Arts news

• It's Unanimous: "The Shape Of Water" Wins Venice Film Festival

  10-09-2017 23:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The world’s oldest film festival has crowned some contentious and controversial winners over the years, but this time, the press and the jury are in agreement: “The Shape of Water” was rapturously acclaimed by critics when it unspooled on the festival’s second day, and has been has been firmly installed as a Golden Lion frontrunner ever since.
  
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• The Art Of Censorship WIthout Leaving Fingerprints

  10-09-2017 23:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The art of controlling speech while avoiding the appearance of doing so has lasted through the ensuing decades. In the 2000s, explicit instructions went out to provincial officials that they avoid putting any censorship or blacklisting into writing. To kill an article, officials should get on the telephone and instruct editors orally. Similarly, serious speech-crime offenders—people being sent to prison for years—were charged under face-saving euphemisms: tax evasion, fraud, even &ld
  
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• NYT Critics' List Of This Season's Theatre Highlights

  10-09-2017 23:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Clockwork Orange? Peter Pan? Benny And Joon? Here's a list of theatre opening this fall and what to look for...
  
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• Making A Living As A Writer Was Always Precarious. Now Evidence It's Getting Worse

  10-09-2017 22:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Recent initiatives by the European Commission as well as Irish and English governments begin to recognise an alarming state of affairs for the contemporary writer. A European Commission report indicates that Irish and British writers are disadvantaged compared to some of their Euroland brethren. In Ireland a controversial pilot scheme announced in June acknowledges Irish writers as self-employed and thus permitted to seek jobseeker’s allowance. Meanwhile in the UK, the Arts Coun
  
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• What Would A New Version Of Voyager's Golden Record Contain?

  10-09-2017 22:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Some critics of the original say it was a poor representation of Earth because it was created by a small group of people who chose to present a rosy view of humans and leave out the terrible things they’re capable of. Lomberg, Ferris, and other Voyager members say the criticism is fair, but Lomberg said the tone of the message was appropriate for the job. The Golden Record was both a first impression and a final word. “You meet somebody, you don’t start by telling them all your
  
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• A Dance Company For Dancers In Wheelchairs

  10-09-2017 21:27 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “People with disabilities lived with the stigma that they can’t do this, they can’t do that, they can’t dance, they can’t walk, they can’t talk. When you dance with a partner, you really forget who you’re dancing with. You forget their age, you forget their ability, disability, ethnicity, height, weight, you know, forget all of that. You start to see people and feel people as people, not a person in a wheelchair.”
  
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• Claim: Half Of London's Galleries Are Losing Money

  10-09-2017 21:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  “I pulled out all the public records for results in 2014 of London galleries, and I presented [the data] anonymously. It was really interesting because more than half of the galleries were in red. Which I think is one of the problems now: that of keeping up appearances and not being honest and open to your artists.”
  
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• The Mystery Of A Stolen deKooning Painting (Taken To Enjoy It?)

  10-09-2017 20:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "It was finally recovered last month, and investigators are focusing on several theories. And one of them is, in its own way, extraordinary: They are trying to determine if the heist was engineered by a retired New York City schoolteacher — something of a renaissance man — who donned women’s clothing and took his son along as his accomplice, and then hung the masterwork in the bedroom of his own rural New Mexico home, where it remained. In other words, they are examining whethe
  
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• The New York Times Grand Schedule Of American Arts Highlights For 2017/18

  10-09-2017 20:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  It's quite a list...
  
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• How Big Tech Is Trying To Reduce Humanity To A Series Of Algorithms

  10-09-2017 19:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "More than any previous coterie of corporations, the tech monopolies aspire to mold humanity into their desired image of it. They think they have the opportunity to complete the long merger between man and machine — to redirect the trajectory of human evolution. How do I know this? In annual addresses and town hall meetings, the founding fathers of these companies often make big, bold pronouncements about human nature — a view that they intend for the rest of us to adhere to."
  
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• Understanding America Through The Lens Of McDonald's

  10-09-2017 19:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "I found myself in McDonald’s a lot because of the friends I made: people who were homeless, addicts. Eventually I found myself going not only because they were there, but for the same reasons that they went. It was a place I could sit and get a moment of respite. I could charge my computer and my phone, use the wi-fi, use the bathrooms, and the food and coffee were cheap and good. And I started noticing how strong the community in each McDonald’s was."
  
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• This Weekend's AJBlogs Highlights 09.10.17

  10-09-2017 18:50 via feedproxy.google.com
  The Arts in the Age of Trump (continued) The Age of Trump has rapidly changed the American cultural landscape in many ways. In the silo of classical music, there is suddenly a felt need to ask: What’s it for? Why are we ... read more
  AJBlog: Unanswered Question Published 2017-09-08
  A Pericles of pure joy In the online edition of today’s Wall Street Journal I report on two more productions that I saw last month at Wisconsin’s American
  
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• Gold Medal Winner At Moscow Foto Awards Stripped Of Prize For Stealing Work

  10-09-2017 18:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The photos, which show a series of portraits of people in Thailand, were changed slightly by Madeleine Fierze and entered into the competition under the title “I look at the world with the eyes of a child”. In July, she scooped the top award in the “Fine Art People Children” non-professional category, but her award was called into question when Sasin Tipchai noticed his photos had been copied at the end of August.
  
