Arts news

• A Writer Turns To Toni Morrison To Get Past The Fear Of A White Audience

  05-03-2017 23:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  "I've known for a long time that as a black person, some white people expect a performance from me, something that might confirm what they think they know about my identity. ... What surprised me was that these questions took up so much imaginative space, and did it so quickly, and were in fact so large and puzzling that they stopped me from writing anything."
  
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• Opera Montreal Is Going All-Out For Pink Floyd

  05-03-2017 23:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  Will this bring in new audiences? "Opera hasn’t been a profitable business for a long time, but Pierre Dufour is betting $3.2-million that he can make money from an opera version of the most ambitious and successful of narrative rock albums: Pink Floyd’s The Wall."
  
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• A Movie Theatre In Alabama Can Handle A Woman/Beast Romance, But Not A Gay Character

  05-03-2017 22:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  That's right, a drive-in movie theatre has banned Disney's live-action remake of "Beauty and the Beast" because one character is (ahem, overtly) gay. One commenter wrote, "A drive-in theater is so perfectly apt for your prehistoric ideologies."
  
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• AJBlog Posts From The Weekend Of 03.05.17

  05-03-2017 22:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  Funny or die
  What makes a comedy? Perspective. Ask Shakespeare’s Malvolia, Titania, or Andrew Aguecheek if they’re living in a comedy and they’ll gaze at you with tear-stained incredulity. Publicly shamed, sexually humiliated, drugged and tricked into ... read more
  AJBlog: Performance MonkeyPublished 2017-03-05
   
  SRJO With Carmen Bradford: Ella At 100
  In Ella Fitzgerald’s centennial year, the great singer is being honored around the world. The Seattle Repertory Jazz
  
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• Private deals far outweighed public auction sales last year, Tefaf’s annual report finds

  05-03-2017 22:00
  
  The annual Tefaf art market report, published today (6 March), has had something of an overhaul by its new author, Rachel Pownall. Using a mixture of public and private sources, including offices of national statistics, financial databases and gallery sales, the economist and university professor estimates that the global art market is now worth $45bn, an increase, she says, of 1.7% compared with 2015.However, if the previous author Clare McAndrews figures from last year are to be taken into ac
  
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• Object lessons: Givenchy's personal art collection and an unknown German still life painter

  05-03-2017 22:00
  
  The Giacometti of Hubert de GivenchyChristie's Paris, 6 MarchTotal estimate 6M-9MThe sale features 21 pieces custom-made for the fashion designer Givenchy by Diego Giacometti (1902-85). Born in Switzerland, Diego (the brother of Alberto) went to Paris as a young man to work with the interior designer Jean-Michel Frank, who introduced him to such fashion luminaries as Elsa Schiaparelli and Coco Chanel. He also met Gustav Zumsteg, a textile designer who supplied silks to Dior, Yves Saint Laurent
  
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• Michelangelo: the first celebrity artist

  05-03-2017 22:00
  Madonna, Beyonc and Michelangelo. The sculptor of David, painter of the Sistine Chapel and designer of the dome of St Peters cathedral, Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) is one of the few artists to be recognised by his first name alone. The wildly talented Renaissance man was the original celebrity artist, says the Guardian newspapers art critic Jonathan Jones, in this clip from the forthcoming documentary Michelangelo: Love and Death. Shot in locations including the marble quarries of C
  
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• Making A Horror Comedy Out Of The Racial Tensions In The U.S.

  05-03-2017 22:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  It wasn't exactly simple, says "Get Out" writer/director Jordan Peele. Known as a comedian, he saw his dream of being a director slipping away - but then he realized comedy and horror were close: "The reason they work, why they get primal, audible reactions from us is because they allow us to purge our own fears and discomforts in a safe environment."
  
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• Live art double-whammy at Chisenhale and Tate Modern

  05-03-2017 22:00
  
  Two strikingly contrasting live art experiences taking place within just a few hours provided a stimulating and thought-provoking end to last week (3 March). Friday afternoon found your correspondent sitting on the floor of the Chisenhale Gallery, captivated by Alex Baczynski-Jenkins live work that had opened on the eve of Trumps presidential inauguration. The showsadly unlike Trumps administrationdraws to a close this Sunday (12 March). Suggestively titled The tremble, the symptom, the swell a
  
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• Female Old Masters finally get their day in the sun

  05-03-2017 22:00
  
  Female Old Masters are enjoying a belated renaissance. A major survey of the 18th-century French portraitist Elisabeth Louise Vige Le Brun drew crowds at the Grand Palais in Paris, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa in 2015 and 2016. Madrids Museo del Prado recently devoted its first exhibition to a female artist, the Flemish Baroque still-life painter Clara Peeters. In April, Tate Britain in London is due to hang its earliest work by a woman
  
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• Curator Jarrett Gregory heads to the Hirshhorn

