association has lifted its 'do not work' order on BroadwayCon, a convention for theater fans scheduled to begin Friday. The contract disagreement between the two parties was settled on Monday, paving the way for such performers as Josh Groban, Kelli O'Hara and Laura Osnes to appear at the event."
  
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• San Francisco Ballet To Mount Major International Festival Of New Works

  25-01-2017 14:17 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Full festival details, including associated activities and events, will be made public at the time of the 2018 season announcement three months from now, but the list of participating choreographers has been announced: David Dawson, Alonzo King, Edwaard Liang, Annabelle Lopez Ochoa, Cathy Marston, Trey McIntyre, Justin Peck, Arthur Pita, Yuri Possokhov, Dwight Rhoden, Stanton Welch, and Christopher Wheeldon."
  
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• Has South Korea's Leading Soprano, Sumi Jo, Been Blacklisted By China?

  25-01-2017 14:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  A coloratura who's had a big international career (including numerous appearances in China) for 30 years, Jo had been planning to appear with three of the country's major orchestras next month; over the weekend, all three orchestras announced that she had been "forced to withdraw." Other South Korean musicians have had performances in China cancelled as well, and they fear that it's because of tension between Seoul and Beijing over a missile system.
  
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• The Artists Who've Stayed On In Syria

  25-01-2017 13:46 via feedproxy.google.com
  Says one, painter and sculptor Fadi Yazigi , "Art is not only part of my survival - it's also a way of looking for a solution." Another, calligrapher Mouneer Al Shaarani, actually moved back to Syria from Egypt after the war started.
  
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• After Outcry, Roman Polanski Withdraws From France's Academy Awards

  25-01-2017 13:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  "Roman Polanski has stepped down from presiding over next month's César awards, France's equivalent of the Oscars, after his nomination to the prestigious role sparked outrage, a 61,000-signature petition and calls to boycott the event."
  
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• Absolut Art Award Names Finalists for 2017 Art Work and Art Writing Categories

  25-01-2017 13:00 via artnews.com
  Absolut announced the finalists for its 2017 Absolut Art Award today, which gives prizes in two categories, Art Work and Art Writing. Of the finalists, two are representing their home countries at the upcoming Venice Biennale, two will be included in … Read More
  
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• Absolut Art Award Names 2017 Finalists

  25-01-2017 13:00 via artnews.com
  Absolut announced the finalists for its 2017 Absolut Art Award today, which gives prizes in two categories, Art Work and Art Writing. Of the finalists, two are representing their home countries at the upcoming Venice Biennale, two will be included in … Read More
  
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• Dr Oetker returns Van Dyck portrait looted by Göring

  25-01-2017 12:46
  
  Dr Oetker, a family-owned German manufacturer of muesli, pizza and cake mixes, says it will return a portrait by Anthony van Dyck acquired by Hermann Gring to the heir of Jacques Goudstikker, a Jewish art dealer forced to flee the Netherlands when the Nazis invaded.The Portrait of Adriaen Hendriksz Moens was among the works in Goudstikkers gallery inventory when the family fled in 1940. It was forcibly sold and acquired by Gring, the founder of the Gestapo and the commander of the Luftwaff
  
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• Top Posts From AJBlogs 01.24.17

  25-01-2017 11:59 via feedproxy.google.com
  Days of tension, anger and (thank God) New York Polyphony
  Post-inauguration Saturday wasn’t the easiest time to be in New York City. Whatever side you were on politically, the streets in much of mid-town were closed off. Police were everywhere. Cars seemed not to know ... read more
  AJBlog: Condemned to Music Published 2017-01-24What Goes With Gouthière?
  Why Marivaux, n’est-ce pas? A year ago, many of us had never heard of, or heard much about, Pierre Gouthière
  
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• Poland's Second World War museum under threat after court allows controversial merger

  25-01-2017 11:39
  The Museum of the Second World War in Polandset to become one of the worlds largest historical museumsfaces an uncertain future after the Supreme Administrative Court in Warsaw gave the green light to a controversial merger with another museum. The ruling paves the way for the creation of a new government-
  sanctioned institution.
  The 100m museum in Gdansk, which is scheduled to open to the public at the end of February, has become a political pawn in an ongoing battle over national memory, with
  
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• How I captured Britain's most notorious gangsters – in paint

  25-01-2017 09:00
  
  Portraits of underworld figures, from ‘Mad’ Frankie Fraser to Roy ‘Pretty Boy’ Shaw, are to be shown in a former illegal drinking den – the artist Charles Delafeld and some of his most dangerous subjects speakPolice mugshots are among the most familiar and revealing of portraits, celebrated internationally in art galleries and coffee table books. But what about less stark images of criminals? This month sees an exhibition of portrayals of British gangsters past and
  
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• Posters celebrate Indigenous languages, 'the origins of Australia's multiculturalism' – video

  25-01-2017 08:51
  
  For the past two years the Adelaide street artist Peter Drew has been placing thousands of posters all over Australia that celebrate multiculturalism. In his latest project, Real Australians Seek Welcome, Drew has designed new posters that acknowledge the 250 distinct language groups that existed in the country before Europeans invaded. He is appealing for help to print and distribute 3,000 posters across Australia Continue reading...
  
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• Rogues’ Gallery by Philip Hook review – the gullible rich and the art market

  25-01-2017 08:30
  
  This expert and elegant history of art dealers provides background to today’s art world, funded by ‘idiots with pretensions’‘No man but a blockhead,” Dr Johnson pontificated in the 18th century, “ever wrote, except for money.” He was perhaps correct, although other ambitions applied as well. But what about painters? Did no man but a blockhead ever paint, except for money? When it comes to the plastic arts circumstances change. For Johnson, as for all wri
  
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• Take a left at Drool Avenue: alternative NYC maps – in pictures

  25-01-2017 08:00
  
  A new book brings together odd maps of New York City, from cityscapes made of jelly to avant-garde musical compositions by John Cage Continue reading...
  
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