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• Fred Hersch's Challenging Road To Jazz Greatness

  10-09-2017 18:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  I must add a warning to music teachers. They will be horrified by this book. “I didn’t practice much and never went to my lesson fully prepared,” Mr. Hersch explains at the outset. Even in later years, he avoided the rote playing of scales and exercises: “I’m never sure what or how to practice, so I rarely do. But I seem to pull it together when the lights go up.” That may seem like a bad attitude for a professional musician, but I have a hunch that much of Fr
  
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• Greg Escalante, 61, King Of The Lowbrow

  10-09-2017 17:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Escalante is one of the key figures associated with Lowbrow, a pop-inflected school of art that emerged in 1970s California, and which drew inspiration from underground comics, punk music, tattooing, the custom car scene, and surf and skate culture — the exact opposite of what the minimalist-minded mainstream art world was into during that era.
  
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• Oregon Bach Festival Music Director Fired Over Joke?

  10-09-2017 17:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Matthew Halls was removed as artistic director of the Oregon Bach Festival following an incident in which he imitated a southern American accent while talking to his longstanding friend, the African-American classical singer Reginald Mobley. It is understood a white woman who overheard the joke reported it to officials at the University of Oregon, which runs the festival, claiming it amounted to a racial slur."
  
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• Oregon Bach Festival Meltdown?

  10-09-2017 17:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "In late June, the university lavished Halls with a new long-term contract containing a large pay increase that took him into six figures a year. But, less than two months later, the University of Oregon abruptly terminated that contract, ordering Halls to immediately cease any festival-­related work, and told him that it was scrapping tentative plans for him to teach at the UO."
  
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• Broadway Springsteen Tickets For $17,000, Anybody?

  10-09-2017 16:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The star’s desire for a space “as personal and as intimate as possible” is certainly an intriguing goal, and what his performance at the Walter Kerr would freshly reveal is exciting to contemplate. It’s depressing, though, to watch as the running-up of prices ushers in an era of hard feelings.
  
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• The Sad (Unnecessary?) Decline Of The Cartooning Business

  10-09-2017 16:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Almost a decade ago, these artists—freelancers who face stiff competition for 15 slots each week in the print magazine—could count on licensing deals for substantial passive income. Some received monthly checks as high as $8,000; others regularly saw one or two thousand dollars. Today, even those who saw the highest royalties receive only a few hundred dollars per month."
  
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• Broadway Composer Michael Friedman, 41

  10-09-2017 15:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Public Theater Artistic Director Oskar in a statement said "Michael Friedman was one of the most brilliant, multi-talented theater artists of our time. He was also a miracle of a human being: loving, kind, generous, hilarious, thrilling. His loss leaves a hole in the theater world that cannot be filled, and a hole in the hearts of those who loved him that will last forever."
  
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• A New String Quartet Festival Highlights Difficulties Of The Art Form

  10-09-2017 14:52 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  "Although one of the greatest in classical music, the quartet literature is designed to be played in small venues, and performance fees have to be divided four ways. Making a secure living is hard. With the honourable exception of the University of Victoria, which has engaged the Lafayette String Quartet, Canada’s universities seem reluctant to emulate the example of their American counterparts in providing a secure working environment for these custodians of some of our greatest music. Me
  
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• Sketching war: the writer who depicts Middle East conflict - in watercolour

  10-09-2017 14:12
  Guardian journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad’s drawings have helped him cope with reporting from the frontline. Now they will illustrate a book of his experiences• See more of Abdul-Ahad’s drawings here
  Last July, as the Iraqi army was liberating Mosul after nine months of catastrophic fighting against Isis, the Guardian journalist Ghaith Abdul-Ahad found himself in a makeshift military post in the old city. The building was so badly damaged, it was hard to tell what it had been before
  
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• Bernard Dunstan obituary

  10-09-2017 12:47
  Artist renowned for his luminous paintings of nudes, musicians and VeniceThe artist Bernard Dunstan, who has died aged 97, was an admirer of Pierre Bonnard’s dictum that: “The thing must start with a vision, with a moment of excitement. After that, you study the model.” His own luminous paintings, so evocative of the intimisme of Bonnard and Édouard Vuillard, combined an impression of spontaneity with a rigorous technique founded on direct observation and meticulous draw
  
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• Andy Holden/ Peter Holden: Natural Selection review – artfulness is egg-shaped

  10-09-2017 09:00
  Former Newington Library, 155 Walworth Road, London SE17
  A father and son ask if birds are born artists in this marvellous Artangel show held together by mud, poetry and natural mysteryThe swallow sculpts its nest out of mud. The horned coot works with pebbles in streams, an avian Andy Goldsworthy. The weaver bird is famous for its elaborate globes and sheaths conjured out of grasses; but the bowerbird surely takes the biscuit, decorating its lavish pavilions with flower petals, shells and shard
  
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• Andy Holden & Peter Holden: Natural Selection review – artfulness is egg-shaped

  10-09-2017 09:00
  Former Newington Library, 155 Walworth Road, London SE17
  A father and son ask if birds are born artists in this marvellous Artangel show held together by mud, poetry and natural mysteryThe swallow sculpts its nest out of mud. The horned coot works with pebbles in streams, an avian Andy Goldsworthy. The weaver bird is famous for its elaborate globes and sheaths conjured out of grasses; but the bowerbird surely takes the biscuit, decorating its lavish pavilions with flower petals, shells and shard
  
  Read more

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