Arts news

• Fear My Book? Ban My Book?

  11-05-2021 23:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  “Those who seek to ban my book and others like it are trying to exploit fear — fear about the realities that books like mine expose, fear about desire and sex and love — and distort it into something ugly, in an attempt to wish away queer experiences.” – The New York Times
  
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• Powell’s Books Union Protests Store’s Rehiring Practices

  11-05-2021 23:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  Under dispute is whether or not Powell’s is obliged to honor employees’ prior seniority, salaries, and benefits. The union says that the store, in a string of emails last year, had agreed to honor the employees’ work history upon rehiring. The store, on the other hand, asserts that, since more than 12 months have passed, they are under no such obligation, and has insisted that former employees reapply for their old jobs. – Publishers Weekly
  
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• Scotland Says Theatres Can Reopen. Theatres Say “No”

  11-05-2021 22:28 via feedproxy.google.com
  In a survey conducted by the Federation of Scottish Theatre (FST), 96% of members responded that it is not economically viable for them to reopen under the current restrictions. – The Guardian
  
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• New Research: Angkor Wat Population Was Greater Than Modern Boston

  11-05-2021 22:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  Researchers have determined the city’s population at its zenith in the 13th century, and the number is impressive: some 700,000 to 900,000 people likely called the Angkor region home, making it one of the world’s largest pre-modern cities. Compare that with the 2019 estimated population for Boston, at 692,600. – Artnet
  
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• World Dance? Seriously?

  11-05-2021 21:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  Typically, it’s an intermediary—a manager, a producer, a critic—who labels something as “world dance.” The term denotes exoticness, authenticity—and it sells. It’s also problematic and limiting. – Dance Magazine
  
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• Maybe Hollywood Could Just Give Up On The Golden Globes Entirely

  11-05-2021 21:02 via feedproxy.google.com
  Kyle Buchanan: “That’s the thing about awards: These trophies are only as important as the recipients believe them to be, and now that the illusion of the Golden Globes has been punctured, stars might find it hard to go back to suspending their disbelief. … In the meantime, it’s possible that another awards show” — such as SAG or Critics’ Choice — “could move to early January to effectively take the Globes’ place on the awards calenda
  
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• The WPA is history

  11-05-2021 20:56 via feedproxy.google.com
  New York City has announced a new program, City Artist Corps, inspired by FDR’s Works Progress Administration. There are two major problems with launching a WPA-styled policy in 2021, one in terms of the choice of policy, and one in terms of the very conception of arts policy. Let’s look at these in turn. – Michael Rushton
  
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• A Soldier’s Tale for Today — Premiered

  11-05-2021 20:54 via feedproxy.google.com
  As I put it in a program note: “It’s a COVID-period entertainment: compact, flexible, rejecting Romantic symphonic upholstery in favor of a dry, caustic sonority conducive to bitter entertainments, light-hearted yet not evasive.” – Joseph Horowitz
  
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• The Point Of The Point Magazine

  11-05-2021 20:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  “As we see it, one of the goals of the magazine is to help our readers remain open to the possibility that facets of everyday life and culture they might be inclined to trivialize or look down upon may have something to teach us. This doesn’t mean we don’t allow criticism, of course; criticism is part of taking something seriously.” – LitHub
  
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• Setting Of James Joyce’s ‘The Dead’ Is Being Turned Into A Hostel, Sending Literary Folk Into A Tizzy

  11-05-2021 20:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  The unassuming 18th-century townhouse at 15 Usher’s Island is where Joyce’s great-aunts ran a music school, and their annual Epiphany dinner was the model for the gathering in the final story of Dubliners. Two Irish investors who bought the house for €650,000 (cheap by current Dublin standards) have gotten permits to convert the four-story building into a 56-bed tourist hostel — and outraged writers from Edna O’Brien and John Banville in Ireland to Rachel Kushner an
  
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• How To Grapple With An Artist’s Legacy When You’re Responsible For It?

