Arts news

• What Should Be Done With Statues Honoring Confederates?

  18-08-2017 23:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "In the wake of the controversy over removing American monuments to the Cult of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, Memento Park is not a bad model for us to consider following now — although certainly there are others. The dispute, which exploded into bloodshed, death and grinding national shame in recent days, demands hard thought. Decisions need to be made. Unlike sculpture, civic monuments are less the product of an individual artist than they are collaborations of entire societies. Civ
  
  Read more

• What Should We Do With Books We Just Don't Understand?

  18-08-2017 23:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Could the book that initially seems plain wrong to us be precisely the one that allows us to understand something new about other people?
  
  Read more

• MoviePass Is Trying To Be The Netflix Of Movie Theatres. It's A Daft Plan. (Or Is It?)

  18-08-2017 22:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "AMC has come out guns blazing, even going so far as to include a solid alchemy burn in its press release trashing the company’s plan. As AMC points out, MoviePass — which buys tickets directly from the exhibitors, then redistributes them to its subscribers by way of a MoviePass-specific debit card — will lose money on every customer who sees more than one movie a month. So what’s MoviePass’s angle here? Is this a strange form of cinematic philanthropy? Or do t
  
  Read more

• Stephen Hough: Let's Think About What Classical Music Does And How People Get It

  18-08-2017 22:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  I think the problem is that, since the Second World War, we have confused "daring" with "breaking rules for the sake of doing so." Beethoven was a great rules-bender, rather than rule-breaker. Even his most outrageous pieces, like the late quartets, are still within classical forms. He doesn't smash [the guidelines set down by his predecessors]. For me, that creates interesting tension.
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Why Intellectual Critiques Of Populism Are Notoriously Unreliable

  18-08-2017 21:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Scholars have not always been the most objective students of populism, partly because their own interests are at stake, scholarship and expertise being so often numbered among the chief targets of populist abuse. Accordingly, scholars find populism to be too prone to ignorance, anti-intellectualism, and demagogy, and too vulnerable to capture by racial and ethnic and tribal bigotries, to serve as an authentic engine of positive social change."
  
  Read more

• Study Says There's More Swearing In Novels Now? So What Does That Actually Mean?

  18-08-2017 21:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "On a broader level, there is no one-to-one correspondence between the art of a culture and the psychology of the society that produced it. Furthermore, noting word frequency in published writing does not have a one-to-one correspondence with spoken language in everyday life. Further furthermore, without any contextual information about how these words are used, we just have semantic fragments floating in history’s void, free of any of the things that turn them into actual langua
  
  Read more

• A Piece Of Theatre That Tests The Will Of The Majority In Real Time

  18-08-2017 20:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The Majority, a new show at London’s National Theatre by the performer and playwright Rob Drummond, is inspired by a wave of recent electoral upsets, from the Scottish independence referendum in 2014 to the Brexit vote last year. Throughout the show, Drummond asks a series of timely questions to which the audience votes “yes” or “no” on in real time, with the results immediately revealed, as he demonstrates how easily the shape of a question can alter its answer.
  
  Read more

• The Beet Goes On: Vegetable Orchestra Takes Root On New York's Long Island

  18-08-2017 20:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Inspired by the venerable Viennese Vegetable Orchestra, Dale Stuckenbruck created the Long Island Vegetable Orchestra. They make snake gourds into saxophones, butternut squash into horns, broccoli into flutes, and long orange root vegetables into, yes, "carronets." "Over the years, [the LIVO] has performed at schools, galleries, libraries and at an environmental conference in Geneva. It even appeared in a film." (includes video)
  
  Read more

• Advertisement

• Decay Of Our Culture Comes When We Decline To Celebrate Humanity's Best Accomplishments

  18-08-2017 19:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "We allow our great cultural institutions to fall into disrepair and disrepute because, as we strip them of their reverential traditions and their arduous canon, we also strip them of our reasons to cherish them. We call them before the tribunal of public opinion to justify their very existence, as if we can no longer see through the smog to the heights of Parnassus, lonelier than ever because we have forgotten that it is even there. We attempt to chain the Muses to the machinery of our modern m
  
  Read more

• Juha, For 1,200 Years The Hero Of The Arab World's Favorite Jokes

  18-08-2017 19:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "[The] wise old fool, [with] his long-suffering donkey ... has been a part of local culture for centuries - and has proved useful to Arab jokers and satirists right up until the modern day."
  
