Arts news

• LA Dance Studios Struggle To Survive

  30-04-2021 23:29 via feedproxy.google.com
  “Some factors that helped the studio persevere? A landlord who is postponing the studio’s $22,000 monthly rent payments, PPP loans totaling more than $110,000, the launch of a subscription-based platform for dance tutorials, and the studio’s nearly 30-year legacy and global brand with franchises in cities including Las Vegas, Nashville and Shanghai.” – Los Angeles Times
  
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• Amazon Earnings Soar, Streaming Up 70 Percent

  30-04-2021 23:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  Video streaming — sometimes a throwaway in the company’s earnings announcements — was this time a centerpiece. Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who is shifting to executive chairman this summer, noted that streaming has risen 70% compared with the same time a year ago. Prime Video, which has recently marked its 10th anniversary, served film or TV titles to some 175 million global members. – Deadline
  
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• The Expert Problem — What We Need To Trust Science

  30-04-2021 22:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  “Complete rejection of expertise not only makes little epistemic sense (for there is no doubt that expertise exists); the complexities of the modern state make trust in others’ expertise indispensable. On the other hand, unqualified deference to those in positions of power and privilege vitiates the basic principles of democracy.” – Boston Review
  
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• Should Hollywood Abandon Georgia?

  30-04-2021 22:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  “Here we are in 2021 and many still think they can affect change by pulling their business from the very people who helped get the statewide and national results they claim to want. Apparently the way to get people to vote the way you like is to yank them around, threatening their ability to pay their mortgage and feed their children. While a middle-class actor like me could, in reality, move to another state where there is work, there are many good folks in my industry who would not have
  
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• Angela O’Keeffe on Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles – and engaging with the art of awful men

  30-04-2021 22:00
  
  The writer’s ingenious debut Night Blue is narrated by Australia’s most infamous and triumphant canvas: Blue PolesIt’s closing-in on half a century since Gough Whitlam approved the purchase of Blue Poles, the painting that divided Australia. Spend an hour people-watching at the foot of Pollock’s canvas, and you’ll hear visitor after visitor come and tell the painting exactly what they think of it. “Do you know how much they paid for that thing?” an old b
  
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• Angela O’Keefe on Jackson Pollock’s Blue Poles – and engaging with the art of awful men

  30-04-2021 22:00
  
  The writer’s ingenious debut Night Blue is narrated by Australia’s most infamous and triumphant canvas: Blue PolesIt’s closing-in on half a century since Gough Whitlam approved the purchase of Blue Poles, the painting that divided Australia. Spend an hour people-watching at the foot of Pollock’s canvas, and you’ll hear visitor after visitor come and tell the painting exactly what they think of it. “Do you know how much they paid for that thing?” an old b
  
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• Authenticity Is Overrated

  30-04-2021 21:28 via feedproxy.google.com
  “Everyone else might be taken, but the effort to be ourselves is the surest path to being just like everyone else, especially in the context of a highly commodified and surveilled culture where we always seem to be on stage. If some person or organisation claims to be concerned with authenticity, you can be almost certain that they’re conformist posers.” – Aeon
  
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• The West’s First Superstar Composer (His 500th Anniversary Is This Year)

  30-04-2021 20:58 via feedproxy.google.com
  Josquin des Prez was, in his day and for more than a century after his death in 1521, the most influential and most revered composer in Europe. He demanded, and got, the highest salary; he was the first to have an entire volume of printed music devoted to his work alone; he was the first composer about whom anecdotes and jokes have survived. Zachary Woolfe gives a brief explanation of why his music is both important in music history and wondrous to listen to, then present-day composer Nico Muhl
  
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• Why Publishing Consolidation Suggests A Bleak Future For Books

  30-04-2021 20:29 via feedproxy.google.com
  “Canadian authors will have fewer houses to present their manuscripts to,” explained executive director Kate Edwards. “A culture of ‘blockbuster’ publishing will become more entrenched. All of this will increase pressure on independent presses who already struggle to compete in a concentrated market dominated by large global companies.” – The Walrus
  
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• Vincent Van Gogh Was His Own Worst Enemy (Just Read His Letters)

