Arts news

• Jack Rabinovitch, 86, Had Major Impact On Canada's Literary Scene

  11-08-2017 23:51 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Mr. Rabinovitch died on Sunday at the age of 87, a few days after falling down the stairs of his Toronto home. On Wednesday he was laid to rest, with hundreds of mourners gathering at the city’s Beth Tzedec Congregation to pay their respects to the man who, through a small act of literary philanthropy, did more to alter the course of Canadian letters over the last few decades than just about anyone else in the country.
  
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• Political Theatre Controversies Go Way Back. Consider This 1624 Play That Makes A Great Cautionary Tale

  11-08-2017 23:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Whenever anyone tries to argue that theatre shouldn’t 'be political,' I like to tell them the story of A Game at Chess. Thomas Middleton’s last play, which premiered in 1624, is mostly unknown outside of academia today; in the seventeenth century, however, it made quite a splash and resulted in the closure of the Globe theatre."
  
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• Sequins, Spandex and sculpture

  11-08-2017 23:00
  The best art moves its viewers. But while it may raise the hair on the back of your neck or even bring tears to your eyes, it rarely makes you want to squat. Nevertheless squattingas well as jumping, marching and stretchingis exactly what a group of visitors found themselves doing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art recently. A crowd of about a dozen art lovers in stretch pants and sports bras gathered at 9am, before the museum opened to the public, to take part in the Museum Workoutan exercise to
  
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• What Music Did Alexander Hamilton Listen To?

  11-08-2017 22:25 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "While rap aficionados and theater nerds have exhaustively cataloged the rich referential web of Mr. Miranda’s “Hamilton” score, little attention has been paid to the show’s engagement with the music that Alexander Hamilton would have known in his lifetime."
  
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• When Artificial Intelligence Software Comes Out Even Stupider Than Its Creators Had Hoped

  11-08-2017 22:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Reporter Jacob Brogan talks with researcher Janelle Shane - who created a neural network to tell knock-knock jokes, only to have it become fixated on the Cow With No Lips joke - about "what's going on under the hood, what her creations might teach us, and why it's so funny when neural networks go bad."
  
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• Are Social Justice Warriors Making The World An Uglier Place?

  11-08-2017 21:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "From declaring that one should interrogate one’s musical tastes for classism to fretting about yellow face in opera to musing as to whether a man can write a novel about rape culture, in the hands of the social justice warriors, artistic and cultural criticism is increasingly less about aesthetics and more about virtue signaling by the critic. Like all other fundamentalists, these secular descendants of the Puritans are so preoccupied with enforcing their rigid mo
  
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• Facebook Watch Is Not A Threat To YouTube

  11-08-2017 21:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  It is, argues Will Oremus, a threat to Twitter.
  
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• Report: Today's Books Have WAAAY More Profanity Than Those From Earlier Decades

  11-08-2017 20:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Books published in 2005-08 (were) 28 times more likely to include swear words than books published in the early 1950s," the researchers report in the journal Sage Open.
  
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• Speed, bonnie boat, to curb excess tourism | Brief letters

  11-08-2017 20:10
  Breastfeeding statue | Glen Campbell’s ‘tosser’ | Frank Field letters | Tony Blair as a young Trot | Codeword | Skye bridgeFurther to Paul Faupel’s letter (9 August) suggesting erecting a monument to breastfeeding in central London, there is such a statue celebrating motherhood with a woman suckling her baby in full public view. It is on the Buckingham Palace side of the Victoria Memorial. I estimate that it’s more than twice life size and has been there for over a
  
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• The Chopin Paradox

  11-08-2017 20:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "The Polish composer and pianist Frédéric Chopin was no doubt regarded as a one-of-a-kind virtuoso. Which is peculiar, in a way, since he also stole freely and transparently from other artists. [Sara Fishko traces] the various influences that went into Chopin's signature style." (audio)
  
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• Phillip Kennicott: Unique Louis Kahn Concert Hall barge Belongs In DC

  11-08-2017 19:40 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "The boat belongs in Washington, a city both blessed and socially determined by its rivers. The nation’s capital was founded at the confluence of the Potomac and the Anacostia, near the ports of Georgetown and Alexandria, and is home to the country’s oldest naval base. At times, the city has embraced its river setting, most significantly in 1901 when the McMillan Plan created the Mall, new parks along the waterfront and Memorial Bridge, which created a symbolic (though often illusory
  
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• Collector Daniel Loeb Apologizes for Stating Black Senator in New York Has Done ‘More Damage to People of Color Than Anyone Who Has Ever Donned a Hood’

  11-08-2017 19:37 via artnews.com
  A since-deleted Facebook post took issue with the legislator's stance on charter schools. Read More
  
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• ‘No to the Invasion’ at CCS Bard Galleries, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York

  11-08-2017 19:34 via artnews.com
  See images from one notable show every weekday. Read More
  
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• Why English Is So Rich In (Or Afflicted With) Puns

  11-08-2017 19:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Big vocabulary, flexible syntax, lots of homophones - perhaps only Chinese is better suited for wordplay. Indeed, in the U.S. an entire circuit of punning tournaments has arisen. Says one frequent competitor, "I sometimes get embarrassed by how seriously I take this."
  