  Read more

• Yan Xing at Kunsthalle Basel, Switzerland

  18-08-2017 18:48 via artnews.com
  See images from one notable show every weekday. Read More
  
  Read more

• Report: Once Red-Hot Chinese Art Market Is Struggling To Revive

  18-08-2017 18:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  According to a new study by artnet and the China Association of Auctioneers (CAA). Incidences of non-payment rose seven percent in 2016, and the number of overseas auction houses offering Chinese art and antiquities fell for the first time in seven years.
  
  Read more

• Members of White House Committee on the Arts and Humanities Resign in Protest Following President’s Comments on Charlottesville

  18-08-2017 18:23 via artnews.com
  This morning, the Washington Post reported that many of the remaining members of the White House Committee on the Arts and Humanities have announced their resignation. In a letter to the president, 16 actors, artists, writers, and architects said that … Read More
  
  Read more

• The 'Voice Of Choice' For Audiobooks

  18-08-2017 18:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Mr. Guidall is the undisputed king of audiobooks: more than 1,300 so far, with a stack of new prospects beside his bed awaiting his attention. ... He's a bit disdainful of some of his competition in the audiobook world. 'They're just reading out loud,' he said. 'They don't have an emotional underpinning. There's a rhythm to speech in terms of what's implied. If it's raining in the book, there's got to be something about the voice that evokes the rain.'"
  
  Read more

• From the Archives: Henry Geldzahler on the Late Work of Fernand Léger, in 1962

  18-08-2017 18:00 via artnews.com
  The curator discusses the "sentimental Communist," whose "goal was to reach the worker and teach him the beauty of his world." Read More
  
  Read more

• Members Of President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities Resign En Masse

  18-08-2017 17:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “Ignoring your hateful rhetoric would have made us complicit in your words and actions,” the letter states. “We took a patriotic oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic. Supremacy, discrimination, and vitriol are not American values. Your values are not American values. We must be better than this. We are better than this. If this is not clear to you, then we call on you to resign your office, too."
  
  Read more

• University Of Utah Introduces Its New MFA In Ballet

  18-08-2017 17:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "This fall, the University of Utah's School of Dance welcomes the first class of candidates to its newly reinstated Master of Fine Arts in Ballet program, currently the only ballet-specific MFA in the country."
  
  Read more

• Spectacle Of Hate: What We Can Learn From White Supremacists' Long And Careful Cultivation Of Their Own Aesthetic

  18-08-2017 16:35 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "The alt-right's Tiki-torch, khaki-pants parade on Friday night has birthed many a 'Hitler luau' joke." Yet, explains Rebecca Onion, white supremacist groups in the US, especially the two incarnations of the Ku Klux Klan, have a long history of deliberately making their physical appearance silly and using that silliness to help them get away with mayhem and murder.
  
  Read more

• President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities members resign en masse in protest

  18-08-2017 16:26
  With the aim of speaking truth to power the 16 remaining members of the Presidents Committee on the Arts and the Humanities resigned today en masse in protest to President Donald Trumps comments about the Charlottesville riots. Reproach and censure in the strongest possible terms are necessary following your support of the hate groups and terrorists who killed and injured fellow Americans in Charlottesville, they write in a resignation letter sent to the White House. The false equivalencies you
  
  Read more

• Web Journalism's 'Pivot To Video' Is Not - **Not** - Because Of Audience Demand

  18-08-2017 16:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  In a much-discussed Twitter thread, Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo reminds us that online news consumers, including Millennials, prefer their news in print (otherwise, why would so many sites resort to autoplay?) and explains why media company after media company is ignoring that preference (and laying off countless journalists in the process).
  
  Read more

• The Prospect Of Acting Onstage Again Nearly Killed Stephen Adly Guirgis

  18-08-2017 15:33 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The Pulitzer-winning playwright (Between Riverside and Crazy, The MF with the Hat, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot) began his career as an actor, and old colleagues still want to work with him. But until this summer, he hadn't been onstage since 2004, and in the meantime he'd let stress affect his health in other ways and backed out of several acting jobs he'd already accepted. As the time approached for the revival of Mamet's American Buffalo he's now co-starring in, his body brought things to
  
  Read more

• High Anxiety: Stephen Adly Guirgis' Hard Road Back To Acting

  18-08-2017 15:33 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The Pulitzer-winning playwright (Between Riverside and Crazy, The MF with the Hat, The Last Days of Judas Iscariot) began his career as an actor, and old colleagues still want to work with him. But until this summer, he hadn't been onstage since 2004, and in the meantime he'd let stress affect his health in other ways and backed out of several acting jobs he'd already accepted. As the time approached for the revival of Mamet's American Buffalo he's now co-starring in, his body brought things to
  
  Read more

• ‘There’s a Reason the Nose Fell Off the Sphinx’: Urs Fischer on His Rotting Fruits and Vegetables at Karma in New York

  18-08-2017 15:30 via artnews.com
  The artist's latest show involves a brick wall and rotting organic material. Read More
  
  Read more

• Keeping Monet's Gardens Growing For 40 Years - Meet The Head Gardener At Giverny

  18-08-2017 15:17 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Gilbert Vahé began work at Giverny when the restoration of the gardens first began in 1977, and (except for a five-year temporary retirement that ended this January) he's been there ever since, "work[ing] to maintain the original aesthetic - a certain profile of color and light - that corresponds to Monet's vision."
  
