Arts news

• Italian Court Cancels Appointments Of Five Museum Directors

  26-05-2017 23:29 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Italy has over the past two years recruited 20 highly-qualified new directors, seven of them foreigners, to shake up institutions which are richly-endowed with cultural treasures but often poorly run and badly promoted. But a regional court ruled that five of the appointments were null and void, saying that the selection process had not been transparent, that some interviews had been conducted via Skype and that the one foreigner appointed should never have been eligible."
  
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• Jamaica Kincaid At 68: What I've Learned

  26-05-2017 23:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "The thing that I am branded with and the thing that I am denounced for, I now claim as my own. I am illegitimate, I am ambiguous. In some way I actually claim the right to ambiguity, and the right to clarity. It does me no good to say, 'Well, I reject this and I reject that.' I feel free to use everything, or not, as I choose."
  
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• Take a peek inside The Shed, New York’s new arts and culture space due to open in 2019

  26-05-2017 22:32
  The figure of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg loomed large at a recent hard hat press tour of The Shed, the multidisciplinary arts and culture centre under construction in Hudson Yards, due to open in 2019. And it was with good reason. Not only is the massive redevelopment project being built over the railway yards on Manhattans far west side one of the former mayors parting legacies, but The Shed had just received a $75m gift from Bloomberg Philanthropies, bringing its fundraising
  
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• What Beethoven Teaches Us About Hearing Loss

  26-05-2017 22:25 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "The extraordinary thing about Beethoven’s hearing loss journey is that he found a way forward at every stage. Once he accepted his deafness at Heiligenstadt, it was no longer a source of shame, and he was open about it from then onwards. Even for the last 10 years of his life, when he could hear nothing, he kept composing. Many people will know the story of his conducting what seems to be an orchestra in his head at the premiere of his 9th Symphony. Eyes still shut, he had to be stopped a
  
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• At This Point, Education Is Technology

  26-05-2017 22:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  When I say that education technology is not new, I’m not arguing that technologies do not change over time; or that our institutions, ideas, experiences, societies do not change in part because of technologies. But when we talk about change – when we tell stories about technological change – we must consider how technologies, particularly modern technologies like computers, emerged from a certain history, from certain institutions; how technologies are as likely to re-inscribe
  
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• How a $25,000 NEA grant became a springboard for change in a rural Minnesota community

  26-05-2017 22:00
  
  A grant of $25,000 is not even a drop in the bucket of the US federal governments spending, around $3.5 trillion per year. But it was able to effect visible change in Fergus Falls, a small rural community in Minnesota with a population of 13,000, which received $25,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), the government agency that funds art and culture across every congressional district in the nation, in 2011.
  The NEA, which had a $148m budget last year, and has been targeted for e
  
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• How A Great Berlin Theatre Is Stepping Away From Great Theatre

  26-05-2017 21:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "The stage of spoken-word theatre is indebted to a sense of the world that is centred on the human. On the stage of the 21st century, however, we find a new distribution of power, a new dynamic of creatures, ghosts, machines, objects. The things we once invented to define identities or let them manifest themselves on stage have lost all traction. The [human] subject – is that even a topic anymore these days?"
  
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• What Makes A Good Conductor?

  26-05-2017 21:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Angel Gil-Ordóñez: "Authority through knowledge. People respect you if you know what you are asking them to do. Then you have to be able to convey what you want. All simply. Through gestures and communication that goes beyond language. I think the orchestra is the most extraordinary achievement of humanity. Can you imagine something more sophisticated than that? One hundred people without verbal communication playing together for one hour? That goes beyond everything. Beyond thinki
  
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• Raphael's drawings, Judy Chicago's Beatles mural and Istanbul street dogs – the week in art

  26-05-2017 20:55
  
  A Renaissance master comes to Oxford, Judy Chicago’s Fab Four artwork and Andrea Luka Zimmerman’s socially engaged films – all in your weekly dispatchRaphael: The DrawingsYou can’t get much better than this. Raphael (1483-1520) has been recognised since his own lifetime as one of the world’s greatest artists, and no fashion or passing cultural mood is ever going to change that.• Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 1 June-3 September.Continue reading...
  
