Arts news

• The Fine Art Of Making (Fine) Books

  26-11-2017 23:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Check out Gray Zeitz and the Larkspur Press in Kentucky: "Zeitz left the University of Kentucky in the winter of 1974, half a semester away from finishing an English degree. He'd been learning letterpress work – the way individually set type makes an impression on high-quality paper –- and he wanted to make fine books, especially poetry. At that time, the letterpress craft was fading as printers moved to faster offset printing. But to Zeitz the moment seemed right. He didn't need ele
  
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• The Netflix Adaptation Of Margaret Atwood's 'Alias Grace' Shows What Real Horror Is

  26-11-2017 22:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The horror is the one reflected in the one painting in the book and adaptation - Guido Reni's Susannah and the Elders. The horror runs through the heart of everything. "Everyone is possessed by the same demon that no one can exorcise. It’s a horror so pervasive and unimaginable that a glimpse of its true power drives Doctor Jordan mad."
  
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• Here's Prokofiev, Balancing Between Stravinsky And Haydn, Trying To Decide How To Be Himself

  26-11-2017 22:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Maybe he was a bit of a jokester: "This was Prokofiev doing his best impression of those guys, but not in the way he had youthfully aped Stravinksy’s style. This time it was, bear with me, a bit. A joke. You’re supposed to be in on the 'Classical' Symphony. Recognize its themes and rhythms and what he’s doing."
  
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• The Mall, Once A Center Of Shopping, Is Now More Likely To Be Your Gym

  26-11-2017 21:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Even mall architecture is changing to fit the new concept in a space where retail is on the wane. "Gyms fit into a broader push by mall owners to reinvent themselves as centers of entertainment at a time when so much of apparel sales have moved online. Landlords are adding restaurants, ice-skating rinks, pools and other recreational options to boost sagging foot traffic."
  
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• Can This Town In Croatia Parlay A Rusting Yacht Into Status As A 'Capital Of Culture'?

  26-11-2017 21:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  It's not just any yacht - it belonged to Yugoslav leader (and uniter) Josep Tito. "If officials have their way, Tito’s boat will become a museum to display the complex history of Rijeka and serve as a point of pride for the nation." Alert: Croatia's far-right politicians, whose power is surging, are not into this idea.
  
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• Top AJBlogs Post From The Week And Weekend Of 11.26.17

  26-11-2017 20:45 via feedproxy.google.com
  The Literary Roots of Lou Reed
  Back in the spring, when I pitched the Los Angeles Review of Books on a regular column on musicians and their literary interests, my editor immediately came up with the title All the Poets. ... read more
  AJBlog: CultureCrashPublished 2017-11-24
  Almanac: Henry James on commercial theater
  “Then the mixture was to be stirred to the tune of perpetual motion and served, under pain of being rejected with disgust, with the time-honoured bread-sauce of the
  
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• Major Advertisers Freeze Spending On YouTube Over That Platform's Inability To Stop Sexual Predators

  26-11-2017 20:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Adidas, DeutscheBank, Mars, Cadbury, Lidl and more have pulled ads entirely from YouTube after The Times of London discovered that "the marketers’ ads had run in videos with young girls in underwear, doing the splits, and rolling around in bed — which included sexually inappropriate comments posted by viewers."
  
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• Will 'Mudbound' Be The Netflix Movie That Breaks Netflix's Oscar Drought?

  26-11-2017 20:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Director Dee Rees, who did Pariah in 2011 and HBO's Bessie in 2015, had a much larger budget - and has much more marketing backing - for this movie, but she also says, "A bigger budget can buy you more background ... but it’s not going to buy you better performances. For me, the directing work is still in the performances. It’s still in the blocking, the composition. Money doesn’t buy you better frames, you know what I mean?"
  
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• A Landscape Artist, Where The Land Is Filled With Markers Of Unceasing Digital Surveillance

  26-11-2017 19:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Trevor Paglen, for the last two decades (yes, digital surveillance has been going on for that long and longer) "has been on a mission to photograph the unseen political geography of our times. His art tries to capture places that are not on any map – the secret air bases and offshore prisons from which the war on terror has been fought – as well as the networks of data collection and surveillance that now shape our democracies, the cables, spy satellites and artificial intelligences
  
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• The Public Theater Is Holding A Town Hall On Sexual Harassment

  26-11-2017 19:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  London and Chicago theaters have already gathered and hammered out some guidelines for theaters in town, and the Public says it's time to do so in New York. "Stephanie Ybarra, the director of special artistic projects and one of the event’s organizers, said the Public Theater was a civic institution as well as an artistic one, and therefore 'a place where art, ideas and conversation flow freely.'"
  
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• Kehinde Wiley Can't Tell Us About The Process Of Painting Barack Obama's Presidential Portrait

  26-11-2017 18:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  But he can talk about painting Michael Jackson: "It was extraordinary. His knowledge of art and art history was much more in-depth than I had imagined. He was talking about the difference between early and late Rubens brushwork. OK, why not? One of the things we talked about was how clothing functions as armour. And if you look at the painting, he’s on horseback in full body armour."
  
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• London Has A Night Mayor, And New York Is Looking For One. Is LA Next?