  05-03-2017 22:00
  
  The curator Jarrett Gregorywho organised the buzz-generating, re-jigged Focus sector at this years Armory Show in New Yorkbegins a new position today, 6 March, as a curator at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC. Im thrilled to be joining the Hirshhorn team, she said over email as she rode the train from New York to Washington. Gregory made a splash during her tenure as the assistant curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) fro
  
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• Blanchett plays orgasmic spider in art film

  05-03-2017 22:00
  
  Seeing Cate Blanchett enact the redback spiders deadly mating ritual has always been on our wish listand now the artist Del Kathryn Barton has delivered with her new film, Red, which is startling visitors at the Art Gallery of South Australia in Adelaide (until 30 April). In a bid to depict the spiders frenzied sexual climax, Blanchett cuts her clothes apart to reveal a webbed body suit. But even Barton was taken aback by the Oscar-winning actresss passion for the part. Barton told the Sydney M
  
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• Arab cultural institute to open in New York

  05-03-2017 22:00
  
  A Middle Eastern patron plans to open an Institute of Arab and Islamic Art in New York in May against the backdrop of President Donald Trumps ongoing attempt to ban immigrants from seven, mainly Muslim, countries entering the US. Sheikh Mohammed Al-Thani, a Qatari national based in New York, is due to launch the 2,500 sq. m cultural space in downtown Manhattan. It will host exhibitions travelling from the Arab and Islamic worlds.
  It made absolute sense to build an institute that would not only
  
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• A Show Sounds Tone Deaf - Even Racist - But Learns From Its Mistakes

  05-03-2017 21:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  Maybe calling your group show, composed of almost all white artists, "Show Mein," and having the promotional material look like Chinese take-out boxes with chopsticks, isn't quite the right decision - as the Spring/Break Art Show quickly learned.
  
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• Theatre Locations Are Getting Weird, Some Might Say Gimmicky

  05-03-2017 21:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  A great space isn't enough; the plays have to match setting and theme, as in this Orpheus and Eurydice under a bridge: "We pass into a damp, dark space, press a coin into the palm of Charon and bend almost double to walk four steps and emerge into a chamber under the Clifton suspension bridge. The walls are mottled with mould. Fronds grow from the roof. Water drips. It’s as cold as hell, and that’s exactly where we are supposed to be."
  
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• The Academy Failed At Transparency, And Must Now Make Far-Reaching Changes

  05-03-2017 20:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  The Academy is notoriously secretive, but its decisions have major ramifications. "The Academy’s members are not part of a private club; they’re part of a global electorate, their elections scrutinized on an international stage. And because of that, those elections should be ruled by the principles we apply to all such plebiscites."
  
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• What Do Memories Smell Like?

  05-03-2017 20:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  The role of smell in cultural preservation is getting its own attention - and the tool of the preservationists is "a sampling device that looks like a contraption out of Jules Verne: a crystalline dome with plastic tubing snaking from its side. The sampler is placed gently on objects — rare books, furniture, carpets — to capture the escaping molecules that create a distinct smell."
  
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• What's Happened Since Writer Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie Wrote About Being A Feminist

  05-03-2017 19:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  She hasn't changed, but she's getting nonstop invitations to what she calls "feminist things," and she's published a new book to help a friend raise a daughter. "Adichie recently came across her own kindergarten reports. 'My father keeps them all. You know what the teacher wrote? ‘She is brilliant, but she refuses to do any work when she’s annoyed.’ I was five years old.'"
  
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• Míriam Colón, Puerto Rican Actress And Theatre Pioneer, Dies At 80

  05-03-2017 19:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  She had a "prodigious" list of roles in movies, usually character acting and bit parts, but one of her biggest contributions was founding the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre.
  
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• George Saunders: What Do Writers Actually *Do* When They Write?

  05-03-2017 18:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  Saunders, whose novel Lincoln in the Bardo just came out and is on many bestseller lists: "We often discuss art this way: the artist had something he 'wanted to express', and then he just, you know … expressed it. We buy into some version of the intentional fallacy: the notion that art is about having a clear-cut intention and then confidently executing same. The actual process, in my experience, is much more mysterious and more of a pain in the ass to discuss truthfully."
  
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• Laurie Anderson On Lou Reed As A Writer, Their Retirement Plans, And Their Archives

  05-03-2017 18:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  Anderson doesn't want the archives to go to a university where no one can access them. That said, some things can't be captured: "The one thing I really miss from this archive that was such a big part of Lou — and can’t really be archived — is his dedication to meditation. He made a very extensive study of the nature of mind, but there is no physical trace of it. He left no footprints."
  
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• Sarasota Ballet Dancers Vote To Unionize

  05-03-2017 17:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  The 26-year-old company's dancers voted to join the American Guild of Musical Artists. Negotiations for a contract begin in two weeks.
  