  Read more

• At The Stella Adler Acting Studio's Summer Workshop For Teens In Poverty

  18-08-2017 15:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  A reporter visits Summer Shakespeare, Adler's five-week intensive program for teens living at or below the poverty level. Says director Kern McDonald, "The concept of the Stella Adler Studio - that being a better actor is equal to being a better human - is the base of this program.”
  
  Read more

• Ways of seeing John Berger

  18-08-2017 15:00
  A new exhibition celebrates Berger’s vision through the drawings that were given to him. The room is filled with affection, writes photographer Eamonn McCabeThe late Booker-winning writer and art critic John Berger was the shop steward for photography; he argued that it was an important way of seeing. Now, to celebrate his life, a wonderful exhibition of drawings is taking place in Norwich. “Isn’t drawing the polar opposite of a photo?” Berger asked. “The latter sto
  
  Read more

• Morning Links: Painting an Eclipse Edition

  18-08-2017 15:00 via artnews.com
  Here's what we're reading this morning. Read More
  
  Read more

• There's A New Generation Of Film Composers, And You Can Hear The Difference

  18-08-2017 14:46 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "If this year's Academy Award nominees for best score are any indication, new blood is beginning to course. Justin Hurwitz, who won the Oscar, is only 32 - and La La Land was his third score for a feature film. Mica Levi, 30, was nominated for her second feature, Jackie. Moonlight composer Nicholas Britell, 36, scored his first major film in 2015. But it's not just the relative youth and wetness-behind-the-ears that are noteworthy. These composers, and several others, are shaking up the sound of
  
  Read more

• Extremist Found Liable For $3.2 Million For Destroying Shrines In Timbuktu

  18-08-2017 14:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "On Thursday, the International Criminal Court ruled that former rebel Ahmad al-Faqi al-Mahdi, the man convicted of ordering the attack on the ancient landmarks in Timbuktu, was required to pay 'individual, collective and symbolic' reparations of up to $3.2 million (2.7 million euros). Al-Mahdi was jailed last September for nine years by the Hague-based court after he pleaded guilty to 'intentionally' directing attacks on nine historic Timbuktu mausoleums and its Sidi Yahia mosque." He is the fi
  
  Read more

• Prince's purple, black consciousness and Pink Floyd – the week in art

  18-08-2017 14:22
  The Pantone Color Institute’s Love Symbol #2, African American art at the Tate, plus Turkish tulips, a medieval master and more – all in your weekly dispatchTurkish Tulips
  Mat Collishaw, Cornelia Parker, Damien Hirst and Peter Blake are among the artists delighting in the botany and art history of the tulip in this exhibition curated by the eponymous Gavin Turk.
  •Bowes Museum, Barnard Castle, County Durham, until 5 November. Continue reading...
  
  Read more

• Arts And Culture Are Big Business In San Francisco: Study

  18-08-2017 14:15 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "A new economic prosperity impact report, organised by the non-profit organisation Americans for the Arts, reveals that San Francisco's arts and culture sector annually brings in $1.45 billion and supports over 39,000 full-time jobs. According to the report, the City by the Bay accounts for nearly 1% of the $166.3 billion generated by the sector nationwide."
  
  Read more

• Art Institute Of Chicago Becomes Battleground In PC Wars Following Instructor's Departure

  18-08-2017 14:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Michael Bonesteel, an adjunct professor specialising in outsider art and comics, ... resigned this year after two Title IX complaints were filed by transgender students" and he was consequently stripped of some courses andrequired to revise his syllabus for another and have it approved. Since then, reports Jori Finkel, the School of the AIC has been receiving some serious pushback over alleged censorship.
  