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• LA County Museum's New Home Won't Just Be About A Building; It Seeks To Change The Ways We See Art

  26-05-2017 20:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "In its new home, expect LACMA’s permanent collection to break all the rules. The permanent collection won’t exactly be permanent. LACMA instead plans to install the collection as a continuing series of temporary exhibitions — cross-cultural and interdisciplinary. An impermanent permanent collection, the scheme is unprecedented."
  
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• Emmanuel Macron and Vladimir Putin to meet in Versailles

  26-05-2017 20:25
  
  The newly elected French president, Emmanuel Macron, is due to meet Russias Vladimir Putin for the first time on 29 May at the Chteau de Versailles, where they will inaugurate a major exhibition celebrating the 300th anniversary of Peter the Greats diplomatic visit to France in 1717. The meeting falls on a Monday, when the palace and grounds are closed to the public.
  The show Peter the Great, a Tsar in France (30 May-24 September) is billed as an exceptional collaboration between the palace and
  
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• Sometimes an Easter bread is really just an Easter bread

  26-05-2017 20:17
  
  Russias moral police are seeing penises everywhere and even a judge recently got fed up. On Thursday, 25 May, a magistrate in the Siberian city of Krasnoyarsk threw out a case against a woman who had been accused of deliberate desecration of a religious object for sharing an allegedly phallic image of kulich, a tall Russian Easter bread, adorned with the requisite eggs, on social media. Prosecutors called in a religion expert who said that overt sexuality had been condemned by Christianity from
  
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• Nancy Graves Foundation Grants Go To Sam Contis and Myeongsoo Kim

  26-05-2017 20:15 via artnews.com
  The Nancy Graves Foundation has named Sam Contis and Myeongsoo Kim as this year’s recipients of its annual Grants for Visual Artists program, which awards artists an unrestricted $5,000 prize.The foundation, which was established in 1996 after Nancy Graves’s death, has given … Read More
  
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• Comic Timing Is Something Most Of Us Completely Misunderstand

  26-05-2017 20:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "It may be that our sense of the importance of comic timing comes more from how we perceive jokes than from how they're delivered. And, for comedians, the timing after the punch line" - as opposed to before, which is what most laypeople assume - "is what really counts." Thomas MacMillan explains.
  
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• Mario Testino to auction art collection to raise money for Lima gallery

  26-05-2017 19:51
  
  Peruvian-born fashion photographer hopes to generate £8m from sale of 400 works by artists including Wolfgang Tillmans He has turned his lens on some of the most beautiful people in the world, from Kate Moss and Princess Diana to David Bowie and Angelina Jolie.But now the paintings and photographs that have hung on the walls of Mario Testino’s house and studio – and shaped his artistic vision since the 1980s – are to be auctioned.Continue reading...
  
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• Neuroscientists Say Listening To This Song Will Significantly Reduce Your Stress

  26-05-2017 19:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Sound therapies have long been popular as a way of relaxing and restoring one's health. For centuries, indigenous cultures have used music to enhance well-being and improve health conditions. Now, neuroscientists out of the UK have specified which tunes give you the most bang for your musical buck. In fact, listening to that one song -- "Weightless" -- resulted in a striking 65 percent reduction in participants' overall anxiety, and a 35 percent reduction in their usual physiological resti
  
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• Is Truth Zilch?: Mel Bochner’s Show at Peter Freeman Thrives on Misinterpretation

  26-05-2017 19:22 via artnews.com
  Through June 10, in New York Read More
  
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• Tucker Nichols at Charlie James Gallery

  26-05-2017 19:12 via artnews.com
  Pictures at an Exhibition presents images of one notable show every weekday. Read More
  
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• Private Prison Sued For Censoring Inmates' Reading Material

  26-05-2017 19:05 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "A private Utah-based corporation that runs the North Central Correctional Complex in Marion, Ohio, has been sued by the nonprofit Human Rights Defense Center for blocking inmates from receiving books on 'criminal justice policies, legal research, health care issues and other similar topics.'"
  