  30-04-2021 20:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  “The tone of the letters consistently is that of a man still aflame after a violent argument, gradually subsiding into a hot puddle of guilt and shame from which now and then, in a renewed fit of rage, he surges up into yet another outburst of rancorous self-justification. On practically every page we seem to hear the slammed door, the kicked chair, the pen nib gouging into the writing paper, and the fierce little red-haired man hissing in fury through his teeth.” – The New Yo
  
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• LA Opens A Tiny Home Village For Homeless People

  30-04-2021 19:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  “The city keeps investing in these temporary shelters, but everyone acknowledges that there’s nowhere to move to from these shelters. And if it’s not permanent housing, it doesn’t actually solve homelessness,” says Shayla Myers of the Legal Aid Foundation of L.A. “Everyone says we need all of these options, and there’s no question that’s true. But at some point, the level of investment that’s going into temporary shelters starts to supplant
  
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• Leslie McCombie obituary

  30-04-2021 19:15
  
  My father, Leslie McCombie, who has died of Covid aged 94, was a graphic designer and early ecologist who campaigned for the Ecology party, a precursor for the Green party. Born in Honor Oak, south London, to Walter, a printer, and Kathleen (nee Middlebrook), Leslie spent the second world war in Orpington, Kent, and experienced first-hand the bombing, acting as a volunteer fire watcher. One of Leslie’s first drawings featured a neighbour’s bomb-damaged house. Continue reading...
  
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• Blackface Didn’t Start With American Minstrel Shows. It’s Been Around For Centuries

  30-04-2021 19:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  “The origins of blackface minstrelsy are much older than most people know, with deep roots in the English medieval and Shakespearean theatrical traditions. Understanding the often-forgotten medieval roots of blackface might help us to end old performance traditions and to create new ones.” – Smithsonian Magazine
  
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• Machines Are Getting Pretty Damn Good At Writing

  30-04-2021 18:29 via feedproxy.google.com
  In July of 2019, Microsoft invested a billion dollars, which allowed OpenAI to create a supercomputer with two hundred and eighty-five thousand C.P.U. cores, ten thousand G.P.U.s, and four hundred gigabits per second of network connectivity per server. Microsoft claims that it ranks in the top five supercomputers in the world, processing more than twenty-three thousand teraflops per second. The power of the supercomputer has been transformative. GPT-2, which John Seabrook took for a test drive
  
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• If You Don’t Start Until Your Teens, Can You Still Make It In Ballet?

  30-04-2021 18:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  “The ballet world is filled with stories of dancers who first pointed their toes as toddlers and became professionals as teenagers. But what about those who started ballet as teenagers — and then realized that they wanted to make it their career? Their experience can be as thrilling as it is overwhelming, and also inspire a bit of panic.” – Pointe Magazine
  
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• Indonesian Theme Park Ordered To Take Down Lights That Violate Chris Burden Copyright

  30-04-2021 17:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  The theme park had recreated Burden’s collection of street lamps that he made for the front of the LA County Museum in Los Angeles. “The court has ordered Rabbit Town to take down its Love Light installation within 30 working days since the verdict.” – Coconuts
  
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• How Kate Winslet Went About Mastering The Notoriously Tricky Philadelphia Dialect

  30-04-2021 17:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  “Few sounds are as difficult to master as the rounded Os, erratic As, dropped consonants and smushed syllables of the Philadelphia accent — or Filelfia acksent, as the locals would say.” Winslet says it’s one of the two trickiest accents she’s ever had to learn; here’s a look at the hard work she put in to get it right. – Los Angeles Times
  
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• These $63 Million Paintings, Literally Kidnapped And Held For Ransom, Are Now The Subject Of A Billion-Dollar Lawsuit

  30-04-2021 16:35 via feedproxy.google.com
  The Shchukin Gallery, which sells Russian art in Paris and New York, is suing a Russian oligarch for damages and attorney fees of $950 million — in what might or might not be the culmination of an unusually tangled legal battle over three paintings by Kazimir Malevich and two by Natalia Goncharova that were, as Shchukin’s attorney puts it, “hijacked” and are now in an “art hostage situation.” – The Art Newspaper
  
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• Hockney beams into Piccadilly and Scots steal the limelight – the week in art

  30-04-2021 16:32
  
  London gets high on Opie, Miró visits the countryside and legendary nightclubs fling open their virtual doors – all in your weekly dispatchJulian Opie
  This stylish and scientific student of perception playfully reveals how simply art can suggest the real.
  • Lisson Gallery, London, 4 May to 12 June. Continue reading...
  