  11-05-2021 19:29 via feedproxy.google.com
  As I’ve tried to make decisions about those areas of influence, I’ve found that I have to fight the “what would Michael have done” or “what would Michael want” voice. While it seems natural to say that my primary job is to listen to that voice, I’ve come to realize this rationale is not a legitimate way to make decisions. – American Theatre
  
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• Hockney is mistaken: it was Delaroche who declared painting dead, not Derrida | Letter

  11-05-2021 19:24
  
  Charlie Gere sets the artist straight on his mention of Jacques Derrida I know it is standard to blame Jacques Derrida for any kind of French intellectual beastliness, but David Hockney is mistaken in suggesting that it was he who claimed that “painting was dead” (David Hockney on joy, longing and spring light: ‘I’m teaching the French how to paint Normandy!’, 10 May). It was, in fact, the painter Paul Delaroche who said it in about 1840 on seeing an early daguerreo
  
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• A Musical About COVID, Titled ‘Breathe’

  11-05-2021 19:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  “Before we get to the logistics of writing, staging and filming a musical” — one with five songwriting teams, four directors plus a supervisor, a passel of actors, and creators Jodi Picoult and Timothy Allen McDonald — “in the midst of a pandemic, let’s address the elephant in the Zoom: Why would anyone want to watch a 90-minute theatrical production about COVID-19 — especially one with scenes named after symptoms many of us have experienced firsthand?
  
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• Want Certainty? (It Might Not Be Good For You)

  11-05-2021 18:29 via feedproxy.google.com
  Philosophers have long warned that this desire for certainty can lead us astray. To think and learn about the world, we must be willing to be uncertain: to accept that we don’t yet know everything. – American Scholar
  
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• Berlin Film Festival Will Get A Live Version This Year After All — Outdoors

  11-05-2021 18:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  “The Berlin Film Festival, which took place online earlier this year, will show most of the movies that were part of the competition at outdoor cinemas across the German capital next month, taking advantage of falling COVID-19 infection numbers. The summer special offered by the festival, also known as the Berlinale, will take place from June 9 to 20 at 16 venues including a specially created open-air cinema at Museum Island in the heart of the city.” – Reuters
  
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• Andrew Lloyd Webber Restores/Updates London’s Oldest Theatre, Built in 1663

  11-05-2021 17:29 via feedproxy.google.com
  In 2000, Lloyd Webber purchased the building, which he calls “objectively marvellous.” For the past two years, with Stephen Thurley’s help, he has been restoring it to its Georgian grandeur, a sixty-million-pound undertaking. There’d been some wear and tear since 1812. “The architecture had been greatly compromised,” Lloyd Webber said. – The New Yorker
  
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• Conductor Christian Thielemann Is Losing His Job

  11-05-2021 17:05 via feedproxy.google.com
  The culture ministry of the German state of Saxony has announced that Thielemann’s contract as music director of the Staatskapelle Dresden, one of Europe’s oldest and most admired orchestras, and the Saxon State Opera (aka the Semperoper) will not be renewed when it expires in the summer of 2024. The contract of Semperoper superintendent Peter Theiler, which expires at the same time, won’t be extended, either; culture minister Barbara Klepsch says the government wants to chart
  
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• ‘Irreparable Damage’ — Scholars Protest Newark Museum’s Plan To Deaccession Artworks

  11-05-2021 16:32 via feedproxy.google.com
  “When the Newark Museum of Art announced a plan to sell 17 objects in March, it provided few details as to which artworks might appear on the auction block. But a gradual release of the specifics has enraged some historians, including previous employees of the museum, who described the sale as a misguided attempt to monetize some of the collection’s best examples of American art, including … [works by] Mary Cassatt, Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Eakins, and Marsden Hartley&r
  
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• Penn State University To Build Largest Art Museum Between Philadelphia And Pittsburgh

  11-05-2021 16:04 via feedproxy.google.com
  “The new [$85 million,] 71,000-square-foot facility will be constructed alongside the botanic gardens at the university’s arboretum. It will increase the size of the museum by more than 40%, adding more space for exhibition, collections, and education as well as visitor services and administrative offices for the museum and the arboretum.” – The Philadelphia Inquirer
  
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• Houston Symphony’s Music Director, Stranded In Europe By Pandemic, Misses Last Two Weeks Of Season

  11-05-2021 15:31 via feedproxy.google.com
  Andres Orozco-Estrada hasn’t been back to Texas to conduct his orchestra for a year, but he had been planning to return for concerts May 7-9 and May 14-16 to close his next-to-last season in Houston. (He’ll step down in the summer of 2022.) But the U.S. government’s National Interest Exemption on pandemic travel restrictions for certain artists expired in early March, exceptions are no longer being considered, and Orozco-Estrada learned at the last minute that he wouldn’
  