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• The Universe, As Rendered And Explained By Music

  26-05-2017 18:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Without interfering with its orbits in any way, by just presenting the data scaled up to our range of hearing, we hear what we readily identify as harmonious music.
  
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• Movie Theater Plans Women-Only Showing Of 'Wonder Woman' - And (Some) Men Flip Out

  26-05-2017 18:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The Alamo Drafthouse in Austin had the idea, and it sold out so fast that they added a second date and plan to extend the idea to other cities. What's more, the Austin Drafthouse's social media person deftly handled all the male butthurt on Facebook. (includes examples of butthurt)
  
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• In the Shadow of ‘Solid Doubts’: Robert Stadler Plays at the Noguchi Museum

  26-05-2017 17:33 via artnews.com
  How might the work of a contemporary artist trained in industrial design match up with a seminal mid-century sculptor trained under Brancusi? Reactions to that question—and many more—are on display in “Solid Doubts: Robert Stadler at the Noguchi Museum” in … Read More
  
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• Tate Britain could be our greatest museum – if it only loved its treasures

  26-05-2017 17:32
  
  Its current displays aren’t just terrible. They turn the story of British art into one long joyless slog through brown and grey sludge. The proposed rehang won’t fix thatIn its 17 years of existence, Tate Britain has practically killed British art history. Drawn from the biggest collection of British art in the world, the gallery’s permanent displays – or, more accurately, incredibly impermanent displays – have achieved such a rare cocktail of superficiality, preten
  
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• What Exactly Is Going To Happen In "The Shed"?

  26-05-2017 17:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “The opportunity for us to design a ground-up building for the arts forced us to ask the question: ‘What will art look like in 10 years? 20 years? 30 years?’ And the answer was that we simply could not know. Artists today are working across disciplines, in all media and all sizes. That will continue to change. The one thing that we could always be certain of is that there would always be a need for space, a need for structural loading capacity, and a need for electrical po
  
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• Goodman Gallery Now Represents Yinka Shonibare MBE, Samson Kambalu, More

  26-05-2017 17:18 via artnews.com
  South Africa’s Goodman Gallery announced today that it now represents Yinka Shonibare MBE, Samson Kambalu, Paulo Nazareth, and Grada Kilomba. They join a roster that includes Ghada Amer, Candice Breitz, William Kentridge, and Hank Willis Thomas.A few of the artists … Read More
  
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• The Universal Remote Control: A Brief History

  26-05-2017 17:06 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "[It's] a device that made millions of devices that work similarly but are slightly different bend to its will. In the age of IFTTT, Alexa, Zapier, and Siri, this device has a surprising amount of value and deserves to be studied. And," writes Ernie Smith, "I'm just the guy to do it."
  
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• From the Archives: Robert Rauschenberg Paints a Picture, in 1963

  26-05-2017 17:01 via artnews.com
  "You can be satisfied with something because you’ve seen how awful it can be." Read More
  
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• Controversial Italian court ruling ousts five top museum directors

  26-05-2017 16:53
  
  An Italian regional court has ousted five directors at Italys top museums, almost two years after they were appointed in an unprecedented shake-up of the countrys bureaucratic museums sector. The reform by the Italian culture ministry saw new leadersincluding, for the first time, seven foreignerstake the helm of 20 top institutions and heritage sites, such as the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence and the Galleria Borghese in Rome, in August 2015. But on 24 May, the Lazio regional administr
  
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• 'A Doll's House, Part 2': How Playwright Lucas Hnath Put Together The Script

  26-05-2017 16:35 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  It was by no means a matter of presenting a finished piece to the director and cast: in fact, the actors - especially Chris Cooper, who's used to working in film - were astonished at how much they were allowed to shape their characters' lines. Peter Marks reports on the process, which leaned heavily on what Hnath calls "scraps."
  