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• How Pixar Pushes The Boundaries Of Color To Push The Buttons of Moviegoers

  30-04-2021 16:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  “In a way, every filmmaker is really just playing with moving light and color on surfaces. That’s the whole ball game, a filmic given. But Pixar takes it further, or perhaps just does it more self-consciously and systematically. Its emotionally weighty, computer-generated animated films deploy precisely calibrated color and light to convey narrative and emotion … But I’ll tell you a secret: When it comes to wringing emotion from color, Pixar cheats.” Reporter Adam
  
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• Germany Takes Care Of Its Opera Houses, Even Through COVID — But There’s A Problem

  30-04-2021 15:34 via feedproxy.google.com
  “‘What we learned in the crisis was that the public purse was very much willing to keep [opera] alive in Germany,’ says Dieter Haselbach, a German cultural sociologist and consultant. ‘But in the long run the state-funded system covers a structural crisis which is an oversupply of theaters and opera houses, with [growing] competition from digital performances.'” – The Christian Science Monitor
  
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• Amsterdam Branch Of The Hermitage In Danger Of Closing Permanently

  30-04-2021 15:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  “After laying off 25% of its full-time staff, including those who had been there since opening day,” the only Western European satellite of the St. Petersburg institution “finally reached the bottom of its reserves last month. Because the Hermitage [Amsterdam] is a private institution ineligible for [Dutch] government aid, it is now calling for one million euros in donations by May 1. … Whether that will even be enough to survive the pandemic is difficult to say.”
  
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• France’s Cultural Venues Get An Official Reopening Date

  30-04-2021 14:33 via feedproxy.google.com
  “Museums, theatres, cinemas and concert halls will reopen on May 19, along with non-essential shops and outdoor seating at cafes and restaurants, [President] Macron told regional French newspapers in a highly-anticipated announcement.” – Yahoo! (AFP)
  
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• Scottish Government Ordered To Reconsider Six-Foot-Distance Reopening Rule After Arts Groups Rebel

  30-04-2021 14:05 via feedproxy.google.com
  Following a personal intervention by the culture minister, “controversial new guidelines which will force Scotland’s arenas, concert halls and comedy clubs to impose two metre social distancing on audiences are to be reviewed in the wake of warnings they will force most venues to remain closed.” – The Scotsman
  
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• Art lovers in Brussels divided over plans for museum about Le Chat

  30-04-2021 13:49
  
  Thousands sign petition calling for rethink as work on €9.38m museum about comic strip is given go-aheadA spat over the wisdom of spending millions of euros of public money on a museum about a popular newspaper comic strip featuring an obese anthropomorphic cat is dividing opinion within Belgium’s artistic community.The decision by the Brussels-Capital Region to give building approval for the Musée du Chat on Rue Royale, the location of some of the country’s most respecte
  
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• The Great British Art Tour: Lady’s Anne fight for rights, a story in three parts

  30-04-2021 07:00
  
  With public art collections closed we are bringing the art to you, exploring highlights from across the country in partnership with Art UK. Today’s pick: The Great Picture at Abbot Hall Art Gallery, KendalThis grand painting was commissioned by Lady Anne Clifford to mark her achievements and celebrate her prominent family, particularly its women. Made in 1646 during the English civil war, it is a rare celebration of the life of a woman of the period. It holds within it the story of Anne&rs
  
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• The Great British Art Tour: Lady Anne’s fight for rights, a story in three parts

  30-04-2021 07:00
  
  With public art collections closed we are bringing the art to you, exploring highlights from across the country in partnership with Art UK. Today’s pick: The Great Picture at Abbot Hall Art Gallery, KendalThis grand painting was commissioned by Lady Anne Clifford to mark her achievements and celebrate her prominent family, particularly its women. Made in 1646 during the English civil war, it is a rare celebration of the life of a woman of the period. It holds within it the story of Anne&rs
  
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• UK Artists Demand Action On Post-Brexit Touring Crisis

  30-04-2021 00:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  “We are extremely concerned by the lack of progress which has been achieved over the last three months to unravel the mountain of costly bureaucracy and red tape which now faces the creative industries,” the letter said. “With scheduling already under way for creative work later this year, you have a limited window of opportunity to resolve this crisis which is threatening our industry.” – BBC
  
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