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• If You're All About Creative Placemaking, Best Consider The Place - And Now It Seems To Be Rural

  11-08-2017 18:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  As for this year's finalists for ArtPlace grants, 34 percent hailed from rural areas. ArtPlace says it's noticed an "increase in regional projects; many working collaboratively across adjacent rural communities." It also said that proposed projects reflected a "sustained interest in water projects that, this year, focused on its use and preservation," and requests for improving or introducing broadband access to rural communities to "increase economic opportunity."
  
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• What Happened To The Moral Outrage That Was Such A Mainstay Of Standup Comedy?

  11-08-2017 18:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Well, perhaps most of it wasn't funny enough, argues James Kettle - and when we see it these days, as with John Oliver, it tends to be cooler and more wry and less, well, outraged than in the '80s.
  
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• Met Museum Website Has A Digital Hit

  11-08-2017 17:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "The Met’s website has seen a 64 percent increase in image downloads since Open Access was implemented, as well as a 17 percent bump in traffic to the online collection. Users who download photographs are now spending five times as long on the site."
  
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• German Now Officially Has 5,000 New Words, Many Of Them English (Which Irks Some Germans)

  11-08-2017 17:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Among the new items in the authoritative Duden dictionary: Selfie, postfaktisch (post-truth), Emoji, Cyberkrieg (cyber-war), and tindern (to do online dating).
  
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• When Hardened Warriors Stitched Quilts

  11-08-2017 16:35 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Soldiers and sailors have been stitching masterpieces of the sewing crafts for hundreds of years. It was a longstanding tradition that during lulls in fighting, while prisoners of war or over extended hospital visits, they would hand-stitch quilts, wool work seascapes and embroider their own uniforms." And some of the pieces they made are quite elaborate.
  
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• Was This Gloomy Englishman The First Singer-Songwriter?

  11-08-2017 16:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Back in the 16th century, the composer and lutenist John Dowland was similarly popular - pressing into a vein of moping soppiness that made him famous, and has served English musicians ever since." (But the first? Perhaps the author forgot about the troubadours.)
  
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• From the Archives: A Defense of Isamu Noguchi’s Controversial Sets for ‘King Lear,’ in 1955

  11-08-2017 16:00 via artnews.com
  Alfred Frankfurter on the artist's "radical, and so impressively successful" sets. Read More
  
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• Leonard Bernstein's Near-Death Experiences In Philadelphia

  11-08-2017 15:33 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  When he first arrived in the City of Brotherly Love, to attend Curtis, Lenny described it as "a city of dust and grit and horror." And while one of those near-death experiences was metaphorical, a professional disaster, the other was real: he nearly got shot. David Patrick Stearns has the stories (and others, too).
  
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• Talking To The Folks Who Do One Of The Hardest Jobs On Broadway: Understudy

  11-08-2017 15:17 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Peter Marks meets Donna Migliaccio, Patti LuPone's understudy in War Paint, and the subs from Come From Away, who each have to have five roles committed to memory.
  
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• Robotics Companies Are Hiring People From Animation Firms To Make Their Machines Cuter

  11-08-2017 15:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "They're taking cues from some of fiction's friendlier robots - think the droids in Star Wars, or Wall-E - and blending it with the latest thinking on how our own brains work to create real-life robots that may make us more inclined to accept these technologies into our lives.... This cottage industry of bot-makers are concerned with what the machines look like, how they sound, and what kind of personalities they have."
  
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• Martin Roth obituary

  11-08-2017 15:01
  Director who put the Victoria and Albert Museum on the world stageDuring his five years as director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, Martin Roth put the London institution on the international stage, travelling tirelessly as its “ambassador”. His resignation last September – greeted with widespread surprise – was prompted to a significant extent by his disappointment at Britain’s referendum decision the previous June to leave the EU.Full of his usual energy, he le
  
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• Morning Links: Meteorologically Bizarre Landscapes Edition

  11-08-2017 15:00 via artnews.com
  Here's what we're reading this morning. Read More
  
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• Venice's Rebellion Against Tourists Is Spreading Across Europe

  11-08-2017 14:46 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "With the continent sweltering under a heatwave nicknamed Lucifer, tempers have been boiling over, too, as a wave of anti-tourism protests take place in some of Europe's most popular destinations." Demonstrations have taken place from Dubrovnik to Barcelona and beyond, with cruise ships and Airbnb being particular targets of anger.
  
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• Classical Music Needs To Drop 'Elitist' Trappings To Survive, A Third Of Poll Respondents Say

  11-08-2017 14:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "One in three [British] adults responding to an online poll highlighted 'aloofness' as a challenge for the artform, and a similar percentage said they thought major classical events only ever happened in [London]. 40% of respondents said concerts need to be performed in more everyday places - such as parks and clubs - for classical music to remain relevant."
  
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• Meet The Bright (And Popular) Young Book Critics Of YouTube

  11-08-2017 14:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "'BookTubers' as they are (slightly irritatingly) known, post videoed book reviews on YouTube and many rack up hundreds of thousands - even millions - of views. ... Who could have predicted that, in the age of smartphones, video games and constant distraction, a vast audience of young people would be clamouring for broadcast literary coverage?"
  