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• US billionaire Thomas Kaplan plans to send collection of Dutch Old Masters to Russia

  26-05-2017 16:32
  
  Thomas Kaplan, the US billionaire metals investor who owns more Rembrandts than anyone else, plans to send his collection of Dutch Old Masters to Russia as part of its world tour. The State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg is in negotiations to show the Leiden Collection in 2018, a spokeswoman says. The Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow has also been earmarked as a possible venue, according to the Economist. The Pushkin could not be reached for comment.The New York-based Leiden
  
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• 'Of Course It's A Sculpture - It's A Downward Sculpture Rather Than An Upward Sculpture' - Anish Kapoor Talks About 'Descension', His Whirlpool

  26-05-2017 16:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "One thing that makes it a sculpture is that there's obviously artifice to it. It is artifice posing as a natural phenomenon. It's obviously been made, but the fiction is that it hasn't been made. That tension is an important part of the work."
  
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• Why Don't More Ballet Companies Have Female Artistic Directors? Wendy Whelan Has An Idea

  26-05-2017 15:33 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "I often get calls when a spot opens up, but I don't see myself in that position. I believe myself to not be a director because of the system. Having a male artistic director is a tradition that’s passed down, and it becomes ingrained and it's like, 'Oh, fuck off.' It's a fake system. It's hard to break it down unless you talk about it, and I think talking about it will slowly open it up, but even a feminist ballerina like me can still realize that I can be biased at times without knowing
  
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• Did The NEH Just Surrender To Its Own Abolition?

  26-05-2017 15:17 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Earlier this week, in response to the budget the Trump administration submitted to Congress, the National Endowment for the Humanities released this statement: "The White House has requested that Congress appropriate approximately $42 million to NEH for the orderly closure of the agency. This amount includes funds to meet [existing] matching grant offers ... as well as funds to cover administrative expenses and salaries associated with the closure." Is the NEH giving up on its own existence? Not
  
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• Tickets cancelled for Nitsch performance in Tasmania due to protest threat

  26-05-2017 15:14
  
  Dark Mofo, a festival hosted at the Museum of Old and New Art (MONA), announced today it is cancelling tickets to a performance by the Austrian Actionist Hermann Nitsch in Hobart next month.Organisers cancelled tickets to the performance scheduled for 17 June after they uncovered a plot to disrupt the event. Around 200 tickets are believed to have been obtained by people opposed to the performance by the 78-year-old artist. Concerns that protestors would be inside the venue and m
  
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• A Closer Look At The Big, New Projects MassMoCA Is Putting In Its Big, New Space

  26-05-2017 15:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  James Turrell will have nine different immersive light installations. Jenny Holzer will be showing 200 silk-screened paintings and 21 stone paintings as well as several LED displays, all (of course) featuring text. Laurie Anderson will be playing with virtual reality.
  
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• Morning Links: Silence Is a Rhythm Too Edition

  26-05-2017 15:00 via artnews.com
  Here's what we're reading this morning. Read More
  
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• Curtis Institute Orchestra's Big BBC Interview Cut Short: They Had To Evacuate The Building

  26-05-2017 14:46 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The Curtis Symphony Orchestra, on tour under conductor Osmo Vänskä, had arrived in London and were being featured on BBC Radio 3's live music-news-and-talk program, In Tune. A small group had just played part of a Mozart flute quintet, and a graduating violinist was about to play a duet with the school's president, Roberto Díaz, when the announcement came ...
  
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• Planners Of London's New Concert Hall Should Learn Some Lessons From Hamburg's New Elbphilharmonie - But Can They?

  26-05-2017 14:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  And no, it's not just that the new hall shouldn't run 920% over budget. Unfortunately, as Jack May writes, the lessons from Hamburg may be things that London just isn't situated to do.
  