  26-11-2017 18:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Part of the idea would be making nightlife safer through smoothing the permit process for party spaces. "In the months since December's tragic Ghost Ship fire in Oakland, which killed dozens of young music fans, Los Angeles has cracked down on unpermitted warehouse parties, which often play host to music and communities shut out of mainstream venues. But those shows have a huge cultural value, and still continue — just further under the radar in more marginal spaces. Meanwhile, promoters a
  
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• When Americans Read Science Fiction, They Automatically Assume It's Stupid

  26-11-2017 17:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  People reading one short story that was "literary" and one that was "science fiction" - identical stories except for small details like the protagonist using an airlock instead of a door - had wildly different reactions. The readers of the second kind of piece "assume the story will be less worthwhile, one that doesn’t require or reward careful reading, and so they read less attentively. This then lowers their scores on objective comprehension tests because they miss so much. Interestingly
  
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• Carol Burnett Changed TV, And Maybe The Future, Fifty Years Ago With Her Show

  26-11-2017 17:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Here's how it went down in the beginning, according to Carol Burnett herself: "I had this terrific and unheard-of contract that read if I wanted to push that button, the network would have to give me 30 one-hour comedy-variety shows. ... I said, ‘That’s what I want to do.’ And they said, ‘Oh, no, no, no. Carol ... all comedy-variety shows are hosted by men — Sid Caesar, Jackie Gleason, Milton Berle, Dean Martin … It’s not really for you gals.’" Ye
  
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• Mary Adelman, The Typewriter Whisperer Of New York, Has Died At 89

  26-11-2017 16:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Her shop was like a (crowded, metal-and-ribbon-smelly) office of therapy for writers when the typewriters clogged up. "The shop attended to the typewriters of such well-known writers as Isaac Bashevis Singer, David Mamet, Erich Maria Remarque, Nora Ephron, Gene Shalit and Philip Roth. Joseph Heller had a Smith-Corona with keys that flew off (they were soldered back on). The novelist David Handler was so grateful for Mrs. Adelman’s assistance that he made her a character in a mystery, The G
  
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• Suggestions For An Architecture Tour Of Los Angeles

  26-11-2017 16:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  The Los Angeles Times architecture critic takes his mother-in-law, and then all of us, on a tour of nine stops through the city: "I sort of tied myself in knots trying to produce the list. I had to balance architectural significance against geography: the buildings had to make up at least a semi-coherent loop, rather than forcing us to hopscotch all over the map. I also wanted the choices to suggest some kind of narrative progression, some sense of how architecture (and Los Angeles) changed over
  
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• How Can We Coax More Americans To Read?

  26-11-2017 15:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Basically? Americans are clueless about how reading works, so they train people badly. We need to spread more basic knowledge about how the world works, because that's the only way to fill in the gaps that all writers leave. And we need to (this is a real surprise) fix standardized testing. "If topics are random, the test weights knowledge learned outside the classroom — knowledge that wealthy children have greater opportunity to pick up."
  
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• How Do You Build A Tradition Of Modern Dance In Russia, Where Ballet Reigns Supreme?

  26-11-2017 15:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Work your butt off in both the U.S. and Russia, and go to the provinces. "It’s easier because that weight of tradition, history and classical heritage that major theaters like the Bolshoi and the Mariinsky have ... the regions are much more flexible now. They don’t have such rigid boundaries."
  
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• Sometimes, Movies Are Better Than The Books They're Based On

  26-11-2017 14:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Children's books in particular seem ripe for the cinematic wonder-inducing treatment. But Wonder isn't one of those books. "Here is where I encourage anyone whose child has not yet read the book, or seen the movie (and let’s remember that with children’s literature, an entirely new audience ages into a book every year): Try to get hold of a copy that is not the brand-new 'movie tie-in edition.' As the cover trumpets, this new edition 'includes full-color movie photos and exclusive co
  
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• Parts Of Canada Have A Program Where People Check Out Museum Passes From The Library

  26-11-2017 14:00 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  And, well, the funding is coming to a close. (The libraries say they think they can get other corporate sponsors.) Surprise number two: The funding is going away ... because Canadians said they valued music education over any other arts access.
  
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• Uma Thurman Posts The Beginnings Of Her Statement On Harvey Weinstein On Instagram, On Thanksgiving

  26-11-2017 13:30 via feedproxy.google.com
  
  Her gratitude was razor-edged: "Happy Thanksgiving Everyone! (Except you Harvey, and all your wicked conspirators - I’m glad it’s going slowly - you don’t deserve a bullet)." She ended the post, "Stay tuned."
  
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• Kehinde Wiley: ‘Creating the portrait of Obama is a huge responsibility’

  26-11-2017 10:00
  The US artist on being the first African American to paint the presidential portrait, Michael Jackson’s surprising art knowledge and the inspiration of loversBorn in Los Angeles in 1977, Kehinde Wiley is best known for his large-scale portraits in which black people occupy scenes from notable old European paintings. Most of his models are cast on the street, though Wiley has also portrayed celebrities such as Michael Jackson and Ice-T. Earlier this year, he was chosen to paint Barack Obama
  
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• Modigliani review – you think you know him? Turns out you do…

  26-11-2017 09:00
  Tate Modern, London
  One hundred portraits by the tormented Italian painter grace this beautiful but almost totally unsurprising show in which each painting begins to look more and more like the nextA tubercular alcoholic, addicted to women, hash and ether, unrecognised, impoverished and dead at 35 with the last painting still wet on the canvas: Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) is a Romantic throwback in 20th-century art. Even his nickname, Modi, is a pun on the peintre maudit, the accursed painter,
  
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