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• More Trouble For Golden Globes As NBC Drops Broadcast

  11-05-2021 15:03 via feedproxy.google.com
  “NBC will not air the Golden Globes in 2022, the network said in a statement on Monday morning. This means the Hollywood Foreign Press Association will now have to decide how or if it will move forward next year without its broadcast partner, or more swiftly enact changes demanded by industry leaders regarding the org’s membership and processes.” – Variety
  
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• Puppet of refugee girl to ‘walk’ across Europe along 12-week arts festival trail

  11-05-2021 14:43
  
  Three teams of four puppeteers will accompany Little Amal from Turkey to Manchester to celebrate refugeesA giant puppet of a nine-year-old Syrian refugee girl is to “walk” from Turkey to the UK through villages, towns and cities for one of the most ambitious and complex public artworks ever attempted.The Walk project was meant to have taken place between April and July but was delayed by the pandemic. Now the 5,000 mile (8,000km) journey of Little Amal, from Gaziantep, near the Turki
  
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• Architect Helmut Jahn, 81, Killed In Bicycle-Car Collision

  11-05-2021 14:35 via feedproxy.google.com
  He’s best-known for a series of major buildings in Chicago, including the Thompson Center, the Xerox Center (now 55 West Monroe), the addition to the Chicago Board of Trade, and the United Airlines Terminal at O’Hare Airport, as well as the Liberty Place towers in Philadelphia, the Sony Center in Berlin, and Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi Airport. – CNN
  
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• Performance Venues And Museums In UK May Reopen Next Monday (Though Many Will Not)

  11-05-2021 14:17 via feedproxy.google.com
  Prime Minister Boris Johnson has announced the lifting of a series of pandemic-related restrictions as of May 17; the new measures include the reopening of theatres, cinemas, concert halls, museums, and similar venues. However, social distancing requirements and capacity limits will still be in place, and many theatres say they can’t afford to reopen to only half-full houses. – BBC
  
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• The Making of Rodin review – not a radical, just a plain old genius

  11-05-2021 11:00
  
  Tate Modern, London
  All the plaster casts in the world cannot convince me Rodin was a modernist. Luckily his fantastic, eloquent art is amazingThe daylight streams in through Tate Modern’s big windows perfectly illuminating the novelist Balzac. His face is angry and stern, his body swathed in a massive, shapeless gown. This lack of defined form is exactly what horrified Parisians when Rodin’s full-sized plaster model for a monument was unveiled in 1898.For the novelist and art critic
  
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• ‘This is exciting for artists’: is this project the future of billboards?

  11-05-2021 08:17
  
  An ambitious interactive structure in West Hollywood is the first part of a new initiative set to bridge outdoor advertising and public artIn 1967, Elektra Records took a risk by purchasing a large hand-painted billboard on West Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard to promote a new album by The Doors, an up-and-coming local band in residency at Whiskey a Go Go, a nearby nightclub. It would ignite a golden era of advertising on the 1.5-mile stretch known as Sunset Strip, where large-format signage
  
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• Jacob’s Pillow – Chief Marketing Officer

  11-05-2021 06:56 via feedproxy.google.com
  The Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) is a newly instituted role to lead the Marketing and Patron Services divisions, and will provide innovative, audience-centric leadership as a crucial member of the Jacob’s Pillow Executive Team.Position ProfileAbout Jacob’s PillowJacob’s Pillow, a National Historic Landmark and recipient of the National Medal of Arts, is a year-round center for dance and home to America’s longest-running international dance festival located in the beautif
  
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• ‘My head is on fire’: Roger Ballen finds poetry in pain – in pictures

  11-05-2021 01:00
  
  Paint, collage and photography combine in Ballen’s tumultuous The Earth Will Come to Laugh and Feast. Italian poet Gabriele Tinti reflects on his work ...Continue reading...
  
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• Songwriters Are Getting Screwed By Streaming Too

  11-05-2021 00:01 via feedproxy.google.com
  Last month, Midia Research, which specializes in music and digital media, released a study, “Rebalancing the Song Economy,” that was commissioned by Abba’s Bjorn Ulvaeus. It includes some surprising findings — in a survey, twice as many streaming users said a song mattered more to them than the artist who performed it, rather than the opposite — and sounds an alarm about the need to reform the economics of streaming to better support songwriters. – The New Yo
  
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