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• Here's A Dance Job You Never Knew Existed: Restaurant Choreographer

  26-05-2017 14:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The idea is to teach staffers about both non-verbal communication (with customers and each other) and about gracefully negotiating tight spaces. Says one restaurant choreographer, "I went into it thinking it would be almost like movement coaching, but the amount of dance terminology, spatial composition, effort and tempo decisions left me feeling each experience couldn't be more of a choreography gig if I tried."
  
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• What Skills Do Workers In Arts And Culture Really Need? We Analyzed Millions Of Job Ads To Find Out

  26-05-2017 14:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The researchers found that the skills required fall into five clusters, only two of which are self-evidently "creative." The other three "are not inherently creative and [are] therefore at risk of being overlooked, but ... are essential to enabling the creative process."
  
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• Alexander Burdonsky, Russian Stage Director And Stalin's Grandson, Dead At 75

  26-05-2017 13:44 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  For 45 years he worked at the People's Army Theater, the main company for the Soviet and then the Russian armed forces. "Aside from his theater work, Mr. Burdonsky kept a low profile, using his mother's surname. He said he had never visited Stalin's grave, by the Kremlin wall."
  
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• Who's Up To Become UNESCO's Next Director-General?

  26-05-2017 13:29 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Among the candidates to succeed Irina Bokova this November is former French culture minister Audrey Azoulay, the only one of nine who's from Europe or North America. Three of the candidates are women, and four are from the Arab world.
  
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• Hokusai’s Kohada Koheiji: the age-old pastime of telling ghost stories

  26-05-2017 13:00
  
  This work from 1833, in which a murdered actor rises from the dead to spook his wife and her lover, shows there is more to the artist than his iconic waveThe murdered actor Kohada Koheiji looks like a zombie in Hokusai’s spooky print. He’s imagined as a skeleton with skin and hair still clinging to his skull. Though pictured as flesh and bone, however, this is a vision of a spectre, from the series One Hundred Ghost Tales. Continue reading...
  
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• Prix Marcel Duchamp, France's leading contemporary art prize, goes abroad

  26-05-2017 12:55
  
  Keen to make the Prix Marcel Duchamp, France's contemporary art prize, better known abroad, the ADIAF (Association for the International Diffusion of French Art), is organising two exhibitions in China and one at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.The China shows, organised by Alfred Pacquement, the former director of the Centre Pompidou, are at the Red Brick Art Museum in Beijing (27 May-27 August) and Times Museum in Guangzhou (3 June-27 July). Both titled HighTension, they spotlight eigh
  
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• Judy Chicago, Canaletto and Marc Quinn: this week’s best UK exhibitions

  26-05-2017 10:30
  
  The renowned feminist artist celebrates 50 years of Sgt Pepper’s, Venice is brought to life and a collection of macabre Georgian sculptures take over Sir John Soane’s MuseumDavid Octavius Hill was already well established as a Scottish painter when he met the chemist Robert Adamson in Edinburgh in 1843. Adamson had started experimenting with the new science of photography and he and Hill started using the camera to make serious portraits. They started with Edinburgh dignitaries but s
  
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• Indigenous art triennial: a haunting exhibition of shock, celebration and defiance

  26-05-2017 05:24
  
  Featuring 30 early- to mid-career artists, Defying Empire is a compelling, unsettling rumination on the Indigenous experienceDefiance is a word which characterises Indigenous Australia better than any other.It’s a defiance of wildly divergent land and seascapes, by vastly different peoples, which have proven fatal for others. And since 1788 it’s a cultural, physical and political defiance of violence, oppression, assimilation and the intent – and attempt – to vanish a peo
  
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• Roger Tomlinson: Measuring An Audience? But What Are You Measuring?

  26-05-2017 00:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "I have been a champion of audience data for a long time. I conducted my first year-long audience survey at the Vic in Stoke on Trent in 1969, supervised by Keele University. I have been commissioning research surveys for over 40 years and the Arts Council published my book ‘Boxing Clever’ on turning data into audiences in 1993... So, I ought to be welcoming the concept of quality metrics and what Culture Counts proposes to deliver for Arts Council England... But I am left
  
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