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• U.S. Billionaires Bought Up Artistic Treasures From Abroad - And The U.K. Wants Its Stuff Back

  05-03-2017 17:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  Much of the artwork, and sometimes entire rooms or domiciles too, is lost. As in, no one knows where it is, who owns it, and how the U.K. might get it back.The U.S. was desperate for a British or European shine, and "the trade was frenzied. When the Titanic sank in 1912, 30 tons of crated English architectural objects were on board."
  
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• Paula Fox, Who Wrote Award-Winning Books For Adults And Children, Has Died At Age 93

  05-03-2017 16:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  Fox wrote for every age, and so, critics said, her adult work was often discounted. "Fox’s best-known novel for adults is 'Desperate Characters' (1970), about the disintegration of a marriage. It was made into a film of the same title, released the next year and starring Shirley MacLaine and Kenneth Mars."
  
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• The First Fiction Smuggled Out Of North Korea Reveals A Lot About Life There

  05-03-2017 16:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  The book, which was written from 1989-1995 and hidden away until a chain of strangers had the chance to smuggle it out, is a series of stories that "are a frank look at the life of regular citizens trying to get by under a repressive regime. Many of the characters fail to grasp the reality of the world in which they live, either through ignorance, stubbornness, or a misguided hope that the regime is more reasonable than it really is."
  
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• Spencer Hays, Business Magnate Who Gave A Huge Art Collection To The Musee D'Orsay, Has Died At 80

  05-03-2017 15:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  Mr. Hays had been a Bible salesman, an apparel salesman and a majority shareholder in a business employing college students to sell magazine subscriptions every summer. And he and his wife adored Paris, and French art. "The gift — the largest foreign donation of art to France since World War II — was announced by President François Hollande in a ceremony at the Élysée Palace in October after months of negotiations with the couple."
  
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• Downsizing Baby Boomers Are Flooding Museums With Donated Art

  05-03-2017 15:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  In addition to changing how nonprofits deal with donations, "the flood of works that may be coming to institutions around the country in the next decade could broaden the definition of postmodern art."
  
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• Will The New Birmingham Conservatoire Challenge London's Dominance?

  05-03-2017 15:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  It's going to be amazing. But, says its director ominously, "this conservatoire, the first to be newly built in Britain since 1987, may well be the last because of the reduction in funding for music."
  
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• Count Another Industry Getting A 'Trump Bump': Late Night TV

  05-03-2017 14:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  The late night political hosts have the most to thank the Orange One In Chief for. "Colbert and other late-night talk show hosts are being lifted by the wave of TV viewers turning to late-night comedy to cope with their angst over the new administration."
  
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• We Seriously Don't Talk Enough About Clara Schumann, So Here You Go

  05-03-2017 14:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  Open a book about Brahms and get a lot more Clara than you bargained for: "Like many celebrity power couples, the woman is often more notable than the man. For a long time, it was easy to overlook Clara Schumann; Robert was the composer of them, really, and she was just the performer. But that’s wrong! It’s extremely wrong! She composed too! She performed all the time!"
  
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• What Could Possibly Explain Last Week's Oscars Flub?

  05-03-2017 13:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  Disaster science, in which lots of little, seemingly inconsequential things add up to large problems. For instance, at the Oscars, "having senior executives taking such a front-line role can be a recipe for trouble – they’re more likely to assume they’re going to do it right. Many accidents have been triggered by very experienced workers who grew overconfident and complacent — wilderness firefighters, for example, are most likely to be killed or injured in their 10th year
  
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• Tony Cragg: ‘I’m most interested in the emotional qualities of things’

  05-03-2017 10:00
  
  The Liverpool-born sculptor on how nature complicates art, and what he’s learned from teaching and living in EuropeYou’ve called your exhibition at Yorkshire Sculpture Park A Rare Category of Objects. Why?
  Sculptures are rare. It’s not as if you walk down pavements dodging sculptures, do you? Sculpture is a rare use of materials. We’re in the industrial north here, where billions of tons of material are being used to make cars, pottery, books, textiles, chemicals –
  
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• A World View: John Latham; Speak review – a time-bending experience

  05-03-2017 09:00
  
  Serpentine Gallery; Serpentine Sackler Gallery, London
  From proto-psychedelic film to book chewing, the hardcore conceptual art of John Latham continues to inspireTime it right, and you could enter straight into the most dizzying spectacle – a million coloured circles hurtling towards you on screen. Discs flash and whirl in the darkness, accompanied by what might be the sound of distant rioting but is actually a circular saw. The furious buzz is perfectly attuned to the constant strobe. It
  
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• From pop art to the present: the dreams that shaped America

  05-03-2017 01:05
  
  The British Museum’s new exhibition features the work of uncompromising US artist Glenn LigonFor Glenn Ligon, the provocative American artist, Barack Obama’s tenure in the White House was notable not just as the first time a black man took the reins of power in the US, but because the president knew about art. And the admiration went both ways: Obama hung Ligon’s work in his private quarters in the White House. This weekend the uncompromising art of the 56-year-old New Yorker f
  
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