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• Five Versions Of Van Gogh's 'Sunflowers' United For First Time - Virtually

  11-08-2017 14:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Six of those now-famous paintings survive, five in public collections ... Alas for aficionados, those five publicly held Sunflowers are scattered over three continents and have never been seen together. But Thursday morning, their isolation ended, so to speak, when a 'virtual exhibition' reunited the Arles Sunflowers on Facebook in a single cyber-gallery - dubbed Sunflowers 360 - creating the illusion that they are hanging in a single space."
  
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• Russian Censors Clear Controversial Film About Last Tsar

  11-08-2017 13:44 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Matilda a sumptuous production about the young Nicholas II's affair with a half-Polish ballerina, has sparked more protests in Russia than any other film since the fall of the USSR. Conservative Orthodox Christians, appalled at the depiction of an illicit (but well-documented) relationship involving a monarch they consider a holy martyr, have been demanding that the film be banned.
  
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• Whale brains, flying robots and Cindy Sherman the selfie queen – the week in art

  11-08-2017 13:00
  The Natural History Museum journeys to the bottom of the sea, Caravaggio dazzles in Edinburgh and Sherman reveals some distorted self portraits on her Instagram account – all in your weekly dispatchWhales: Beneath the Surface Continue reading...
  
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• Whale brains, flying robots and a new selfie queen – the week in art

  11-08-2017 13:00
  The Natural History Museum journeys to the bottom of the sea, Caravaggio dazzles in Edinburgh and Cindy Sherman reveals a selfie-filled Instagram account – all in your weekly dispatchWhales: Beneath the Surface Continue reading...
  
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• Quentin Blake’s The Photo: life’s disappointments in microcosm

  11-08-2017 13:00
  Roald Dahl’s collaborator sums up the stereotypes of travelling in his inimitable style, but he also sets our imaginations to workThanks to his work with Roald Dahl, the illustrations of Quentin Blake are so well known that it’s easy to take them for granted. We all recognise the scratchy, loose, improvised lines and the good-natured mood. Yet his work’s range can be surprising. Continue reading...
  
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• Cézanne unmasked: the shattering portraits that blew Picasso and the Paris avant garde away

  11-08-2017 12:25
  He painted his wife without lips. He painted his friend with a spinal deformity. And he painted himself as a ghost in a top hat. Paul Cézanne’s unflinching portraits, coming to Britain this autumn, didn’t just astonish Picasso and his disciples. They changed art for everIn Paris at the dawn of the 20th century, a generation of young artists changed everything. They visited the dusty yet magical galleries of the Ethnography Museum in the rambling Trocadéro and some start
  
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• Construction boss Jack Kirkland’s collection gets Sheffield outing

  11-08-2017 11:21
  While much of construction boss Jack Kirklands collection has been loaned for international exhibitions, 13 out of the 14 works going on show at the Graves Gallery in Sheffield next month have never been exhibited in the UK before. The exhibition (2 September-2 December) has been organised by Going Public, an initiative launched in 2015 by Museums Sheffield to foster collaboration between major international collectors and regional museums. It follows a show of the London-based philanthrop
  
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• Soul of a Nation and Raphael: this week’s best UK exhibitions

  11-08-2017 10:30
  The Tate excels itself with an incredibly rich study of black American art, while the Ashmolean will transform how you think about the Italian geniusHilarious and provocative conjunctions of word and image make Davis a powerful feminist artist. Her arresting videos include a surreal remix of a 1960s documentary about the sculptor Barbara Hepworth. The pretentious narration is undermined by images of the banality and boredom of housework and suburban life. Intelligent, enjoyable stuff.
  Stills Gal
  
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• Thomas Hart Benton’s naval gazing

  11-08-2017 10:00
  The Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia is celebrating the 100th anniversary of the Naval Station Norfolk with an exhibition of works by the American Regionalist artist Thomas Hart Benton, who was stationed at the base at the end of the First World War and referred to this time as a turning point in his development as an artist, says the Chryslers curator of exhibitions, Seth Feman. Before [the First World War], he had been experimenting in abstract styles largely by looking to the late
  
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• Winter Whiteout is coming—to Madison Square Park with art installation

  11-08-2017 00:26
  As daylight grows shorter this winter, Madison Square Parks central Oval Lawn will be blanketed by a small blizzard of incandescent light when the Austrian-born artist Erwin Redl installs his public art work Whiteout (13 November-18 April 2018). Commissioned by the parks non-profit group Mad Sq Arts, the installation will be made up of hundreds of white spheres embedded with LED lights and suspended from steel poles. The projects aims to evoke the phenomenon of a whiteout that, in nature, disor
  
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• Why Have So Many Music Festivals Gotten Into Trouble This Year?

  11-08-2017 00:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Between the councils, organisers, security and ticket companies, it’s often hard to know who was actually at fault, and although it might seem reductive to see individuals to blame for large-scale disasters like Hope & Glory, it might be not too far from the truth."
  
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