  Read more

• Two Kennedy Center Honorees (So Far) Decide To Boycott White House Reception

  18-08-2017 13:44 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Dancer Carmen de Lavallade said on Thursday that she would be honored to attend the Dec. 3 ceremony at the Kennedy Center, buuuut ... 'In light of the socially divisive and morally caustic narrative that our current leadership is choosing to engage in, and in keeping with the principles that I and so many others have fought for, I will be declining the invitation to attend the reception at the White House.'" Norman Lear is sitting out the party as well, and Lionel Richie is, for now, on the fen
  
  Read more

• An eggs-eptional Artangel project by Andy and Peter Holden

  18-08-2017 13:44
  Artangel is keeping it in the family for its next public art project. Natural Selectiona collaboration between the UK artist Andy Holden and his father, the ornithologist Peter Holdenis due to go on show in the former Newington Library, Elephant & Castle in south London, next month (10 September-5 November).  The work is the culmination of collaborations with my dad over about seven years, which started as a performance and gradually grew into this body of jointly authored work, Andy te
  
  Read more

• Architect Gunnar Birkerts, 92

  18-08-2017 13:29 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Birkerts was best known for light-filled modernist buildings that reflected the Scandinavian architectural tradition that influenced him. Many" - among them, the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, the Corning Museum of Glass, the south wing of the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City, and the Latvian National Library - "were essays in bold curves or angular, irregular shapes."
  
  Read more

• Leonardo da Vinci’s A Nude Man from the Front: a fusion of the gods

  18-08-2017 13:00
  Nature and knowledge of the classical world informed Renaissance artists and both are represented in this drawing that recalls the Italian’s iconic Vitruvian ManTaut muscles are conjured with soft red chalk shadows within a sharply outlined pen and ink silhouette in this study, created around the time Leonardo was prepping for his lost mural depicting the Battle of Anghiari. Continue reading...
  
  Read more

• Top Posts From AJBlogs 08.17.17

  18-08-2017 11:18 via feedproxy.google.com
  Resistance Insistence: Museums (& CultureGrrl) Grapple with Political Turmoil
  Even before Saturday’s horrific game-changer, some art museums — including major “establishment” institutions — had begun dropping their guard, casting aside their habitual reluctance to risk offending the more conservative members of their culture-loving base and taking political stands. ... read more
  AJBlog: CultureGrrl Published 2017-08-17
   
  
  Read more

• Zhao Bandi’s party crashed by censorship at the Ullens Center in Beijing

  18-08-2017 11:09
  The whimsical Beijing-based artist Zhao Bandis solo show China Party (until October 22) opened earlier this month at the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in the Chinese capital with works spanning his three decade career. However, amidst Zhaos paintings, performances and cheeky panda posters, two 2015 paintings Scenery with Cameras and Night View bore the curious caveat (reproduction).
  On 21 July, the UCCA's director Philip Tinari posted on Twitter: While we're on the topic of the Beijing Cul
  
  Read more

• Islamic extremist liable for €2.7m in damages for destroying Timbuktu shrines

  18-08-2017 10:47
  The International Criminal Court (ICC) ruled on 17 August, that an Islamic extremist caused 2.7m in damages when he destroyed shrines in Timbuktu, Mali, in 2012. This is the first time that the ICC has made a ruling solely on cultural destruction, setting an important precedent.The Hague-based ICC ordered "individual, collective and symbolic reparations to be made to the community of Timbuktu. Acknowledging that the destruction of the protected buildings has caused the suffering of people throu
  
  Read more

• Giacometti and Rashid Johnson: this week’s best UK exhibitions

  18-08-2017 10:30
  One of the true greats of modern art is celebrated at the Tate Modern, while the New Yorker takes his meditation on race to the English countrysideThis outstanding presentation of one of the true greats of modern art manages to combine an exquisite layout with abundant in-depth selections from all periods of the Swiss-born sculptor’s evolution to create a genuine blockbuster. It starts with an entrancing display of the human face, from Giacometti’s earliest realistic busts to the elo
  
  Read more

• Collection of Yeats family treasures to go on display for first time

  18-08-2017 01:01
  Letters from poet WB Yeats to his first love, and artwork by his brother, sisters and father will be auctioned at Sotheby’sA treasure trove of Yeats family material, including hundreds of passionate, rueful and philosophical letters from the poet William Butler to the first of his many loves, and the desk at which he wrote them, will go on public display for the first time in Dublin and London in September, before being sold in a Sotheby’s auction in London.The sale will include book
  
  Read more

• The Startling Rise Of Killer Technologies

  18-08-2017 00:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "As biochemists concoct new life-extending medications, calls to Poison Control after swallowing the wrong pills or the wrong number of the right pills have recently doubled. We put a smartphone in every hand, and now more than 1,000 distraction-related crashes happen on our roads every day (also steadily rising). Kids and pets succumb to heatstroke inside cars that are more environmentally sealed than ever—we’re on track to set a new record&nb
  
  Read more

Follow @ArtsUKnews on Twitter!